Even decades after the advent of computer technology, preserving information in digital archives remains a challenging task. Technological progress on all levels calls for migration as an essential component of any digital archive. Migration, however, is not only expensive, but also makes it difficult to ensure the authenticity of digital documents. The University of Basel's Imaging and Media Lab has developed PEVIAR (Permanent Visual Archive), an archiving solution addressing one of the fundamental challenges of digital archiving, migration, and introducing the notion of digital originals. Essentially, digital documents are inseparably bound to a migration-free medium, thereby overcoming the transient nature of today's state-of-the-art storage systems.


Written for a Symposium on The People Themselves, this essay aims to revise and strengthen some important features of Larry Kramer's pioneering account of popular constitutionalism, particularly during the last century, which Kramer covers on the run. In doing so, the essay also complicates the normative path of Kramer's narrative. First, I discuss the role of racism in shaping American popular constitutionalism and its rivals. The People Themselves has been assailed for glossing over this and other dark chapters in popular constitutionalism's history. I sketch how and why Kramer's narrative should take these dark chapters on board. Next, I turn to the Progressive Era and the New Deal. In both these moments, Kramer argues, when matters came to a head, Americans chose popular constitutionalism over judicial finality. In fact, I argue, Americans preferred to have it both ways. While Progressives' and New Dealers' attacks on conservative judicial doctrines enjoyed broad support, efforts to demote the courts and institute more democratic allocations of interpretive authority never gained broad and deep popular approval. The Progressive Era was the first and last time Americans seriously considered profound institutional changes aimed at enlarging ordinary citizens' role in determining the meaning of the Constitution and the course of its development. Progressive efforts to rethink popular self-rule and make constitutionalism more democratic in a modern, urbanized America were deep and systematic - more so than Kramer's or any of today's constitutional thinkers. What can we learn from them? Popular political sway over constitutional questions in both eras stood in tension with a conservative current of popular skepticism about the people's collective enthusiasms about the uses of state power, a current that ran in favor of judicial finality. Americans refused to forsake the ideal or myth of judicially enforceable constitutional commitments standing obdurately above and beyond the sway of non-judicial political actors. Throughout the twentieth century, I suggest, even in the thick of popular constitutional battles against the courts, Americans associated judicial finality with the stability of firm, unduckable, law-like constitutional guarantees. They disagreed about what rights the Constitution vouchsafed and about what rights were properly safeguarded by courts. But on all sides, they were believers in the indispensability of judicial finality in respect of some important set of rights, which they deemed essential to their rival conceptions of popular self-rule and constitutional democracy. This basic agreement on the virtues of judicial finality across the liberal-conservative divide, which Kramer bemoans as a late twentieth century development, arose many decades earlier. But contrary to Kramer, I do not find that this agreement has spelled the demise of popular constitutionalism. From the New Deal right down to the present, party politics and social movements, including movements to amend the Constitution, have been lively sites of popular involvement in - and popular influence over - the nation's constitutional development.


Methionine residues in proteins are susceptible to oxidation, and the resulting methionine sulfoxides can be reduced back to methionines by methionine-S-sulfoxide reductase (MsrA) and methionine-R-sulfoxide reductase (MsrB). Herein, we have identified two MsrB families that differ by the presence of zinc. Evolutionary analyses suggested that the zinc-containing MsrB proteins are prototype enzymes and that the metal was lost in certain MsrB proteins later in evolution. Zinc-containingDrosophila MsrB was further characterized. The enzyme was found to employ a catalytic Cys124 thiolate, which directly interacted with methionine sulfoxide, resulting in methionine and a Cys124 sulfenic acid intermediate. A subsequent reaction of this intermediate with Cys69 generated an intramolecular disulfide. Dithiothreitol could reduce either the sulfenic acid or the disulfide, but the disulfide was a preferred substrate for thioredoxin, a natural electron donor. Interestingly, the C69S mutant could complement MsrA/MsrB deficiency in yeast, and the corresponding natural form of mouse MsrB was active with thioredoxin. These data indicate that MsrB proteins employ alternative mechanisms for sulfenic acid reduction. Four other conserved cysteines in DrosophilaMsrB (Cys51, Cys54, Cys101, and Cys104) were found to coordinate structural zinc. Mutation of any one or a combination of these residues resulted in complete loss of metal and catalytic activity, demonstrating an essential role of zinc in Drosophila MsrB. In contrast, two conserved histidines were important for thioredoxin-dependent activity, but were not involved in zinc binding. ADrosophila MsrA gene was also cloned, and the recombinant enzyme was found to be metal-free and specific for methionineS-sulfoxide and to employ a similar sulfenic acid/disulfide mechanism.


The service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts such as loose coupling may have negative impact on the overall execution performance of a single request. There are ways to facilitate high performance applications which benefit from this kind of architectural style compensating the caused overhead significantly. This paper gives an overview on six high level strategies to improve the performance of SOAs with a central service bus and presents how to apply them to build high performance service-oriented applications without corrupting the SOA paradigm and concepts on the technical level.


In recent years, the idea of player control, or agency, has become central and explicit in certain video games and genres, affecting many debates concerning the study or definitions of video games. In spite of this, the notion of agency in video games has been rarely explicitly explored or defined in relation to its sociological and political dimensions. Hence, drawing on actor–network theory, (neo-)Foucauldian governmentality studies, and empirical data gathered over a 3-year period, this article expands to our understanding of video game player agency and, moreover, argues that video games provide an important example and perspective to consider the contemporary nature and political basis of agency.


How can interlocking directorates cause financial instability for universal banks? A detailed history of the Rotterdamsche Bankvereeninging in the 1920s answers this question in a case study. This large commercial bank adopted a new German-style universal banking business model from the early 1910s, sharing directors with the firms it financed as a means of controlling its interests. Then, in 1924, it required assistance from the Dutch state in order to survive a bank run brought on by public concerns over its close ties with Müller & Co., a trading conglomerate that suffered badly in the economic downturn of the early 1920s. Using a new narrative history combined with an interpretive model, this article shows how the interlocking directorates between the bank and this major client, and in particular the direction of influence of these interlocks, resulted in a conflict of interest that could not be easily overcome.


This paper investigates the compressive properties of polyester based fillers with different proportions of resin, sand and fly ash. The research program aims at developing a polymer based filler for a glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) tube to be used as a structural rehabilitation system. It has been initiated to improve fundamental understanding of this material and to provide the knowledge required for its broad utilization. In this development, sample trial mixes were considered based on several weight percentages of polyester resin, fly ash and sand. These weight percentages were selected after analyzing volumetric properties of sand. The effect of resin (binder), sand and fly ash contents on the compressive strength of polyester based fillers with respect to age is reported. It has been found that at the age of 7 days all the batches reached about 90% of the compressive modulus. The experimental compressive stress-strain curves reported here were compared with established analytical models for normal strength concrete.


This article presents rigorous normwise perturbation bounds for the Cholesky, LU, and QR factorizations with normwise or componentwise perturbations in the given matrix. The considered componentwise perturbations have the form of backward rounding errors for the standard factorization algorithms. The used approach is a combination of the classic and refined matrix equation approaches. Each of the new rigorous perturbation bounds is a small constant multiple of the corresponding first-order perturbation bound obtained by the refined matrix equation approach in the literature and can be estimated efficiently. These new bounds can be much tighter than the existing rigorous bounds obtained by the classic matrix equation approach, while the conditions for the former to hold are almost as moderate as the conditions for the latter to hold.


Police took a woman who was raped to the emergency room of a Catholic hospital for treatment. Doctors examined the woman, but did not give her any postcoital contraception (the morning-after pill), the standard medical treatment for rape victims used to prevent pregnancy. Even when the patient's mother asked for information about the pill, the physician refused to provide any information. The hospital prohibited the physician from dispensing the pill or giving information about it because it violated Catholic doctrine. Consequently, the plaintiff did not obtain the contraception within the 72-hour window necessary for it to be effective. There is a long-standing conflict between patients and religious hospitals in the area of reproductive health. This conflict is getting renewed media attention because of the growth of religious hospitals and mergers that eliminate reproductive healthcare for underserved communities. To safeguard these services, bills are being proposed that would require all hospitals to provide such care as a condition of government funding and other benefits. Catholic hospitals argue that these laws would infringe on their First Amendment right to deliver health care in a manner that is consistent with their religious beliefs, and that they should be exempt from such laws. While the First Amendment protects religious liberty, current jurisprudence does not appear to provide religious hospitals protection from these laws. Under current law, as set forth in Employment Division v. Smith, only laws that intentionally target conduct because of its religious significance can be challenged. There is no protection from neutral laws of general applicability that unintentionally burden religiously motivated conduct. Laws requiring all hospitals to provide reproductive health care are a prime example of neutral laws of general applicability designed to protect the health and safety of society, but which unintentionally burden Catholic Hospitals' religious freedom. This conflict illustrates a fundamental debate about the proper scope of free exercise protection and whether religiously motivated conduct should be protected from unintentional burdens. In this Article, I argue that courts should abandon the Smith test in favor of a more searching intermediate review, but should not go as far as some states in providing almost absolute free exercise protection from government laws serving important interests. Under this principle, religious freedom should be limited by the government's interest in protecting third parties from harm. The Catholic Hospital conflict provides an important case study to understand how this principle would work in practice. Religious freedom must be balanced against the potential harm to patients who cannot access medically necessary reproductive health care and information. Thus, even under this more protective principle, exemptions should be denied in certain cases, as for example, with informed consent laws or refusals to perform medically necessary care without making safe alternatives. In short, the scenario described at the beginning of this Abstract should not recur. Moreover, granting exemptions in such cases would undermine, not protect, religious liberty because the patient is coerced into a making a treatment decision based on religious beliefs to which s/he does not subscribe.


