In this paper hybrid coupler connected diagonal shaped patch antenna with slot is examined. Theoretical performance is carried out using advanced system design (ADS) software. Measurement of antenna parameters like return loss, standing wave ratio also have been presented in this article. The measured values for the antenna are taken by agilent E5062A network analyzer. Simulated and measured results are having good agreement. The effect of excited two orthogonal modes with equal amplitude and 90 degree phase shift coupler connected with patch will produce circular polarization. The antenna is having gain of 3.319dB and the directivity of 6.98dB. The proposed antenna can be useful in wireless applications.


Background: Adult height and leg length have been shown to be positively associated with childhood socioeconomic circumstances in several studies in western populations. This study will determine whether similar associations are observable in settings with different social histories, and will assess whether adult leg length is more strongly associated than adult height. Methods: Random samples of men and women aged 45–69 years were taken from population registers in Novosibirsk (Russia), Krakow (Poland) and six towns of the Czech Republic, recruiting nearly 29 000 people. Participants completed a questionnaire that included questions regarding their mother's and father's education (not available in the Czech Republic) and ownership of several household items when they were 10 years old. Participants' standing and sitting heights were measured and from these an estimate of leg length was derived. Associations between indicators of childhood socioeconomic circumstances and anthropometric measures were analysed using linear regression. Results: Russian individuals were shorter and reported fewer household assets at the age of 10 years than Czech and Polish individuals. Parental education and household assets were strongly associated with each other and both were independently associated with height, leg length and trunk length. Height was associated with childhood circumstances more strongly than leg length. The associations of childhood circumstances with the leg/trunk ratio were weak and inconsistent. Conclusion: In these urban populations in eastern Europe, adult height is associated with childhood conditions at least as strongly as leg length.


The majority of southern Africa's inhabitants are economically marginalised. Robert W. Cox's macro-theory of change suggests that the marginalised are a social force that could bring about political economic transformation from below. Other contemporary analysts also stress the importance of focusing on the marginalised as a source of social instability. The paper uses empirical data from the Afrobarometer (Round I, 1999-2000) to investigate whether this expectation for the marginalised to act as a catalyst for change in seven southern African states is substantiated. The analysis shows that the political protest potential of the marginalised is lower than that of the economically integrated, that they are more tolerant of authoritarian political alternatives, and that they are not significantly more economically dissatisfied than other groups. They are also inclined to accord somewhat more legitimacy to the state than are the integrated. Societies where large parts of the population are poor and marginalised are thus not necessarily more prone to political instability in the form of protest actions (violent or nonviolent). Those who are justly concerned about equity and greater inclusiveness must take cognisance of the need to access the profile of the marginalised.


Curriculum and its' reforms have received increased attention in international policy in recent years as a means to making education relevant to societal changes. Major curricula reforms focus on providing learners with abilities of learning new skills and knowledge for effective living in the midst of rapid technological change. The reforms have given rise to a range of emergent curriculum trends which have significant implications on how teachers should teach. This paper explores and highlights some of the emergent curriculum trends and the implications for teachers who implement the curricula. The implications are informed by an abundance of research examining how teachers, as facilitators can foster students' learning by understanding curriculum theory and processes, providing differentiated differentiation; facilitating learner-centered instruction; utilizing multiple instructional strategies, developing global citizens and lifelong learners, and developing emergent curriculum integration of technologies for curriculum delivery.  The paper concludes by pointing to the fact that since emergent curricula trends are geared towards the basic purpose of promoting the full realization of individual's whole life, teachers should align their teaching to correspond to the trend, acquire more knowledge and skills for responsive teaching, meet the needs of students for all-round development and should manifest basic characteristics and direction of curriculum development essential for global citizens. Keywords: Emergent curriculum, teachers, technology, life-long learning, learner-centered instruction


Elasmobranchii is a clade of chondrichthyans (cartilaginous fishes) that comprises sharks, skates and rays represented today by approximately 1,200 species. Chondrichthyans have a long evolutionary history dating back to the Late Ordovician (ca. 450 million years ago [Mya]) based on isolated dermal denticles (Janvier 1996). Other remains such as articulated skeletons and teeth are known from the Lower Devonian (ca. 410 Mya: Mader 1986; Miller et al. 2003). The fossil record of modern elasmobranchs (Neoselachii) can be traced back to the Early Permian (ca. 290 Mya) and is represented by isolated teeth (Ivanov 2005), with fossils of crown group sharks and rays appearing in Lower Jurassic (ca. 200 Mya) rocks (e.g., Cappetta 2012). Since their appearance in the geological record, elasmobranchs are mainly represented by isolated teeth, whereas articulated skeletons are very rare and restricted to a small number of fossil localities (e.g., Cappetta 2012). The scarcity of skeletal remains in their fossil record is due to their poorly mineralized cartilaginous skeleton that requires special taphonomical conditions to be preserved. Elasmobranch teeth, in contrast, are composed of highly mineralized tissues (hydroxyapatite) that have a strong preservation potential (Shimada 2006). In addition, elasmobranchs replace their teeth continuously over the course of their life span (polyphyodonty) and therefore shed thousands of teeth in their lifetime (Reif et al. 1978; Schnetz et al. 2016) leading to large numbers of potential fossils. These morphologically highly diverse isolated teeth constitute much of the rich fossil record of elasmobranchs, and largely form the basis of our understanding of elasmobranch diversity and evolution through geological time.


We investigate all-optical switching at the guided mode resonances originating near the Dirac point of a finite, 2-D photonic crystal consisting of a square lattice of dielectric columns possessing a cubic nonlinearity. The peculiar field localization properties of these Dirac-point guided mode resonances conspire to yield extremely low switching threshold at near-to-normal incidence for remarkably low filling factors of the nonlinear material.


International insolvency has aroused a great deal of interest in recent years, owing to the spectacular rise in cases of the collapse of banks and multinational companies situated in a variety of jurisdictions. There has been considerable progress in England and Wales from the traditional common law methods of asserting jurisdiction and their statutory equivalents, which lead inevitably to the winding up of the company, towards procedures for reciprocal assistance, which allow domestic procedures to be extended to the foreign company. This often has the effect of allowing the company to attempt to consolidate its economic future through the judicious use of those rescue regimes available in domestic law. The history in the United Kingdom for co-operation has been good, with many of the cases leading the way in developing the principle that domestic courts should allow the most efficient result to obtain for the benefit of creditors and other participants in the process as a whole. Often, this requires domestic courts to extend jurisdiction and the rules in the United Kingdom are framed widely, so as to allow for very wide bases for asserting jurisdiction, where there is a conceivable benefit from doing so.


The profile of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has risen dramatically over the last decade and cancer patients represent its most prolific users. As a result, the NHS and UK cancer services are attempting to develop a wider range of therapeutic options for patients. Despite such developments, little is known about why cancer patients use CAM, its perceived benefits and the perspectives of the doctors and nurses involved. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the UK, Therapeutic Pluralism includes over 120 interviews with cancer patients and professionals, plus innovative 'diary' data which, for the first time, detail the experiences of CAM users. It gives a systematic analysis of issues such as: The development of patient preferences and influences on decision making Expectations of CAM and interpretations of 'success' in cancer treatment The nature and importance of 'evidence' and 'effectiveness' for patients The organisational dynamics involved in integrating CAM into the NHS Pathways to CAM and the role of the Internet The role of oncology clinicians in patients' experiences of cancer and their use of CAMs Therapeutic Pluralism is essential reading for students and researchers of medical sociology, complementary and alternative medicine and cancer. It will also be useful to medical and health professionals, and policy-makers with an interest in complementary and alternative medicine.


Abstract. Airborne Lidar Bathymetry is a laser scanning technique to measure waterbody bottom topography in shallow waterbodies with limited turbidity. The topic has recently gained relevance due to the advent of new sensor technologies allowing for much higher spatial resolution in bathymetry data capture and due to guidelines demanding regular monitoring of waterbodies. In our contribution, we focus on three important aspects of lidar bathymetry: In the first part, systematic effects of wave patterns will be analysed in order to derive waterbody coordinate correction terms. In the second part, we will apply waveform-stacking techniques to enhance the detectability of water bottom points in lidar bathymetry full waveform signals. In the third part, a dedicated full wave-form analysis procedure is shown, which allows for deriving turbidity information from the decay of the signal intensity in the waterbody.


An algorithm based on independent component analysis for blind polarization demultiplexing in a coherent transmission system is presented. A comparison with the constant modulus algorithm in terms of the convergence properties is performed, and it is found that the suggested algorithm has a significantly faster convergence rate and does not have any singularity problems. We also demonstrate that the algorithm convergence is strongly dependent on the choice of starting condition and show how this can be exploited to increase the convergence rate.


Higher education institutions and the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Kuwait have been shifting from face-to-face to blended learning (BL) for several years. The only exception is the School of Basic Education (SBEK) where face-to-face and one-way communication is virtually the only method used. The main objective of SBEK is to train teachers. This research aims to explore the possible challenges that face the implementation of BL at SBEK and the solutions needed, from the perspectives of the senior management, teachers and final year students. I also sought to measure and interpret the attitudes of the management, teachers and students at SBEK towards BL using a mixed-methods approach and to explore the extent to which these attitudes are currently perceived as obstacles towards the implementation of blended learning. The sample of this research consists of 344 participants (N = 293 final year students, N = 43 faculty teachers and N = 8 senior management) for the quantitative phase and 43 participants (N = 7 college leaders/senior management, N = 10 teachers/faculty members and N = 26 students) for the qualitative phase.

