The parasitic weed, Red witchweed (Striga asiatica) (L.) Kuntze) was first recorded at Habana, near Mackay in July 2013, the only known infestation to have established in Australia. An eradication response program was endorsed and commenced 1 July 2015 involving a treatment period of 3 years. A 'targeted adaptive three zone approach' was adopted, utilising the integration of three treatment methods (planting of false host crops, herbicides and ethylene fumigation) to specific sections, or zones, within each infested property, with the aim to expedite RWW soil seedbank depletion and minimise emergence.

This paper will outline the treatment progress made to date and challenges encountered. The planting of the false host, soybean, in the high priority zone was completed in 2015-16, 2016-17 & 2017-18. High rainfall occurring in the RWW area during 2016 (1607 mm) and 2017 (2100 mm), necessitated an active weed control program within the soybean crop. Potential grass hosts amongst the soybean; needed to be destroyed before RWW could germinate, establish and set seed.

To accelerate RWW soil seed bank run-down ethylene gas was also injected into the soil at 1.5 to 2.0 kg/ha using a custom-made delivery system during the autumn period. Once delivered ethylene gas disperses readily through the soil from the point of injection, saturating the soil profile, initiating germination of any red witchweed seed in the soil that are in a pre-conditioned state. An integrated research field trial (efficacy trial) has also been established on an infested property examining 16 control options to help govern the management strategies utilised within the RWW eradication program.


This Article proposes a solution to a problem in the cannabis industry resulting from the unavailability of federal trademark registration for that sector. The author offers modest changes to the existing state trademark registration systems to make up for the gaps at the federal level. The proposed reforms would strengthen the trademark framework by conferring on cannabis trademark registrations presumptions of ownership, exclusive rights, and validity beyond the presumption of registration currently afforded under state laws. To extend protection throughout the geographic breadth of the cannabis marketplace, the states with legalized recreational cannabis would offer reciprocal recognition of state cannabis registrations, meaning that one state in the consortium would recognize a registration issued by another consortium member as if it had issued the registration itself. This reciprocity will limit bad-faith adoption of trademarks by those seeking to usurp the goodwill of a cannabis business operating in a different part of the country.


As the world population grows and the standard of living increases a need for better health care is an important consideration. Over the latter half of this century the use of polymeric materials within the field of medicine has grown considerably.

This thesis investigates a variety of novel polymers whose applications within the medical field are both important and varied. In the cases studied, as with other polymeric materials intended for medicinal uses, the interaction with their surfaces is important, as when placed in the body the surface is the first place of contact and hence interaction with the system. Because of the importance of these surface interactions, which can elicit both beneficial and detrimental effects, this thesis is concerned with the surface chemistry and the relationship of this property to the interfacial interactions of the polymeric systems investigated.

Chapter 1 will concentrate on providing a historical overview of the field of polymers, especially the applications in the biomedical field. The surface analytical techniques of surface plasmon resonance (SPR), atomic force microscopy (AFM), X-ray photoelectron spectrometry (XPS) and secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) utilised in this the is to investigate the surface properties of the materials of interest will also be introduced.

The demand for organ transplants far outweighs the supply of donor organs. Therefore, many patients with a variety of disease die each year. If new organs could be grown utilising the patients own cells, the supply of organs could be increased to meet the demand and these custom grown organ would not nave the problems of rejection as observed with donor ones. This is what tissue engineering aims to do. By utilising polymer matrices, to provide a scaffold for the tissue to grow in the correct configuration and a variety of growth factors and cell signalling agents to ensure the correct differentiation and function of the cells, it is hoped in the future new organs for example lung and livers will be able to be grown on demand. Chapter 3 and 4 concentrate on the in depth study of a polymer intended for such an application. Chapter 3 concentrates on determining the surface chemistry of this polymer system. XPS and SIMS are used to identify the type of chemical groups present at the surface and quantify their contribution to the overall surface layer. Chapter 4, probes the interactions, both specific and non specific with this system using a variety of complementary techniques. SPR is utilised to quantify the extent and rate of the interactions, whilst AFM in force distance mode the strength of these. AFM was also utilised to visualize the absorbed molecules on the polymer surfaces.

In Chapter 5 the area of gene therapy is introduced. It is hoped that in the future, gene therapy may form the basis of a cure for inherited gene tic diseases, such as hemophilia and other conditions such as AIDS and some cancers. The main problems which need to be overcome before this aim can be realised are firstly, isolating the correct genes to cure the diseases, and secondly, delivery of these genes. Cationic polymers and cationic lipids are two of the three main areas of research being investigated to find a potential carrier system for the DNA. In Chapter 5, the effect of PEG molecular weight on the condensation of plasmid DNA into a particles by poly(L-lysine)s for gene therapy is investigated. SPR was utilised to investigated the rate and extent of DNA binding and condensation by the various polymers, and utilising AFM the effect of PEG molecular weight on the structure of the observed particles was probed.

The gene therapy theme is continued in Chapter 6 where the surface interactions of a cationic lipid / DNA gene therapy complex is investigated by both AFM and SPR. There are two main aims to the studies in this chapter. Firstly, to provide an understanding of the interactions between the DNA and lipid components of the delivery system. It is hoped this will supply further information on its stability, formation and structure and secondly, to provide a knowledge of the interactions of the complex with model surfaces. This may provide an insight into the gene therapy vectors possible mode of interaction with the cell.

Chapter 7, is concerned with a family of dendrimeric polymers. The family of interest are the poly(amidoamine) (PAM AM) dendrimers. These have shown potential not only as drug delivery vehicles in the field of cancer chemotherapy and gene therapy, but also in enhancing medical imaging. The investigations performed in Chapter 7 form a basis for understanding the factors effecting the PAMAM's interaction with cell membranes and hence, provide information for optimising their formulation into drug delivery vehicles. The studies undertaken utilised both AFM and SPR as well as a range of model surface. These surfaces possess differing characteristics and were ulilised in conjunction with AFM and SPR to study the effect of dendrimer size, shape, surface charge and charge density on the interaction of these molecules.

The final chapter, Chapter 8 discusses the progress made towards the aims of this thesis as outlined in section 1.8 and addresses the avenues for future investigations exposed by experimental work in chapters 3 - 7. Overall it is hoped that the work described in this thesis shows that a multi technique approach, as well as the collaborations of chemists, materials engineers, biophysicist, biologists and clinicians may, in the future lead to a better understanding of the materials utilised in the medical setting and hence provide a systematic design of systems for treating specific disease conditions.


In present study, silver nanoparticles were produced from interaction the ethanolic extract of Salvadora persica leaf with silver nitrate solution. UV-vis spectroscopy and PSA device confirmed size and formation of silver nanoparticles. The results showed the average size of silver nanoparticles synthesized is 6.2 nm and the minimum size of silver nanoparticles is 4.7 nm. Furthermore, the antifungal activity of silver nanoparticles and ethanolic extract of Salvadora persica leaf against Aspergillus niger and Penicillium digitatum were investigated by using disk diffusion method. The results showed that silver nanoparticles have significant antifungal activities in comparison to other treatmeants. So these silver nanoparticles have unique antifungal activity and can be used of them in pharmaceutical Industries.


O‐methylation is an unusual sugar modification with a function that is not fully understood. Given its occurrence and recognition by lectins involved in the immune response, methylated sugars were proposed to represent a conserved pathogen‐associated molecular pattern. We describe the interaction of O‐methylated saccharides with two β‐propeller lectins, the newly described PLL2 from the entomopathogenic bacterium Photorhabdus laumondii, and its homologue PHL from the related human pathogen Photorhabdus asymbiotica. The crystal structures of PLL2 and PHL revealed up to 10 out of 14 potential binding sites per protein subunit to be occupied with O‐methylated structures. The avidity effect strengthens the interaction by 4 orders of magnitude. PLL2 and PHL also interfere with the early immune response by modulating the production of reactive oxygen species and phenoloxidase activity. Since bacteria from Photorhabdus spp. have a complex life cycle involving pathogenicity towards different hosts, the involvement of PLL2 and PHL might contribute to the pathogen overcoming insect and human immune system defences in the early stages of infection.


Bladder cancer is the fourth most common cancer in men and is considered to have the highest rate of recurrence of all cancers at ~70%, and transitional cell carcinoma (TCC) is the most common form of intrabladder malignancy. Current standard-of-care for Stages 2 or higher is radical cystectomy, which involves removal of the urinary bladder and nearby lymph nodes. Alternative, organ-sparing treatments such as chemo- or radiotherapy are relatively ineffective against these cancers. The latter is effective when precisely targeted, but suffers from accuracy issues due to low contrast from computed tomography guidance. These motivate an innovative approach to more precisely visualize and spatially pinpoint TCC. This manuscript presents a novel non-invasive computer vision pipeline that can extract 3D structural information from 2D images obtained during routine flexible cystoscopy. The pipeline utilized camera calibration, adaptive thresholding, Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), and a Structure from Motion (SFM) implementation to reconstruct 3D point clouds of the inner surface of organ phantoms and an ex vivo porcine bladder. 3D point clouds were processed by Poisson reconstruction to generate a textured, triangle meshed 3D surface. The reconstruction pipeline generated a visually recognizable, qualitative 3D representation of the bladder from 2D video captured via flexible cystoscopy. Once further developed, this approach will enhance the targeting precision of external beam radiotherapy, providing clinicians with better organ-sparing methods to treat TCC.