STUDY QUESTION
What is the optimal management of women with endometriosis based on the best available evidence in the literature?

SUMMARY ANSWER
Using the structured methodology of the Manual for ESHRE Guideline Development, 83 recommendations were formulated that answered the 22 key questions on optimal management of women with endometriosis.

WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY
The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) guideline for the diagnosis and treatment of endometriosis (2005) has been a reference point for best clinical care in endometriosis for years, but this guideline was in need of updating.

STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION
This guideline was produced by a group of experts in the field using the methodology of the Manual for ESHRE Guideline Development, including a thorough systematic search of the literature, quality assessment of the included papers up to January 2012 and consensus within the guideline group on all recommendations. To ensure input from women with endometriosis, a patient representative was part of the guideline development group. In addition, patient and additional clinical input was collected during the scoping and review phase of the guideline.

PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODS
NA.

MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE
The guideline provides 83 recommendations on diagnosis of endometriosis and on the treatment of endometriosis-associated pain and infertility, on the management of women in whom the disease is found incidentally (without pain or infertility), on prevention of recurrence of disease and/or painful symptoms, on treatment of menopausal symptoms in patients with a history of endometriosis and on the possible association of endometriosis and malignancy.

LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION
We identified several areas in care of women with endometriosis for which robust evidence is lacking. These areas were addressed by formulating good practice points (GPP), based on the expert opinion of the guideline group members.

WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS
Since 32 out of the 83 recommendations for the management of women with endometriosis could not be based on high level evidence and therefore were GPP, the guideline group formulated research recommendations to guide future research with the aim of increasing the body of evidence.

STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTEREST(S)
The guideline was developed and funded by ESHRE, covering expenses associated with the guideline meetings, with the literature searches and with the implementation of the guideline. The guideline group members did not receive payment. All guideline group members disclosed any relevant conflicts of interest (see Conflicts of interest).

TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER
NA.


In this paper, I provide a possible explanation of why nominally risk-free bonds are essential in monetary economies. I argue that the role of nominal bonds is to serve as record-keeping devices in intertemporal exchanges of money. I show that bonds can only serve this role if they are illiquid (costly to exchange for goods). Finally, I show that in economies in which nominal bonds are essential, welfare and nominal interest rates are both positively associated with the supply of illiquid bonds (if that supply is small).


A novel compensation method for temperature-dependent gain tilt of L-band erbium-doped fiber amplifier (L-EDFA) is proposed, in which the attenuation between stages is the only parameter to be adjusted. A simple linear relationship between the attenuation and the erbium fiber coil temperature was derived theoretically. When the erbium fiber coil temperature cycles from 26 to 70 ?, the gain tilt variation less than 0.3 dB is achieved experimentally by adjusting only the pre-inserted variable optical attenuator (VOA).


Numerical geochemical modeling was used to study the effects on pore-water composition and mineralogy from carbon dioxide (CO2) injection into the Pennsylvanian Morrow B Sandstone in the Farnsworth Unit in northern Texas to evaluate its potential for long-term CO2 sequestration. Speciation modeling showed the present Morrow B formation water to be supersaturated with respect to an assemblage of zeolite, clay, carbonate, mica, and aluminum hydroxide minerals and quartz. The principal accessory minerals in the Morrow B, feldspars and chlorite, were predicted to dissolve. A reaction-path model in which CO2 was progressively added up to its solubility limit into the Morrow B formation water showed a decrease in pH from its initial value of 7 to approximately 4.1 to 4.2, accompanied by the precipitation of small amounts of quartz, diaspore, and witherite. As the resultant CO2-charged fluid reacted with more of the Morrow B mineral matrix, the model predicted a rise in pH, reaching a maximum of 5.1 to 5.2 at a water–rock ratio of 10:1. At a higher water–rock ratio of 100:1, the pH rose to only 4.6 to 4.7. Diaspore, quartz, and nontronite precipitated consistently regardless of the water–rock ratio, but the carbonate minerals siderite, witherite, dolomite, and calcite precipitated at higher pH values only. As a result, CO2 sequestration by mineral trapping was predicted to be important only at low water–rock ratios, accounting for a maximum of 2% of the added CO2 at the lowest water–rock ratio investigated of 10:1, which corresponds to a small porosity increase of approximately 0.14% to 0.15%.


The globalization development of the world allows the economic development presenting knowledge. Talent cultivation is similar to long-term investment that the importance cannot be neglected. Moreover, low birth rate in current society has each child being the treasure of the parents, who spoil the children with permissive parenting and do not realize the immaturity and low self-control of children in the preschool stage to result in children's deviant behaviors and teachers' increasing workload and pressure. Aiming at kindergarten teachers in Jiangsu as the research objects, total 380 copies of questionnaire are distributed, and 277 valid copies are retrieved, with the retrieval rate 72%. The research results are summarized as below: Kindergarten teachers are general people who have emotion and cannot exercise forbearance for everything. For this reason, school organizations should be considerate of kindergarten teachers' emotional labor problems, parents and the mass society should treat teachers' work with objective perspective and putting themselves in the place. Using individual emotional intelligence to achieve personal emotional accommodation in the process is an important strategy for kindergarten teachers; In the cultivation process, kindergarten teachers stress on evaluating children's level, strength, and weakness for individualized instruction. Step-by-step design of learning content aims to emphasize the importance of rational evaluation. In this case, special education teachers with better emotional intelligence performance could well apply rational evaluation and emotional accommodation strategies, reduce working pressure, and enhance subjective well-being; Kindergarten organizations could properly support teachers with time flexibility to reduce kindergarten teachers dealing with class affairs or other problems with extra time. Cooperation among people would help deal with problems and promote individual positive affect. According to the research results, suggestions are eventually proposed, expecting to help kindergarten teachers present higher commitment and better effectiveness on the teaching performance to promote the overall education quality.


Current criteria used to determine whether rough surfaces affect skin friction typically rely on a single amplitude parameter to characterize the roughness. The most commonly used criteria relate the centreline averaged roughness, Ra, to an equivalent sandgrain roughness size, ks. This paper shows that such criteria are oversimplified and that Ra/ks is dependent on the roughness topography, namely the roughness slope defined as the roughness amplitude normalized by the distance between roughness peaks, Ra/λ.

To demonstrate the relationship, wake traverses were undertaken downstream of an aerofoil with various polished surfaces. The admissible roughness Reynolds number (ρ1u1Ra/μ1) at which the drag rose above the smooth blade case, was determined. The results were used to demonstrate a 400% variation in Ra/ks over the roughness topographies tested.

The relationship found held for all cases tested, except those where the roughness first initiated premature transition at the leading edge. In these cases, where the roughness was more typical of eroded aerofoils, the drag was found to rise earlier.


Abstract Exceptional examples of planispiral ammonites that were infested by epizoans during life display alterations of their normal coiling. Most commonly, the epizoan(s) settled on the venter of the ammonite and constituted an obstacle for the whorl tube grown one whorl later; this caused lateral deviation of the whorl tube and tilting of the ammonoid because of changes in the hydrostatic condition; from here on, the whorl tube periodically crossed the venter of the preceding whorl, thereby producing a zigzag coiling pattern. Some epizoans, which were particularly centered on the midventer, provoked detachment between whorls. In a few cases, lateral placement of the epizoan did not directly obstruct the normal growth path of the ammonite but induced a trochospiral coiling pattern. Both the zigzag and the trochospiral pattern were created when the ammonite tried to maintain the growth direction within the vertical plane at the same time as whorls remained in contact along a differentiated dorsal epithelium. The aperture reacted to changes in growth direction, to maintain also a permanent angle with the vertical direction. Growth direction, then, was a major morphogenetic parameter in ammonites, because it contained the necessary instructions for correct shell coiling. The model based on the observation of fabricational defects has been tested by a theoretical model by which the different situations so far observed are simulated and in which the parameters are the morphogenetic instructions inferred to have been present in the biological system.


Despite the superior photovoltaic efficiencies of perovskite solar cells (PSCs), the relatively low long-term stability of the perovskite layer against ambient moisture is a tremendous obstacle for the practical applications of PSCs. Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) suffers from the limitations of high acidity and low work function. Herein, for the first time, dopamine was doped to modify PEDOT:PSS to develop a new hole extract material (HEM), DA-PEDOT:PSS; moreover, since dopamine is basic in nature, it reduced the acidity of PEDOT:PSS, thereby improving the device stability of planar heterojunction PSCs. The new HEM exhibited extremely low acidity and showed highly enhanced device durability. Moreover, when compared with that of PEDOT:PSS, the work function of DA-PEDOT:PSS was higher and made the DA-PEDOT:PSS-based PSC achieve a higher power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 16.4% due to the obvious enhancement of Voc, and DA-PEDOT:PSS showed significantly enhanced long-term device stability as compared to PEDOT:PSS under unencapsulated condition. Intriguingly, after 28 days of aging, the PCE and Jsc of DA-PEDOT:PSS still remained 85.4% and 89.2%, respectively, as compared to those of PEDOT:PSS (PCE of 60.4% and Jsc of 59.3%). Dopamine-copolymerized PEDOT:PSS showed great advantage over PEDOT:PSS for the enhancement of device durability.