BL has been considered in the context of the Kuwait higher education system and the MOE as a way of increasing the achievement and the critical thinking necessary for students in Kuwait. The study concludes that the attitudes of most of the participants in this study towards the implementation of BL at SBEK appeared to be positive and optimistic; however, many obstacles were identified. These include an apparent absence of planning and leadership, financial issues, academic issues, cultural issues, English language and technical issues. I have also proposed a road map as a strategy for implementing BL in SBEK based on the research findings.


The aims of this study are to develop, justify and test a conceptual framework
related to information and knowledge use by managers. This is currently a
critical management area partly due to the extent of external change which has
reduced the ability to rely on experience but also because of the increasing
interest in evidence informed management which includes an emphasis on the
effective use of information and knowledge resources.

The literature review integrates the information and knowledge use literature
from librarianship/information science and management with that of
information and knowledge production and evidence informed management
into one conceptual framework. The fieldwork has involved an exploratory
testing of the elements of this conceptual framework by investigating: (a)
what is the context of information and knowledge need including what
situations provoke the explicit use of information and knowledge resources
and what resources have been produced relating to these decision areas; (b)
what are the intervening variables that affect information and knowledge
seeking and use; (c) what are the information and knowledge seeking
behaviours of managers; and (d) how is information and knowledge processed
and used in the context of adoption of an evidence informed management
approach.

The research methodology consists of semi structured interviews with 28
managers from 3 National Health Service (NHS) trusts designed to test the
conceptual framework but also enable participants identify other relevant
issues. In addition to identifying general management issues related to use of
information and knowledge resources, the study investigates use in relation to
two contemporary strategic decision making areas: education and training and
performance management.

This study makes a particular contribution by identifying those decision
making areas tending to lead to use of information and knowledge resources in
a health context. It finds the most extensive use is of practice related
resources and adds to the limited research on information literacy in a
management situation. In addition, the study adds to the relatively few
empirical studies associated with evidence informed management. It
confirms evidence informed management as the appropriate label and
determines the breadth of information and knowledge resources is relevant to
this approach.

Finally, the study makes recommendations to enhance NHS management
practice in a number of areas. These include strengthening academic
research; strengthening availability of practice related information and
knowledge; developing skills and/or support for managers related to
information and knowledge use; developing the production of systematic
reviews; and improving organisational arrangements associated with
information and knowledge resources. Also included is a dissemination
strategy and identification of areas for future research.


Gearbox condition monitoring(CM) plays a vital role in ensuring the reliability and operational efficiency of a wide range of industrial facilities such as wind turbines and helicopters. Many technologies have been investigated intensively for more accurate CM of rotating machines with using vibro-acoustic signature analysis. However, a comparison of CM performances between surface vibrations and airborne acoustics has not been carried out with the use of emerging signal processing techniques.

This research has focused on a symmetric evaluation of CM performances using vibrations obtained from the surface of a multi stage gearbox housing and the airborne sound obtained remotely but close to the gearbox, in conjunction with state of the art signal processing techniques, in order to provide efficient and effective CM for gear transmissions subject to gradual and progressive deteriorations. By completing the comparative studies, this research has resulted in a number of new findings that show significant contributions to knowledge which are detailed as follows.

In general, through a comprehensive review of the advancement in the subject, the research has been carried out by integrating an improved dynamic modelling, more realistic experiment verification and more advanced signal processing approaches. The improved modelling has led to an in-depth understanding of the nonlinear modulation in vibro-acoustic signals due to wear effects. Thereafter, Time Synchronous Average (TSA) and Modulation Signal Bispectrum (MSB) are identified to be the most promising signal processing methods to fulfil the evaluation because of their unique properties of simultaneous noise reduction and modulation enhancement. The more realistic tests have demonstrated that arun-to-failure test is necessary to develop effective diagnostic tools as it produces datasets from gear transmissions where deterioration naturally progresses over a long operation, rather than faults created artificially to gear systems, as is common in the majority of studies and the results unreliable.

Particularly, the evaluation studies have clarified a number of key issues in the realisation of gearbox diagnostics based on TSA and MSB analysis of the vibrations from two accelerometers and acoustics from two microphones in monitoring the run-to-failure process, which showed slight gear wear of two back-to-back multiple stage helical gearboxes under variable load and speed operations.

TSA analysis of vibration signals and acoustic signals allows for accurate monitoring and diagnosis results of the gradual deterioration in the lower speed transmission of both the tested gearboxes. However, it cannot give the correct indication of the higher speed stages in the second gearbox as the reference angle signal is too erroneous due to the distortion of long transmission trains. In addition, acoustic signals can indicate that there is a small determination in the higher speed transmission of the first gearbox.

The MSB analysis of vibration signals and sound signals allows for the gathering of more corrective monitoring and diagnostic results of the deterioration in the four stages of transmissions of the two tested gearboxes. MSB magnitudes of both the two lower speed transmissions show monotonic increases with operational time and the increments over a longer period are in excess of three times higher than the baselines, the deteriorations are therefore regarded as severe. For the two higher speed transmissions, the MSB of vibrations and acoustics illustrates small deteriorations in the latter operating hours.

Comparatively, acoustic signal based diagnostics can out-perform vibration as it can provide an early indication of deteriorations and correct diagnosis of the faults as microphones perceive a large area of dynamic responses from gearbox housing whereas accelerometers collect a very localised response which can be distorted by transmission paths. In addition, MSB analysis can out-perform conventional TSA as it maintains all diagnostic information regarding the rotating systems and can be implemented without any additional reference channels.


In the implementation of Public Service Information System, an agency needs to provide openly public service information that can be accessed easily, quickly, accurately, and accountably. The information system is a series of activities which include the storaging and managing information and also mechanism of delivering information from organizer to the public which are presented electronically (PermenpanRB No. 13 Tahun 2017).Public information must be conveyed and announced periodicly, soonly, and available in everytime (UU No. 14 Years 2008). With the reformation of this public information announcement technique, it is believed that the objective of UU 14 Years 2008 about Public Information Openness can be achieved. The intended purposes are listed in Article 3:1)    to ensure the right of citizens to know public policy making plans, public policy programs, and public decision-making processes, and the reasons for public decision making;2)    to encourage public participation in the public policy-making process;3)    to enhance the community's active role in public policy making and good Public Agency management;4)    to realize good state administration, which is transparent, effective and efficient, accountable and accountable;5)    to know the reasons for public policy affecting the livelihood of the public;6)    to develop science and intellectual life of the nation; and / or improve the management and information services within the Public Agency to produce quality information services.The First Class of Agricultural Quarantine Station in Tanjung Balai Asahan use social media as a system information. The informations provide in 2 (two) forms, its are photos and videos. Photos and videos are uploaded on Instagram account of the First Class Agricultural Quarantine Station in Tanjung Balai Asahan (@karantina_tbasahan).


Common Wireless LAN (WLAN) pathologies include low signal-to-noise ratio, congestion, hidden terminals or interference from non-802.11 devices and phenomena. Prior work has focused on the detection and diagnosis of such problems using layer-2 information from 802.11 devices and special purpose access points and monitors, which may not be generally available. Here, we investigate a user-level approach: is it possible to detect and diagnose 802.11 pathologies with strictly user-level active probing, without any cooperation from, and without any visibility in, layer-2 devices? In this paper, we present preliminary but promising results indicating that such diagnostics are feasible.


Transgenic organisms are a valuable tool for studying epigenetics, as they provide significant insight into the evolutionary conservation of epigenetic control sequences, the interacting proteins, and the underlying molecular mechanisms. Paramutation is an epigenetic phenomenon in which the epigenetic status and expression level of one allele is heritably altered after pairing with another. At the b1 locus in maize, a control region consisting of seven 853 bp tandem repeats is required for paramutation. To study the conservation of the epigenetic mechanisms underlying maize b1 paramutation, I created transgenic Drosophila carrying the maize b1 control region flanked by FRT sites and adjacent to the Drosophila white reporter gene. The maize b1 tandem repeats caused epigenetic silencing in Drosophila, as white expression consistently increased following repeat removal. A single copy of the tandem repeat sequence was sufficient to cause silencing, and silencing strength increased as the number of repeats increased. Trans interactions, such as pairing-sensitive silencing, were also observed and appear to require a threshold number of b1 tandem repeats, similar to paramutation in maize. Analysis of transcription from the repeats showed that the b1 tandem repeats are transcribed from both strands in Drosophila, as they are in maize. Bidirectional transcription was found to extend to the regions flanking the repeats, and persisted in "repeats-out" transgenes following repeat removal. However, aberrant transcription was lost when a zero-repeat transgene was moved to a new genomic position, suggesting that it may be due to an epigenetic mark that is retained from the previous silenced state. A search for modifiers of b1 repeat-mediated silencing demonstrated that Polycomb group proteins are involved. Together, these results indicate considerable conservation of an epigenetic silencing process between the plant and animal kingdoms. Genomic imprinting is a related epigenetic process in which parent-specific epigenetic states are inherited and maintained in progeny. The conservation of epigenetic mechanisms was further explored via an in-depth review of the molecular mechanisms underlying genomic imprinting in plants, mammals and insects, and identification of potentially imprinted genes in Drosophila by microarray analysis.