Title of Dissertation: READING COMPREHENSION AND ITS ASSESSMENT: ALIGNING OPERATIONALIZATION WITH CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE CONSTRUCT Taslima Rahman, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Directed by: Professor Patricia A. Alexander Department of Human Development The current study explored ways to improve reading comprehension assessments. Available assessments appeared misaligned with views of comprehension that are emerging in the reading research literature. Further, the measurement models as currently applied to comprehension assessment do not take into account the cognitive perspective of the construct when estimating proficiency. It has been argued that an assessment, an evidentiary argument, when based on a theory of the construct can offer more informative estimates of proficiency and improve validity of the inferences drawn from those estimates (Mislevy, Steinberg, & Almond, 2003). For this study, the design and the analytic approach for an assessment of comprehension were grounded on a premise that comprehension is influenced by task attributes (e.g., text type or target mental representation) as well as reader attributes (e.g., prior knowledge or interest). Construction of the comprehension measure and the ensuing psychometric analyses were framed following Kintsch's (1998) ConstructionIntegration model and Alexander's (1997) Model of Domain Learning. The resulting measure was administered to 160 eighth-grade students with no known status of receiving services for special education. In completing the comprehension task, the students read four text passages and answered a set of text passage-related questions, eight per passage. Those passages varied by text type and text topic, and questions varied by the target mental representations of a text and relations among the events of a situation described in the text. In addition, participants answered a set of questions for self-reporting about their familiarity with and interest in the topic of a text passage that they had read. In synthesizing the data, a particular form of the Linear Logistic Test Model introduced by Fischer (1973) was applied within a Bayesian framework. When the attributes were incorporated in the measurement model, the comprehension proficiency estimates changed in a way that reflected positive effects of topic familiarity and topic interest. Further, the task and reader attributes considered in the study contributed to estimates of item difficulties. Thus, the study, based on empirical evidence, suggests that developing a comprehension assessment more aligned with views of the construct offered in the literature is indeed viable. READING COMPREHENSION AND ITS ASSESSMENT: ALIGNING OPERATIONALIZATION WITH CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE CONSTRUCT


The late nineteenth century witnessed the birth and popularization of a number of highly emotional musical styles that played on the eagerness of modern Europeans and Americans to toy with the limits of sanity and to taste the ecstasies of living on the edge. This absorbing book explores these popular, passionate musical styles -- which include flamenco, tango and rebetika -- and points out that they arose as well-intentioned intellectuals co-opted the emotional experiences most closely associated with women. In drawing those experiences out of female practice, they defined, objectified, and turned them into strategies of domination, the deepest impact of which was felt, ironically, by modern women.In bridging anthropology, sociology, cultural, media, body and gender studies, this book broadens the base of theory which has ignored the transnational world of Latin and Mediterranean popular culture and makes a powerful statement about the intersection of nationalism, sexuality, identity and authenticity.


The recent literature contains numerous observations of episodic or intermittent flow in unsaturated flow systems under both constant flux and ponded boundary conditions. Flow systems composed of a heterogeneous porous media, as well as discrete fracture networks, have been cited as examples of systems that can exhibit episodic flow. Episodic outflow events are significant because relatively large volumes of water can move rapidly through an unsaturated system, carrying water and contaminants to depth greatly ahead of a wetting front predicted by a one‐dimensional, gravity‐driven diffusive infiltration model. In this study, we model the behavior of water flow through a sand column underlain by an impermeable‐walled macropore. Relative permeability and capillary pressure relationships were developed that capture the complex interrelationships between the macropore and the overlying porous media that control flow out of the system. The potential for episodic flow is assessed and compared to results of conventional modeling approaches and experimental data from the literature. Model results using coupled matrix–macropore relative permeability and capillary pressure relationships capture the behavior observed in laboratory experiments remarkably well, while simulations using conventional relative permeability and capillary pressure functions fail to capture some of the observed flow dynamics. Capturing the rapid downward movement of water suggests that the matrix‐macropore capillary pressure and relative permeability functions developed have the potential to improve descriptions of flow and transport processes in heterogeneous, variably saturated media.


Since spectrum is the invisible infrastructure that powers the wireless communication, the demand has been exceptionally increasing in recent years after the implementation of 4G and immense data requirements of 5G due to the applications, such as Internet-of-Things (IoT). Therefore, the effective optimization of the use of spectrum is immediately needed than ever before. The spectrum sensing is the prerequisite for optimal resource allocation in cognitive radio networks (CRN). Therefore, the spectrum sensing in wireless system with lower latency requirements is proposed first. In such systems with high spatial density of the base stations and users/objects, spectrum sharing enables spectrum reuse across very small regions. The proposed method in this Thesis is a multi-channel cooperative spectrum sensing technique, in which an independent network of sensors, namely, spectrum monitoring network, detects the spectrum availability. The locally aggregated decision in each zone associated with the zone aggregator (ZA) location is then passed to a decision fusion centre (DFC). The secondary base station (SBS) accordingly allocates the available channels to secondary users to maximize the spectral efficiency. The function of the DFC is formulated as an optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the spectral efficiency. The optimal detection threshold is obtained for different cases with various spatial densities of ZAs and SBSs. It is further shown that the proposed method reduces the spectrum sensing latency and results in a higher spectrum efficiency. Furthermore, a novel power allocation scheme for multicell CRN is proposed where the subchannel power allocation is performed by incorporating network-wide primary system communication activity. A collaborative subchannel monitoring scheme is proposed to evaluate the aggregated subchannel activity index (ASAI) to indicate the activity levels of primary users. Two utility functions are then defined to characterize the spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) as a function of ASAI to formulate a utility maximization problem. The optimal transmit power allocation is then obtained with the objective of maximizing the total utility at the SBS, subject to maximum SBS transmit power and collision probability constraint at the primary receivers. Since optimal EE and SE are two contradicting objectives to obtain the transmit power allocation, the design approach to handle both EE and SE as a function of common network parameter, i.e., ASAI, is provided which ultimately proves the quantitative insights on efficient system design. Extensive simulation results confirm the analytical results and indicate a significant improvement in sensing latency and accuracy and a significant gain against the benchmark models on the rate performance, despite the proposed methods perform with lower signalling overhead.


Several algorithms consisting in 'non-standard' versions of the Multiple Scale Method are illustrated for 'difficult' bifurcation problems. Preliminary, the 'easy' case of bifurcation from a cluster of distinct eigenvalues is addressed, which requires using integer power expansions, and it leads to bifurcation equations all of the same order. Then, more complex problems are studied. The first class concerns bifurcation from a defective eigenvalue, which calls for using fractional power expansions and fractional time-scales, as well as Jordan or Keldysh chains. The second class regards the interaction between defective and non-defective eigenvalues. This problem also requires fractional powers, but it leads to differential equations which are of a different order for the involved amplitudes. Both autonomous and parametrically excited non-autonomous systems are studied. Moreover, the transition from a codimension-3 to a codimension-2 bifurcation is explained. As a third class of problems, singular systems possessing an evanescent mass, as Nonlinear Energy Sinks, are considered, and both autonomous systems undergoing Hopf bifurcation and non-autonomous systems under external resonant excitation, are studied. The algorithm calls for a suitable combination of the Multiple Scale Method and the Harmonic Balance Method, the latter is applied exclusively to the singular equations. Several applications are shown, to test the effectiveness of the proposed methods. They include discrete and continuous systems, autonomous, parametrically and externally excited systems.


The genus Koiulus gen. nov. and its type-species, Koiulus interruptus gen. et sp. nov., are described from the Russian Far East. The new genus is compared with other genera of Mongoliulidae, in particular with Ussuriiulus Golovatch, 1980, also from the Russian Far East, with which it shares the absence of ozopores from individual body rings distributed along the body, a condition so far otherwise unknown in the superorder Juliformia. A synoptic table of genera and a list of species of Mongoliulidae are presented.


The early mammalian conceptus (blastocyst) comprises an outer trophoblast globe that forms an axis originating from the inner embryonic cells. From the mouse conceptus, Trophoblast stem cells (TSCs) are derived, which are in vitro analogues of early trophoblasts. Here, we show that TSCs contain plastic subpopulations reflecting developmental states ranging from pre- to post-implantation trophoblasts. However, upon exposure to a specific combination of embryonic inductive signals, TSCs globally acquire properties of pre-implantation polar trophoblasts (gene expression, self-renewal) juxtaposing the inner embryonic cells, and an enhanced, homogeneous epithelial phenotype. These lines of polar-like TSCs (pTSCs) represent a transcriptionally earlier state that more efficiently forms blastoids, whose inner embryonic cells then induce the patterning of gene expression along the embryonic-abembryonic axis. Altogether, delineating the requirements and properties of polar trophoblasts and blastocyst axis formation in vitro provides a foundation for the precise description and dissection of early development.


The variability of sea surface temperature (SST) in the tropical Atlantic Ocean has a significant influence on the rainfall over Northeast Brazil and the Sahel. The predictability of the SST fluctuations in this region has, therefore, been a central concern for Atlantic climate studies. Here we show that the north tropical Atlantic SST variability has significant predictability using statistical models at short lead times (≤ 1 year), and using a coupled ocean‐atmosphere model for longer‐range forecasts (lead times up to about 3 years). While the remote influence of the IndoPacific, primarily due to El Niño, has been found to enhance the predictability of SST in the north Atlantic at short lead times, local ocean‐atmosphere interactions dominate the predictable dynamics farther south, and at longer time scales.