Purpose of reviewThe purpose of this review is to highlight recent publications examining nitric oxide production in health and disease and its association with clinical nutrition and alterations in metabolism. Recent findingsThe role of the cofactor tetrahydrobiopterin in nitric oxide production and its relation with arginine availability is indicated as an important explanation for the arginine paradox. This offers potential for nitric oxide regulation by dietary factors such as arginine or its precursors and vitamin C. Because diets with a high saturated fat content induce high plasma fatty acid levels, endothelial nitric oxide production is often impaired due to a reduction in nitric oxide synthase 3 phosphorylation. Increasing the arginine availability by arginine therapy or arginase inhibition was, therefore, proposed as a potential therapy to treat hypertension. Recent studies in septic patients and transgenic mice models found that inadequate de-novo arginine production from citrulline reduces nitric oxide production. Citrulline supplementation may, therefore, be a novel therapeutic approach in conditions of arginine deficiency. SummaryBoth lack and excess of nitric oxide production in diseases can have various important implications in which dietary factors can play a modulating role. Future research is needed to expand our understanding of the regulation and adequate measurement of nitric oxide production at the organ level and by the different nitric oxide synthase isoforms, also in relation to clinical nutrition.


Article type: Original Article Background: In some disorders such as diabetes mellitus patients can display depressive symptoms. Metformin is among the first-line treatments for management of the type 2 diabetes mellitus which may have some antidepressant effect. Objective: Current investigation was performed to examine the anti-depressant effects of metformin and the involvement of nitric oxide (NO) in this way, in an experimental animal model of cholestasis in NMRI (Naval Medical Research Institute) mice. Materials and Methods: Bile duct ligated (BDL) and sham-operated mice were forced to swim separately and the effect of metformin on immobility time in the last 4 minutes of the 6 minutes test was assessed. To evaluate the probable participation of NO, N-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (L-NAME) a non-specific NO synthase inhibitor and aminoguanidine, a specific iNO synthase inhibitor were injected acutely to metformin-treated BDL mice and then their immobility time was calculated in forced swimming test (FST). Results: The immobility time significantly reduced after bile-duct ligation and metformin-treatment decreased this time additionally. L-NAME but not aminoguanidine administration significantly inhibited antidepressant like property of metformin in BDL mice. We have displayed that NO overproduction by metformin in cholestatic mice produce an anti-depressant like effect, causing a decrease in the mice immobility time in FST. Conclusion: Metformin pretreatment can decrease depression in cholestatic mice through an NO dependent pathway.


The Cenozoic in southern Australia contains many foraminifera endemic to the region in neritic (intermediate- to shallow-water) facies. They were mostly epifaunal and inhabited waters to some 300 m deep. This endemism is first obvious in the later Eocene when Maslinella, Crespinina and Wadella, among others, evolved. More than half of the Eocene endemic species disappeared in the Eocene or Oligocene. There followed in the Oligocene the evolution of such species as Parrellina imperatrix and Astrononion centroplax. The Miocene was a time of slightly reduced endemism and is characterized by migration into the region of many larger (sub)tropical taxa such as Lepidocyclina and Cycloclypeus. The long-ranging genus Notorotalia emerged about 50 Ma ago and is still common in modern southern mid-latitude waters. The youngest common extant species which made their first appearance in the Pliocene–Quaternary include Discorbis dimidiatus and Parredicta porifera, both with a test up to 1.5 mm in diameter. A similar pattern has been recorded in New Zealand. Four phases of endemism can be recognized: later Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene and Pliocene–Quaternary. It appears that the four phases were all stimulated in response to major marine transgressions, respectively the Wilson Bluff ( = Khirthar), Aldingan, Clifton–Longfordian and Hallet Cove–Glanville transgressions. Probably they signal four important stages in the transformation of water masses along the southern continental margin.


Macroinvertebrates play a key role in freshwater lentic and lotic ecosystems. Lake Neor, located in the northwest of Iran (37o 55´ to 38o 1´ 45), 2700m above sea level, is one of the lakes with little information available regarding the limnological data. Therefore, the present study was planned and conducted during a period of one year focusing on macroinvertebrate fauna and assemblage. Sampling was done monthly at four sites from August 2008 to July 2009. Altogether, a total of 11 species belonging to three phyla, seven classes, 10 orders and 10 families were identified, indicating a low diversity. From these species, eight are recorded for the first time from this lake and from the country, including Pisidium supinum, Fossaria humilis, Stagnicola catascopium, Quistadrilus multisetosus, Stylodrilus herngianus, Mooreobdella fervida, Podura aquatica, Dasycorixa hybrida. From these species, Gammarus fasciatus, Pisidium supinum and Quistadrilus multisetosus were dominant, constituting 49%, 43% and 5% of the total benthic fauna respectively. Two predominant species, Gammarus fasciatus and Pisidium supinum, are indicator species that are sensitive to eutrophic conditions, reflecting the oligo-mesotrophic character of the lake. Dissolved oxygen, temperature, TOM and habitat homogeneity seemed to be the main environmental factors affecting the community structure of macroinvertebrate fauna in this lake. At present, in this shallow water body


The stability of Northern Bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) populations in Texas, where high density polygyne red imported fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) account for >50% of all (S. invicta) colonies, has been cited as a reason to repudiate impacts by this exotic species on Northern Bobwhite. We used two approaches to investigate the relationship between red imported fire ants and Northern Bobwhite. In the first approach, we used correlation analysis to compare Northern Bobwhite abundance trends, determined from Christmas Bird Count data in 15 Texas counties, before and after fire ant infestation. Before red imported fire ant infestation, no significant trend in Bobwhite abundance existed (r = -0.355, P = 0.314). After fire ant infestation, Northern Bobwhite abundance declined and was highly negatively correlated with years of infestation (r = -0.867, P < 0.001). Bob- white populations from 16 uninfested counties in Texas revealed no trend over a 27-yr (1966-1992) period (r = -0.081, P = 0.688). In the second approach, red imported fire ant populations were reduced on five 202-ha study areas in the Texas Coastal Bend; autumn Northern Bobwhite densities were monitored for 2 yr on those reduced areas and five untreated areas. By the 2nd yr, Bobwhite autumn density was higher (P = 0.028) on areas where red imported fire ants were suppressed. We concluded that polygyne red imported fire ants were negatively impacting Northern Bobwhite in this region of Texas.


For economic and environmental reasons, there is need for alternative crops to rotate with winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) in the inland Pacific Northwest (PNW). White (Lupinus albus L.) and narrow-leafed (Lupinus angustifolius L.) lupins were evaluated as potential alternative grain crops under PNW conditions. Maximum grain yield of white lupin was 2128 kg ha -1 ; however, yields were unstable, and cultivars matured later and were more prone to disease than narrow-leafed lupin. Narrow-leafed lupin had a yield potential of >2000 kg ha -1 . Early sowing was the most important agronomic factor tested for maximizing yield of narrow-leafed lupin, with greatest yields associated with sowing during the third week of March. Yield loss due to delayed sowing ranged from 5.8 kg ha -1 d -1 under dry conditions to as much as 60 kg ha -1 d -1 in more favorable conditions. In 2000, delaying sowing from 21 March to 17 April coincided with a reduction in soil water storage of 5.3 cm in the upper 1 m soil layer. Most of this evaporative loss occurred in the upper 50 cm layer, considerably reducing crop water availability. Crude protein content of grain also declined with delayed sowing. Maximum water use efficiency for grain production under our conditions was 6 kg ha -1 grain mm -1 water use. Mean harvest loss ranged from 24 to 62% of hand-harvested yields, suggesting this will be a potential production constraint. Our results suggest good agronomic potential for narrow-leafed lupin in the PNW. Agronomic challenges and market potential are discussed.


Coastal ecosystems are centres of high biological productivity, but their conservation is often threatened by numerous and complex environmental factors. Citing examples from the major littoral habitats worldwide, such as sandy beaches, salt marshes and mangrove swamps, this text characterises the biodiversity of coastline environments and highlights important aspects of their maintenance and preservation, aided by the analysis of key representative species. Leaders in the field provide reviews of the foremost threats to coastal networks, including the effects of climate change, invasive species and major pollution incidents such as oil spills. Further discussion underscores the intricacies of measuring and managing coastline species in the field, taking into account the difficulties in quantifying biodiversity loss due to indirect cascading effects and trophic skew. Synthesising the current state of species richness with present and projected environmental pressures, the book ultimately establishes a research agenda for implementing and improving conservation practices moving forward. [Book Synopsis]


One of the main drawbacks of classical Optical Burst Switching (OBS) solutions is the loss of bursts when contentions occur. Time-domain Wavelength Interleaved Networking (TWIN) is a lossless solution with contention resolution in the edge nodes providing a simple and passive switching in the core nodes and satisfying both low-energy and efficient bandwidth use criteria. However, this solution requires an efficient control plane. In this paper, we compare three different control planes based on either centralized or distributed schemes. Moreover we use two different slot allocation strategies (contiguous or disjoint). The performances of the proposed solutions are compared in terms of total delay, jitter, queue length and bandwidth utilization. The simulation parameters are carefully chosen to take into account implementation constraints. We find that the centralized solution with contiguous slot allocation is the most efficient and it allows a throughput up to 7 Gb/s.


Net uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) measured by eddy covariance in a 60- to 80-year-old forest averaged 2.0 ± 0.4 megagrams of carbon per hectare per year during 1993 to 2000, with interannual variations exceeding 50%. Biometry indicated storage of 1.6 ± 0.4 megagrams of carbon per hectare per year over 8 years, 60% in live biomass and the balance in coarse woody debris and soils, confirming eddy-covariance results. Weather and seasonal climate (e.g., variations in growing-season length or cloudiness) regulated seasonal and interannual fluctuations of carbon uptake. Legacies of prior disturbance and management, especially stand age and composition, controlled carbon uptake on the decadal time scale, implying that eastern forests could be managed for sequestration of carbon.


Enumerated Powers Act - Requires each Act of Congress to contain a concise and definite statement of the constitutional authority relied upon for the enactment of each portion of that Act. Declares that failure to comply with this requirement shall give rise to a point of order in either House of Congress.