The barrier properties of polymers are a significant factor in determining the shelf or device lifetime in polymer packaging. Nanocomposites developed from the dispersion of nanometer thick platelets into a host polymer matrix have shown much promise. The magnitude of the benefit on permeability has been different depending on the polymer investigated or the degree of dispersion of the platelet in the polymer. In this dissertation, the effect of density changes in the bulk and at the polymer-platelet interface on permeability of polymer nanocomposites is investigated. Nanocomposites of nylon, PET, and PEN were processed by extrusion. Montmorillonite layered silicate (MLS) in a range of concentrations from 1 to 5% was blended with all three resins. Dispersion of the MLS in the matrix was investigated by using one or a combination of X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Variation in bulk density via crystallization was analyzed using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and polarized optical microscopy. Interfacial densification was investigated using force modulation atomic force microscopy (AFM) and ellipsometry. Mechanical properties are reported. Permeability of all films was measured in an in-house built permeability measurement system. The effect of polymer orientation and induced defects on permeability was investigated using biaxially stretched, small and large cycle fatigue samples of PET and nylon nanocomposites. The effect of annealing in nylon and nanocomposites was also investigated. The measured permeability was compared to predicted permeability by considering the MLS as an ideal dispersion and the matrix as a system with concentration dependent crystallinity.


Arjuna is an object-oriented programming system implemented entirely in C++, that provides a set of tools for the construction of fault-tolerant distributed applications. Arjuna exploits features found in most object-oriented languages (such as inheritance) and only requires a limited set of system capabilities commonly found in conventional operating systems. Arjuna provides the programmer with classes that implement atomic transations, object level recovery, concurrency control and persistence. These facilities can be overridden by the programmer as the needs of the application dictate. Distribution of an Arjuna application is handled using stub generation techniques that operate on the original C++ class headers normally used by the standard compiler. The system is portable, modular and flexible. The paper presents the design and implementaion details of Arjuna and takes a retrospective look at the system based on the application building experience of users.


Since philosophers began thinking seriously about the moral status of non-human animals, many of the practices we once took for granted have come to be condemned as unjustifiable, among them our reliance on animals as a food source. While the arguments which have been adduced in support of moral vegetarianism invoke quite different (indeed incompatible) moral frameworks, they begin with a common concern for the welfare of animals. In the real world of practising vegetarians, this concern tends to be subordinated to considerations of health or food scarcity. Philosophical vegetarians need not deny, and have not denied, the importance of these further considerations. But among philosophers the case for moral vegetarianism has rested primarily on arguments from animal welfare.


In the copyright policy debate, proponents of strong copyright protection tend to be dismissive of the quality of freely available content. In response to counter-examples such as open access scholarly publications and advertising-supported business models (e.g., newspaper websites and the over-the-air television broadcasts viewed by 50 million Americans), the strong copyright proponents center their attack on amateur content. In this narrative, YouTube is for cat videos and Wikipedia is a wildly unreliable source of information.Recent studies, however, indicate that the volunteer-written and -edited Wikipedia is no less reliable than professionally edited encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Moreover, Wikipedia has far broader coverage. Britannica, which discontinued its print edition in 2012 and now appears only online, contains 120,000 articles, all in English. Wikipedia, by contrast, has 4.3 million articles in English and a total of 22 million articles in 285 languages. Wikipedia attracts more than 470 million unique visitors a month who view over 19 billion pages. According to Alexa, it is the sixth most visited website in the world.Wikipedia, therefore, is a shining example of valuable content created by non-professionals. Is there a way to measure the economic value of this content? Because Wikipedia is created by volunteers, is administered by a non-profit foundation, and is distributed for free, the normal means of measuring value — such as revenue, market capitalization, and book value — do not directly apply. Nonetheless, there are a variety of methods for estimating its value in terms of its market value, its replacement cost, and the value it creates for its users. These methods suggest a valuation in the tens of billions of dollars, a one-time replacement cost of $6.6 billion with an annual updating cost of $630 million, and consumer benefit in the hundreds of billions of dollars.


Titanian andradite is a diagnostic accessory phase of silica undersaturated alkalic plutonic and volcanic rocks but also occurs in skarn and hydrothermal alteration assemblages. We examine the extent and nature of Ti substitution in andradite as a function of environment, based on electron microprobe analyses of titanian andradite from magmatic and hydrothermal occurrences in the Canadian Cordillera. Although magmatic and hydrothermal titanian andradite forms under diverse conditions, the range of compositions reported is similar. All compositions are completely described by eight linearly independent Thompson-space components: Andradite (additive), TiSi-, TiMg (super 2+) [Fe (super 3+) ] (sub -2) , Fe (super 2+) Mg-, Al[Fe (super 3+) ]-, MgCa-, MnCa- and H 4 Si-. Titanium is accommodated in all igneous garnet via two exchange components: TiSi-, which is numerically equivalent to silicon deficiencies at the tetrahedral site, and TiMg[Fe (super 3+) ]-2 representing coupled substitutions involving octahedral cations. In natural samples of igneous Ti-bearing garnet, TiSi-tends to be twice as abundant as TiMg[Fe (super 3+) ] (sub -2) . In contrast, hydrothermal titanian andradite can have as much TiSi- as igneous varieties, but has zero or negative amounts of TiMg[Fe (super 3+) ] (sub -2) . This is also true of synthetic Ti-bearing garnet produced under high f O2 conditions. Experimental data on titanian andradite are used to demonstrate that composition can be directly related, at least semi-quantitatively, to the intensive parameters aSiO 2 and f O2 attending the formation of Ti-bearing garnet in both igneous and hydrothermal environments. Potentially, titanian andradite can be used to track changes in these two important parameters throughout the evolution of individual magmatic or hydrothermal systems.


American Legion letter dated Aug. 13, 1979 to McCane-Sondock Security. This letter is about B. F. Rader having been voted out of the organization and his pass card needs to be cancelled and Mr. Joe Garcia replacing him as part of the American Legion Building Corp. He needs to be issued a pass card as does Joe Garcia, Leticia Salazar and Evangelina Allen.


'Human rights' and 'democracy' as two related but also distinct concepts are frequently confused with each other in the discourse of practical politics. They tend to be seen as necessarily coexisting or otherwise both absent in a given polity, resulting in the notions' interchangeable usage in a taken-for-granted manner. The argument of this essay is a three-fold clarification. First, basic human rights have to be defined in terms of the right to life, thus minimal enough to be universally intelligible, acceptable and measurable. Second, as such human rights are generally independent of democracy, although the latter may serve the former along with other favourable social and institutional conditions. Third, the assertion of human rights legitimacy over democratic legitimacy entails some normative re-articulations of policy priorities. Overall, the obvious conceptual distinction needs to be remade for intellectual clarity as well as moral-political validity, which is immediately relevant in particular to developing and transitional societies.


The Gold Butte block of southeastern Nevada appears to be a cross section through the upper {approximately}17 km of Colorado Plateau crust, tilted eastward and tectonically denuded via top-to-the west normal faulting in Tertiary time. The east side of the block exposes a steeply dipping cratonic Paleozoic section 2 to 3 km thick; Proterozoic basement to the west is continuously exposed for an apparent thickness of {approximately}15 km structurally below the basal Cambrian unconformity. Apatite fission track dating and confirmed track-length distributions have been used to determine the time of unroofing of the Gold Butte block and hence the timing of one episode of extension in this part of the Basin and Range province. Samples collected in as east-west transect along the block indicate an abrupt transition from a period of relative thermal and tectonic stability to the onset of rapid cooling. The fission-track data indicate that the unroofing of the Gold Butte block was rapid and that the crustal section was brought to within a few kilometers of the surface at ca. 15 Ma.


I t is rare for a single hospital death to become the subject of multiple-day stories in the major national newspapers and play on one evening television news program after another. But the tragic demise of a young volunteer subject at Johns Hopkins Hospital did. Why? In matters medical, a lot depends on trust. In the public mind, Johns Hopkins may be the medical gold standard; the very week of the event saw it atop U.S. News and World Report 's "best medical center" list. Dramatic failings by trusted institutions attract attention.

So does disagreement. The dramatic ban on all human subjects research handed down by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP) drew a feisty, outraged response from Johns Hopkins management. Here were the government of the United States and a leading academic institution fighting about a rule violation. For the press, it doesn't get much better than that. The frenzy subsided only when Johns Hopkins was let out of jail, with parole conditions, after serving 3 days. The controversy hasn't been good for our profession either: The New York Times editorial page headline was "Death at the Hands of Science."

What can be learned from all this? Several things about this case are special. It was a rare kind of study: a "challenge" trial in which hexamethonium, a drug not currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), was used to induce asthma-like symptoms in healthy subjects. Federally funded experiments such as the Hopkins study are overseen by OHRP, an office that lived at NIH until last year but was moved downtown to the HHS secretary's office after a well-publicized death last year during a gene therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania. (Clinical trials performed to support a new drug or device application are regulated by the FDA; some centers have dual oversight for everything.)