A methodology, based on two-dimensional super-Gaussian light spread functions (LSFs), was studied for the light-emitting-diode (LED) backlighting system in the high dynamic range (HDR) liquid crystal displays (LCDs). We proposed a novel LED-based optomechanical configuration to implement the desirable luminous pattern. A dual-liquid-crystal-panel system was constructed as a pseudo-HDR LCD to evaluate the super-Gaussian illumination. The proposed HDR scheme was verified via the current platform: overall luminance uniformity, contrast ratio and processing speed could be improved by factors of 1.55, 1.95-4.15, and 4.82, respectively. The design flexibility made the methodology applicable to any panel dimension and backlight division of the HDR LCDs, and to the conventional full-on backlighting LCDs as well.


Background: Many Muslim diabetes patients choose to participate in Ramadan despite medical advice to the contrary. This study aims to describe Qatar pharmacists' practice, knowledge, and attitudes towards guiding diabetes medication management during Ramadan. Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study was performed among a convenience sample of 580 Qatar pharmacists. A web-based questionnaire was systematically developed following comprehensive literature review and structured according to 4 main domains: subject demographics; diabetes patient care experiences; knowledge of appropriate patient care during Ramadan fasting; and attitudes towards potential pharmacist responsibilities in this regard. Results: In the 3 months prior to Ramadan (July 2012), 178 (31%) pharmacists responded to the survey. Ambulatory (103, 58%) and inpatient practices (72, 41%) were similarly represented. One-third of pharmacists reported at least weekly interaction with diabetes patients during Ramadan. The most popular resources for management advice were the internet (94, 53%) and practice guidelines (80, 45%); however only 20% were aware of and had read the American Diabetes Association Ramadan consensus document. Pharmacist knowledge scores of appropriate care was overall fair (99, 57%). Pharmacists identified several barriers to participating in diabetes management including workload and lack of private counseling areas, but expressed attitudes consistent with a desire to assume greater roles in advising fasting diabetes patients. Conclusion: Qatar pharmacists face several practical barriers to guiding diabetes patient self-management during Ramadan, but are motivated to assume a greater role in such care. Educational programs are necessary to improve pharmacist knowledge in the provision of accurate patient advice.


Background: Participation in research during undergraduate studies may increase students′ interest in research and inculcate research essentials in them. Aims: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the mentored student project (MSP) program. Settings and Design: In the MSP program, students in groups (n = 3 to 5) undertook a research project, wrote a scholarly report, and presented the work as a poster presentation with the help of a faculty mentor. To begin with, the logic model of the program was developed to identify short-term outcomes of the program on students, mentors, and the institution. A quasi-experimental design was used to measure the outcomes. Materials and Methods: A mixed method evaluation was done using a newly-developed questionnaire to assess the impact of the MSP on students′ attitude, a multiple-choice question (MCQs) test to find out the impact on students′ knowledge and grading of students′ project reports and posters along with a survey to check the impact on skills. Students′ satisfaction regarding the program and mentors′ perceptions were collected using questionnaires. Evidence for validity was collected for all the instruments used for the evaluation. Statistical Analysis: Non-parametric tests were used to analyze data. Based on the scores, project reports and posters were graded into A (>70% marks), B (60-69% marks), and C (<59% marks) categories. The number of MSPs that resulted in publications, conference presentation and departmental collaborations were taken as impact on the institution. Results: Students′ response rate was 91.5%. The students′ attitudes regarding research changed positively (P = 0.036) and score in the MCQ test improved (P < 0.001) after undertaking MSP. Majority of project reports and posters were of grade A category. The majority of the items related to skills gained and satisfaction had a median score of 4. The MSPs resulted in inter-departmental and inter-institutional collaborations, 14 publications and 15 conference presentations. An area for improvement noted was to have the MSP implemented in the curriculum without increasing students′ overall workload and stress. Conclusion: The study identified strengths and weaknesses of the MSP program. Our model of undergraduate research project may be incorporated in undergraduate medical programs to foster positive attitude and knowledge base about scientific research and to instil research skills among students.


Optomechanical systems are currently of great interest as they lie at the boundary between quantum and classical mechanics, promising fundamental insights as well as new technologies. The practical operation of an optomechanical system requires that it satisfy the criteria of mechanical stability. Further, for quantum applications, it is important to characterize the degree of nonclassical correlation present between the mechanical and optical subsystems. In this study, we analyze the stability and entanglement in an optomechanical system where couplings linear as well as quadratic in the mechanical displacement are present simultaneously. Such systems can be realized experimentally. Our analysis of the optomechanical system is accomplished by inspecting the equations of motion that characterize the system. By analyzing the steady state of the system, we find a stability diagram which differs dramatically from the case of pure linear coupling which has been studied earlier. Specifically, we find generally a major loss of stability and a disconnection of the stability diagram when a quadratic coupling is introduced. We derive and state analytically in this thesis the stability criteria for our more generalized system. Further, by linearizing the equations of motion, we characterize the entanglement present in the system, using the logarithmic negativity as a measure. We thereby characterize the changes in the system entanglement that result from the addition of a quadratic coupling to a linearly coupled system.


This paper represents a novel approach to the system information correlating General System Theory, Cybernetic and the Theory of Information. The main objective is to investigate whether "information" is a subjective concept or an objective entity in the physical reality. In this quest, system has been identified as an abstract model for observation and the perception of the world by the human mind. Based on this definition, every phenomenon that can be observed or imagined is perceived as a system. Where there is a system, there should be an observer and hence there exist information in between.
Combination of system elements as a whole is explained by System Dynamics. Based on this assertion, the system is in a continuous change and transmutation; a conceptual process that is independent of time and space. In this perspective, time and space are conceived not as the background but the outcomes of the inherent dynamics of the system. It is shown how the time could be considered as sequence of events and the space as relation between system elements.
System structure is modeled based on Binary graph as the fundamental topology for combinatory pattern of the system. A new System Algebra is defined, based on which the System Information Matrix (SIM) is introduced to demonstrate information imbedded in a system. This model is also used to evaluate the amount of system information based on Entropy as defined in thermodynamics and in the information theory. Complexity is another parameter of the system that is represented here based on multi-functionality of system elements. This new definition provides basis to quantify this feature of the system.
Cybernetic systems categorized as life, machines and composite systems with high degree of complexity such as human societies, are all shown to be distinguishable by exchange of information. In these systems, information flows through different components the same way as it would from any system to the observer. It is concluded that information realized by the observer is a relative objective entity in a system. However, in cybernetic systems having controllers as internal observers, the information is physical and objective regardless of any external observer.


The paper describes work done using synchrotron light to investigate the microstructure and how it behaves in 3D when a load is applied. Two different cast iron materials with different matrix structures and graphite morphologies were investigated; SiMo51, which is basically a spheroidal iron (SGI) alloyed with Si and Mo, and a lamellar graphite iron (LGI). The tensile test specimens were loaded in steps, at which x-ray tomography as well as 3DXRD measurements were made to characterize the microstructure. The result shows how the crack propagates and which path it takes through the materials. DVC was applied to analyze the strain fields. This work also shows how useful synchrotron experiments can be in the study of the mechanical behavior of cast iron.


This working paper elaborates on China's approach towards and use of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM). It builds on statistical data and existing opinions in the literature to demonstrate the evolution of China's behaviour as a participant in the DSM. It also endeavours however to take the analysis one step further and to determine whether China's adherence to the DSM may be less genuine than this of the other WTO Members, notably in comparison to its main trading partners – the European Union (EU) and the United States of America (US). To this end, an examination of China's arguments put forward as a respondent in WTO proceedings is undertaken in search of suggested restrictive interpretations of its obligations under the WTO Agreement. The paper goes on and poses the question whether indeed such attitude could be characterised as systematic and whether traditional sovereignty-bound considerations underlie it. Conclusions are drawn as to the existing balance between national regulatory autonomy and global governance in the WTO legal system, the importance of which may go beyond China's economic and political context.


DNA has proved to be a successful material for creation of nanoscale structures because of its inherent programmability and predictable structural features. However, the assembly of periodic three-dimensional (3D) DNA crystals is hampered by the junctions needed to connect the inherently linear Watson–Crick duplexes. Here, we examine how predictable noncanonical base pairing motifs can be used in conjunction with Watson–Crick duplexes to assemble macroscopic 3D crystals with useful nanoscale features. Parallel-stranded homopurine 5′-GGA base pairs serve as a junction region in a continuously base paired 13-mer DNA crystal (Paukstelis et al., 2004). This motif is predictable and has been used in different sequence contexts to rationally design DNA crystals with different lattice dimensions. These designed crystals have been utilized as macromolecular sieves for capturing or excluding proteins (Paukstelis, 2006). Further, we have demonstrated that a protein enzyme encapsulated in the crystal solvent channels is capable of performing catalysis. Enzyme-infused DNA crystals are capable of multiple cycles of catalysis following removal of substrate and products, and may offer potential new routes for enzyme replacement therapies or the creation of new biodegradable solid-state catalysts and sensors. A structurally similar homoparallel region, 5′-CGAA, has also been used to generate crystals that are capable of making concerted in crystallo structural transitions in response to pH perturbations (Muser & Paukstelis, 2012). These studies highlight potential uses of DNA crystals as stimuli-responsive biomaterials. Despite these successes, the ability to use noncanonical DNA motifs in crystal design is limited by both the number of available noncanonical DNA structures, and our understanding of how these structures self-assemble. To address this we have initiated a high-throughput crystallization screen of short DNA oligonucleotides to identify new noncanonical base pairing motifs and to address the broad question: How structurally diverse is DNA?