Most anatomical studies of primates focus on skeletal tissues, but muscular anatomy can provide valuable information about phylogeny, functional specializations, and evolution. Herein, we present the first detailed description of the head, neck, pectoral, and upper limb muscles of the fetal lemuriforms Lemur catta (Lemuridae) and Propithecus coquereli (Indriidae). These two species belong to the suborder Strepsirrhini, which is often presumed to possess some plesiomorphic anatomical features within primates. We compare the muscular anatomy of the fetuses with that of infants and adults and discuss the evolutionary and developmental implications. The fetal anatomy reflects a phylogenetically more plesiomorphic condition in nine of the muscles we studied and a more derived condition in only two, supporting a parallel between ontogeny and phylogeny. The derived exceptions concern muscles with additional insertions in the fetus which are lost in adults of the same species, that is, flexor carpi radialis inserts on metacarpal III and levator claviculae inserts on the clavicle. Interestingly, these two muscles are involved in movements of the pectoral girdle and upper limb, which are mainly important for activities in later stages of life, such as locomotion and prey capture, rather than activities in fetal life. Accordingly, our findings suggest that some exceptions to the "ontogeny parallels phylogeny" rule are probably driven more by ontogenetic constraints than by adaptive plasticity. Anat Rec, 297:1435–1453, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


Economists have lately been called upon not only to analyze markets, but to design them. Market design involves a responsibility for detail, a need to deal with all of a market's complications, not just its principle features. Designers therefore cannot work only with the simple conceptual models used for theoretical insights into the general working of markets. Instead, market design calls for an engineering approach. Drawing primarily on the design of the entry level labor market for American doctors (the National Resident Matching Program), and of the auctions of radio spectrum conducted by the Federal Communications Commission, this paper makes the case that experimental and computational economics are natural complements to game theory in the work of design. The paper also argues that some of the challenges facing both markets involve dealing with related kinds of complementarities, and that this suggests an agenda for future theoretical research. Copyright The Econometric Society 2002.


The AEIs included in this report focus on four key components of the environmental sustainability of primary agriculture: soil quality, water quality, air quality and biodiversity. The results reveal some consistent national trends, as well as considerable differences in various agrienvironmental conditions across Canada. Overall, the results suggest that considerable progress has been achieved towards environmental sustainability, but that further expansion and intensification of cropping and livestock production has the potential to exacerbate the environmental risks unless appropriate actions are taken to manage them. The main AEI results for the period 1981 to 2001 can be summarized as follows: 1) Environmental farm management: This component consists of five indicators, including three that currently provide national coverage (Soil Cover, Residual Soil Nitrogen and Energy Use Efficiency). Results are mixed, with soil cover showing overall improvement, whereas nitrogen use efficiency and energy use efficiency have declined. The two other indicators are still under development (Water Use Efficiency: Irrigation and Integrated Pest Management). 2) Soil quality: There are five soil quality indicators with results, including separate indicators for assessing the risk of soil erosion by water, wind and tillage. The Soil Organic Carbon Change Indicator tracks changes in soil carbon content, and estimates CO2 sequestration in agricultural soils. The Risk of Soil Salinization Indicator is designed to assess the change in soil salinity on the Prairies. All five indicators showed improvement, with a majority of land in the very low risk classes for erosion and salinity and most land falling into the increasing classes for soil organic carbon change. An additional indicator, the Risk of Soil Contamination by Trace Elements, is being developed to gain a better understanding of how agricultural management practices can affect the levels of trace elements in the soil and change their bioavailability. 3) Water quality: On the water quality front, two separate indicators were used to assess the Risk of Water Contamination by Nitrogen and by Phosphorus, taking into account changes in land use (e.g. shifts in crop area) and management practices (e.g. fertilizer inputs). Mixed results were obtained for these two indicators. While close to two-thirds of the land shows a low or very low risk of water contamination by nitrogen, the 20-year trend is worsening. By contrast, the trend for the risk of water contamination by phosphorus (Quebec only) is improving, although only a third of farmland is in the lowest risk classes. Two additional indicators, dealing with pesticides and pathogens, are still under development. 4) Air quality: One air quality indicator is currently available—the Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Budget estimates greenhouse gas (nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide) emissions from agricultural sources. The indicator shows a positive national trend, with a 4% reduction in net GHG emissions during the period under review. This trend is largely attributable to an increase in soil carbon sequestration, which compensated for a rise in nitrous oxide and methane emissions. Work is continuing on the development of indicators for measuring agricultural emissions of ammonia and particulate matter. 5) Biodiversity: Biodiversity is assessed using the Indicator of Wildlife Habitat on Farmland, which provides insight into trends in wildlife habitat availability on Canadian farms. Somewhat negative results were obtained for this indicator, with more farmland showing a decreasing trend in habitat capacity than a rising trend. Several other indicators are currently under development: risk of wildlife damage; invasive alien species; and soil biodiversity. 6) Food and Beverage Industry: AAFC's science-based indicator approach is being expanded to include eco-efficiency indicators for the food and beverage industry as well. These indicators, still under development, will cover the following environmental issues: energy use and greenhouse gas emissions; water use and effluent generation; and organic solid residues and packaging wastes.


The report presents a new treatment, due essentially to von Karman, of the problem of the thin airfoil. The standard formulae for the angle of zero lift and zero moment are first developed and the analysis is then extended to give the effect of disturbing or interference velocities, corresponding to an arbitrary potential flow, which are superimposed on a normal rectilinear flow over the airfoil. An approximate method is presented for obtaining the velocities induced by a 2-dimensional airfoil at a point some distance away. In certain cases this method has considerable advantage over the simple "lifting line" procedure usually adopted. The interference effects for a 2-dimensional biplane are considered in the light of the previous analysis. The results of the earlier sections are then applied to the general problem of the interference effects for a 3-dimensional biplane, and formulae and charts are given which permit the characteristics of the individual wings of an arbitrary biplane without sweepback or dihedral to be calculated. In the final section the conclusions drawn from the application of the theory to a considerable number of special cases are discussed, and curves are given illustrating certain of these conclusions and serving as examples to indicate the nature of the agreement between the theory and experiment.


Purpose – Although adolescents and older adults are often targets for nutritional change interventions, little has been done to explore how people in these transitional life phases perceive the matter themselves. The aim of this paper is to explore and compare adolescents' and older adults' own perceptions of the barriers and facilitators of a change towards healthier eating.Design/methodology/approach – This study design consisted of four focus groups that were conducted with adolescents and older adults to identify their health orientations, and their expected and experienced outcomes and self-efficacies in implementing approach and avoidance behaviours in relation to healthy eating, i.e. increasing consumption of fruit and vegetables and decreasing consumption of soft drinks and red meat.Findings – The study resulted in a number of interesting insights, e.g. that older and younger participants alike: were keen not to seem "overly healthy" to their important others, had a demonstratively detached orientation towards healthy eating and felt that their diets were generally healthy (although this was generally disproved by their self-reported intake data).Originality/value – The study and findings reported in this article contribute by providing the first steps towards a better understanding of how social cognition and self-efficacy perceptions related to healthy eating develop in the transitional phases of adolescence and older adulthood. In order to complement and validate the findings of the study; and with the aim of facilitating efficient nutritional change interventions directed at adolescents and older people, further studies should be conducted.


This thesis explores the interconnections between masculinity, health and prison. It contests reductionist, individualist and biomedical approaches to health care management in prisons and challenges gender-blindness within criminology and social science where masculinities have been overlooked as key factors of prison culture and organisation. The research set out to explore how masculinities manifest at institutional, social and cultural levels in prison as key determinants of health.

The study was conducted in an enhanced wing of an adult male training prison in Southern England. A reflexive ethnographic approach was used, comprising sustained (non-participant)observation, focus group interviewing, and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with thirty-five inmates and four prison officers.

The research revealed how prison masculinities were produced and performed by inmates and prison staff, and through the discourses and practices of the prison regime. They were manifested at social and organisational levels as key determinants of health – as 'deprivations' associated with imprisonment and as 'importation factors' reflecting inmates pre-prison health status. Values of the institution and those of inmates and staff combined to create a pervasively 'masculine' atmosphere and culture, which adversely affected the physical and mental health of many prisoners.

This thesis recommends that health policy for prisons is developed and organised with consideration to issues of gender and power. The masculine ideology that underpinned the organisational and social fabric of the prison in this study was evident in the attitudes and behaviours of inmates and staff and in the 'progressive regime' advocated by the Prison Service. This research shows that a broad, holistic and 'gendered' view of prison health can provide alternative insight into men's health in prisons, and therefore offer a positive and productive way forward for future prison health policy, in line with the World Health Organisation's Healthy Prisons philosophy.


There is now clear scientific evidence that emissions from economic activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels for energy, are causing changes to the Earth´s climate. A sound understanding of the economics of climate change is needed in order to underpin an effective global response to this challenge. The Stern Review is an independent, rigourous and comprehensive analysis of the economic aspects of this crucial issue. It has been conducted by Sir Nicholas Stern, Head of the UK Government Economic Service, and a former Chief Economist of the World Bank. The Economics of Climate Change will be invaluable for all students of the economics and policy implications of climate change, and economists, scientists and policy makers involved in all aspects of climate change.


