In the last decade, research in Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) has become a major endeavour in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and speech processing. Accurate SER is essential for many applications, like assessing customer satisfaction with quality of services, and detecting/assessing emotional state of children in care. The large number of studies published on SER reflects the demand for its use. The main concern of this thesis is the investigation of SER from a pattern recognition and machine learning points of view. In particular, we aim to identify appropriate mathematical models of SER and examine the process of designing automatic emotion recognition schemes. There are major challenges to automatic SER including ambiguity about the list/definition of emotions, the lack of agreement on a manageable set of uncorrelated speech-based emotion relevant features, and the difficulty of collected emotion-related datasets under natural circumstances. We shall initiate our work by dealing with the identification of appropriate sets of emotion related features/attributes extractible from speech signals as considered from psychological and computational points of views. We shall investigate the use of pattern-recognition approaches to remove redundancies and achieve compactification of digital representation of the extracted data with minimal loss of information. The thesis will include the design of new or complement existing SER schemes and conduct large sets of experiments to empirically test their performances on different databases, identify advantages, and shortcomings of using speech alone for emotion recognition. Existing SER studies seem to deal with the ambiguity/dis-agreement on a "limited" number of emotion-related features by expanding the list from the same speech signal source/sites and apply various feature selection procedures as a mean of reducing redundancies. Attempts are made to discover more relevant features to emotion from speech. One of our investigations focuses on proposing a newly sets of features for SER, extracted from Linear Predictive (LP)-residual speech. We shall demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed relatively small set of features by testing the performance of an SER scheme that is based on fusing our set of features with the existing set of thousands of features using common machine learning schemes of Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The challenge of growing dimensionality of SER feature space and its impact on increased model complexity is another major focus of our research project. By studying the pros and cons of the commonly used feature selection approaches, we argued in favour of meta-feature selection and developed various methods in this direction, not only to reduce dimension, but also to adapt and de-correlate emotional feature spaces for improved SER model recognition accuracy. We used rincipal Component Analysis (PCA) and proposed Data Independent PCA (DIPCA) by training on independent emotional and non-emotional datasets. The DIPCA projections, especially when extracted from speech data coloured with different emotions or from Neutral speech data, had comparable capability to the PCA in terms of SER performance. Another adopted approach in this thesis for dimension reduction is the Random Projection (RP) matrices, independent of training data. We have shown that some versions of RP with SVM classifier can offer an adaptation space for Speaker Independent SER that avoid over-fitting and hence improves recognition accuracy. Using PCA trained on a set of data, while testing on emotional data features, has significant implication for machine learning in general.
The thesis other major contribution focuses on the classification aspects of SER. We investigate the drawbacks of the well-known SVM classifier when applied to a preprocessed data by PCA and RP. We shall demonstrate the advantages of using the Linear Discriminant Classifier (LDC) instead especially for PCA de-correlated metafeatures.
We initiated a variety of LDC-based ensembles classification, to test performance of scheme using a new form of bagging different subsets of metafeature subsets extracted by PCA with encouraging results.
The experiments conducted were applied on two benchmark datasets (Emo-Berlin and FAU-Aibo), and an in-house dataset in the Kurdish language. Recognition accuracy achieved by are significantly higher than the state of art results on all datasets. The results, however, revealed a difficult challenge in the form of persisting wide gap in accuracy over different datasets, which cannot be explained entirely by the differences between the natures of the datasets. We conducted various pilot studies that were based on various visualizations of the confusion matrices for the "difficult" databases to build multi-level SER schemes. These studies provide initial evidences to the presence of more than one "emotion" in the same portion of speech.
A possible solution may be through presenting recognition accuracy in a score-based measurement like the spider chart. Such an approach may also reveal the presence of Doddington zoo phenomena in SER.


Abstract OECD unemployment rates show long swings which dominate shorter business cycle components and these long swings show a range of common patterns. Using a panel of 21 OECD countries 1960-2002, we estimate the common factor that drives unemployment by the first principal component. This factor has a natural interpretation as a measure of global expected returns, which is given added plausibility by the fact that it is almost identical to the common factor driving investment shares. We estimate a model of unemployment adjustment, which allows for the influence both of the global factor and of labour market institutions and we examine whether the global factor can act as a proxy for the natural rate in a Phillips Curve. In 15 out of the 21 countries one cannot reject that the same natural rate, as a function of the global factor, appears in both the unemployment and inflation equations. In explaining both unemployment and inflation, the global factor is highly significant, suggesting that models which ignore the global dimension are likely to be deficient.


● Article 6 of the Paris Agreement offers the opportunity to build a global carbon market to assist in accelerating the energy transition and in delivering a net zero emissions outcome at lowest cost to society. Early analysis by the World Bank Group shows that financial savings by countries working collectively through Article 6 can be 30% lower than countries working on their own to meet their respective mitigation targets. This is consistent with prior economic studies, all of which suggest that market cooperation can deliver a significant savings.


What behavior can be expected from state and local governments, given market-analogy theories of intergovernmental competition (competition enhances efficiency) and game-theoretic models (competition is destructive)? How does the real world depart from these paradigms? What empirical hypotheses do they imply concerning the effectiveness of alternative competitive public policies? Paper: Daphne A. Kenyon Discussion: Caroline M. Hoxby, Andrew Reschovsky


Fractional calculus (integral and differential operations of noninteger order) is not often used to model biological systems. Although the basic mathematical ideas were developed long ago by the mathematicians Leibniz (1695), Liouville (1834), Riemann (1892), and others and brought to the attention of the engineering world by Oliver Heaviside in the 1890s, it was not until 1974 that the first book on the topic was published by Oldham and Spanier. Recent monographs and symposia proceedings have highlighted the application of fractional calculus in physics, continuum mechanics, signal processing, and electromagnetics, but with few examples of applications in bioengineering. This is surprising because the methods of fractional calculus, when defined as a Laplace or Fourier convolution product, are suitable for solving many problems in biomedical research. For example, early studies by Cole (1933) and Hodgkin (1946) of the electrical properties of nerve cell membranes and the propagation of electrical signals are well characterized by differential equations of fractional order. The solution involves a generalization of the exponential function to the Mittag-Leffler function, which provides a better fit to the observed cell membrane data. A parallel application of fractional derivatives to viscoelastic materials establishes, in a natural way, hereditary integrals and the power law (Nutting/Scott Blair) stress-strain relationship for modeling biomaterials. In this review, I will introduce the idea of fractional operations by following the original approach of Heaviside, demonstrate the basic operations of fractional calculus on well-behaved functions (step, ramp, pulse, sinusoid) of engineering interest, and give specific examples from electrochemistry, physics, bioengineering, and biophysics. The fractional derivative accurately describes natural phenomena that occur in such common engineering problems as heat transfer, electrode/electrolyte behavior, and sub-threshold nerve propagation. By expanding the range of mathematical operations to include fractional calculus, we can develop new and potentially useful functional relationships for modeling complex biological systems in a direct and rigorous manner. In Part 1 of this review (Crit Rev Biomed Eng 2004; 32(1):1-104), the fundamental properties of fractional calculus were introduced. The reader should refer to that material, particularly the sections on special functions and fractional order differential equations, for background.