In this thesis, we describe various algorithms for the construction of tubular networks in an arbitrary three-dimensional region that possesses a principal direction along which the cross-section varies. The region can be digitized into a series of blocks Bi, each of which exhibits no variation in the principle direction. Tubular networks with one inlet and one outlet are constructed by connecting the series of blocks packed with parallel cylindrical tubes. Packing tubes into a block Bi can be simplified to packing circles into its cross section Ci which is approximated by a polygon. Building upon the basic method from [12], a set of novel circle-packing algorithms are developed to possess the following desirable features. Firstly, circles are first packed into an interior region which is common to several or all blocks and the remainder of the unpacked region are packed afterwards. Secondly, larger circles are placed primarily in the central part of the region. Lastly, at a certain stage of circle-packing, all the packed circles are moved towards the center of mass by a fictitious force so that as much empty space as possible is left along the boundary. Three fundamental connections are used to construct a tubular network with one inlet and one outlet: (i) endcap connection–two 90-degree bends that connect two adjacent tubes at their ends, (ii) a merge operation in which a tube flows into an adjacent tube, and (iii) a shift operation in which a tube is shifted into an adjacent position. Tubes at the extreme ends of a network must be connected by endcaps and the other tubes can be connected via any one of the above connections. A set of algorithms are developed to generate all the possible solutions of constructing tubular networks and to check the feasibility of solutions to make sure there is no dead end or isolated loop. Among all the feasible networks, an optimal network should be chosen with respect to a certain measure. Obviously, enumerating all the possible solutions of constructing feasible networks is extremely time-consuming and sometimes it can take millions of years. Therefore, a genetic algorithm with only mutation is applied here to randomly search for the best network. In this genetic algorithm, every fundamental connection could mutate to any other fundamental one. Thus every network could mutate to any other one and genetic algorithm could find the globally best network.


Jim Henry demonstrated an animal's society can induce an increase in blood pressure and its cardiovascular sequale. He recognized that the stress required to elevate blood pressure was a function of the genetically determined behavioral traits of the mice used. He termed some strains aggressive, others peaceable. Being highly inbred (indeed isogenic strains) it was intriguing to find that the behavior of these genetically identical individuals could differ markedly once placed in a society that decreased territory. A dominant or "king" mouse emerged. Other non-dominant males were aggressive and striving to be king. Adrenal medullary systems were activated and renins high. Others huddled in one cage and appeared to have given up. Jim called them depressed. Their adrenal cortex was hyperplastic suggesting pituitary adrenal axis activation as in depression, their renin was low and corticosterone high. In rats, careful selection of a strain genetically aggressive had to be combined with titration of societal stress to reliably induce hypertension. Its likely that humans retain some, if not all, of these variations, i.e. some respond to stress with an increase in blood pressure and others do not, some respond via the sympathetic pathway and others by adrenal cortical activation. The suggestion that African American's high blood pressures is due to stress is relevant to the Henry paradigm and the known genetic influences on sodium retention in blacks. The integration of this paradigm with the genetically increased sensitivity to the blood pressure raising effects of dietary sodium in blacks is proposed and discussed.


At the low temperatures achieved in cool brown dwarf and hot giant planet atmospheres, the less refractory neutral alkali metals assume an uncharacteristically prominent role in spectrum formation. In particular, the wings of the Na-D (5890 Å) and K I (7700 Å) resonance lines come to define the continuum and dominate the spectrum of T dwarfs from 0.4 to 1.0 μm. Whereas in standard stellar atmospheres the strengths and shapes of the wings of atomic spectral lines are rarely needed beyond 25 Å from a line center, in brown dwarfs the far wings of the Na and K resonance lines out to thousands of angstroms detunings are important. Using standard quantum chemical codes and the unified Franck-Condon model for line profiles in the quasi-static limit, we calculate the interaction potentials and the wing line shapes for the dominant Na and K resonance lines in H2- and helium-rich atmospheres. Our theory has natural absorption profile cutoffs, has no free parameters, and is readily adapted to spectral synthesis calculations for stars, brown dwarfs, and planets with effective temperatures below 2000 K.


Any automated decision support software must tailor its actions or recommendations to the preferences of different users. Thus it requires some representation of user preferences as well as a means of eliciting or otherwise learning the preferences of the specific user on whose behalf it is acting. While additive preference models offer a compact representation of multiattribute utility functions, and ease of elicitation, they are often overly restrictive. The more flexible generalized additive independence (GAI) model maintains much of the intuitive nature of additive models, but comes at the cost of much more complex elicitation. In this article, we summarize the key contributions of our earlier paper (UAI 2005): (a) the first elaboration of the semantic foundations of GAI models that allows one to engage in preference elicitation using local queries over small subsets of attributes rather than global queries over full outcomes; and (b) specific procedures for Bayesian preference elicitation of the parameters of a GAI model using such local queries.


Figshare's annual report, The State of Open Data 2017, looks at global attitudes towards open data. It includes survey results of 2,300 respondents and a collection of articles from industry experts, as well as a foreword from Jean-Claude Burgelman, Head of Unit Open Data Policies and Science Cloud at the European Commission. Its key finding is that open data has become more embedded in the research community - 82% of survey respondents are aware of open data sets and more researchers are curating their data for sharing.


This article combines an analysis of the fabrics, surfaces and styles chosen to dress Pedro Almodóvar's male characters with an exploration of how those codes might be read with respect to the specific and significant shifting historical contexts of 1980s and 1990s Spanish
 society. Through focusing our interdisciplinary analysis upon Labyrinth of Passions (Almodóvar, 1982) and The Flower of My Secret (Almodóvar, 1995), we will identify the multifarious ways in which the male subject mirrors societal and cultural trends in a rapidly changing Spain
 during the years following the country's emergence from isolation after the Franco years, its subsequent return to democracy and the emergence of a high-living, fashionable cosmopolitanism. In examining the tensions that emerge between pairings of key male figures in the Spanish director's
 work, we will pay particular attention to their costuming as central to the construction and performance of masculine identities. We will argue that in the films under examination, a series of binary oppositions are offered in which the suited male (whether a doctor or a military general)
 is self-consciously contrasted with representations that connote shifting bohemian, subcultural (or 'alternative') identities that destabilize and reconfigure the construction and performance of masculine identities and their more 'traditional' counterparts.


Attempts to manage air traffic by either decreasing delay or increasing flow can have the reverse effect on the other. In the National Airspace System (NAS), flights typically depart at their chosen times, and flow management techniques are implemented in the air in an effort to maximize flow, which could lead to delay for individual aircraft. Other areas of the world allow flights to depart only at predetermined slot times knowing that there is a clear unobstructed path, leading to minimal delays but possibly underutilizing airspace. We propose a new approach in leveraging the highway cell transmission model (CTM) to the airspace in the form of a multi-objective optimization that trades between maximizing throughput and minimizing delay. The model is posed as a multi-commodity traffic flow integer program where the constraints are relaxed slightly from the CTM to examine strategies for achieving optimal throughput and delay. In practice, the model is envisioned to initially run offline to determine a preliminary solution to the initial state of the system. Solutions for subsequent changes in actual state can be determined by running the model online for the incremental state change. Stochastic events such as convective weather clearing times or capacities can be included in the model to better see the benefits and impacts of pre-positioning traffic to take advantage of possible future clearing.


Introduction: The purpose of this study was to determine the physical fitness level of elderly adults aged 60 years and over stay in public home for aged in Ankara according to their Physical Performance Test (PPT) protocol scores. Materials and Method: A total of 107 elderly adults (50 male, 57 female) who did not have any medical problems to prevent or limit applying PPT protocol, participated in this study voluntarily. The subjects were divided into three age groups as 60-69, 70-79 and 80>. Some physical fitness tests and PPT protocol were applied to the subjects. Results: At the end of statistical analysis of variables; especially in females significant decreases of physical fitness values were indicated through aging process, comparison of sexes indicated that there were significant differences (p<0.05) between males and females on all parameters except blood pressure and resting heart rate. Generally males had better scores, but flexibility scores of 70-79 age group females were significantly higher than scores of males (p<0.05). Also PPT score of females over 80 yrs were significantly lower than the other age groups. Conclusion: Consequently physical fitness level decreases through aging and these deficiency were observed in females much more than males.