Abstract Coals and associated shales are important oil source rocks in certain deltaic environments, in which selective processes of degradation or reworking increase the content of hydrogen-rich kerogen. The formation of hydrogen-rich kerogen in a deltaic setting is either by preferential concentration of plant cuticles and spores after reworking of delta top freshwater peats, or, by accumulation of delta margin peats under saline conditions. In each case the source rocks and derived oils may be expected to show distinctive indicators of the depositional environment in the associated alkane content, sulphur content, biomarker and carbon isotope signatures. Coals in the Oligo-Miocene Talang Akar Formation of South Sumatra and Northwest Java Basins contain perhydrous vitrinite and are the source of isotopically relatively light waxy oils which contain biomarkers derived from tree resins. Waxy oils are also produced in the Sunda Basin, between Sumatra and Java but in this case the upper (coaly) part of the Talang Akar Formation is immature and the oils are derived from algal kerogen in the older, lacustrine Banuwati Formation shales; these oils are distinguished by low contents of land plant biomarkers and by a markedly heavier carbon isotopic signature. In the Western Desert of Egypt, coals of the mostly marine Jurassic Khatatba Formation have sourced oils with a relatively heavy isotopic signature. It is proposed that the isotopically heavy character of the coals and oils is due to a combination of microbial contribution, and raised salinity (and sulphate) levels due to marine influence. In northern England, Namurian (Pendleian) marine shales are generally distal turbidites derived from pro-delta sediments but mostly without oil source potential. Rich oil source rocks occur as basinal shales at the extreme margins of or interdigitating with the turbidites or as condensed sequences on structural highs. They contain kerogen derived by reworking of peats of a deltaic-coastal plain environment, and may be correlated with many of the oil shows and produced oils of the area. The examples demonstrate that the recognition of source rock facies aids exploration by guiding the prediction of the location and potential of oil-prone facies, but that this is only possible if all facets of oil and source rock geochemistry are integrated with a knowledge of sedimentary processes.


In this article I will examine how Erasmus and Charles Darwin responded to the epic tradition in their writings, and how the legacy of epic was worked into their respective evolutionary visions. Erasmus Darwin formulated a brief sketch of his evolutionary theory in prose in his medical textbook Zoonomia, but when he came to flesh out his conception of evolution in imaginative and empirical detail he turned to verse. His poem The Temple of Nature, published posthumously in 1803, self-consciously evokes epic conventions and engages intertextually with Milton, Lucretius and Ovid in particular. One of the poems that Erasmus Darwin replied to in his verse – Paradise Lost – was by Charles Darwin's account his constant companion during his voyage on the Beagle. Through exploring how both Darwins responded to Milton's vision of Creation, and to the counter-visions offered by other epic poets and by Satan within Milton's own poem, it is possible to see how fundamental epic poetry was to the generation of evolutionary theory and the forms it came to take.


While available evidence supports the role of genetics in the pathogenesis of placental abruption (PA), PA-related placental genome variations and maternal-placental genetic interactions have not been investigated. Maternal blood and placental samples collected from participants in the Peruvian Abruptio Placentae Epidemiology study were genotyped using Illumina's Cardio-Metabochip platform. We examined 118,782 genome-wide SNPs and 333 SNPs in 32 candidate genes from mitochondrial biogenesis and oxidative phosphorylation pathways in placental DNA from 280 PA cases and 244 controls. We assessed maternal-placental interactions in the candidate gene SNPS and two imprinted regions (IGF2/H19 and C19MC). Univariate and penalized logistic regression models were fit to estimate odds ratios. We examined the combined effect of multiple SNPs on PA risk using weighted genetic risk scores (WGRS) with repeated ten-fold cross-validations. A multinomial model was used to investigate maternal-placental genetic interactions. In placental genome-wide and candidate gene analyses, no SNP was significant after false discovery rate correction. The top genome-wide association study (GWAS) hits were rs544201, rs1484464 (CTNNA2), rs4149570 (TNFRSF1A) and rs13055470 (ZNRF3) (p-values: 1.11e-05 to 3.54e-05). The top 200 SNPs of the GWAS overrepresented genes involved in cell cycle, growth and proliferation. The top candidate gene hits were rs16949118 (COX10) and rs7609948 (THRB) (p-values: 6.00e-03 and 8.19e-03). Participants in the highest quartile of WGRS based on cross-validations using SNPs selected from the GWAS and candidate gene analyses had a 8.40-fold (95% CI: 5.8–12.56) and a 4.46-fold (95% CI: 2.94–6.72) higher odds of PA compared to participants in the lowest quartile. We found maternal-placental genetic interactions on PA risk for two SNPs in PPARG (chr3∶12313450 and chr3∶12412978) and maternal imprinting effects for multiple SNPs in the C19MC and IGF2/H19 regions. Variations in the placental genome and interactions between maternal-placental genetic variations may contribute to PA risk. Larger studies may help advance our understanding of PA pathogenesis.


This conference contribution celebrates Richard Kay's contention that a sound theory of legal meaning depends on a sound theory of legal status. Contrary to Kay, I conclude that identifying law's true source reveals that we should seek law's meaning not primarily in lawgivers' intentions, but in public understanding.

If the rule of recognition at the core of a legal system emerges through shared expectations, if its essence is social custom, then the whole legal system grows forth from shared expectations, from social custom. Our following particular persons pedigreed by that system as lawgivers, including constitutional lawgivers, is not a departure from custom, but an extension of custom, morally supported by whatever morally supports following custom. Customs of following leaders are custom-based fast tracks to many more customs. Our underlying reason for following law "because it is law" is the thing that makes it law, namely its success at self-fulfillingly expressing what people in our community are likely to do and to expect, including how various among them are likely to respond to how we act. That weighty (though not preemptive) and law-specific reason for following law is not only about eliciting approval and avoiding punishment, but more deeply about our need to have the shared expectations that law alone can provide. Legal systems are multifaceted prediction systems that we have strong moral reason to preserve, because we live inside them. H.L.A. Hart rightly rejected the notion that statements of obligation are just predictions, but a prediction system can produce moral obligation to conform if there is good in having that system.

Attempts to salvage an idea of authority as source of law may frame it as a source of merely presumptive, defeasible duties to obey. Such attempts might add value if they could demarcate a zone in which lawgivers and law receivers can both know ex ante that lawgivers will be morally justified in issuing laws and law receivers will be morally required to follow laws. But there is no such zone. Each human action – of lawgiving and of law following – is a separate, individualized moment of all-things-considered moral judgment. From the lawgiver's perspective, doing particular acts that are likely to succeed in lawgiving may or may not be the right thing to do whether or not the lawgiver came to power in a good way. And for the rest of us, following law on particular occasions may or may not be the right thing to do whether or not the lawgiver was morally justified in doing the acts that made that law and whether or not the lawgiver came to power in a good way. What's the point of an "authority" that is not coextensive with the claimant's power, and not clear ex ante about its own extent, and not in itself the answer to when we should follow? The truth to which defeasible duty talk points is simply that when we live inside legal systems, we have a strong moral reason to maintain them, and that reason points us to following our law unless we have stronger moral reasons to do differently.

Hart's contrast between law and the demands of a bank-robbing gunman is sharpened by the ad hoc, arbitrary character of such a gunman's actions. Law's distinctive contribution to our lives is to make our relations with one another less ad hoc, more predictable, and so let us live together in large groups. But there is no necessary contrast at all between the morality of individual governing actions and the morality of bank robbing. Often enough, so-called "authoritarian" leaders are gunmen; criminal gangs do run whole nations. Nonetheless, those nations have law; those gangs are government. Our ever present reason to care about law is not that we owe something to lawgivers, but that we need law's help to live together. We read law not to understand lawgivers. We read law to understand one another, to learn how life is likely to be in our community. And that fact tells us where to look for law's meaning. The understanding we need when we read law is primarily not what lawgivers intended, but what our community understands its law to be. We do not need our lawgivers even to intend to be lawgivers. What we need is a vehicle for shared understanding across our community and over time about how our life together is going to be. And for that, we need law to have a public meaning.


The on-demand printing of living cells using inkjet technologies has recently been demonstrated and allows for the controlled deposition of cells in microarrays. Here, we show that such arrays can be interrogated directly by robot-controlled liquid microextraction coupled with chip-based nanoelectospray mass spectrometry. Such automated analyses generate a profile of abundant membrane lipids that are characteristic of cell type. Significantly, the spatial control in both deposition and extraction steps combined with the sensitivity of the mass spectrometric detection allows for robust molecular profiling of individual cells.


Modeling of the polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) temporal changes in long fiber routes represents a critical aspect of system outage characterization. In this paper, an analysis of the PMD temporal statistics in links obeying the recently proposed hinge model is presented. The analytical expression of the differential group delay probability density function is derived and used to show that the outage probability is channel specific in a wavelength-division-multiplexed system. The existence of outage-free channels, which represents one of the most important implications of the hinge model, is demonstrated and quantified. The frequency dependence of the temporal statistics is also characterized, and an expression for PMD-induced pulse broadening is derived


BACKGROUND
Ceftaroline is a novel oxyimino-cephalosporin, strongly active against methicillin-resistant staphylococci and pneumococci. It is active against Enterobacteriaceae too, but is labile to common beta-lactamases, including AmpC and extended-spectrum types. To counteract these enzymes, ceftaroline is also being developed combined with NXL104, a beta-lactamase inhibitor.

METHODS
Chequerboard MIC titrations were performed to determine the NXL104 concentrations needed to protect ceftaroline against beta-lactamase-producing Enterobacteriaceae, most of them with ceftaroline MICs >16 mg/L.