Unbounded, unordered, global-scale datasets are increasingly common in day-to-day business (e.g. Web logs, mobile usage statistics, and sensor networks). At the same time, consumers of these datasets have evolved sophisticated requirements, such as event-time ordering and windowing by features of the data themselves, in addition to an insatiable hunger for faster answers. Meanwhile, practicality dictates that one can never fully optimize along all dimensions of correctness, latency, and cost for these types of input. As a result, data processing practitioners are left with the quandary of how to reconcile the tensions between these seemingly competing propositions, often resulting in disparate implementations and systems.We propose that a fundamental shift of approach is necessary to deal with these evolved requirements in modern data processing. We as a field must stop trying to groom unbounded datasets into finite pools of information that eventually become complete, and instead live and breathe under the assumption that we will never know if or when we have seen all of our data, only that new data will arrive, old data may be retracted, and the only way to make this problem tractable is via principled abstractions that allow the practitioner the choice of appropriate tradeoffs along the axes of interest: correctness, latency, and cost.In this paper, we present one such approach, the Dataflow Model, along with a detailed examination of the semantics it enables, an overview of the core principles that guided its design, and a validation of the model itself via the real-world experiences that led to its development.


This article analyses the conflicts between the National Agency for Education and fourteen municipalities in regard the practices for approval of the establishment of independent school in Sweden. Nineteen records from the National Agency for Education were use for text analysis concerning these practices during the period 2002-2003. These records include the pronouncements with regard to these establishments from the municipalities, the National Agnecy for Education, the national courts and the involved independent schools. The analysis of these conflicts exemplifies the redistribution-recognition dilemma present in the concepts of equity, social justice and equivalence. For some actors the opening of independent is an instrument to develop diversity and cultural justice. For others, the growth of indepedent schools can be seen as the gradual disappearance o public shools as a common sphere to all citizens. By closing or reducting common public spaces, there is a risk to have higher segregation and inequality in Sweden. The analysis of the redistribution-recognition dilemma is necessary in order to become aware of how much we are ready to lose of the right to equality in order to obtain an increase of educational diversity.


Composition of Internet-based services exported by different organizations has quickly become a key software paradigm for engineering and scientific communities. Although the scheduling of composite service invocations in such a multi-organization, multi-tiered and geographically dispersed environment may have strong impact on performance, this issue has not been explored very much so far. In this work we study the performance of the composite service and we take the perspective of the organizations involved in its implementation. We focus on the trade-off between the performance of the composite service and the global cost incurred at the participating organizations. We seek techniques for executing a given workload by minimizing such cost, while maintaining the performance delivered to clients to an acceptable level.


The strong Si-O-bond under dry conditions and in absence of impurities needs high activation energy for mobilization. Chemical activation with water based on the reaction: SiO{sub 2(s)} + nH{sub 2}O{sub (g,f)} = SiO{sub 2} {center_dot} nH{sub 2}O{sub (g,f)} lowers the energy barriers remarkably. Under normal conditions the equilibrium is extremely shifted to the left, however at increased temperatures and water-pressures (hydrothermal conditions) the reaction may cause strong chemical transport. The efficiency (rate) of transport depends on the physico-chemical and physical parameters (temperature, pressure, viscosity e.g.) as well as on the mechanism of flow. The phase composition and micro-structure of the silica-deposit formed by the reverse process, strongly depends on the rate of transport and deposition and on temperature of the substrate.


There are numerous studies on shifting Francophone-Anglophone relations during the Quiet Revolution, and migration studies tend to focus on Anglophones who sought opportunity outside Québec (Pettinicchio 2012). However, less attention has been paid to the experiences of Francophones who migrated to English Canada during this period. Undeniably, these people had their own unique political, economic and social motivations for leaving Québec at this time. Their adopted communities brought experiences of cultural assimilation and language loss, which have been previously explored in relation to First Peoples in Canada and the indigenous groups of other countries (e.g. Hallett et al. 2007; Wanhalla 2007).
Using the oral history of a Francophone whose family migrated from Québec to British Columbia during the 1960s, I reveal the roles of motivation, alienation, assimilation and language in his migration experience. I argue that (1) the motivations of these Francophone migrants were complex, involving not only politico-economic reasons but also social and personal ones, (2) their subsequent experiences of alienation and assimilation were intimately connected to language and were sometimes self-enforced to prevent low-level persecution, (3) this partial assimilation resulted in a lack of belonging in both their original and adopted communities. My informant's narrative cannot speak for all interprovincial Francophone migrants, but it does provide insight into the intimate nuances and complexities of the situation that are often overlooked in generalized statistical approaches.


Any symmetric mixed-strategy equilibrium in a Tullock contest with intermediate values of the decisiveness parameter ("$$2<R<\infty $$2<R<∞") has countably infinitely many mass points. All probability weight is concentrated on those mass points, which have the zero bid as their sole point of accumulation. With contestants randomizing over a non-convex set, there is a cost of being "halfhearted," which is absent from both the lottery contest and the all-pay auction. Numerical bid distributions are generally negatively skewed and exhibit, for some parameter values, a higher probability of ex-post overdissipation than the all-pay auction.


Farmers in Tanzania consider rodents to be the major vertebrate pest of maize, especially at planting and seedling stages and annual losses are high. We evaluated the potential of two seed-dressing compounds, thiram and cinnamamide, as rodent repellents to protect maize against damage by multimammate rats, Mastomys natalen- sis. In laboratory tests, the two compounds showed a strong repellent effect against M. natalensis and thus the potential to protect maize seeds. The two compounds were evaluated in maize fields using Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replications. The results show that these repellents are effective for protecting maize seeds against multimammate rats in the field, but in locations with high population of Tatera leucogaster, seedlings are still damaged after emergence. Therefore, in such locations, other control measures, including applica- tion of rodenticides just before seedling emergence may be necessary.