In this article, a study has been carried out to analyze the effect of aging, in healthy individuals, on heart rate variability (HRV) using time-domain, frequency-domain and Poincaré plot techniques. For this study data is taken from a standard database i.e. Fantasia Database which contains 20 elderly (68-85 years old) and 20 young (21-34 years old) strictly tested healthy individuals for comparability of result more extensive. The results convey that (i) The time domain methods provide a distinction in young and elderly groups in terms of mean coefficient of variance reduced by 47.03%, mean standard deviation of all RR intervals reduced by 45.37%, mean standard deviation of differences between adjacent RR intervals reduced by 54.81%, and mean root-mean-square value of successive differences between adjacent RR intervals reduced by 47.14% of young age group. (ii) In frequency domain analysis, Welch method shows that the peak frequencies VLF, LF and HF are not much affected by aging and power spectral density reduced significantly, particularly LF and HF reduced to one sixth that of young age group. The power ratio LF/HF is same for both age group which suggest that aging establishes a new equilibrium between two branches of autonomic nervous system. (iii) Auto Regressive (AR) method provides that peak frequencies VLF, HF are not much affected by aging but LF shifted to higher side and power values are reduced to one tenth of young age group.(iv)As compared to Welch method, AR provides higher power, lower LF/HF, smooth and high resolution peaks in all frequency bands of young and elderly age group but the disadvantages of the AR spectrum are the complexity of model order selection while Welch method allows simple and high processing speed algorithm. (v) From Poincaré Plot it is found that Poincaré cloud is spread over a wider area for young age group as compared to elderly and there is reduction of 20.9% in SD1, 45.35% in SD2, 41.37% in standard deviation of RR interval and 24.28% in ellipse area in elderly group as compared to young group. Thus with all measures HRV declines with aging.


This article is a descriptive analysis of the local impact of a national school/university partnership programme in Scotland. Starting from a high-level report on improving teacher education, a series of recommendations was filtered through various stages and agencies until local providers (local authorities and higher education institutions) were faced with having to decide how best to respond to a large national agenda but in a manner which was appropriate for local circumstances. How one university and its partners engaged with this agenda, while experiencing considerable staff shortages and in the light of ongoing financial constraints, is described and analysed through the lenses of local and national policy. The most significant learning from that engagement is how national priorities shift and are replaced without much sustainability or continuity while the 'locals' remain committed to more fundamental and long-term issues of working together to enhance teacher and pupil learning. In the analysis, considerations of professional development through partnerships are also discussed in an international context.


PURPOSE
This study aims to develop a novel method for volumetric validation of deformable image registration. The developed method was used to determine the accuracy in bladder and rectum registration between external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) and intracavitary brachytherapy (ICBT) CT images.

METHODS
Twenty patients treated for intact cervical cancer were used for this study. All patients had EBRT CT (CT1) and ICBT CT (CT2). A single patient from the population was chosen as the reference patient. CT1 from the remaining 19 patients were then deformed to the reference CT1 (CT1_ref). The mean deformation and principle components of deformation fields were determined and used to simulate a known interpatient deformation. For each patient, CT1 was also deformed to CT2 to quantify deformation within each patient. The mean deformation and principal components of those fields were used to create a known intrapatient deformation field. The inter-patient deformation field was applied to the CT1_ref and inter-and intra-patient deformation field was applied to CT2_ref to create artificial CT1 and CT2, respectively. Our DIR algorithm was tested by deforming artificial CT1 to CT2. Errors in DIR were determined by taking the difference between calculated and the known fields.

RESULTS
We have successfully created artificial CT images that were realistic, represented our patient population, and had realistic deformations between EBRT and ICBT. The mean errors in registration for the bladder were 0.98 mm, 1.09 mm, -0.17 mm, and 3.47 mm in the RL, AP, SI directions, and total magnitude, respectively. For the rectum, the mean errors in registration were 0.02 mm, -0.86 mm, -0.37 mm, and 2.74 mm in the RL, AP, SI directions, and total magnitude, respectively.

CONCLUSION
We have developed a method to validate any DIR algorithm for any particular patient population and organs of interest.


We start with a description of Lacan's work that we then take into our analytics methodology. In a first investigation, a Lacan-motivated template of the Poe story is fitted to the data. A segmentation of the storyline is used in order to map out the diachrony. Based on this, it will be shown how synchronous aspects, potentially related to Lacanian registers, can be sought. This demonstrates the effectiveness of an approach based on a model template of the storyline narrative. In a second and more comprehensive investigation, we develop an approach for revealing, that is, uncovering, Lacanian register relationships. Objectives of this work include the wide and general application of our methodology. This methodology is strongly based on the "letting the data speak" Correspondence Analysis analytics platform of Jean-Paul Benzecri, that is also the geometric data analysis, both qualitative and quantitative analytics, developed by Pierre Bourdieu.


Structural health monitoring (SHM) of composite structures provides an approach for fully utilizing the benefits of composite materials while providing a strategy for monitoring their complex damage mechanics in real-time. Application of SHM requires not only the ability to localize, classify, and quantify damage in a structure, but also to compensate for changing environmental and operational conditions. This work will focus on one such problem, specifically identifying the presence of delamination in composites while the material is under applied load. An experimental series was conducted testing composite coupons under tension-tension fatigue in order to cause damage to gradually propagate through the samples. Guided wave signals, propagated through the composite samples using piezoelectric transducers, and verification X-ray images were collected at progressive stages and different applied load levels during testing. By analyzing ultrasonic signal changes from the SHM system when experiencing effects from varying levels of damage severity and applied load the goal is to identify delamination in a signal propagation path. Signal features extracted from the guided wave data, such as amplitude, velocity, and energy content, are used to identify delamination. Utilizing combinations of signal features as prediction variables for statistical modeling, decision trees are grown to create a multi-layer model which uses these signal changes in order to predict delamination regardless of the operational effects also influencing the guided wave SHM system


Motivation to learn is a process that encourages a person to achieve a goal, in this case is on teaching and learning activities. Learning motivation and learning activities are influenced by several things, including factors that come from within oneself which is also called internal factors. Grade 4 Students Encouragement SDN Balearjosari 1 No. 01 in an effort to learn still low, this is seen by many, many students are punished by his teacher because he violates the rules, like not doing homework or take any
other task. It seems students have never been bored with punishment from her teacher that is excluded from the class if it does not do homework. In fact, almost every day there are always students who are removed from class because it violates. It can be seen that the sense of discipline students for learning and encouragement to do homework is still far from expectations. Next is the external factors originating from the environment. Support parents are expected to be the main motivation to spur Study abroad in their children, because family is the smallest environment where these students live. Environmental grade 4 students who felt too crowded, with 50 students. In this case the teacher is less able to give attention to students who lacked motivation to learn, so the teacher is less optomal in teaching. Become very rowdy classroom teaching and learning activities and could not walk properly. The purpose of this study is to investigate students' motivation in learning activities. In school year 2005-2006, there were 8 students grades 4 SDN Balearjosari 1 No. 01 is not the next grade. Subjects were some grade 4 student at SDN Balearjosari 1 No. 01 are considered to lack the impetus to learn which can be seen from his behavior in the classroom and on teacher command. Data collection methods used were interviews and observation. Bardasarkan research results it can be concluded that the grade 4 student at SDN Balearjosari have less motivation to learn, be it at home that can be seen from its complete or not in homework and in school with all his behavior. This can be seen from several aspects unearthed, namely interest, concentration, effort in learning and a desire to read is still low.


Capturing human motion is a key problem in computer vision, because of the wide range of applications that can benefit from the acquired data. Motion capture is used to identify people by their gait, for interacting with computers using gestures, for improving the performance of athletes, for diagnosis of orthopaedic patients, and for creating virtual characters with more natural looking motions in movies and games. These are but a few of the possible applications of human motion capture.In some of the application areas mentioned above it is important that the data acquisition is unconstrained by the markers or wearable sensors traditionally used in commercial motion capture systems. Furthermore, there is a need for low latency and real-time performance for certain applications, for instance in perceptive user interfaces and gait recognition. Human pose estimation is defined as the process of estimating the configuration of the underlying skeletal structure of the human body.In this dissertation several algorithms that together form a real-time pose estimation pipeline are proposed. Images captured with a calibrated multi-camera system are input to the pipeline, and the 3D positions of 25 joints in the global coordinate frame are the resulting output. The steps of the pipeline are: a) subtract the background from the images to create silhouettes; b) reconstruct the volume occupied by the performer from the silhouette images; c) extract skeleton curves from the volume; d) identify extremities and segment the skeletal curves into body parts; and e) fit a model to the labelled data. The pipeline can initialise automatically, and can recover from errors in estimation.There are four main contributions of the research effort presented in this dissertation: a) a toolset for evaluating shape-from-silhouette-based pose estimation algorithms using synthetic motion sequences generated from real motion capture data; b) a fully parallel thinning algorithm implemented on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) that can skeletonise voxel volumes in real time; c) a real-time pose estimation algorithm that builds a tree structure segmented into body parts from skeleton data; and d) a constraint algorithm that can fit an articulated model to a labelled tree structure in real time.