RESULTS
All of 60 extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers were susceptible to ceftaroline + NXL104, 1 + 1 mg/L, as were 5/5 Klebsiella oxytoca with high-level K1 enzyme. Among 30 Enterobacteriaceae with high-level chromosomal AmpC, 18 were susceptible at 1 + 1 mg/L, 28 at 1 + 4 mg/L and all at 4 + 4 mg/L; among 10 with plasmid AmpC enzymes, nine were susceptible at 1 + 1 mg/L and all at 1 + 4 mg/L. None of 10 isolates with combinations of AmpC or ESBL and impermeability was susceptible at 1 + 1 mg/L, but nine were susceptible at 1 + 4 mg/L and all at 4 + 4 mg/L. Among 12 with KPC carbapenemases, only two were susceptible at 1 + 1 mg/L, compared with 10 at 1 + 4 mg/L and 11 at 4 + 4 mg/L; 8/8 with OXA-48 carbapenemase were susceptible at 1 + 1 mg/L whilst 0/5 with metallo-beta-lactamases were inhibited by ceftaroline + NXL104, even at 8 + 4 mg/L. NXL104 potentiated the activity of ceftaroline against many ESBL- and AmpC-negative isolates for which ceftaroline MICs were 1-4 mg/L but not those for which MICs were < or = 0.5 mg/L, probably reflecting the slight lability of this cephalosporin to classical penicillinases, which were present in the former group but not the latter.

CONCLUSIONS
At concentrations of < or = 4 mg/L, NXL104 protected ceftaroline against all relevant beta-lactamases except metalloenzymes.


In this paper, we address the multicast routing problem for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). We present the Source Grouped Flooding approach to achieve multicast in MANETs. In this protocol, each source creates a flooding group consisting of nodes connecting the source to the multicast members. The nodes in the flooding group are recruited based on hop count distance constraints obtained during a request-reply phase. The flooding group though robust may result in redundant data transmissions. We also propose a probabilistic data forwarding mechanism to achieve efficient data dissemination. The protocol aims to achieve the robustness of flooding and data distribution efficiency of tree based protocols. Simulation results verify performance.


Since the early days of Quality of Experience (QoE) research, relationships to Quality of Service (QoS) and corresponding QoE-QoS models have been of great interest to the research community. However, the manifold quality transformations throughout the communication stack, together with accessibility issues of QoS parameters inside networks, hamper availability, applicability and generality of such models. On this background, the paper proposes the use of specific transport layer information, in particular the ratios of selected flags used by the TCP protocol, as QoE indicators. In our work, we show that such flag ratios help identifying, characterizing and quantifying user annoyance from observations anywhere along the TCP connection. As use case, we address video streaming from a TCP CUBIC web server in a wireless setting.


In order to explore a new mulch-free maize planting mode and the best seedling age for maize transplantation in Shanxi early mature area, a field experiment was carried out using completely randomized block design. Taking mulch-based direct sowing as the control group, effects of transplantation in different stage on maize growing process, plant height, three-ear leaf area in mature period, and yield and composition factors of maize. Results indicate that growing process of maize seedlings transplanted in every stage is slightly slower than the control group. Transplantation has effect of reducing plant height and three-ear leaf area in mature period. There was no significant difference between the yield of maize transplanted on May 1st and the control group, and the yield declined only by 7% compared with mulch-based direct sowing (CK). Damages to maize seedlings by the local late frost must be noticed when maize is planted by the method of mulch-free transplantation in early mature area. Transplanting the seedlings earlier after the late frost is deemed as an appropriate period in this area.


Interface states at the boundary between two phononic crystals can arise when the two crystals possess overlapping bandgaps and differing signs in the imaginary components of their impedance [1]. The suitability of a given pair of crystals when designing an interface system can be inferred from the parity of the supported standing edge states marking the beginning and end of their band gap [2]. A crystal that supports a standing wave with an even parity pressure distribution at the beginning of its band gap will possess a differing imaginary impedance sign to a crystal supporting an odd parity state at the start of its band gap [2]. Previous works [1,2,3] have designed such systems by varying the geometry of a crystal, such variations result in the band gap of the crystal closing and re-opening, leading to two crystals with geometries that place them either side of a band gap closure. This will meet the previously given criteria for exhibiting an interface state [3]. The present study uses a variation of materials within a phononic crystal to demonstrate an interface system, whilst maintaining a consistent geometry between the two crystals. FEM Modelling was performed, using the commercial COMSOL software, to show that variations in the material properties of one of the materials within a phononic crystal results in an analogous process of band gap opening and closing. Two, two component 1D phononic crystals consisting of alternating layers of materials 'A' and 'B' were then designed and modelled to confirm the parity of their band gap edge states. Material 'A' was set as 3 mm thick ABS plastic, whilst material 'B' was either water or aluminium with thickness of 0.3 mm. The crystals were numerically modelled to provide the transmission spectra both individually and as a combined interface system revealing the predicted presence of an interface state. Initial experimental confirmation is underway, with a preliminary sample of an ABS/water crystal having been constructed, and its transmission spectrum obtained. Results thus far show the presence of the expected modes and a band gap. Further investigations are now underway using an improved sample so that data may be better compared with modelling.References:1. Xiao, M., Zhang, Z. Q., & Chan, C. T. (2014). Surface impedance and bulk band geometric phases in one-dimensional systems. Physical Review X, 4(2), 1–12. 2. Meng, Y., Wu, X., Zhang, R. Y., Li, X., Hu, P., Ge, L., Wen, W. (2018). Designing topological interface states in phononic crystals based on the full phase diagrams. New Journal of Physics, 20(7). 3. Xiao, M., Ma, G., Yang, Z., Sheng, P., Zhang, Z. Q., & Chan, C. T. (2015). Geometric phase and band inversion in periodic acoustic systems. Nature Physics, 11(3), 240–244.


OF PROJECT The Million-Click Thinking Tip "The Million-click Thinking Tip" is a social media project. Its ultimate goal is to share tools, tips and insights from the field of creativity with people around the world. Its more immediate goals were to provide a framework for author and speaker Sarah Thurber to learn about public speaking, social media dynamics and message penetration. The five two-minute videos resulting from the project are posted on Youtube.com. They garnered hundreds of hits in their initial weeks online and continue to reach new audiences through Youtube.com, Facebook.com, LinkedIn.com and Twitter.com. The tips created in this project will serve as a prototype for future development of a "Thinking Tip Series" from the FourSight publishing company. __________________________________________________ Sarah B. Thurber May 4, 2012 __________________________________________________ Date


Exploration in unknown environments is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and control. In this work, we study task-guided exploration and determine what precisely an agent must learn about their environment in order to complete a particular task. Formally, we study a broad class of decision-making problems in the setting of linear dynamical systems, a class that includes the linear quadratic regulator problem. We provide instance- and task-dependent lower bounds which explicitly quantify the difficulty of completing a task of interest. Motivated by our lower bound, we propose a computationally efficient experiment-design based exploration algorithm. We show that it optimally explores the environment, collecting precisely the information needed to complete the task, and provide finite-time bounds guaranteeing that it achieves the instance- and task-optimal sample complexity, up to constant factors. Through several examples of the LQR problem, we show that performing task-guided exploration provably improves on exploration schemes which do not take into account the task of interest. Along the way, we establish that certainty equivalence decision making is instance- and task-optimal, and obtain the first algorithm for the linear quadratic regulator problem which is instance-optimal. We conclude with several experiments illustrating the effectiveness of our approach in practice.


This paper explores notions of 'employability' in further education, a concept which is at the basis of much government policy associated with marginalised learners. Drawing on earlier empirical work by Atkins (2009) Atkins et al (2010) and Simmons and Thompson (2011) and working within a framework informed by Marxist concepts of Power and control, the paper problematises the term employability, arguing that in policy terms the term is ill-defined yet associated with a positive rhetoric about high pay, skill work which is in tension with the prospects of the marginalised group of students at whom it is directed. Despite the rhetoric, most employability programmes are far removed from the 'genuine work experience' advocated by Wolf (2011:130). They offer little in the way of conceptual knowledge or exchange value, but are resonant with earlier concerns about the structure of vocational PCET programmes as producing users who are socialised to work, rather than as citizens (Tarrant, 2001).

The paper argues that employability programmes are little more than an exercise in social control which are productive of false hope that engagement with them will offer a route into high pay, high skill employment with the prospect of financial and career security. The paper concludes that this hope obscures the reality that such programmes at best may lead to low pay, low skill work and, at worst, form another stage in the 'churn' of young people who are NEET (not in education, employment or training). The impact of such programmes is unlikely, therefore, to be one of progression to high pay, high skill careers, but rather to be one of class and labour (re) production as students are socialised into particular forms of casual and low pay, low skill employment.


A programme of work funded by the UK Water Research Centre (WRc) has been carried out to investigate the nature, occurrence and re-entrainment into the sewage flow of sewer sediments and their associated pollutants to provide data for the development of UK sewer flow quality models, MOSQITO and MOUSETRAP. Methodologies for the preparation of sewer sediment samples prior to chemical analysis are described. These methods have been developed to determine the level of pollutants released from sewer sediments which will be representative of the conditions found in the sewer environment. Application of progressively lower shear stresses to samples of sediment, from an extreme, via blending, to less severe preparative methods by means of a stirring technique, fractionate sediment samples so that the polluting potential may be assessed separately for both dissolved and resuspendable phases. Stirring preparative methods release less pollutants from a sediment sample than from the blending procedures, with the level of pollutant release being dependent upon the shear stress being applied to the sample, with higher shear values releasing as would be expected, more pollutants.