Remote sensing (RS) techniques have evolved into an important instrument to investigate forest function. New methods based on the remote detection of leaf biochemistry and photosynthesis are being developed and applied in pilot studies from airborne and satellite platforms (PRI, solar-induced fluorescence; N and chlorophyll content).
Non-destructive monitoring methods, a direct application of RS studies, are also proving increasingly attractive for the determination of stress conditions or nutrient deficiencies not only in research but also in agronomy, horticulture and urban forestry (proximal RS).
In this work I will focus on some novel techniques recently developed for the estimation of photochemistry and photosynthetic rates based (i) on the proximal measurement of steady-state chlorophyll fluorescence yield, or (ii) the remote sensing of changes in hyperspectral leaf reflectance, associated to xanthophyll de-epoxydation and energy partitioning, which is closely coupled to leaf photochemistry and photosynthesis. I will also present and describe a mathematical model of leaf steady-state fluorescence and photosynthesis recently developed in our group. Two different species were used in the experiments: Arbutus unedo, a schlerophyllous Mediterranean species, and Populus euroamericana, a broad leaf deciduous tree widely used in plantation forestry.
Results show that ambient fluorescence could provide a useful tool for testing photosynthetic processes from a distance. These results confirm also the photosynthetic reflectance index (PRI) as an efficient remote sensing reflectance index estimating short-term changes in photochemical efficiency as well as long-term changes in leaf biochemistry.
The study also demonstrated that RS techniques could provide a fast and reliable method to estimate photosynthetic pigment content and total nitrogen, beside assessing the state of photochemical process in our plants' leaves in the field. This could have important practical applications for the management of plant cultivation systems, for the estimation of the nutrient requirements of our plants for optimal growth.


This paper presents a new open source Python framework for causal discovery from observational data and domain background knowledge, aimed at causal graph and causal mechanism modeling. The 'cdt' package implements the end-to-end approach, recovering the direct dependencies (the skeleton of the causal graph) and the causal relationships between variables. It includes algorithms from the 'Bnlearn' and 'Pcalg' packages, together with algorithms for pairwise causal discovery such as ANM. 'cdt' is available under the MIT License at this https URL.


Punitive school discipline procedures have increasingly taken hold in America's schools. While they are detrimental to the wellbeing and to the academic success of all students, they have proven to disproportionately punish minority students, especially African American youth. Such policies feed into wider social issues that, once more, disproportionately affect minority communities: the school-to-prison pipeline, high school dropout rates, the push-out phenomenon, and the criminalization of schools.
Before such pervasive racial inequality can be addressed effectively, the social and the psychological mechanisms that create racial inequality in the first place must be examined. This Comment offers insights from the field of Critical Race Theory on the root causes for racial inequality in American society more broadly, and in the context of school discipline more specifically. It argues that racial stigmatization, stereotyping, and implicit biases that are based on a long history of racial prejudice in the United States continue to infuse seemingly objective standards of what is considered appropriate behavior, as well as the practices — such as punitive school discipline — that are used to enforce such standards.
Because a comprehensive remedy to these systemic issues cannot be expected to come from efforts in the courts, advocates will have to rely on alternative strategies to soften and to reverse the negative impact that punitive school discipline imposes on students, especially minority students. This Comment proposes disciplinary practices based on the concept of Restorative Justice as a promising alternative to current disciplinary policies. It argues that Restorative Justice–based disciplinary policies are consistent with core principles of Critical Race Theory and are more conducive to creating a nurturing, safe, and inclusive school environment that not only keeps children in school but also helps to undermine the sources of racial conflict and of racial inequality that have plagued this nation for too long.


INTRODUCTION As the landscape of scholarly communication and open access continues to shift, it remains important for academic librarians to continue educating campus stakeholders about these issues, as well as to create faculty advocates on campus. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM Three librarians at Miami University created a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) on Scholarly Communication to accomplish this. The FLC, composed of faculty, graduate students, staff, and librarians, met throughout the academic year to read and discuss topics such as open access, journal economics, predatory publishing, alternative metrics (altmetrics), open data, open peer review, etc. NEXT STEPS The members of the FLC provided positive evaluations about the community and the topics about which they learned, leading the co-facilitators to run the FLC for a second year. The library's Scholarly Communication Committee is creating and implementing a scholarly communication website utilizing the structure and content identified by the 2012-2013 FLC.


Many poverty, safety net, training, and other social programs utilize multiple screening criteria to determine eligibility. We apply recent advances in multidimensional measurement analysis to develop a straightforward method for summarizing changes in groups of eligibility (screening) indicators, which have appropriate properties. We show how this impact can differ across participants with differing numbers of initial deprivations. We also examine impacts on other specially designed multidimensional poverty measures (and their components) that address key participant deficits. We apply our methods to a BRAC ultra-poverty program in Bangladesh, and find that our measures of multidimensional poverty have fallen significantly for participants. This improvement is most associated with better food security and with acquisition of basic assets (though this does not mean that the cause of poverty reduction was program activities focused directly on these deficits). In general, we find that the BRAC program had a greater impact on reducing multidimensional poverty for those with a larger initial number of deprivations. We also showed how evaluation evidence can be used to help improve the selection of eligibility characteristics of potential participants.


Using in-situ small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering, we demonstrate that bundles with smectic ordering are produced by a step shear in a supercooled isotactic polypropylene melt. This occurs well before any formation of crystals. The period of the smectic mesophase is about 3.8 nm and depends neither on the shear rate nor on the temperature. During the subsequent crystallization, crystals grow epitaxially around the smectic filaments that provide nucleation sites. The period of the crystals is an order of magnitude larger than the smectic one. Finally, the smectic filaments also transform into crystals, which is accompanied by a slight increase of the period to 4 nm. A new picture of the shish-kebab structure is presented in which the initial smectic bundles, instead of extended-chain crystals, play the role of the shish, while crystals grow epitaxially around it as kebabs.


Reform is a politically charged issue in the Middle East. Governments admit change is necessary, but do not want to surrender power. Opposition groups want democracy but cannot generate sufficient momentum. The Bush administration's ""freedom agenda"" has brought the issue into focus but blurred the distinction between democracy promotion and forceful regime change. Some governments have taken steps toward political reform. Are these meaningful changes or empty attempts to pacify domestic and international public opinion? How do we distinguish reforms that alter the character of the political system from those that are only window dressing? Beyond the Facade: Political Reform in the Arab World evaluates the changes that are taking place in the region and explores the potential for further reform. The essays provide careful, detailed examinations of ten countries (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen), highlighting the diversity of processes and problems. Beyond the Facade forces us to recognize the reality of conflicting interests and the limitations of external actors to bring about political reform, while drawing lessons on how to make international democracy promotion more effective. Contributors include Nathan Brown (George Washington University), Michele Dunne (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace),Amr Hamzawy (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), Ellen Lust-Okar (Yale University), Sarah Phillips (National Democratic Institute,Yemen), Meredith Riley (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Hugh Roberts (freelance writer and consultant), and Paul Salem (Carnegie Middle East Center).