The report of the OHRP asserts that the Hopkins Institutional Review Board (IRB) (required under law to approve protocols and monitor informed consent for experiments involving human subjects) and/or the principal investigator (i) failed to find earlier literature demonstrating risks associated with hexamethonium, (ii) didn't check its regulatory status, and (iii) didn't use a proper informed consent procedure. It is hard to read the OHRP findings without concluding that the process at Hopkins was out of compliance. But the report contains charges strangely reminiscent of those in well-publicized past actions against other medical centers. That suggests that the problem may be a systemic one. (It also makes one wonder why we don't learn more from the misfortunes of others!)

The heated Hopkins response put me in mind of the tensions that arose when the FDA inspected IRBs in the late 1970s. People with badges had to be sent into academic institutions that were pursuing fine work with high purpose, saying that they were from the government and had come to help. The investigators probably thought: "Who are these folks to tell us how to do our experiment?" Most of the time, the regulators and the regulated managed to work things out, but it did become clear that a lot was being asked of the IRBs.

We are asking even more now. Conversations with IRB members reveal deep concern about the workload imposed on busy faculty, and the increasing requirements for support staff. Universities are doing more and more clinical trials, and the dual oversight by the FDA and OHRP adds confusion. And as the transaction volume is increasing, a series of adverse events has intensified oversight, adding to the pressure on the institutions and their IRBs.

The problem thus looks like a system problem rather than only a Hopkins problem. A retrofit of the oversight process is overdue; HHS needs to decide how to manage IRBs without bureaucratic collision. Universities, having been told for years to invest more resources in patient protection, need to deliver more administrative leadership and staff support; or faculty members, who dislike growth in administrative budgets, may have to give the process even more of their time. And the public may have to suspend its predilection for placing blame and accept that even a perfect system, alas, will not be risk-free.


From the Publisher:
Computers and devices are more connected now than ever before.Why? Because the humans who use those computers need to collaborate. We need to share information, and we need to do it quickly, without regard to the physical distance that separates us. Corporate solution developers now more than ever have the opportunity and responsibility to enable people to communicate in ways never before possible.
CDO and MAPI Programming with Visual Basic: Developing Mail and Messaging Applications dives deep into Microsoft's Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) and the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI), then moves into succinct explanations of the types of useful messaging applications that can be written in Visual Basic.
Microsoft has given the Visual Basic community Collaboration Data Objects (CDO)--a technology that goes far beyond simple email, fully into the realm of information workflow. CDO enables Visual Basic applications to exchange not only classic email, but in fact any information in a straightforward and easy way. The Internet--sometimes seen as a barrier by developers--is turned into an open pipe, ready to take your application's data around the world. Routing documents and building email list servers is just the beginning. Harness the power of worldwide communication in your everyday business applications.
MAPI is the cornerstone of messaging on the Windows platforms, and profoundly influences the way you will write your collaboration applications. Understanding this technology lays the foundation for adding effective collaboration capabilities to your own applications.
CDO and MAPI Programming with Visual Basic: Developing Mail and Messaging Applications fills a gap in an exciting and relatively young, yet popular, technology that lacks adequate documentation.


On October 26, 2000, a Black Brant V sounding rocket carrying a chemical tracer release was launched from the rocket range at White Sands, New Mexico, as part of the Turbulent Oxygen Mixing Experiment (TOMEX). The releases occurred approximately 150 km from the location of the Starfire Optical Range where the University of Illinois sodium lidar was operated to measure winds and temperatures in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. The geometry for the experiment was such that the lidar beam was able to intersect the release point for the chemical tracer trail on the upleg part of the flight near an altitude of 95 km. In all, a total of five lidar beam directions were used to sample the region from approximately 85 to 105‐km altitude in the vicinity of the releases. Combining the lidar Doppler velocity data from the various beam directions made it possible to produce profiles of vector horizontal winds that could be compared directly with the winds obtained from the triangulation of the chemical tracer trails.


Robotics Applications KUKA is a global automation corporation with sales of around EUR 3.2 billion and around 14,200 employees. As a leading global supplier of intelligent automation solutions KUKA offers its customers everything from a single source: from robots and cells to fully automated systems and their net-working in markets such as automotive, electronics, general industry, consumer goods, e-commerce/retail and healthcare. The KUKA Group is headquartered in Augsburg, Germany.


We assessed the effects of nutrient enrichment on three stream ecosystems running through distinct biomes (Mediterranean, Pampean and Andean). We increased the concentrations of N and P in the stream water 1.6–4-fold following a before–after control–impact paired series (BACIPS) design in each stream, and evaluated changes in the biomass of bacteria, primary producers, invertebrates and fish in the enriched (E) versus control (C) reaches after nutrient addition through a predictive-BACIPS approach. The treatment produced variable biomass responses (2–77% of explained variance) among biological communities and streams. The greatest biomass response was observed for algae in the Andean stream (77% of the variance), although fish also showed important biomass responses (about 9–48%). The strongest biomass response to enrichment (77% in all biological compartments) was found in the Andean stream. The magnitude and seasonality of biomass responses to enrichment were highly site specific, often depending on the basal nutrient concentration and on windows of ecological opportunity (periods when environmental constraints other than nutrients do not limit biomass growth). The Pampean stream, with high basal nutrient concentrations, showed a weak response to enrichment (except for invertebrates), whereas the greater responses of Andean stream communities were presumably favored by wider windows of ecological opportunity in comparison to those from the Mediterranean stream. Despite variation among sites, enrichment globally stimulated the algal-based food webs (algae and invertebrate grazers) but not the detritus-based food webs (bacteria and invertebrate shredders). This study shows that nutrient enrichment tends to globally enhance the biomass of stream biological assemblages, but that its magnitude and extent within the food web are complex and are strongly determined by environmental factors and ecosystem structure.


This paper discusses an image enhancement technique based on a standard deviation method to obtain high contrast C-scan results by using immersion ultrasonic testing. Ultrasonic C-scan results have relatively low resolution and poor imaging quality in anisotropic composites due to the speckle noise produced by the interference of backscattered signals. This developed technique will aid non-destructive evaluation (NDE) inspectors in making quick, accurate, and reliable decisions. A high quality region of interest (ROI) image was first reconstructed from the raw amplitude data obtained from ultrasonic testing. Then, a standard deviation based method was applied on ROI images to improve the edge contrast of the defect area to the non-defect area. The results obtained demonstrated that this applied method can greatly improve the image quality and offer detailed information of defects in an ROI by restraining the noises effectively. We believe this technique can make the defect evaluation process much easier and more accurate, and it can be expected to be a novel method for the ultrasonic C-scan result enhancement.


The stories of Indonesian women have often been told by Indonesian men and Dutch men and women. This volume asks how these representations—reproduced, transformed, and circulated in history, ethnography, and literature—have circumscribed feminine behavior in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia. Presenting dialogues between prominent scholars of and from Indonesia and Indonesian women working in professional, activist, religious, and literary domains, the book dissolves essentialist notions of "women" and "Indonesia" that have arisen out of the tensions of empire.

The contributors examine the ways in which Indonesian women and men are enmeshed in networks of power and then pursue the stories of those who, sometimes at great political risk, challenge these powers. In this juxtaposition of voices and stories, we see how indigenous patriarchal fantasies of feminine behavior merged with Dutch colonial notions of proper wives and mothers to produce the Indonesian government's present approach to controlling the images and actions of women. Facing the theoretical challenge of building a truly cross-cultural feminist analysis, Fantasizing the Feminine takes us into an ongoing conversation that reveals the contradictions of postcolonial positionings and the fragility of postmodern identities.

This book will be welcomed by readers with interests in contemporary Indonesian politics and society as well as historians, anthropologists, and other scholars concerned with literature, gender, and cultural studies.

Contributors . Benedict R. O'G. Anderson, Sita Aripurnami, Jane Monnig Atkinson, Nancy K. Florida, Daniel S. Lev, Dede Oetomo, Laurie J. Sears, Ann Laura Stoler, Saraswati Sunindyo, Julia I. Suryakusuma, Jean Gelman Taylor, Sylvia Tiwon, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Diane L. Wolf


When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn't just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapuścinski, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the streetfighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now? There are many versions of last month's events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western 'reform movement', something along the lines of the colour-coded revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. They support the protests as a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution, as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic Iran freed from Muslim fundamentalism. They are countered by sceptics who think that Ahmadinejad actually won, that he is the voice of the majority, while Mousavi's support comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. Let's face facts, they say: in Ahmadinejad, Iran has the president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the clerical establishment whose differences from Ahmadinejad are merely cosmetic. He too wants to continue with the atomic energy programme, is against recognising Israel, and when he was prime minister in the repressive years of the war with Iraq enjoyed the full support of Khomeini. Finally, and saddest of all, are the leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad. What is at stake for them is Iranian freedom from imperialism. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country's independence, exposed corruption among the elite and used Iran's oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority. This, we are told, is the true Ahmadinejad: the Holocaust-denying fanatic is a creation of the Western media. In this view, what's been happening in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a coup, financed by the West, against the legitimate premier. This not only ignores the facts (the high electoral turnout, up from the usual 55 to 85 per cent, can be explained only as a protest vote), it also assumes, patronisingly, that Ahmadinejad is good enough for the backward Iranians: they aren't yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular left. Opposed to one another though they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests as a conflict between Islamic hardliners and pro-Western liberal reformists. That is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants to increase people's freedom and introduce a market economy, or a member of the clerical establishment whose victory wouldn't significantly change the nature of the regime? Either way, the true nature of the protests is being missed.