Aedes aegypti (L.), the main vector of dengue fever in Brazil, has been controlled with the use of massive chemical products, contributing to the development of resistance and decreasing the insect control efficiency. The control of dipterans with bioinsecticides based on Bacillus thuringiensis has been satisfactory, due to the production of insecticidal proteins denominated Cry (crystal), Cyt (cytolytic) toxins and Chi (chitinase), and to the synergistic effects among them. The present work aimed to select B. thuringiensis isolates efficient against A. aegypti larvae. A bacterial collection containing 1,073 isolates of B. thuringiensis, obtained from different locations of Brazilian territory, had the DNA isolated and submitted to PCR amplifications using specific primers for cry4Aa, cry4Ba, cry11Aa, cry11Ba, cyt1Aa, cyt1Ab, cyt2Aa and chi genes. For the LC50 and LC90 determination, the entomopathogenic isolates were evaluated by selective and quantitative bioassays. Only 45 isolates (4.2%) presented amplicons for the cry and cyt genes. The chi gene sequence was detected in 25 (54.3%) of those isolates. From the 45 isolates submitted to the selective bioassays, 13 caused 100% mortality of A. aegypti larvae. The identification of cry, cyt and chi genes of B. thuringiensis and the toxicity analysis on A. aegypti led to the selection of a set of isolates that have the potential to be used in the formulation of new bioinsecticides.


Synapses in the neuromuscular junction are key components involved in control of muscle movement. Kittel et al. (see the Perspective by Atwood) describe the role of Drosophila Bruchpilot (BRP), a coiled-coil domain protein, in the establishment and maintenance of synapses. BRP was localized to donut-shaped structures centered at the transmitter release sites (active zones) of Drosophila neuromuscular synapses. In mutants lacking BRP, presynaptic membranes were defective. The authors suggest that BRP is needed to form a fully functional synapse and might mediate presynaptic changes in vivo by establishing a proximity between Ca2+ channels and vesicles at release sites. R. J. Kittel, C. Wichmann, T. M. Rasse, W. Fouquet, M. Schmidt, A. Schmid, D. A. Wagh, C. Pawlu, R. R. Kellner, K. I. Willig, S. W. Hell, E. Buchner, M. Heckmann, S. J. Sigrist, Bruchpilot promotes active zone assembly, Ca2+ channel clustering, and vesicle release. Science 312, 1051-1054 (2006). [Abstract] [Full Text] H. L. Atwood, Gatekeeper at the synapse. Science 312, 1008-1009 (2006). [Summary] [Full Text]


Connected cars have received massive attention in Intelligent Transportation System. Many potential services, especially safety-related ones, rely on spatial-temporal messages periodically broadcast by cars. Without a secure authentication algorithm, malicious cars may send out invalid spatialtemporal messages and then deny creating them. Meanwhile, a lot of private information may be disclosed from these spatialtemporal messages. Since cars move on expressways at high speed, any authentication must be performed in real-time to prevent crashes. In this paper, we propose a Fast and Anonymous Spatial-Temporal Trust (FastTrust) mechanism to ensure these properties. In contrast to most authentication protocols which rely on fixed infrastructures, FastTrust is distributed and mostly designed on symmetric-key cryptography and an entropy-based commitment, and is able to fast authenticate spatial-temporal messages. FastTrust also ensures the anonymity and unlinkability of spatial-temporal messages by developing a pseudonymvarying scheduling scheme on cars. We provide both analytical and simulation evaluations to show that FastTrust achieves the security and privacy properties. FastTrust is low-cost in terms of communication and computational resources, authenticating 20 times faster than existing Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm.


Apple and Samsung, two of the world's premier technology companies, have recently been involved in heated legal disputes over certain patents and related technologies. Lawsuits were filed in many jurisdictions around the world. In Korea, Samsung filed a lawsuit against Apple, and one of the issues raised was whether an injunctive relief can be granted when a holder of standard essential patents committed to license its patents under FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms. The answer to this question will have significant ramifications, beyond determining the result of the ongoing lawsuit, and will have a serious impact on the processes and applicable rules employed at many standard-setting organizations. This article reviews the court decision in Korea, with a particular focus on the justifiability of granting an injunction to a holder of standard essential patents who committed to grant licenses under FRAND terms. In reviewing the court decision, the article will consider the negotiating parties' bargaining behavior and related transaction costs, when an injunctive court relief is sought by a party. This article then proposes a new court procedure, which would ameliorate the parties' incentives to engage in hold-up or reverse hold-up and would instead prompt and facilitate the parties' negotiation. Under the proposed court procedure, the court would initially make an interim and provisionary decision on FRAND and would make a final and definitive decision on FRAND only at a later stage when doing so becomes necessary. This procedure would exert pressures on the parties to engage in negotiation in earnest and in good faith, without necessarily relying on the court's direct involvement.


This paper examines an apparent paradox in the history of British and Irish sport, thatis, the participation of 'Irish' athletes in the British Empire Games (BEG) of the 1930s.Crucially, issues of national and cultural identity were interwoven with questionsconcerning the organisation of sport on a pan-Ireland basis and the allegiance of teamsin international competition. The Irish Free State (IFS) had been established in 1922,though six counties of Ireland had remained part of the United Kingdom (UK). Thisterritory was to become known as Northern Ireland. In the following period,culminating in the establishment of the Irish / Eire Constitution (1937), severalamendments were made to IFS laws that removed reference to an oath of allegiance tothe British crown and severed links to UK jurisdiction, but crucially maintained that "thewhole island of Ireland its islands and the territorial seas" formed a single "nationalterritory". Despite this context, and the related tension that emerged around 'Irish'involvement in the Olympic Games at that time, 'Ireland' participated both in theinaugural BEG in 1930 and also in 1934, but by 1938 only Northern Ireland wasinvolved. Significantly, the BEG were replete with the pageantry of the Empire and withathletes swearing allegiance to the crown. Participation in the BEG highlights the role ofsport in constructing different ideas of what it means to be Irish during a period whichwas characterized by palpable resistance to participation in English or British sportsteams and political separation. It also reflects much of the politics of the then waningEmpire


1 Plant community development depends to a great extent on the availability of soil nutrients, but recent studies underline the role of symbiotic, herbivorous and pathogenic soil biota. We tested for interactions between these biotic and abiotic factors by studying the effects of additional nutrients and the removal of soil biota on the replacement of grassland plant species typical of different successional stages. 2 Species representing each of the early, mid and target phases of secondary succession in a grassland community (four per phase) were grown in mid‐successional grassland soil. The mixed plant communities were grown in sterilized and non‐sterilized soil, at three nutrient supply levels. The distribution of shoot biomass over the different plant species, and the total root biomass, were determined, as well as the composition of nematode and microarthropod communities and soil decomposition rates. 3 The effect of nutrient supply on plant community composition depended on soil sterilization. In sterilized soil, the plant community was initially dominated by grasses that increased in dominance even without fertilization. In non‐sterilized soil, the plant community was more diverse and grass dominance decreased over time, except with high fertilization. Fertilization enhanced the productivity of the plant community in sterilized and, to a greater extent, in non‐sterilized soil. 4 The abundance of root‐feeding nematodes was positively related to increased root biomass, pointing to a strong bottom‐up control. Increased levels of nutrient supply were associated with reduced abundance of omnivorous nematodes, the cause of this reduction being less clear. Increased soil fertility altered the functional diversity of the soil nematode community, which might, in the longer term, also affect their feedback effects on the plant community. 5 Increased nutrient supply reduced soil decomposition activity in the non‐sterilized soil, but not in the sterilized soil. 6 Our results imply that soil biota may reduce the effects of nutrient supply on plant dominance. Incorporating the effects of soil biota on plant species interactions into studies on succession, plant species diversity and restoration may therefore considerably increase our understanding of the observed plant community patterns.


Many popular network models rely on the assumption of (vertex) exchangeability, in which the distribution of the graph is invariant to relabelings of the vertices. However, the Aldous-Hoover theorem guarantees that these graphs are dense or empty with probability one, whereas many real-world graphs are sparse. We present an alternative notion of exchangeability for random graphs, which we call edge exchangeability, in which the distribution of a graph sequence is invariant to the order of the edges. We demonstrate that edge-exchangeable models, unlike models that are traditionally vertex exchangeable, can exhibit sparsity. To do so, we outline a general framework for graph generative models; by contrast to the pioneering work of Caron and Fox (2015), models within our framework are stationary across steps of the graph sequence. In particular, our model grows the graph by instantiating more latent atoms of a single random measure as the dataset size increases, rather than adding new atoms to the measure.


ABSTRACT Background: Several studies are going on worldwide directed towards finding natural antioxidants from plant origin which possess strong antioxidant activity. Objective: The aim of the present study was to study in vitro antioxidant and free radical scavenging activity of Pithecellobium dulce (Roxb.) Benth. Method: Methanol and 70% acetone extracts of wood bark and leaves of Pithecellobium dulce were evaluated for their total phenolic & flavonoid content, antioxidant and radical scavenging activity. Results: Total antioxidant activity (IC 50 values) in DPPH assay by methanol extract of bark (MB), acetone extract of bark (AB), methanol extract of leaf (ML) and acetone extract of leaf (AL) shown 150.23 ± 2.8, 16.83 ± 0.38, 250.32 ± 4.8 and 18.30 ± 0.43 μg/ml respectively. The IC 50 values for scavenging of free radicals like for hydroxyl, superoxide, nitric oxide, hydrogen peroxide, singlet oxygen and hypochlorous acid by MB, AB, ML and AL were studied. The extract was found to be a good iron chelator. The reducing power was increased with increasing amounts of extract. The MB, AB, ML & AL extracts (5 mg/ml) yielded 0.129 ± 0.11, 0.190 ± 0.14, 0.084 ± 0.24 and 0.115 ± 0.25 μg/ml gallic acid-equivalent phenolic content and 0.43 ± 0.01, 0.23 ± 0.01, 0.90 ± 0.01 and 0.25 ± 0.01 μg/ml quercetin-equivalent flavonoid content respectively. Conclusion: Thus, our findings provide evidence that the methanolic and 70% acetone extracts of P dulce wood bark and leaves are potential source of natural antioxidants and some extent validated its medicinal potential.