One of the goals of Meillassoux's philosophy is to secure the claim that the mathematizable properties of a thing can be thought as real properties of that thing. He explicitly says that he has not accomplished this goal yet. What the claim implies is that those properties remain the same whether there is a subject that thinks of them or not. However, such a goal runs into a series of difficulties which, nonetheless, can be resolved. Specifically, it encounters the difficulty that it is possible to mathematize the properties of non-real entities. A more serious difficulty is represented by the fact that the properties of human bodies, such as weight and height, can be mathematized.


Recent empirical studies on outcomes in employment discrimination litigation all reach the same conclusion: plaintiffs have little chance of success. But these studies rely on summary judgment decisions and trial verdicts, gleaned from reported opinions, electronic docket entries, and data collected by the Administrative Office of the Courts, and they acknowledge that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Until now, settlement outcomes, which account for 70% of case resolutions, have been rendered invisible because of confidential settlement agreements. Along with the vanishing trial syndrome, secret settlements have created an information vacuum, skewing the public policy discourse about employment discrimination litigation, and leaving the judiciary, litigants and attorneys without benchmarks by which to negotiate resolutions. This article reports on an anonymously coded database of 1170 cases settled by federal magistrate judges in Chicago over a six year period ending in 2005, and provides the first detailed analysis of settlement outcomes. These data reveal that employment discrimination litigation, which accounts for over 40% of the database, with a mean recovery of $54,651, is neither jeopardizing American business nor resulting in undeserved windfalls for disgruntled employees. Plaintiffs are achieving a reasonable degree of success, measured against their lost wages. The Chicago project should be replicated and refined to provide an even more complete picture of settlement outcomes.


An unintended consequence of the open access movement, predatory publishers have appeared in many countries, offering authors a quick and easy route to publication in exchange for a fee and usually without any apparent peer review or quality control. Using a large database of publications, Marcelo S. Perlin, Takeyoshi Imasato and Denis Borenstein analyse the extent of this problem throughout the entire Brazilian academic system. While predatory publications remain a small proportion of the overall literature, this proportion has grown exponentially in recent years, with both early-career and established scholars found to have authored papers published in predatory venues. The inclusion of predatory publications in national journal quality rankings has been a key factor in this increase.


The implementation of employee ethnic representation has become a widespread practice for organisations operating within multi ethnic societies. However, scholars disagree on its effectiveness in positively influencing employees' perceptions. Also, the process through which ethnic identification positively influences employee perceptions is currently unknown. The purpose of this study is to investigate the process through which ethnic identification influences employee psychological ownership perception. To achieve this aim, the thesis first reviews relevant literature which highlights the gap in literature and support the need for this study. For example, existing studies have not considered the components of psychological ownership and how they are influenced. This study contributes by showing that psychological ownership perception is a formative construct comprised of three distinct components; employee self-efficacy, organisational self-identity and employee voice. A review of literature on the empirical context show the importance of this study within the Nigerian context specifically noting Nigerians displayed high levels of ethnic identification. The problem that persist for organisations was how ethnic identification may be channelled to organisational identification.

A quantitative cross-sectional survey data collection approach was adopted for this study. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse survey responses from 1,525 employees of selected public and private sector organisations in Rivers State, Nigeria.

Findings suggest the following relational framework for linking ethnic diversity and employee psychological ownership perception; that employees who overtly identify with their ethnicity at work will positively attract co-worker social support and this is possible in an organisational climate that promotes interpersonal fairness. Co-worker social support positively mediates the relationship between employee ethnic identification and employee psychological ownership perception.

The practical implication for organisations operating within a multi ethnic environment is human resource practitioners to pay attention to ethnic identification because of its influence on co-worker social support and employee psychological ownership perception.

The originality of this thesis is seen in the relational framework designed to link ethnic diversity to employee psychological ownership perception. This study contributes to existing literature by explaining how employees' ethnic identification influences their perception of psychological ownership. The study provides new insights on the components of employee psychological ownership perception and how they relate to ethnic identity. The investigation of psychological ownership perception at the individual component level is novel and provides new insight into how psychological ownership relates with antecedents that influences it.


Obesity and metabolic syndrome (MetS) are considered chronic inflammatory states. Chemerin, a novel adipokine, may play an important role in linking MetS and inflammation. We investigated the association of chemerin with inflammatory markers and with characteristics of MetS in apparently healthy overweight and obese adults. We studied 92 adults; 59 men and 33 women whose average body mass index (BMI) was 28.15±5.08 kg/m2. Anthropometric parameters, insulin resistance indices, lipid profiles, and inflammatory markers including high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), pentraxin 3 (PTX3), adiponectin, and chemerin were measured. Controlling for age, gender, and BMI, serum chemerin level was positively correlated with body fat and serum triglyceride, and negatively correlated with adiponectin and high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL- C), and was not correlated with altered hsCRP or PTX3 levels. Among the low, moderate and high chemerin groups, high chemerin individuals are more likely to have lower HDL-C. Conversely, individuals in the low adiponectin group are more likely to have lower HDL-C and show more MetS phenotypic traits than moderate and high adiponectin subjects. To determine the relationships of chemerin and adiponectin to MetS and its components, participants were stratified into four groups based on their chemerin and adiponectin levels (high chemerin/high adiponectin, high chemerin/low adiponectin, low chemerin/high adiponectin, or low chemerin/low adiponectin). Participants who were in the high chemerin/low adiponectin group more likely to have dyslipidemia and MetS (OR: 5.79, 95% CI:1.00–33.70) compared to the other three group. Our findings suggest that chemerin and adiponectin may reciprocally participate in the development of MetS.


Colloidal nanocrystals (NCs) are of considerable interest due to their size-dependent optical and electronic properties, which allow their implementation in photovoltaic cells, light-emitting diodes, photo-detectors and more. Along with the development of the synthesis procedures, numerous investigations have explored the optical and electronic properties of different NCs, involving the study of exciton emission. The current work focuses on two types of NCs: CsPbBr3 perovskite and CdSe/CdS with core/alloyed-shell. We investigated for the first time the interplay of Rashba and band-edge excitonic effects in CsPbBr3 single NC, in particular showed an evidence for the Rashba effect in the excitonic magneto-photoluminescence spectra of CsPbBr3 at cryogenic temperature. Using a home-built confocal microscope we recorded the band-edge excitonic transitions, by measuring the linearlyand circularly-polarized photoluminescence (PL) of a single CsPbBr3 NC under an applied magnetic field, up to 8T. The experiments resolved discrete narrow excitonic transitions with an energy splitting that increases nonlinearly with the magnetic field strength. The nonlinearity in the exciton band splitting observed in the experiment is supported by our theoretical calculations, suggesting a crossover between the Rashba effect at low magnetic fields to a Zeeman effect at higher fields. The unusual magneto-optical properties shown in this work underscore the importance of the Rashba effect in the implementation of such perovskite materials in various optical and spin-based devices. In addition, the influence of the low temperature coating and annealing processes on the optical properties of CdSe/CdS NCs with 3 monolayer (ML) and 6ML shells, were investigated by comparative experimental studies of NCs ensemble, using temperature dependent optical spectroscopy. We showed that low temperature coating and annealing led to enhanced PL quantum yield, due to reduction of lattice strain, suppression of the number of defects at the CdSe core surface and formation of alloy at the CdSe/CdS interface.