Shibusa – Extracting Beauty celebrates a number of artistic endeavours: music, painting and the skill of making in general with particular reflection upon Japanese aesthetics. Composer, Monty Adkins and visual artist, Pip Dickens (through a Leverhulme Trust Award collaboration) investigate commonality and difference between the visual arts and music exploring aspects of rhythm, pattern, colour and vibration as well as outlining processes utilised to evolve new works within these practices. The hand-cut paper Katagami stencil: a beautiful utilitarian object once used to apply decoration on to Japanese kimonos, is used as a poignant symbol – the 'hand-made machine' - by Adkins and Dickens both within the production of paintings and sound compositions and as a thematic link throughout the book. The book reviews examples of a number of contemporary artists and craftspeople and their individual approaches to 'making things well'. It explores the balance between hand skills and technology within a work's production with particular reference to Richard Sennett's review of material culture in The Craftsman. Shibusa – Extracting Beauty includes contributing essays by arts writer, Roy Exley, who examines convergence and crossover within the arts and an in-depth history, and review, of the kimono making industry by Kyoto designer, Makoto Mori. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/12836/


In "Engaging with Shakespeare", Marianne Novy considers the contributions of women novelists in shaping and responding to Shakespeare's cultural presence. Paying particular attention to issues related to gender or to ideologies of gender - especially the ways in which women writers use Shakespeare's plots of marriage and romantic love, his female characters, and the gender-crossing aspects of his male characters and his image - Novy traces a history of women trying to create a Shakespeare of their own. Charting an alternative course to the one emphasised by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in "The Madwoman in the Attic", which portrays the male-authored canon as alienating to women, Novy contends that the responses of women writers to Shakespeare often involve an appropriate creativity, a tradition of reading and rewriting male-authored texts to find their own concerns. After showing that women's fictional experiments as early as the 18th century and Jane Austen enter into dialogue with Shakespeare, Novy considers the engagements of women novelists with Shakespeare over the more than 250 years up to the 1990s. She discusses some women novelists' identification with his female characters, and the more surprising occasional identification with his status as an outsider, as well as the many different novelistic transformations of his plots. She also shows that for many women novelists, beginning with Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, the wide-ranging sympathy associated with Shakespeare could be a congenial ideal - up to a point. Novy demonstrates how Eliot's novels "Felix Holt", "Middlemarch", and "Daniel Deronda", especially, take on new meanings when seen as in dialogue with Shakespeare. She explores the changes between Eliot's responses and those of early 20th century modernists - Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, and Iris Murdoch - and then marks the emergence of more explicit feminist protest in the works of such novelists as Margaret Drabble and Margaret Atwood. Finally, she discusses recent works by Angela Carter, Nadine Gordimer, Gloria Naylor, and Jane Smiley, as well as Drabble, that engage with Shakespeare and contemporary cultural hybridity, thereby repositioning Shakespeare as part of a global multiculturalism. "My hope in this book", writes Novy, "is not only to give women novelists a larger place in Shakespearean cultural studies but also to contribute to a feminist criticism that does not perceive men's writing as monolithic. I am trying to combine two different modes of feminist criticism - the kind that is interested in texts by women as a group, contrasting them with texts by men, and the kind that is interested in breaking down dichotomies between texts by women and texts by men".


High-level synthesis tools are gaining more and more acceptance in industrial design flows. While they increase productivity in implementing a single complex hardware module, synthesizing and optimizing many hardware components simultaneously is still an open problem. In particular, resource sharing is typically only performed for single components, thereby neglecting optimization possibilities across concurrent modules. On the other hand, domain-specific models and specifications, which are generally seen as a key ingredient to raise the level of abstraction in future design flows, may enable such global optimizations. In this paper, we present a model-based approach for inter-process resource sharing which provides for efficient high-level synthesis of streaming applications modeled as a set of communicating processes. The applicability of the proposed approach is validated by a case study.


Migration involves individuals in serious risks of social exclusion from the information society (Halfman 1998) and thus from social participation more broadly - specifically, within the first few months and years of arrival, language and socio-cultural contexts may fundamentally differ and cause extreme challenges for immigrants with low education and illiteracy. Everywhere/everytime assistance is crucial to immediately support immigrants in necessary information access, to cope with critical situations. Furthermore, immigrants require support for learning how to progress and to bridge knowledge gaps, to become a productive member of the information society. The EC funded project MASELTOV is developing a mobile service for continuous assistance and investigates the influence of persuasive and affective computing on the individual's motivation for learning. The paper presents MASELTOV's concept of applying digital games, mobile context awareness, and social computing to motivate local community building, to connect immigrants with native citizens and vice versa, in order to foster communication and bridging of cultural differences. Communication at both personal and cultural level will be reinforced where it really matters - in everyday critical situations that profoundly determine the quality of life. Social interaction/help is particularly important in community building and will be supported by services such as geo-social radar functionality. In this way MASELTOV manages all the "approximation steps" that must be taken to achieve a personal goal and that can be supported by a wide range of people who have some understanding and experience of what needs to be done and how to do it. The services will support the development of communication skills, situated learning of the target language and culture, and will prevent cultural hyperghettoisation. The MASELTOV prototypical service implicitly has the potential to scale up to a very large number of end users – it will complement Europe's largest online social network for language learning.


Abstract Cat vocal behavior, in particular, the vocal and social behavior of feral cats, is poorly understood, as are the differences between feral and fully domestic cats. The relationship between feral cat social and vocal behavior is important because of the markedly different ecology of feral and domestic cats, and enhanced comprehension of the repertoire and potential information content of feral cat calls can provide both better understanding of the domestication and socialization process, and improved welfare for feral cats undergoing adoption. Previous studies have used conflicting classification schemes for cat vocalizations, often relying on onomatopoeic or popular descriptions of call types (e.g., "miow"). We studied the vocalizations of 13 unaltered domestic cats that complied with our behavioral definition used to distinguish feral cats from domestic. A total of 71 acoustic units were extracted and visually analyzed for the construction of a hierarchical classification of vocal sounds, based on acoustic properties. We identified 3 major categories (tonal, pulse, and broadband) that further breakdown into 8 subcategories, and show a high degree of reliability when sounds are classified blindly by independent observers (Fleiss' Kappa K = 0.863). Due to the limited behavioral contexts in this study, additional subcategories of cat vocalizations may be identified in the future, but our hierarchical classification system allows for the addition of new categories and new subcategories as they are described. This study shows that cat vocalizations are diverse and complex, and provides an objective and reliable classification system that can be used in future studies.


This thesis explores the relationship between minority religions and American religious pluralism, an ideology which supports religious equality and functions through social norms and legal mechanisms. Examining American religious pluralism's responses to efforts by nineteenth-century Spiritualists and contemporary Pagans to gain social recognition and political rights produces new insights into the nature of American religious pluralism. I argue that conceiving of American religious pluralism as a project with inherently Protestant Christian investments challenges its ability to support religious equality and exposes the ways in which it actively works to marginalize minority religions due to their inconsistency with the beliefs and practices of Protestant Christianity. The first chapter of this thesis examines how Spiritualism and Neopaganism challenge American religious pluralism's understanding of what qualifies as a legitimate form of American religion. Chapter two investigates the ways in which Spiritualism and Neopaganism's privileging of women contributes to their inability to become established modes of American religiosity. The third chapter explores the limitations American religious pluralism places on minority religions' responses to death. I argue that although in some ways American religious pluralism's treatment of minority religions has changed, a Protestant logic continues to influence American religious pluralism's strategies for religious management. From Spiritualists to Neopagans: Complicating American Religious Pluralism


With the introduction into the discourse of the UK National Health Service (NHS) of the term Clinical Governance in the 1997 Department of Health White Paper, A New NHS, Modern and Dependable, arguable a new and distinct phase in the relationship between the government of the day and the providers of health care was begun. As a concept Clinical Governance is difficult to define, its very ambiguity aids the ability of different stakeholders to, rhetorically at least, accept it in principle. In its ability to appeal to a strengthening of professional self-regulation on the one hand, whilst simultaneously stressing the need for a greater visibility of accountability and enforcement on the other, the concept can appear to offer a win-win outcome for health professionals, managers, auditors, politicians and patients alike. This paper, uses insights, gleaned from early empirical research within a large NHS Hospital Trust to produce a narrative account of the efforts of a group of medical and technical support staff to introduce a series of Integrated Care Pathways (ICPs), which to many of the actors involved, would stand as a concrete example of clinical governance in action. In striving to make a reality of these conceptual notions, many of the tensions inherent in implementing ICPs and clinical governance came to the fore. As such it makes an ideal precursor and pilot project for highlighting some of the problems facing the introduction of clinical governance into the everyday culture of the NHS.


This paper shows the effectiveness of a DBpedia-based approach for text categorization in the e-government field. Our use case is the analysis of all the speech transcripts of current White House members. This task is performed by means of TellMeFirst, an open-source software that leverages the DBpedia knowledge base and the English Wikipedia linguistic corpus for topic extraction. Analysis results allow to identify the main political trends addressed by the White House, increasing the citizens' awareness to issues discussed by politicians. Unlike methods based on string recognition, TellMeFirst semantically classifies documents through DBpedia URIs, gathering all the words that belong to a similar area of meaning (such as synonyms, hypernyms and hyponyms of a lemma) under the same unambiguous concept


Decision Support Systems (DSS) are information systems that support decision making processes. In many scenarios these systems are built on top of data managed by DBMSs and make extensive use of its underlying grouping and aggregation capabilities, i.e., Group-by operation. Unfortunately, the standard grouping operator has the inherent limitation of being based only on equality, i.e., all the tuples in a group share the same values of the grouping attributes. Similarity-based Group-by (SGB) has been recently proposed as an extension aimed to overcome this limitation. SGB allows fast formation of groups with similar objects under different grouping strategies and the pipelining of results for further processing. This demonstration presents how SGB can be effectively used to build useful DSSs. The presented DSS has been built around the data model and queries of the TPC-H benchmark intending to be representative of complex business analysis applications. The system provides intuitive dashboards that exploit similarity aggregation queries to analyze: (1) customer clustering, (2) profit and revenue, (3) marketing campaigns, and (4) discounts. The presented DSS runs on top of PostgreSQL whose query engine is extended with similarity grouping operators.