Managing the demand for higher education has been a major concern of successive UK governments over the last 30 years. While initially they sought to increase demand, latterly the emphasis has been on widening participation to include demographic groups among which it has traditionally been low. There had long been an academic and policy interest in the drivers of demand, but an appreciation of the contrasting patterns between different geographical areas was relatively late to emerge. Little research has thus far focused on the extent to which demand within an area is a function of background factors with a spatial dimension. For example, while it is known that demand tends to be lower in deprived areas, it is not well understood what specific features of deprivation cause this. This paper reports the findings of a quantitative study using linear regression modelling to determine which localised factors played a significant role in the demand for higher education between 2004 and 2009 in English local authority areas. It concludes that attainment at 16, the proportion of working-age graduates and the ethnic profile are major explanatory variables, but that the nature of the local employment market also plays a role in explaining changes over time. Coinciding with other significant changes in the education sector, the abolition of the Aimhigher initiative in July 2011 marked the return of demand management back to individual universities, so the importance of spatial patterns in higher education demand are likely to be of renewed importance in coming years. © 2012 British Educational Research Association.


An intriguing paradox in European tectonics is that present intracontinental seismicity seems to be broadly distributed, whereas past deformation was restricted to sedimentary basin areas. These basins were created by repeated Mesozoic rifting and later affected by pervasive Late Cretaceous-early Tertiary inversion. We propose that the change from localized deformation to distributed seismicity reflects changes in strength due to an interplay between Neogene thermal perturbations by mantle plumes and stress-induced intraplate deformation. As a result, inversion tectonics in the North Sea Basin area ceased and gave way to lithospheric folding, which is most pronounced in onshore Paleozoic massif areas. Thermomechanical models demonstrate that this important transition in the mode and distribution of intraplate deformation can be explained by a strength reversal resulting from the combined effects of changes in Moho depth due to the transition from rifting to inversion and heating by mantle plumes. © 2005 Geological Society of America.


This study is mainly concerned with the production and marketing of small ruminants being raised in Kovak and Asghara valleys of Balochistan, Pakistan. In all 61 farmers raising small ruminants were interviewed. The mean size of flock of ruminants raised was consisted of 134 animals including 89 sheep and 45 goats. The cost of production on average was estimated at Rs. 1,54,259 per flock. The major items of cost consisted of feed and fodder, veterinary medicines, repair and maintenance, shearing, chain & rope, shepherd and miscellaneous costs, which accounted for Rs. 1,02,237.48, Rs. 15,283.49, Rs. 5,213, Rs. 1,450, Rs. 361, Rs. 13,912 and Rs. 15,800 to the total, respectively. The average yields of wool of adult sheep of Balochi, Bibrik, Harnai and Rakshani were 2.30, 1.75, 1.83 and 1.25 kgs while that of young sheep of the same breeds were 1.75, 1.12, 1.10 and 0.96 kgs per animal, respectively. The average yields of hair from adult goat of Kajli and Khursani breeds were 1.20 and 1.12 kgs per animal, while that from young goat of Kajli and Khursani breeds were 0.70 and 0.75 kgs.

The net revenue per flock was estimated at Rs. 90,574. The net revenues in Kovak and Asghara valleys were Rs. 1,06,824, and Rs. 71,424 respectively. On overall basis, net revenue per animal per year was estiamted at Rs. 675.87 with Rs. 710 and Rs. 622 in Kovak and Asghara valleys, respectively. However, the net revenue per adult animal was Rs. 1,293 with Rs. 1,286 and Rs. 1,337 in Kovak and Asghara valleys, respectively.

A very high proportion of both sheep and goats raised (88%) in the study area was used for the household purposes, and only 12% were marketed. Steps should be taken to encourage marketable surpluses of both sheep and goats. In most of the cases, animals were marketed/sold out when the family needed to purchase the necessities of life from the market. This tendency should be discouraged through expanding credit facilities. Instead of fixing meat prices and imposing meatless days which depress the sheep and goat price, market must be freely operated on the basis of demand and supply forces. Lack of information constitutes a major hurdle to improving small ruminant's market efficiency, and steps must be taken for the dissemination of market price so that farmers plan output more carefully according to seasonal price fluctuations. Step should be taken to encourage small ruminant growers to convert from rural farming to commercial farming.


Decentralised electricity systems require effective price and quantity risk management mechanisms but the nature of such systems poses particular problems for satisfying those requirements. Among these problems are investment hold-up risks rooted in the competition facing both electricity retailers and large industrial firms. Additional problems include those of load profile information and bargaining mismatches between generators and customers. Significantly hold-up risks exist not only between retailers and generators but also affect (e.g. fuel) suppliers upstream of generators. Contracts are one means of addressing such problems and represent a particular improvement on spot market trading alone. However we argue that market contracting in electricity systems is a costly approach to addressing hold-up and related problems and that internal organisation (i.e. vertical integration) is a more efficient alternative minimising the overall costs of market contracting and ownership. Not only does integration internalise wholesale market risks and market power costs to the integrated firm thereby reducing their importance it also reduces the need for and efficacy of regulation to constrain generator market power. It furthermore thins contract markets reducing the threat of generator hold-up from competitive retail entry and otherwise supports generation investment and hence supply security. While the reinstatement or retention of retail franchise areas is one possible solution to the problems of contracting it is arguably unnecessary if there are other system features (such as transmission constraints) impeding retail entry. This is particularly so in systems involving vertical integration although even then policy makers are confronted with a trade-off between promoting retail competition and facilitating generation investment and supply security requiring judgement as to the optimal degree of retail market power. While vertical integration is a more natural and self-sustaining solution to electricity sector problems it too is only a partial solution leaving complementary roles for spot and long-term contract markets.


The brain renin-angiotensin system (RAS), of which angiotensin II (AngII) is the primary effector peptide, plays a critical role in the neurohumoral regulation of cardiovascular and body fluid homeostasis by modulating blood pressure, secretion of hypothalamic and pituitary hormones, and water intake. AngII produced locally in the brain or in the systemic circulation can act on brain regions called circumventricular organs (CVO), which lack the blood-brain-barrier. Dysregulation of central AngII signaling is implicated in the pathogenesis of hypertension; therefore, understanding the mechanisms of AngII in the CNS is an important area of investigation. Recently, a novel signaling mechanism for AngII in the periphery has been shown to involve NAD(P)H oxidase-derived reactive oxygen species (ROS). Although ROS are now known to be involved in numerous AngII-regulated processes in peripheral tissues, and are increasingly implicated in CNS neurodegenerative diseases, the role of ROS in central regulation of AngII-induced cardiovascular function remains unexplored. The hypothesis that ROS are critically involved in central AngII signaling and in AngII-dependent blood pressure and drinking behavior was tested by harnessing the power of an array of selective genetic tools, in combination with novel technologies for analysis of cardiovascular function in conscious mice. More specifically, central injections of adenoviruses encoding ROS-modulating molecules were used to examine the redox mechanisms in central AngII-mediated cardiovascular responses in vivo. Neuronal cell cultures were also used to investigate the involvement of NAD(P)H oxidase-derived ROS in AngII signaling, as well as to examine a link between calcium and ROS in intraneuronal AngII signaling. Finally, in order to better understand the potential role of ROS in the brain in the pathogenesis of AngII-dependent hypertension, a mouse model that recapitulates the characteristics of human hypertension was employed in conjunction with genetic modulation of the redox state of the brain. These studies provide new evidence


In the mobile communication area there is a demand for reference free perceptual quality measurements in video applications. In addition low complexity measurements are required. This paper proposes a method for prediction of a number of well known quality metrics, where the inputs to the predictors are readily available parameters at the decoder side of the communication channel. After an investigation of the dependencies between these parameters and between each parameter and the quality metrics, a set of parameters is chosen for the predictor. This predictor shows good results, especially for the PSNR


This paper presents a wireless power transmission subsystem with high power supply rejection (PSR) low dropout (LDO) regulator and thermal protection mechanism for artificial retina application. The proposed subsystem performs the functions of rectification, regulation and thermal detection. It can provide a stable DC source for implanted devices, and the subsystem only needs a small rectification capacitor. The proposed LDO achieves high PSRR performance of 46 dB at 10 MHz without any external capacitor. Moreover, the system contains the thermal protection mechanism to prevent cells from being damaged. A power controller in the system controls the received power by adjusting resonant capacitance in feedback. By controlling the received power, the system avoids receiving excessive power, enhances the power transmission efficiency, and avoids the device to be damaged by excessive heat. The proposed subsystem is to be fabricated with the TSMC 0.18 um CMOS process and occupies area of 556 um × 700 um. It achieves a high power conversion efficiency of 73 % under output voltage of 3.3 V and load current of 5 mA.


The familiar linear relation (Gutenberg-Richter) between the logarithm of the number of earthquakes and their magnitude is commonly ascribed to the distribution (fractal) of fault sizes in a self-similar process. We show that a concept of earthquake quanta whose failure is governed by simple physics and suggested by observations explains not only the Gutenberg-Richter relation but also the relatively constant stress drop for larger magnitude events. Results from computer simulation are consistent with observations from detailed seismicity studies.


When creating a design automation system for a mature product there already exists a complete and functional product design and the task is to retrace the initial design process to find the input parameters, algorithms, rules, relations and solution strategies (design process information) that govern this initial design.
This paper presents strategies and procedures for retracing, naming, classifying and storing the design process information governing the design variables of a mature product design, seen from a CAD representation perspective. Emphasis is on strategy for storing the design process information for use with the CAD representation as well as system transparency and efficient reuse of the documented and stored information.