The question of whether China has reached the Lewis turning point (LTP) has recently been intensively debated in the literature. Partly, this is due to the profound policy implication of the turning point posited by Lewis (1954) and Ranis and Fei (1961), while it is also closely related to the growing concern of ChinaOs growth sustainability. Various empirical approaches and criteria have been applied in the literature and greatly contributed to the diverse findings on the questions of ChinaOs LTP. In this paper, we carefully review the approaches applied in the existing studies and revisit the question by applying the wage-productivity approach which is most closely to the theoretical definition of LTP and the core criterion recommended by Minami (1968). Moreover, we examine the regional heterogeneity of ChinaOs LTP which has long been neglected in the literature but shall have significant policy implications to ChinaOs regional economic development. Our results show that in ChinaOs Eastern provinces, the marginal product of labour has increased rapidly and outpaced agricultural incomes by 2002 for the earliest and 2008 for the latest. In Central China, most provinces included in the sample of our study have passed the LTP by the mid to late 2000s except for Jiangxi province. In contrast, half of the examined provinces in Western China have not yet passed the turning point. The regional heterogeneity of the LTP can be explained by diverse levels of economic development of ChinaOs regions. It also indicates that China should adopt heterogeneous industrial policies across regions.


Since an early article of Professor Brian Simpson's, the opinion of historians and lawyers has been that the penalty doctrine which disallows the enforcement of penal stipulations in voluntary transactions derives from a fusion of law and equity. Specifically, the doctrine derives from 'fusion by convergence': the independent development by separate courts of law and courts of equity of similar rules concerning relief from penalties.
Under Simpson's account, the penalty doctrine has become a model of the fusion of law and equity dating to the life of equity's 'father', Lord Nottingham. On that account, after transacting parties began using them in the fourteenth century, English law condoned the use of penalties in voluntary transactions for upwards of one century. Slowly the Court of Chancery found situations in which it would be inequitable to condone the penalty: at first because of special circumstances, later simply because the penalty was a penalty. The common law soon followed, inverting the maxim aequitas sequitur legem. By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the common law courts routinely relieved against penalties, and by the turn of the nineteenth century had taken over the bulk of such litigation. The penalty doctrine became a common law doctrine solely or nearly so.
Half a century after its publication, Simpson's thesis requires examination. This paper suggests that Simpson's account and the current understanding that flows therefrom are false. On the basis of a fuller examination of printed and unprinted reports and manuscript sources of the Court of King's Bench and Court of Chancery than previously made, this paper redraws the account of the development of the penalty doctrine. The evidence shows that: penalties were routinely enforced in common law courts until the end of the eighteenth century; all "common law" relief in the royal courts depended on statutes under which the judges applied equitable principles borrowed from the Court of Chancery; reliance on statutory power to grant relief at common law continued after 1875 in "Judicature Act courts"; but the repeal of those statutes means that the only source of principle for relief from penalties in England today are principles of equity.
Simpson's suggestion that the penalty doctrine is a product of "fusion" is mistaken: in the modern period, there has been no judge-made common law of relief from penalties with which the equitable doctrine could fuse. As Parliament has directed that those equitable principles shall continue to apply, fusion is a distraction from the application and development of the (equitable) penalty doctrine.


Mutation of Escherichia coli minicell locus (minB) results in aberrant placement of the division septum. In this paper we report the isolation and characterization of the minB locus. Replacement of the chromosomal minB+ allele by cloned minB sequences containing transposon insertions resulted in the minicell phenotype, indicating that minB+ function is required to maintain the normal division pattern. Paradoxically, overexpression of the locus also resulted in the minicell phenotype. The locus codes for several peptides whose expression is coordinately affected by transposon mutations that also eliminate minB+ function. A subset of the minB peptides is sufficient to prevent minicell formation in minB1 mutants or to induce minicell formation when overproduced in wild-type strains, implicating these peptides in the normal process of localization of the division site. The results indicate that minB is a complex locus whose expression must be maintained within certain limits to maintain the normal pattern of localization of the division septum.


In a GNSS software receiver, blocks of digitized intermediate-frequency (IF) data are prepared at the front end and sent to the processing unit for signal acquisition, tracking, demodulation, and position fix. A problem that is observed in practice when the GNSS software module is co-located with a mobile phone device is that the digitized IF data are subject to data intermittency. The intermittency results from the use of mobile phone when the GNSS signals are being received or the execution of higher priority routine in the host computer. An improper buffering scheme at the front end may also lead to such phenomena. Such data intermittency leads to burst-type errors (rather than bit-type errors) on the data to be processed, posing a challenge for the tracking of the GNSS signals. Indeed, if not properly handled, a typical tracking algorithm is not able to accommodate such a large data gap. In the paper, a decision-aided tracking algorithm is developed for a seamless tracking of codes and phases. The effects of data intermittency on code and phase tracking are analyzed. To accounting for the effect without going through the reacquisition process, a detector based on signal power and continuity is then implemented to facilitate decision making. It is shown, through the processing of field gathered data, that the proposed algorithm can indeed be able to continuously track codes and phases in the presence of data intermittency.


Surface water microalgae samples were collected during the ice-free period in a small subarctic wastewater stabilization pond system, complemented with chemical precipitation during the winter period (fellingsdam), and serving 310 persons. In the primary pond microalgae dominance alternated between the Cryptophyte Cryptomonas and green algae (Chlorophyta). In the second and third pond the general pattern was that Cryptomonas dominated during summer but was replaced by green algae in autumn and the following spring. Estimations of the microalgae part of the effluent COD and phosphorus showed that microalgae dominated these parameters for only 3-4 weeks of 12 evaluated. This does not support the reasoning behind the European Union directive of the use of filtered samples for effluent BOD, COD and SS from stabilization ponds, in contrast to other wastewater treatment methods. The reasons behind the EU's procedure for ponds are based on the assumption that stabilization ponds convert "sewage BOD" to "algal BOD". The results of this study suggest that further investigations of the microalgae function in subarctic wastewater stabilization ponds and fellingsdams should be conducted, before implementing the EC directive into Swedish law, or into similar laws in other countries with subarctic regions.