The aim of the present study was to evaluate the immunomodulatory potential of Biofield Energy Treatment (The Trivedi Effect®) on a new proprietary compound composed of herbs and minerals (herbomineral formulation). The test formulation contains the mixture of the herbal root extract ashwagandha and the minerals (zinc, magnesium, and selenium). The test formulation was divided into two parts. One part was denoted as the control without any Biofield Energy Treatment, while the other part was defined as the Biofield Energy Treated sample, which received the Biofield Energy Healing Treatment remotely from eighteen renowned Biofield Energy Healers and defined as the Biofield Energy Treated formulation. The immunomodulatory parameters viz. humoral immune response (IgG and IgM), cellular immune response (CD4+/CD8+), hematological parameters, lipid profile, hepatic enzymes, and sex hormones (progesterone and estrogen) in female Sprague Dawley rats were analyzed. The results of humoral immune response data showed decreased levels of IgG and IgM by 80.54% and 78.94% respectively, in the Biofield Energy Treated test formulation group (G3) compared with the disease control group (G2). Estimation of cellular immune response data revealed a significant (p≤0.01) increase in the ratio of CD4+/CD8+ by 161.71% in the G3 group, while it was increased by 100.50% in the untreated test formulation group (G4) compared with the G2 group. Thus, the humoral and cellular immune responses were significantly altered in the G3 as compared with the G4 group. The TLC and neutrophils counts were significantly increased by 11.34% and 1.34% respectively, in the G3 compared with the G2 group. Lipid profile data suggested that the Biofield Energy Treated test formulation showed improvement in the tested parameters compared with the untreated test formulation group. However, significant improvement was found in the tested hepatic biomarkers i.e. decreased levels of the SGOT, SGPT, and CK-MB by 14.28%, 8.54%, and 20.79% in the G3 group compared with the G2 group. The levels of total protein, alkaline phosphatase, albumin, and globulin were increased by 11.93%, 1.24%, 6.10%, and 20.74% respectively, in the G3 compared with the G2 group. Consequently, the levels of progesterone and estrogen were significantly increased by 199.86% and 50.19%, respectively in G3 with respect to the G2 group. In conclusion, overall data suggest that The Trivedi Effect®-Biofield Energy Healing Treatment on the herbomineral formulation can be used for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, stress management, and anti-aging by improving overall health.


The increasing number of users as well as their demand for more and richer content has led to an exponential growth of Internet traffic for more than 15 years. In addition, new applications and use cases have changed the type of traffic. For example, social networking enables users to publish their own content. This user generated content is often published on popular sites such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Another example are the offerings of interactive and multi-media content by content providers, e. g., Google Maps or IPTV services. With the introduction of peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols in 1998 an even more radical change emerged because P2P protocols allow users to directly exchange large amounts of content: The peers transfer data without the need for an intermediary and often centralized server. However, as shown by recent studies Internet traffic is again dominated by HTTP, mostly at the expense of P2P. This traffic growth increases the demands on the infrastructure components that form the Internet, e. g., servers and routers. Moreover, most of the traffic is generated by a few very popular services. The enormous demand for such popular content cannot be satisfied by the traditional hosting model in which content is located on a single server. Instead, content providers need to scale up their delivery infrastructure, e. g., by using replication in large data centers or by buying service from content delivery infrastructures, e. g., Akamai or Limelight. Moreover, not only content providers have to copewith the demand: The network infrastructure also needs to be constantly upgraded to keep up with the growing demand for content. In this thesis we characterize the impact of content delivery on the network. We utilize data sets from both active and passive measurements. This allows us to cover a wide range of abstraction levels from a detailed protocol level view of several content delivery mechanisms to the high-level picture of identifying and mapping the content infrastructures that are hosting the most popular content. We find that caching content is still hard and that the user's choice of DNS resolvers has a profound impact on the server selection mechanism of content distribution infrastructures. We propose Web content cartography to infer how content distribution infrastructures are deployed and what the role of different organizations in the Internet is. We conclude by putting our findings in the context of contemporary work and give recommendations on how to improve content delivery to all parties involved: users, Internet service providers, and content distribution infrastructures.


This paper discusses the current status of the Angolan macroeconomy, with a particular focus on the role of oil income both now and in the future. Emphasis is placed on the distortions that can result from large inflows of foreign exchange both in terms of the real exchange rate and also in terms of bias in sectoral growth rates. At the present time Angola is in the second year of a de facto policy of exchange rate based stabilization wherein the government is using large purchases of domestic currency to reduce the excess liquidity generated by deficit spending. This policy of "sterilization" of government spending has resulted in a quasi-fixed exchange rate at a level between 80 and 90 Kwanzas to the US Dollar. While inflation has declined substantially, prices have climbed more than 31% over the past year, a rate approximately half that of 2003. The result has been a sharp real appreciation of the Kwanza and a consequent decline in incentives to produce traded goods. Finding a sustainable way to transition from this expensive policy will be key to a successful rehabilitation and reconstruction of Angola's war torn economy. By any measure the extent of the appreciation has been large. While it is impossible to assign a precise number to the extent of overvaluation it is possible to compare the current situation with the recent past to give an idea of what the nominal exchange rate would be if depreciation had kept pace with the inflation in consumer prices that has continued unabated over the past years. These calculations suggest that a nominal depreciation of as much as 50% would be needed to restore the real exchange rate to the level of only three to four years ago. There can be little doubt that oil revenue and the real appreciation that it has caused has resulted in serious distortion of the economy even beyond that caused by war. While there have been various theoretical reformulations of the precise channels through which the classical "resource curse" symptom of a stagnating non-oil traded sector can occur, there is general agreement on the observed fact of this outcome. It is worth noting that virtually all channels identified in the literature can, at least potentially, be contributing factors in the Angolan case, including both the classical direct disincentive effects of an appreciated exchange rate, resource pull out of traded sectors toward urban and oil financed sectors, and an inability for non-oil sectors to invest due to high risk premiums caused by high variability in relative prices and hence profitability. Using an index developed to measure the extent of sectoral distortion in oil economies, the extent of this sectoral distortion is evaluated in the Angolan case. The results show that the Angolan economy is among the most severely distorted of any included in previous analyses, including some oil economies in the Persian Gulf.


Previous work has suggested that the promoter regions of the human embryonic zeta 2 and epsilon globin genes contain negative regulatory regions that could play a role in the repression of these genes in postembryonic erythroblasts. We have examined this possibility by studying the expression of these genes in mouse erythroleukemia cells, an adult erythroid cell line that might be expected to contain repressor molecules that would bind to the putative negative regulatory regions. When attached to appropriate upstream regulatory elements (alpha HS-40 and beta HS1,2) both the zeta and epsilon genes were expressed in these cells at a low level, but no increase in expression was observed when similar constructs lacking the proposed negative regulatory sequences were introduced into these cells. These results cast doubt on the possibility that these sequences play a major role in the developmental repression of the embryonic globin genes, unless they function only in a normal chromosomal organization.


A phenomenological model of dark energy that tracks the baryonic and cold dark matter at early times but resembles a cosmological constant at late times is explored. In the transition between these two regimes, the dark energy density drops rapidly as if it were a relic species that freezes out, during which time the equation of state peaks at +1. Such an adjustment in the dark energy density, as it shifts from scaling to potential-domination, could be the signature of a trigger mechanism that helps explain the late-time cosmic acceleration. We show that the non-negligible dark energy density at early times, and the subsequent peak in the equation of state at the transition, leave an imprint on the cosmic microwave background anisotropy pattern and the rate of growth of large scale structure. The model introduces two new parameters, consisting of the present-day equation of state and the redshift of the freeze-out transition. A Monte Carlo Markov Chain analysis of a ten-dimensional parameter space is performed to compare the model with pre-Planck cosmic microwave background, large scale structure and supernova data and measurements of the Hubble constant. We find that the transition described by this model could have taken place as late as a redshift z~400. We explore the capability of future cosmic microwave background and weak lensing experiments to put tighter constraints on this model. The viability of this model may suggest new directions in dark-energy model building that address the coincidence problem.


The social determinants of health are important factors that shape a person's well-being, life expectancy, and quality of life. The environments in which people live, work, and play are paramount in determining their overall health. As such, viewing health as an outcome, not only of individual choices and biomedical factors but also of socioenvironmental influences, can be an important lens to guide health-care practice. This report examined the social determinants of health of people admitted to inpatient units in a forensic psychiatry program in a major Canadian urban centre. Twenty health variables were collected from the Resident Assessment Instrument–Mental Health form. A deprivation scale was created to understand social and material inequality on a gradient. Findings showed that those surveyed had high rates of poor social determinant of health factors, such as low educational attainment, insecure housing, and lack of secure employment before their admission to the program. Chi-square tests showed associations between material deprivation, race, and comorbidity status. The findings may influence a multisectorial approach to mental illness prevention, management, and recovery practices.


OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effect of cisapride and chest physical therapy on the gastroesophageal reflux of wheezing babies. METHODS: We prospectively assessed the presence of technetium ((99)Tc) in the upper, middle, and lower esophagus of 25 wheezing babies (13 with GERD and 12 without GERD) using scintigraphy. Both groups underwent clinical investigation, including laboratory, X-ray and scintigraphy tests, for the etiology of the wheezing baby syndrome (WBS) and GERD. Expiratory Flow Acceleration (EFA) was performed before and after treatment with cisapride. The total time of GER episodes was accounted for each portion of the esophagus during scintigraphy and during EFA. RESULTS: Cisapride significantly reduced the total reflux time in the upper esophagus (P<0.05), but showed no influence during EFA. After cisapride therapy, EFA increased the total reflux time in the upper and medium esophagus; however, no statistical significance was found. Infants with GERD presented a shorter total reflux time in the distal esophagus (P<0.05) during EFA. After cisapride treatment, no statistical significance was found. Infants without GERD also presented reduced total reflux time in the distal esophagus during EFA (P<0.05). Those with GERD had increased total reflux time in the distal esophagus (P<0.05) before and after cisapride treatment during EFA and scintigraphy. CONCLUSIONS: Cisapride was effective in reducing the total reflux time, mainly in the upper esophagus. EFA apparently increased the number of episodes of GER, without achieving statistical significance. Further studies are necessary to investigate the effects of chest physical therapy according to body positions.


Knowledge visualization can be used in several fields from medical imaging to industrial engineering. Although there could be variety of applicable research areas, our consideration will be the tacit knowledge visualization in organizations. This proposal aims to suggest a study to develop a tacit knowledge visualization framework to support know-where requirements of the organizational knowledge. With the implementation of our framework in a software application, it is aimed to create a virtual environment, where subject-based knowledge requirements will be answered by the visualized tacit knowledge of individuals and possibly the relations among individual members of the organization.


Therapeutic pet robots designed to help humans with various medical conditions could play a vital role in physiological, psychological and social-interaction interventions for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this paper, we report our findings from a robot-assisted therapeutic study conducted over seven weeks to investigate the changes in stress levels of children with ASD. For this study, we used the parrot-inspired therapeutic robot, KiliRo, we developed and investigated urinary and salivary samples of participating children to report changes in stress levels before and after interacting with the robot. This is a pioneering human-robot interaction study to investigate the effects of robot-assisted therapy using salivary samples. The results show that the bio-inspired robot-assisted therapy can significantly help reduce the stress levels of children with ASD.


The pandemic caused by emerging coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 presents a serious global public health emergency in urgent need of prophylactic and therapeutic interventions. SARS-CoV-2 cellular entry depends on binding between the viral Spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) and the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) target cell receptor. Here, we report on the isolation and characterization of 206 RBD-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) derived from single B cells of eight SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals. These mAbs come from diverse families of antibody heavy and light chains without apparent enrichment for particular families in the repertoire. In samples from one patient selected for further analyses, we found coexistence of germline and germline divergent clones. Both clone types demonstrated impressive binding and neutralizing activity against pseudovirus and live SARS-CoV-2. However, the antibody neutralizing potency is determined by competition with ACE2 receptor for RBD binding. Surprisingly, none of the SARS-CoV-2 antibodies nor the infected plasma cross-reacted with RBDs from either SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV although substantial plasma cross-reactivity to the trimeric Spike proteins from SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV was found. These results suggest that antibody response to RBDs is viral species-specific while that cross-recognition target regions outside the RBD. The specificity and neutralizing characteristics of this plasma cross-reactivity requires further investigation. Nevertheless, the diverse and potent neutralizing antibodies identified here are promising candidates for prophylactic and therapeutic SARS-CoV-2 interventions.


extrapolation of steels & belpaeme's (s&b) results show that colour is a culturalist category. populations will only share the category of colour if it is built into the system. if "left to themselves" different populations may or may not stumble on the colour category. populations that do not share a colour category may still be able to communicate in a wide variety of environments.


This paper explores the household-level underpinnings of the observed aggregate relationship between consumption and wealth. There are important potential gains from studying wealth effects using data on individual households given that economic theory predicts that the response of consumption to movements in asset prices will differ depending on the source of those movements and on who is affected. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, I find that the consumption of stockholders had a strong positive correlation with current and lagged changes in stock prices in the 1980s and 1990s, whereas the consumption of non-stockholders did not. That pattern implies that changes in wealth had direct effects on spending as opposed to merely predicting changes in consumption because they signaled changes in future income. However, augmenting the sample with more recent data considerably weakens the result. A similar analysis of housing wealth effects for the years 1994-2008 suggests no near-term link between growth in house prices and growth in homeowners' consumption of nondurables apart from housing itself.


Between January 1988 and December 1990, 283 patients with symptomatic gall stones were referred for non-operative treatment. After ultrasound scanning including a functional assessment, 220 (78%) patients were found to be suitable for percutaneous cholecystolithotomy. Of these, 113 underwent the procedure including 10 in whom extracorporeal shock-wave lithotripsy or methyl tert-butyl ether therapy had failed. Forty four patients underwent extracorporeal shockwave lithotripsy, methyl tert-butyl ether therapy or rotary lithotripsy, 46 chose laparoscopic cholecystectomy or minicholecystectomy and 27 declined treatment. Percutaneous cholecystolithotomy was successfully performed in 100 patients. Thirty four patients were a high operative risk and 14 presented with an acute complication of gall stone disease. Complications developed in 15 patients, all of whom were managed conservatively and most occurred during development of the technique. Outcome has been assessed clinically and by ultrasound scanning in 92 patients with a median follow up period of 14 months (six to 37 months). Seventy nine per cent were completely cured of their symptoms. Ninety three per cent of gall bladders were shown to be functioning and nine (9.8%) contained stones, although five of these are believed to have developed from residual fragments. Percutaneous cholecystolithotomy is a safe, non-operative treatment for symptomatic gall stones and enabled the patient to fully recover within two to three weeks; it has a definite role in the management of the elderly and high risk patient but its use for the treatment of other groups is likely to remain controversial.


The removal of Indigenous children from their parents has been part of the colonising relations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people since the earliest days of the British occupation of Australia. The National Museum of Australia is beginning the process of developing a collection of objects that will enable it to tell this significant story. The paper will look at this curatorial process of 'remembering'. It will cover such issues as the structure of the Museum; the particular nature of the Indigenous section and its aims; the contested identity of an Indigenous object; relationships established between Museum staff and the community; the 'implied contract' of trust established with this community in order to tell their stories; and the 'object as witness' and the 'object as betrayer'.


Paul Krause calls upon the methods and insights of labor history, intellectual history, anthropology, and the history of technology to situate the events of the lockout and their significance in the broad context of America s Guilded Age. Utilizing extensive archival material, much of it heretofore unknown, he reconstructs the social, intellectual, and political climate of the burgeoning post-Civil War steel industry."


The Article discusses and analyzes recent developments regarding Section 546 of the Bankruptcy Code. Several important policies underpin the Bankruptcy Code, including, inter alia: (i) fostering the debtor's reorganization of its financial affairs; and (ii) treating "similarly situated" creditors ratably in accordance with an established priority scheme. To reach these goals, the Bankruptcy Code contains provisions that allow the debtor to "clawback" transfers referred to as "preferential transfers" and "fraudulent transfers". These clawback provisions are aimed at preventing certain creditors from: (i) "picking the debtor apart" within a close temporal proximity to the date of its bankruptcy filing; and (ii) receiving either actual or constructive fraudulent transfers from the debtor.
Over the past three decades, however, Congress has amended the Bankruptcy Code to reflect an additional policy — protection of the financial markets from systemic risk. To accomplish this goal, Congress enacted and expanded Section 546(e) of the Bankruptcy Code (the "Section 546(e) Safe Harbor") to insulate various types of financial transactions from the Bankruptcy Code's clawback provisions. Congress's intent underlying the Section 546(e) Safe Harbor is to prevent a "ripple effect" of financial losses to financial institutions and clearinghouses that function as intermediaries in interconnected financial transactions.
Several recent cases of apparent first impression have demonstrated that the precise parameters of the Section 546(e) Safe Harbor are not clear. Indeed, there is a current split within the federal circuits on several crucial issues involving the Section 546(e) Safe Harbor. Several of these cases involve multi-billion dollar disputes connected to leverage buyouts ("LBO's"), Ponzi Schemes and derivative transactions. Several decisions applied the Section 546(e) Safe Harbor more broadly than Congress intended. Namely, there is a lack of clarity as to whether the Section 546(e) Safe Harbor: (i) insulates a settlement payment by a debtor to a holder of securities issued by the debtor from a constructive fraudulent transfer or a preferential transfer simply because a financial institution acted as a conduit (such as a transfer agent, escrow agent or bailee) between the debtor and the holder of the debtor's securities; (ii) applies to settlement payments involving privately held securities; (iii) applies to payments to "net winners" in Ponzi schemes; and (iv) preempts: (a) fraudulent transfer actions based on state law; or (b) state law claims such as unjust enrichment. The Supreme Court has recently granted certiorari with respect to the conduit issue.
This Article argues that the Supreme Court should rule that the Section 546(e) Safe Harbor does not insulate a payment by a debtor to a holder of securities issued by the debtor from a constructive fraudulent transfer or a preferential transfer simply because a financial institution acted as a conduit (such as a transfer agent or escrow agent) between the debtor and the securities holder. The Article further argues that, even if the Supreme Court makes that ruling, that Congress should amend, clarify and narrow the scope of the Section 546(e) Safe Harbor so that it (i) never applies to shield Net Winners in Ponzi Schemes; (ii) never applies to insulate a financial institution from constructive fraudulent transfer liability or preferential transfer liability where that financial institution is engaged in proprietary trading and not acting purely as an intermediary in the commodities or securities clearing and settlement system; (iii) preempts constructive fraudulent transfer claims based on state law only against: (a) non-insider investors in publicly held securities that acted in good faith; (b) entities that act solely as intermediaries in the commodities and securities clearing and settlement system; (c) repo participants, and (d) swap participants; (iv) never preempts state law fraudulent transfer claims based on intentional fraud; and (v) does not preempt causes of action based on state law or federal law, such as breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing and unjust enrichment, so long as the underlying facts of such claims are not wholly identical to the elements of a preference action or constructive fraudulent transfer action.