The relationship between buildings and the people that inhabit and utilise them is complex and multifaceted. This complexity is dependent on a number of interconnected factors such as; the nature of the building, the building's status and its use, all of which affect the perception of the building and its contribution to the local environment. The purpose of this paper is to consider what happens when a particular set of these factors combine. Hospitality and the built environment are interdependent upon one another and have been so ever since the inception of civilisation (O'Gorman 2010). The commercialisation of hospitality has been accompanied over the centuries by a combination of the development of specific buildings and the adaptation of existing buildings for hospitality purposes. This has led to the adaptation, revitalisation and rejuvenation of post-industrial buildings for commercial hospitality purposes as a key means to achieve the continued and sustainable us of the historic built environment (Mc Neill, 2008, Bell, 2005). This creation of hospitality outlets in character buildings can be seen as a 'lightest touch' option allowing the implementation of conservation and planning legislation, an option that also provides the possibility of income generation and employment creation with continued public access and therefore fulfils their obligation not only to preserve such buildings but also to achieve sustainable development (PCPAct, 2004). While adaption can result in operational and financial challenges (Ransley and Ingram, 2004) these can be countered by opportunities for brand management. Current UK Government advice is that developers and policy makers should see the historic built environment as an asset, with economically viable reuse being encouraged as a means of achieving sustainable development (DCLG 2012). But in order to achieve successful adaptation an understanding of the relationship between buildings, people, operations and legislation is necessary. The alternative ontological perspective offered by Actor-Network Theory (Law, 1999, Latour, 2005), bridges the traditional social-physical divide and provides a tool for allowing the relationship between hospitality and the built environment to be understood.


To alleviate the complex communication problems that arise as the number of on-chip components increases, network-on-chip (NoC) architectures have been recently proposed to replace global interconnects. In this paper, we first provide a general description of NoC architectures and applications. Then, we enumerate several related research problems organized under five main categories: Application characterization, communication paradigm, communication infrastructure, analysis, and solution evaluation. Motivation, problem description, proposed approaches, and open issues are discussed for each problem from system, microarchitecture, and circuit perspectives. Finally, we address the interactions among these research problems and put the NoC design process into perspective.


We showed that these two cell lines obviously expressed megakaryocytic phenotypes, such as multilobular, hyperploid nuclei, expression of GPIIb/IIIa complex, GPIb and PPO, although they have been originated from patients with leukemia. Furthermore, these cells had following characteristics. First, they responded to various kinds of hemopoietic factors. Especially, UT-7 cells were solely dependent on GM-CSF, IL-3 or Ep. Therefore UT-7 cells are useful to the assay of these factors as megakaryocytic cells. These facts provide us with new questions: why they are dependent on plural number of factors? How are the expressions of their receptors controlled. Is there an "autocrine" mechanism controlling their growth? Among these questions, we have just started with the Ep receptors, and most of the problems remain to be clarified. Second, PMA treatment suppressed their growth, but enhanced their differentiation and maturation. Among the megakaryocytic phenotypes, increase in GPIIb/IIIa complex, determined by a biochemical method, PPO by ultrastructural study, and the increase in cellular ploidy were clearly observed by PMA treatment. The phorbol ester PMA is well known to induce the differentiation of various kinds of leukemic cells (Rovera et al., 1979). Detailed molecular basis to clarify why the same PMA treatment causes differentiation into different cell lineages, dependent on cellular origin of the target cells, should be further studies. Third, the cells produced hemopoietic growth factors by PMA treatment, the majority of which was GM-CSF. Humoral control of megakaryopoiesis still remains unsettled. Our study may shed a light on its "multistep" regulatory mechanisms. Availability of a large amount of homogeneous megakaryocytic populations, which are responsive to hemopoietic factors and phorbol ester, will provide us with a great deal of informations concerning the molecular insight of megakaryocytopoiesis and thrombocytopoiesis.


Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a noninvasive technique that provides accurate, detailed, anatomic images, has had a major impact in the diagnosis of human disease. This technique is based upon the inherent magnetic properties of certain nuclei. Induction of the nuclei into a low energy state is achieved by placing them in a static magnetic field. The nuclei may then be excited into a high energy state by application of a radio frequency pulse. When the second field is stopped, the nuclei return to ground state and emit the absorbed energy in the form of a radio signal. This signal is received by a coil that generally surrounds the specimen and converted to an anatomic image through a process of computer-assisted reconstruction. Contrast is altered by applying the second pulse in different sequences (saturation recovery, inversion recovery, and spin echo) and using enhancing agents such as gadolinium. In this paper, we present an overview of the general principles of MRI and some clinical examples in dogs and cats with central nervous system disease.


Twenty neonatal harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) pups in rehabilitation following maternal separation underwent serial echocardiographic studies to assess patency and subsequent age of functional closure of the ductus arteriosus (d.a.). B-mode, color-flow Doppler, and pulse and continuous wave Doppler were utilized to identify the d.a. and determine patency and directionality of blood flow. Seals were also evaluated for evidence of foramen ovale (f.o.) patency. B-mode ultrasound was used to evaluate the inter-atrial septum for abnormal (aneurismal) motion, a sign of f.o. patency in other species. In one harbor seal, this motion was confirmed as being consistent with f.o. patency by contrast echocardiography. Closure of the f.o. was not confirmed in any harbor seal prior to release back into the free-ranging population. Data acquired indicate that there is patency of the f.o. and d.a. after birth for a longer period in phocids than in described terrestrial mammals. The f.o. may be patent up to 7 wks of age, and the d.a. may be patent up to 6 wks of age without evidence of clinical consequence. This difference in ontogeny between terrestrial mammals and harbor seals is presumptively a diving adaptation. Such an adaptation is counterintuitive given that humans with f.o. patency are at increased risk of stroke following the introduction or formation of intravascular gas bubbles and suggests that concurrent protective mechanisms may be present.


A 3-D hydrodynamic-biogeochemical coupled model has been used to estimate a budget of organic carbon and its interannual variability over the 5 year period 2004–2008 in the North-Western Mediterranean Open Sea (NWMOS). The comparison of its results with in situ and satellite observations reveals that the timing and the magnitude of the convection and bloom processes during the study period, marked by contrasted atmospheric conditions, are reasonably well reproduced by the model. Model outputs show that the amount of nutrients annually injected into the surface layer is clearly linked to the intensity of the events of winter convection. During cold winters, primary production is reduced by intense mixing events but then spectacularly increases when the water column restratifies. In contrast, during mild winters, the primary production progressively and continuously increases, sustained by moderate new production followed by regenerated production. Overall, interannual variability in the annual primary production is low. The export in subsurface and at middepth is however affected by the intensity of the convection process, with annual values twice as high during cold winters than during mild winters. Finally, the estimation of a global budget of organic carbon reveals that the NWMOS acts as a sink for the shallower areas and as a source for the Algerian and Balearic subbasins.


The European Commission published 'Guidelines for a Model for A European Taxpayer's Code'. The Guidelines seek to clarify taxpayers' fundamental rights and obligations in the EU while proposing best practices for their enhancement. The European initiative follows several international ones to the same end. Their comparison reveals the Guidelines' rather restricted scope. Although they constitute a step forward, they fall short of their potential, demanding further steps to ensure due protection of taxpayers' rights.


Reaching the Moon poses very strict requirements in terms of performance, flexibility and cost for all the spacecraft subsystems. These requirements become more stringent if the mission is designed to be accomplished using a small satellite. The navigation subsystem is without any doubts essential and nowadays, several systems offer different solutions to the navigation problem. Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) such as GPS, GLONASS, or the future Galileo and BeiDou systems, introduce an easier way to provide an autonomous on-board orbit determination system; they only require the realization and installation of an on-board GNSS receiver, with low-cost, low-power consumption and limited mass and volume. While GNSS receivers have been already exploited with success for Low Earth Orbit (LEO), their use for very High Earth Orbit (HEO) up to the Moon altitude is still at the research stage. In this context, the purpose of this research is to determine the potential achievable accuracy of a code-based GNSS receiver solution, during the whole trajectory to reach the Moon. GPS, Galileo, and GPS-Galileo combined (dual constellation) solutions are estimated, by considering constellations availability, pseudorange error factors and geometry factors. Unlike previous investigations, our study is making use of a very accurate multi- GNSS constellation simulator "Spirent GSS8000", which supports simultaneously the GPS and Galileo systems and the L1, L5, E1, and E5 frequency bands. The contribution of this study, based on the achieved results, clearly demonstrates that GNSS signals can be tracked at the Moon's surface, but not with the current GNSS receiver's technology for terrestrial use. A possible navigation solution we consider and discuss uses a double constellation GPS-Galileo receiver aided by external on board systems in order to improve the accuracy of the navigation solution and achieve the required sensitivity.