ISO 185/JL/275 is an intermediate-tensile-strength gray cast iron that has a pearlitic matrix and a tensile strength of 275–375 MPa (40–54 ksi), when determined on test pieces machined from separately cast, 30 mm (1.2 in.) diameter test bars. Compared with the lower strength gray cast iron grades, ISO 185/JL/275 contains lower carbon and silicon contents, while still maintaining good thermal conductivity and damping capacity. Owing to its higher tensile strength and hardness, it exhibits superior wear properties. This datasheet provides information on composition, physical properties, elasticity, tensile properties, and bend strength as well as fatigue. It also includes information on casting and heat treating. Filing Code: CI-79. Producer or source: International Organization for Standardization.


The purpose of this paper is to know innovation learning result of Entrepreneurship 4: Innovation Venture Creation through Business Model Canvas. Five learning sequences within entrepreneurship 4, searching opportunity, generated solution ideas, market testing, business model analysis; and implementation and evaluation of students' innovative venture in products or services or/and innovative business model. As an action research, this paper has been created based on case study of 407 students in multidisciplinary. This paper will focus on continuous learning process in order to create an innovative venture. The result of this learning process is 97 real business units that divided into five categories: food and beverage, fashion, IT and graphic design, interior and animal. The final result is 9% of the business units managed to reach break-even point within 6 weeks, while 59% of the total business unit had gained financial profit.


Significance Language is a quintessentially human ability. Research has long probed the functional architecture of language in the mind and brain using diverse neuroimaging, behavioral, and computational modeling approaches. However, adequate neurally-mechanistic accounts of how meaning might be extracted from language are sorely lacking. Here, we report a first step toward addressing this gap by connecting recent artificial neural networks from machine learning to human recordings during language processing. We find that the most powerful models predict neural and behavioral responses across different datasets up to noise levels. Models that perform better at predicting the next word in a sequence also better predict brain measurements—providing computationally explicit evidence that predictive processing fundamentally shapes the language comprehension mechanisms in the brain. The neuroscience of perception has recently been revolutionized with an integrative modeling approach in which computation, brain function, and behavior are linked across many datasets and many computational models. By revealing trends across models, this approach yields novel insights into cognitive and neural mechanisms in the target domain. We here present a systematic study taking this approach to higher-level cognition: human language processing, our species' signature cognitive skill. We find that the most powerful "transformer" models predict nearly 100% of explainable variance in neural responses to sentences and generalize across different datasets and imaging modalities (functional MRI and electrocorticography). Models' neural fits ("brain score") and fits to behavioral responses are both strongly correlated with model accuracy on the next-word prediction task (but not other language tasks). Model architecture appears to substantially contribute to neural fit. These results provide computationally explicit evidence that predictive processing fundamentally shapes the language comprehension mechanisms in the human brain.


The complementarity regime created by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal
Court (ICC) marked a radical departure for international criminal justice. It represented a
significant break with the Westphalian state system of national sovereignty and a step
towards a regime of global governance based on the rule of law. The ICC is rooted in a
Kantian notion of cosmopolitan justice where there is a need for a response to state
failures to eliminate gross human rights violations. However, it has also been seen as a
post-colonial court representing the hegemony of western justice and western authority
over local traditions, particularly in the Islamic world. The operation of the operation of
the complementarity regime does not reflect all types of juridical traditions and is
therefore viewed with suspicion by nations with different criminal justice ideologies and
policies.

This thesis examines the practical and moral legitimacy of the complementarity regime
of the ICC from two possible perspectives, both of which in their different ways support
the idea of universal jurisdiction. Kant's moral philosophy represents the western
justification for the regime, whereas the tradition of Islamic Shari'a epitomises the
potential resistance from the developing world. Through an analysis of the exercise of
prosecutorial discretion under the complementarity regime in relation to the Ituri region
of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Darfur situation in Sudan, the thesis
examines both the logistics of the decision-making in these cases, as well as the moral
justifications for intervention. The fieldwork included a six month programme of
participant observation and interviewing in the Office of the ICC Prosecutor in The
Hague.

The ICC is an independent court with a global jurisdiction which grants the Prosecutor a
broad discretion to apply the complementarity regime to meet the expectations of the
entire international community, regardless of the status, national origin or state
citizenship of the accused. This thesis argues that a careful consideration of the moral
case for the exercise of authority under the complementarity regime is important and
depends upon an understanding of the inherent differences between the Rome Statute and
national justice systems. The research highlights the fact that moral obligations do not
end at national borders. It asserts that a credible complementarity mechanism requires the
effective prosecution of international crimes in a manner which is legitimate in terms of
local culture and traditions. Otherwise, as the research demonstrates, the Court will enjoy
little support, particularly as enforcement has so far focused only on Islamic or less
developed countries.


The adoption of early revascularization as the preferred strategy in all ST-elevation myocardial infarctions (STEMI) and high risk acute coronary syndromes (ACS) without ST elevation resulted in a considerable reduction in the incidence of post-ACS cardiogenic shock (CS) however the incidence of CS on hospital arrival has not changed. In-hospital and 30 day mortality from CS remains excessively high in facilities with coronary revascularization capabilities. Trials investigating the incremental value of either intra-aortic counter-pulsation (IACP) or advanced MCS did not demonstrate a meaningful mortality reduction. Mortality remains 45-60% and depends on clinical characteristics of the patient, timely and successful revascularization and advanced MCS in suitable candidates. Most CS survivors demonstrate satisfactory functional capacity and quality of life. The authors propose the "Guthrie classification" for post-ACS CS. This classification promotes better characterization of CS patients enrolled in clinical trials and registries. It also allows the clinician to better define the goals and benefits of therapy for the CS subjects. The precise pathophysiology of post-ACS CS remains poorly understood at the biochemical and cellular level. Uncovering and modifying these processes remains key to any fundamental change in post-ACS CS outcomes.


Abstract. The study is to understand individual presence and movement in Friuli Venezia Giulia region. It is important for tourism planning, hazard management, business marketing, implementing government lifetime policies and benefit. The aim of this study is achieved by advanced web 2.0 applications. We need real time and geo-located data to monitor the inflow of tourist and to come up with effective promoting and benefiting plans for tourism, the evacuation and mitigation strategies during hazards to protect social life and environment with less infrastructure damage, marketing plans for advertising or selling of products. Despite wide spread success in predicting specific aspects of human behavior by social media information, a little attention is given to twitter and cell phone data. Accessibility to detailed human movements with fine spatial and temporal granularity is challenging due to confidentiality and safety reasons. With rapid development of web 2.0 applications people can post about events, share opinion and emotions online. Using twitter data, how short term travelers, such as tourists, can be recognized and how their travel pattern can be analyzed. Study of finding tourist dynamics such as arriving and outgoing of tourist, sum of trips, sum of days and night spent, number of unique visitors, country of residence, main destination, secondary destination, transits pass through, repeat visits are achieved using CDR (call detail records) and DDR (data detail records).