LI ET AL.: Carotid Stent-Supported Angioplasty Using Different Distal Protection Devices. Stroke is an important cause of morbidity and mortality in Hong Kong. Extra-cranial carotid stenosis is a common cause of thrombotic stroke, although its incidence is less in Chinese compared with Caucasians. Carotid endarterectomy is the conventional revascularization procedure for carotid stenosis. In the past decade, carotid angioplasty has been emerging as a treatment option for patients with significant carotid stenosis. Due to the intrinsic mechanism of angioplasty, distal embolization causing thromboembolic stroke has been one of the most important complications of carotid stenosis. Distal protection has been shown to be safe and effective in preventing distal embolization during the procedure. According to their mechanism, distal protection devices can be categorized into two major types, namely distal occlusion balloon and filters. Distal occlusion balloon system is of lower crossing profile but it causes temporary cessation of blood flow during the procedure, which may not be well tolerated in all patients. Filters, on the other hand, allow continuous blood flow during the procedure but are of much higher crossing profile, which may make their passage through tight and angulated lesions difficult and traumatic. The choice of the different distal protection devices depends on the characteristics of the lesions and the status of contralateral carotid artery and collateral supply. Local experience reported similar feasibility and efficacy as in the literature. Although the ideal distal protection device is yet to be developed, the use of distal protection devices would become, wherever feasible, a standard during carotid stent-supported angioplasty. (J HK Coll Cardiol 2002;10:179-183)


Between 1978 and 2006, GDP growth in China maintained an annual average rate of 9.7%, meaning the Chinese economy increased by more than twelve times. This was achieved with quite unorthodox approaches to reform and development as China has adopted a gradualist approach to adopting key institutions, as well as modifying and experimenting with traditional recipes for economic growth. This collection brings together key researchers in the field from Asia, US, Europe and Australia to discuss how China has managed to push forward reforms in the face of political resistance, how the Chinese economy has maintained growth within an imperfect institutionalist environment and how the Chinese government remains effective when it relinquishes its power to the market. Specific emphasis is paid to the relevance of China's experiences to other developing countries. This valuable contribution to the study of China's economy covers a wide range of topics, including the historical foundations of the 30 years of reform, law and development in China, foreign direct investment, poverty reduction, market integration, income distribution, social protection, as well as demographics and population. Reform and Development in China finds both unique elements to the Chinese experience and elements which can be applied to other developing countries. In particular, China's gradualism in economic reform, strong leadership, and emphasis on inclusive development are singled out to be potentially transferable to other developing countries. This collection will be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers as well as practitioners in development economics.


This paper presents an inverse method for inferring trace gas fluxes at high temporal (daily) and spatial (model grid) resolution from continuous atmospheric concentration measurements. The method is designed for regional applications and for use in intensive campaigns. We apply the method to a one month inversion of fluxes over Europe. We show that the information added by the measurements depends critically on the smoothness constraint assumed among the source components. We show that the initial condition affects the inversion for 20 days, provided one has enough observing sites to constrain regional fluxes. We show that the impact of the far-field fluxes grows throughout the inversion and hence a reasonable global flux field is a prerequisite for a regional inversion.


Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising technology for communication systems. However, the synchronization of OFDM over dispersive fading channels remains an important and challenging issue. In this paper, a synchronization algorithm for determining the symbol timing offset and the carrier frequency offset (CFO) in OFDM systems, based on the maximum-likelihood (ML) criterion, is described. The new ML approach considers time-dispersive fading channels and employs distinctive correlation characteristics of the cyclic prefix at each sampling time. The proposed symbol timing estimation is found to be a 2-D function of the symbol timing offset and channel length. When compared with previous ML approaches, the proposed likelihood function is optimized at each sampling time without requiring additional pilot symbols. To practically realize the proposed method, a suboptimum approach to the ML estimation is adopted, and an approximate but closed-form solution is presented. Nonlinear operations of the approximate solution can be implemented using a conventional lookup table to reduce the computational complexity. The proposed CFO estimation is also found to depend on the channel length. Unlike conventional schemes, the proposed method fully utilizes the delay spread of dispersive fading channels (which usually reduces the accuracy of estimations). Furthermore, the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) on the CFO estimate is analyzed, and simulations confirm the advantages of the proposed estimator.


Geographic and environmental factors can be catalysts of evolutionary processes and central drivers of genetic and phenotypic differentiation. Characteristic patterns of genetic and phenotypic variation elucidate whether predominately adaptive or nonadaptive processes are involved in shaping variation among populations. Such genetic and phenotypic signatures can provide insight in how specific extrinsic factors relate to adaptive and non-adaptive processes. This dissertation aims to investigate whether and how disturbance events, intraspecific competition and secondary contact after a species introduction contribute to genetic and phenotypic differentiation among populations of Anolis lizard. In chapter 1, I tested whether patterns of genetic diversity and differentiation of island populations in the Bahamas were consistent with disturbance-driven demographic fluctuations and strong genetic drift. I used ten microsatellite markers to measure genetic diversity and population differentiation. Population genetic structure and differentiation were consistent with expectations of strong genetic drift after founder events. Genetic bottlenecks were prevalent across the island populations and coalescent-based demographic models supported a colonization scenario for most islands, rather than scenarios for population bottlenecks or relative stability of populations. Low rates of gene flow among island populations have likely preserved the genetic signatures of colonization and extinction events. This study provides evidence that disturbance events such as hurricanes are catalysts of long-term, nonadaptive evolution when gene flow is limited. In chapter 2, I examined whether intraspecific competition is a potential driver of directional morphological change in male and female lizards (Anolis sagrei) among island populations in the Bahamas. I used measures of population density and injuries, as a proxy for aggressive encounters, to test whether body size and head size vary in the direction predicted by natural selection. I found that lizards in high-density populations had a higher proportion of injuries as compared to low-density populations, suggesting that the former experience higher levels of intraspecific aggression. Additionally, lizards in these higher density populations had larger heads (longer and wider, corrected for body size). In both sexes, relative head size and frequency of injury increased with population density, suggesting that females may play an active role in intraspecific competition. In chapter 3, I examined whether the introduction of the Cuban green anole (Anolis porcatus) to South Florida has resulted in local hybridization with its closely related sister species, the native green anole (Anolis carolinensis), or whether reproductive barriers prevent gene exchange across species boundaries. I used one mtDNA marker and 18 microsatellite loci to test for cyto-nuclear discordance, which is indicative of hybridization, and whether population-genetic patterns are consistent with recent or historic gene flow. I found mtDNA haplotypes of two species in South Miami, local A. carolinensis and A. porcatus from West Cuba. Contrary to expectations of recent hybridization, I did not find intermediate nuclear genotypes. Instead, the population in South Miami forms a separate, genetically homogeneous cluster, which is differentiated from both parental species. A historic gene flow analysis confirms that ~33% of the nuclear ancestry of the South Miami population is derived from West Cuban A. porcatus. Thus, reproductive isolation between A. porcatus and A. carolinensis is weak or absent, despite considerable divergence time in allopatry, which reinforces a proposal to revise the taxonomy of A. carolinensis and A. porcatus from West Cuba according to guidelines of the biological species concept. In summary, my dissertation evaluated how demographic and ecological factors relate to patterns of genetic and phenotypic variation in populations of Anolis lizards. My research shows that hurricanes can act as evolutionary catalysts by altering nonadaptive evolutionary processes when gene flow is limited. The same island populations vary morphologically in the direction predicted by natural selection as a consequence of intraspecific competition. Lastly, historic hybridization resulting from secondary contact between formerly allopatric introduced and native species can locally erode species boundaries and alter the genetic composition of native populations. By characterizing patterns of genetic and phenotypic variation, my research provides insight in to how extrinsic factors and long-term evolutionary processes are interconnected and potentially shape future trajectories of these