John Maynard Keynes once observed that the "ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood." The contributors to this volume take that assertion seriously. In a full-scale study of the impact of Keynesian doctrines across nations, their essays trace the reception accorded Keynesian ideas, initially during the 1930s and then in the years after World War II, in a wide range of nations, including Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Scandinavia. The contributors review the latest historical evidence to explain why some nations embraced Keynesian policies while others did not. At a time of growing interest in comparative public policy-making, they examine the central issue of how and why particular ideas acquire influence over policy and politics.Based on three years of collaborative research for the Social Science Research Council, the volume takes up central themes in contemporary economics, political science, and history. The contributors are Christopher S. Allen, Marcello de Cecco, Peter Alexis Gourevitch, Eleanor M. Hadley, Peter A. Hall, Albert O. Hirschman, Harold James, Bradford A. Lee, Jukka Pekkarinen, Pierre Rosanvallon, Walter S. Salant, Margaret Weir, and Donald Winch.


High energy physics experiments require on-the-fly processing of signals from many particle detectors. Such signals contain a high and fluctuating rate of pulses. Pulse shape hints particle type, and the amplitude relates to energy of the particle, while pulse occurrence times are needed for event reconstruction. Traditionally, these parameters have been extracted with the help of complete racks of dedicated electronics. Our FPGA design on a general-purpose DAQ card does real-time pulse detection and high-precision curve fitting. It greatly shrinks required equipment in terms of form factor, cost, power usage, and setup time. Unlike traditional systems, we can handle bursts of back-to-back pulses, pulses as narrow as 6 ns and at rates over 1M pulses per second. We have a novel scalable architecture that combines pipelining and parallelism. Moreover, the parallel part of the architecture uses loop pipelining in each of its interleaved identical parallel processors (IIPPs). An IIPP is a specialized CPU, which executes nested loops, with number of iterations that varies from pulse to pulse. IIPPs are fed data from a FIFO by a priority encoder based dispatcher. Number of IIPPs can be calculated to meet any pulse rate and average pulse width. The architecture is flexible enough to work with a variety of curve fitting algorithms.


A new type of grazing-incidence spectrometer with a flat focal field is developed, and XUV spectroscopy in the extreme ultraviolet region ranging from 15 to 200 A is carried out. Soft x-ray line spectra emitted from picosecond laser plasmas of aluminum and iron targets are measured and good resolutions are obtained in the XUV region. The spectral regions of detection are extended to shorter wavelengths (15 A) using a finer spaced grating. Computational studies on x-ray spectra are also performed taking into account the transient characteristics of picosecond laser-produced plasmas; the importance of the transient treatment is clearly shown. This type of soft x-ray spectrometer should be useful for time-resolved picosecond soft x-ray spectroscopy.


Background: Menopause is the time when permanent cessation of menstruation occurs due to loss of ovarian activities. Postmenopausal asymptomatic endometrial thickening is an endometrial thickness of ˃5mm in the absence of bleeding per vaginal. There is a strongassociation between endometrial thickness and endometrial disease. Factors influencing endometrial thickness includes parity, postmenopausal years, body mass index and medical illness. These factors exert their influence on the endometrium and resultant chaanges may be picked by transvaginal scan.
Aim: This study assessed asymptomatic endometrial thickness in postmenopausal women and those with medical disorders at the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital, Ilorin using transvaginal scan.
Objectives: The objectives of the study were to determine the endometrial thickness among asymptomatic postmenopausal women attending selected out-patient clinics at the UITH, relationship between body mass index and asymptomatic endometrial thickness among postmenopausal women and endometrial thickness in postmenopausal women with diabetes and hypertension.
Methods: The study was conducted in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and other out-patient clinics of the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital. It was carried out among asymptomatic postmenopausal women who attended the gynaecological, endocrinology, cardiology and general out-patient clinics. It was hospital-based, cross- sectional descriptive study. Participant selection was based on purposive non-probability sampling on the set inclusion criteria. A study proforma sheet was used to obtain information

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on age, parity, age at menopause, postmenopausal years and associated medical illnesses. Anthropometric measurements were taken and body mass index was calculated. Theparticipants' blood pressure was measured using a mercury sphygmomanometer and the blood glucose levels using a standardised glucometer. The endometrial thickness was measured using a tranvaginal scan and women with abnormally thickened endometrium were counselled on endometrial biopsy for histo-pathological diagnosis and subsequently referred to the Gynaecology clinic for further investigations and definitive management. Descriptive analysis was performed using SPSS software version 23. The results were presented in tables and charts. P – Value was set as 0.05 as the level of significance.
Results: The mean age of participants was 64.90 years ± 8.20 and their mean age at menopause was 48.65years ± 2.67. The mean (SD) of postmenopausal years was 15.65 (6.69) years. There was a documented increase in the mean values of endometrial thickness for participants with the hypertension; 2.82mm ± 4.07 and DM; 2.27mm ± 1.08 when compared with those with no medical disorder; 1.42mm ± 1.16 and this was statistically significant with p values 0f 0.026 and 0.005 respectively while duration of medical illness showed no statistical significant relationship with endometrial thickness. Endometrial thickness of participants increased as BMI increased though not statistically significant. There was an inverse relationship between duration of menopause, parity and endometrial thickness and this was statistically significant (p values = 0.048 and 0.005).
Conclusion: This study suggests that parity, duration of menopause, presence of hypertension and diabetes mellitus are related to asymptomatic endometrial thickness in postmenopausal women.Recommendation: Postmenopausal asymptomatic endometrial thickening should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and risk factors for endometrial cancer including diabetes mellitus and hypertension should be considered in decision making.


Dengue Fever (DF) has emerged as a significant public health problem of international concern with its high prevalence in the tropic and subtropical regions. Dengue Virus (DENV), which is the cause of DF, consists of four serotypes of antigenically distinct viruses. The immense variation and limited identity similarity at the amino acid level lead to a problematic challenge in the development of an efficacious vaccine. Fortunately, the extensively available immunological data, the advance in antigenic peptide prediction, and the incorporation of molecular docking and dynamics simulation in immunoinformatics have directed the vaccine development towards the rational design of the epitope-based vaccine. Here, we point out the current state of dengue epidemiology and the recent development in vaccine development. Subsequently, we provide a systematic review of our validated method and tools for Band T-cell epitope prediction as well as the use of molecular docking and dynamics in evaluating epitope affinity and stability in the discovery of a new tetravalent dengue vaccine through computational epitope-based vaccine design.


During the later years the teaching in Earth sciences has faced a lot of problems with less students in Earth sciences. Also, even if there is interest among the public, the knowledge about geology in Sweden is generally decreasing. This is obvious when teaching Earth science in different educations, especially like education for special professionals as teacher education. This is a big problem but also challenge for the Earth science community, since knowledge of the scientific field of Earth science is the foundation for much of the contact between the education, science and society.In the summary of the report to the Ministry of Environment from the Geological Survey of Sweden (SGU, 2000), the importance of geological knowledge in the society is repeated through the report. There is also proposals for action pointing out things like the importance with more geology in Swedish schools, teaching the relevance of geology in education for other professionals and information to the public. But, the most work to realize this intentions, lies actually within the Earth science community itself. First of all, the work with teaching must get higher priority and a higher academic value. Teaching and higher quality is not developing automatically just by a common goal for geology or positive advance in scientific research.Even with the start of successful popular events, like "Geologins dag", there is still a gap between common knowledge and Earth science community. This problem has to be overbuilt to secure the development of Earth science in to the future and to maintain knowledge among people. One of the main problems is the low priority of teaching in Earth sciences for students in geosciences and for other groups than students in geosciences education. One important professions in this matter is the education of teachers to comprehensive school and upper secondary school. Today these are found especially in courses like Geography and Physical geography. Teaching for these groups should be in frontline to give them right tools and knowledge to early wake the interest among young peoples. Also the teaching of Earth science for groups like planners, engineers etc. is of big value for the whole field of geology. Professionals in Earth sciences should not abandon their own knowledge in teaching, but prior the importance of professional teaching for maintaining the quality.References:SGU, 2000. Summary of report to the Ministry of Environment Geological Survey of Sweden.


Abstract We present mineral chemistry data and petrological evidence from the Yarlung Zangbo suture zone ophiolites (Southern Tibet) suggesting that they represent a collage of heterogeneous massifs. Mantle sections in these ophiolites consist of harzburgite and lherzolite cut by several generations of gabbroic to diabasic intrusions, all affected by high-temperature deformation. Pyroxenitic bands are parallel to the mantle foliation. Crustal plutonic sections, consisting of dunite, wehrlite and gabbro, are thin or absent and have been observed only in the Dazhuqu massif. Plagioclase is an additional phase associated with crustal peridotites. The mineral chemistry of silicate minerals and spinel in the mantle and crustal rocks varies widely and is believed to reflect complex melt percolation and reaction. The massifs record polybaric exhumation steps from at least 50 km depth to the plagioclase stability field. Pyroxene has re-equilibrated compositions from 1200 °C down to medium-grade metamorphic conditions. The mantle peridotites are interpreted as the residues of 10–40% partial melting of a fertile lherzolitic source. High Cr number, low TiO2 content and relatively high Fe3+ number of spinels suggest that the ophiolitic massifs were generated in a suprasubduction zone (arc or back-arc) environment.