The HIV drug-resistance interpretation systems are used routinely throughout the world in a clinical setting. More knowledge is rapidly becoming available upon which clinical decisions could be made. This knowledge, information, data and evidence from many sources are combined within a Decision Support System (DSS) to provide coherent judgements on drug-susceptibility. At the core of the DSS is a HIV drug-resistance interpretation system incorporating knowledge from the principal systems (Stanford HIVdb, Rega, ANRS, Virolab) in use throughout the world. We describe an improved rule-based language which has adequate expressiveness and enjoys a fully-specified, formal semantics, allowing for automated reasoning over rule sets. Among the questions which can be addressed are: • Ambiguity: Is the rule set internally ambiguous? Does it allow more than one interpretation? • Completeness: Does the rule set have complete coverage? • Consistency: Are there rules in the set which make contradictory predictions? • Redundancy: Do some rules of a rule set subsume others? • Dissonance: How do rule sets differ in their predictions? • Predictive power: Can one rule set make more specific predictions than another or can it make predictions in cases where the other is silent? The formal language which we present has a well-defined semantics that will allow for making judgements of the above kinds using reasoning that is either completely automated or at least semi-automated. Furthermore recent findings have revealed the need to express multiplicative effects of certain mutations on drugs. The state of the art language for specifying HIV drug interpretation rules, ASI, in its present form, is limited to linear combinations of effects. In future work we will use Bayesian hierarchical modelling to make predictive distributions in the presence of uncertainty. The full chain of analysis will combine Bayesian hierarchical modelling with probabilistic decision analysis based on utility attribution and/or multi-objective optimisation of such quantities as cost, chance and duration of survival or quality-adjusted life years. Acknowledgements. This work was done within the Virolab project using the Virolab Virtual Laboratory experimental environment (see www.virolab.org). For more details see: P.M.A. Sloot, A. Tirado-Ramos, I. Altintas, M.T. Bubak, and C.A. Boucher: From Molecule to Man: Decision Support in Individualized E-Health, IEEE Computer, (Cover feature) vol. 39, nr 11, pp. 40-46. November 2006.


PURPOSE
The authors investigated photopic electroretinographic changes during degeneration in the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) and transgenic P23H rhodopsin rat models, including the cellular origins of a large corneal-negative component that persists in the RCS rat.

METHODS
Photopic and scotopic electroretinograms (ERGs) were recorded from dystrophic RCS (RCS-p(+)/Lav) rats (4-18 weeks old) and transgenic rhodopsin Pro23His line 1 (P23H) rats (4-30 weeks old). Age-matched congenic (RCS-rdy(+)p(+)/Lav) and Sprague-Dawley rats were used as controls. N-methyl-DL-aspartic acid (NMA), dopamine, and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) were injected intravitreally, and optic nerve sectioning (ONS) was performed to suppress or remove inner retinal neuron activity. Retinal morphology for cone cell counts and immunohistochemistry for quantification of Kir4.1 channels were performed at various stages of degeneration.

RESULTS
As degeneration progressed, the photopic ERG of RCS dystrophic rats was distinctly different from that of P23H rats, primarily because of the growth of a corneal-negative response (RCS-NPR) after the b-wave in RCS rats. This response had a peak time similar to the photopic negative response (PhNR) in controls but with a more gradual recovery phase, and it was not affected by ONS. The PhNR in P23H rats declined linearly with the b-wave. NMA and GABA eliminated the RCS-NPR and uncovered a larger b-wave in RCS rats at late stages of degeneration, but NMA had little effect on the ERG in P23H rats. The NMA-sensitive negative response in RCS rats declined with age more slowly than did the NMA-isolated b-wave. The density of Kir4.1 channels at the endfeet of Müller cells and in the proximal retina increased significantly between 6 to 10 weeks and 14 weeks of age in the RCS rat retina but not in the P23H rat retina.

CONCLUSIONS
The photopic ERG of the dystrophic RCS rat retina becomes increasingly electronegative because of an aberrant negative response, originating from amacrine cell activity, which declines more slowly than the b-wave with degeneration. The absence of this response in the P23H rat indicates that the inner retinal cone pathway pathology is different in the two models. A relative increase in Kir4.1 channels on Müller cells of RCS retina may contribute to the enhanced negative ERG response in the RCS rat.


In this paper we introduce and exploit the concept of contextual rules in the field of object detection. These rules are defined as associations between different object likelihood maps and are learned from given examples. The contextual rules can be used to prime regions where a target object category occurs in an image given areas of other object categories. The principal idea is to locate several basic object categories in an image and then use this information to infer object likelihood maps for other object categories. The proposed framework itself is general and not limited to specific object categories. For demonstrating our approach, we use likely occurrences of pedestrians and windows in urban scenes, extracted by a technique employing visual context, and use them to prime for shop logos.


R Coronae Borealis (RCB) stars are hydrogen-deficient, carbon-rich, pulsating, post–asymptotic giant branch stars that experience massive irregular declines in brightness caused by circumstellar dust formation. The mechanism of dust formation around RCB stars is not well understood. It has been proposed that CO molecules play an important role in cooling the circumstellar gas so that dust may form. We report on a survey for CO in a sample of RCB stars. We obtained H- and K-band spectra including the first- and second-overtone CO bands for eight RCB stars, the RCB-like star DY Per, and the final-helium-flash star FG Sge. The first- and second-overtone CO bands were detected in the cooler (Teff < 6000 K) RCB stars, Z Umi, ES Aql, SV Sge, and DY Per. The bands are not present in the warmer (Teff > 6000 K) RCB stars, R CrB, RY Sgr, SU Tau, and XX Cam. In addition, first-overtone bands are seen in FG Sge, a final-helium-flash star that is in an RCB-like phase at present. Effective temperatures of the eight RCB stars range from 4000 to 7250 K. The observed photospheric CO absorption bands were compared to line-blanketed model spectra of RCB stars. As predicted by the models, the CO bands are strongest in the coolest RCB stars and not present in the warmest. No correlation was found between the presence or strength of the CO bands and dust formation activity in the stars.


The sun's role in the earth's recent warming remains controversial even though there is a good deal of evidence to support the thesis that solar variations are a very significant factor in driving climate change both currently and in the past. This precis lays out the background and data needed to understand the basic scientific argument behind the contention that variations in solar output have a significant impact on current changes in climate. It also offers a simple, phenomenological approach for estimating the actual-as opposed to model dependent-magnitude of the sun's influence on climate.