The operator's safety is a very crucial issue in heavy duty machines. The dangerousness of the working environment forces the operator to consider several parameters at the same time, and a large amount of practice and concentration are usually required to operate the machine safely. In fact, man-machine interaction is often very poor in these kind of machines. With the aim of improving this interaction and enhancing stability, a stability control system is proposed, which is based on a simplified model of the machine and on a 2-degrees-of-freedom force-feedback joystick, and combines the use of a passive ad an active actuator. Active drives can generate high-fidelity sensations but, in general, they have a poor torque/size ratio, they are expensive and can become dangerous for the operator. On the other hand, passive devices (like brakes) can generate higher torques, are cheaper and safer, however they cannot provide energy to the system but only dissipate it; this feature reduces the range of sensations that can be rendered to the operator. In order to partially overcome this limitation, an elastic element is integrated in series with the brake. In this way, it is possible to store some potential energy that can be returned to the operator to give a better sensation of the proximity of an instability working condition for the machine. In the paper, the stability control system is introduced, and the design of the haptic joystick is presented. First experimental results on a simulator are finally illustrated.© 2008 ASME


In recommender systems, usually, a central server needs to have access to users' profiles in order to generate useful recommendations. Having this access, however, undermines the users' privacy.
 The more information is revealed to the server on the user-item relations, the lower the users' privacy is. Yet, hiding part of the profiles to increase the privacy comes at the cost of recommendation accuracy or difficulty of implementing the method. In this paper, we propose a distributed mechanism for users to augment their profiles in a way that obfuscates the user-item connection to an untrusted server, with minimum loss on the accuracy of the recommender system. We rely on the central server to generate the recommendations. However, each user stores his profile offline, modifies it by partly merging it with the profile of similar users through direct contact with them, and only then periodically uploads his profile to the server. We propose a metric to measure privacy at the system level, using graph matching concepts. Applying our method to the Netflix prize dataset, we show the effectiveness of the algorithm in solving the tradeoff between privacy and accuracy in recommender systems in an applicable way.


We consider a model of contagion in financial networks recently introduced in the literature, and we characterize the effect of a few features empirically observed in real networks on the stability of the system. Notably, we consider the effect of heterogeneous degree distributions, heterogeneous balance sheet size and degree correlations between banks. We study the probability of contagion conditional on the failure of a random bank, the most connected bank and the biggest bank, and we consider the effect of targeted policies aimed at increasing the capital requirements of a few banks with high connectivity or big balance sheets. Networks with heterogeneous degree distributions are shown to be more resilient to contagion triggered by the failure of a random bank, but more fragile with respect to contagion triggered by the failure of highly connected nodes. A power law distribution of balance sheet size is shown to induce an inefficient diversification that makes the system more prone to contagion events. A targeted policy aimed at reinforcing the stability of the biggest banks is shown to improve the stability of the system in the regime of high average degree. Finally, disassortative mixing, such as that observed in real banking networks, is shown to enhance the stability of the system.


The thermal decomposition of aqueous ammonium nitrate, aqueous urea and aqueous urea ammonium nitrate was investigated by means of simultaneous TGA/DTA/DTG/MS analysis under ambient pressure, and DSC under applied pressures of 5 and 10 MPa. Aqueous urea ammonium nitrate was previously suggested as a low carbon nitrogen-based alternative fuel. Investigation of the processes which occur in the condensed phase as the temperature increases is crucial in order to understand the combustion mechanism of the suggested alternative fuel. Isomerization of urea into ammonium cyanate as well as urea hydrolysis was inhibited in the presence of ammonium nitrate, hence the fuel is considered to be chemically stable at room temperature. No solid residuals remained above 315 °C. Thermal decomposition of the fuel under ambient pressure was found to involve four principal endothermic stages: (a) water vaporization, (b) urea decomposition along with biuret formation, (c) biuret decomposition, and (d) ammonium nitrate dissociation. The thermal decomposition of the fuel under isobaric conditions of 5 and 10 MPa revealed only an exothermic process with a sharp increase in the heat flow above 300 °C. The present research increases the basic understanding of the suggested nitrogen-based alternative fuel combustion process.


Using microdata from the 2000 Census, we analyze how the employment rates of foreign-born and US-born men vary with education. After a period of adjustment during the first few years upon arrival, the overall employment rate of immigrant men quickly approaches that of US natives. Among those with the lowest education levels, immigrants exhibit substantially higher rates of employment than comparable natives. This pattern is consistent with a simple theoretical model of migrant selectivity that jointly considers a potential migrant's decisions regarding where to locate and whether to work.


This Essay discusses the design and implementation of introductory Immigration Law courses taught at two different law schools, Western State College of Law in Orange County, California and the University of Maine Law School in Portland, Maine. Although the courses took place on opposite coasts and did not engage in a formal partnership that was visible to students, the authors deliberately planned the courses in close collaboration with one another behind the scenes. In doing so, the courses shared the explicit goal of increasing students' exposure to practical lawyering skills while reinforcing students' understanding of the substantive immigration laws. This Essay provides an example of the ways in which doctrinal courses across the law school curriculum can both deepen students' understanding of substantive law while also exposing them to the realities of legal practice.Part II of the Essay discusses the increasing focus within the legal academy today on training law students for the practice of law. Part II also describes how immigration law courses are well-positioned to illustrate how professors might emphasize doctrine alongside skills, even when those courses are not explicitly simulation-based or clinical in nature. In Part III, we share the process by which we planned our courses, the types of exercises that we incorporated into our classes, and the nature of the cross-country collaboration that took place between us as instructors and, to a lesser extent, between our students. The Essay concludes with a reflection on some of the limitations of our courses and areas for future development.


Abstract The amount of financial debt held by older adults has grown substantially over the past two decades in Europe. This study examines the association of objective and subjective debt burden with social and emotional loneliness among 1,606 older adults in the Netherlands. Objective debt burden is based on financial terms, such as debt-to-income ratio; whereas subjective debt burden measures the psychological distress caused by financial debt. Data are from the 2015/2016 wave of the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam. First, we use means-comparison tests to examine whether older adults who experience social and emotional loneliness differ from older adults who do not experience loneliness regarding their subjective and objective debt burdens. Subsequently, using linear regression models we address two questions: whether social loneliness and emotional loneliness are associated with objective and subjective debt burden; and whether social participation, social network size, anxiety and depression mediate these relationships. We find that subjective debt burden (i.e. the worry related to debt) is a significant predictor of social loneliness, above and beyond the role of social and psychological measures. Objective debt burden, in contrast, is unrelated to social and emotional loneliness. Social participation, social network size, anxiety and depression do not mediate the debt-burden-to-loneliness relationships. The results point to the importance of subjective debt burden in understanding social loneliness and designing interventions.


Background: In paradoxical low-flow, low gradient (PLFLG) aortic stenosis, 2D-transthoracic echocardiography (2D-TTE)may underestimate flow because it assumes a circular left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) shape. Three-dimensional transesophagealechocardiography (3D-TEE) is a better method to measure LVOT area.Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate left ventricular stroke volume index (SVi) by 2D-TTE and 3D-TEE in patientswith normal heart (NH) and with severe aortic stenosis (SAS) and to determine how many patients are categorized asPLFLG by 2D-TTE and 3D-TEE.Methods: Thirty-five patients were evaluated by 2D-TEE and 3D-TEE: NH=17 patients and SAS=18 patients. Left ventricularoutflow tract area was estimated during early systole by 2D-TTE (ES2DLVOT Ar) and by 3D-TEE (ES3DLVOT Ar)planimetry, and as systolic average (Avg 3DLVOT Ar). Each LVOT area was multiplied by its corresponding flow integral toobtain SVi (ES2D-TTE SVi, ES3D-TEE SVi and Avg 3D-TEE SVi) in NH and SAS groups. Paradoxical LFLG was determinedin SAS following standard criterion.Results: NH: ES2DLVOT Ar vs. ES3DLVOT Ar p<0.05; SAS: ES2DLVOT Ar vs. ES3DLVOT Ar p<0.001 and vs. Avg 3DLVOTAr p<0.023; ES2D-TTE SVi vs. ES3D-TEE SVi p<0.002 and vs. Avg 3D-TEE SVi p<0.038. In the NH group, the lower limitof normal SVi for 2D-TTE, ES3D-TEE and Avg 3D-TEE was <34, <38.9 and <35.9 ml/m2, respectively. Three SAS patientswere categorized as PLFLG by 2D-TTE, but none by 3D-TEE.Conclusions: Patients with PLFLG by 2D-TTE could


The nonprofit performing arts industry in America, along with many performing arts organizations around the world, are facing crises on a variety of fronts. Accordingly, arts organizations must learn new ways to attract the resources they need to sustain their mission and quality. Arts managers must improve their skills in increasing and broadening their audience base, improving accessibility to various art forms, and learning how to better meet the needs of specific audience segments and contributors. To accomplish this, they must develop a better understanding of their own business and of the interests, attitudes, and motivations of their customers. They must professionalize their marketing and management skills and learn to be accountable to all their publics: their artists, their funders, and their audiences. Then they can create offerings, services, and messages to which the target audience will enthusiastically respond, without compromising their artistic integrity.