In tomato plants under attack by the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas syringae, the plasma membrane serine/threonine kinase Pto binds the intracellularly injected bacterial effector proteins AvrPto and AvrPtoB, initiating a cell death response that limits spread of the infection. Although Pto substrates have been identified in vitro, the specific pathways mediating this "hypersensitive response" (HR) are unclear (see Eckardt). Wu et al. mutated individual residues in the Pto P +1 loop (which has been implicated in AvrPto binding and in regulating cell signaling), thereby creating Pto mutants that, when expressed in Nicotiana benthamiana, constitutively elicited the HR independently of AvrPto. All of these mutations involved amino acids exposed on the Pto surface, and the authors used a combination of site-directed mutagenesis and structural analysis to define a contiguous patch of surface-exposed residues involved in Pto signaling. Mutation of residues within this patch led to a constitutive HR; moreover, most mutants were unable to bind to AvrPto and AvRPtoB. Although kinase activity of PTO was required for the AvrPto-dependent HR, it was not required for activation of HR by mutants that elicited the HR independently. Thus, the authors propose a new model for Pto activation of the HR in which Avr binding displaces a negative regulator from the patch and stimulates Pto kinase activity. This leads to a conformational change (mimicked in the constitutively active mutants) that is the trigger for activation of the HR pathway. A.-J. Wu, V. M. E. Andriotis, M. C. Durrant, J. P. Rathjen, A patch of surface-exposed residues mediates negative regulation of immune signaling by tomato Pto kinase. Plant Cell 16, 2809-2821 (2004). [Abstract] [Full Text] N. A. Eckardt, Mechanism of Pto-mediated disease resistance: Structural analysis provides a new model. Plant Cell 16, 2543-2545 (2004). [Full Text]


In 1935 R. Zariquiey Cenarro published a paper in the Spanish language, in which he separated the specimens of Nephrops norvegicus occurring in the Mediterranean and the southern Atlantic Ocean as a separate variety meridionalis from the typical form of the northern Atlantic. In this paper he remarks that Boas as well as Bouvier stated that the second maxillipede of Nephrops norvegicus does not bear a podobranch. When Zariquiey, however, examined material from the Catalonian coast he found that in all his specimens a podobranch was present. For comparison with the northern forms he obtained an adult male and ovigerous female from Danish waters. In these specimens indeed the podobranch was absent, the maxillipede bearing only a rounded tubercle provided with hairs. This he thought of sufficient evidence to separate the southern form as a distinct variety. Furthermore he mentioned the following differences between the two forms: the northern specimens are more robust, their body being much broader than in specimens of the same size from the Mediterranean; the sculpture on the dorsal surface of abdomen and carapace is much stronger in the typical form, in which also the pereiopods are much longer. The chelae of specimens of the same size had the same breadth, but were longer in the typical form; the relation between dactylus and propodus was different too in the two forms; the second pincer in the danish specimens was larger and there were also differences in the relation between the breadth and the lenght of the merus. The var. meridionalis was reported from the Golfe du Lion, from the Catalonian coast, from the waters east of Alicante, from Melilla (Spanish Morocco), from San Sebastian and Coruna (both at the north coast of


Research in the neurosciences, especially in systems neuroscience, is still in its infancy in Romania, with relatively few active groups compared to Western countries or even neighboring Hungary. This unfortunate situation is in clear contrast with the strong emphasis that both Europe and US put on brain research, with massive funding being pumped in through the Human Brain Project and the BRAIN Initiative. Nevertheless, this field of science started to gain momentum in the past decade in Romania. Here I discuss the recent developments, with a focus on the Romanian Institute of Science and Technology (RIST), a private, not for profit research institution in Cluj-Napoca. RIST was built on the backbone of the Center for Cognitive and Neural Studies (Coneural), founded more than 12 years ago. Its aim is to contribute to development of Romanian science, and neuroscience in particular, by offering support to several research groups which perform both experimental and theoretical studies and by organizing one of the most visible summer schools worldwide – the Transylvanian Experimental Neuroscience Summer School (TENSS), recently featured in National Geographic and Nature. I argue that, in spite of these individual efforts, neuroscience research can develop on a long term in Romania if and only if funding for science will become significant and predictable, a desiderate that is currently largely ignored by the political establishment.


Study objectives Among the leading causes of adolescent injuries are transport-related factors. School-based curriculum programs are a commonly used method to reduce such injury and these are typically focused on targeting change in known risk and protective factors particularly alcohol use. Another commonly identified risk factor for adolescent risk-taking is adolescents' relationship with, and the influence of, their peers. The program evaluated in this paper however sought to explicate an alternative role of peers as a protective factor. The program, Skills for Preventing Injury in Youth (SPIY) was an eight lesson curriculum integrated program that has previously demonstrated its effectiveness in reducing road-related risktaking behaviours. The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of some of the possible mechanisms of change for SPIY participants and in particular peer intervening behaviour. Methods used & sources of data/ information Qualitative and quantitative methods were employed to understand adolescent perceptions of protecting and to evaluate change in motivation to protect. Focus groups with adolescents were used to provide a greater depth of understanding regarding intervening in friends' roadrelated risk-taking and their motivation to do so. The quantitative component included an evaluation of the effectiveness of SPIY in increasing motivation to intervene. This component of the trial involved 230 intervention and 157 control students completing baseline and sixmonth follow-up surveys. Results & Conclusions There was no significant difference between groups on motivation toward protecting their mates from road-related risk-taking. The qualitative data showed that this was a complex issue with multiple considerations affecting intervening behaviour including confidence regarding protection and the context of the risk situation. In sum, it appears that the program based on encouraging protective intervening to improve adolescent road safety can increase motivation to do so and that the issue of mates looking out for mates is a complicated yet relevant road safety strategy for adolescents.


Stress refers to a series of neuroendocrine reactions, such as sympathetic nerve excitation and pituitary-adrenal cortex secretion increase, which occur when the body is stimulated by various stressors, and the changes of various functions and metabolism caused by these reactions. Chronic fatigue stress is a fatigue state caused by long-term physical and psychological stress. When the stress reaches a certain intensity or the individual is not well-tolerated, the body stability is impaired, resulting in various pathophysiological reactions leading to various diseases, such as stress hyperglycemia, stress cardiomyopathy, stress arrhythmia, stress ulcer hemorrhagic shock, or even stress ulcer hemorrhagic shock. Eventually lead to sudden death and other adverse events.


Globalisation and the development of the international transport network have increased the role of
ports as nodes in the global logistics and supply chain systems. Meanwhile, seaports encounter great
challenges, uncertainties and risks than ever before. The development of different markets has
contributed to intensifying competition in the port industry (Haezendonck & Notteboom, 2002). The
reform of liner shipping service networks as well as the increased bargaining power of the shipping
lines, has contributed to the deterioration of existing ports and to the development of new ones which,
in turn, causes change in market structure and port hierarchy.
Container ports, in particular, have not only encountered competition from the large load centers in the
same port range but also from the medium and small load centers having the same hinterland and, to
some extent, from load centers in other port ranges. The hub-and-spoke system that has emerged in
liner shipping operation patterns has increased pressure on the supply chain network around load
centers. Thus, the concept of containerisation has enlarged the geographical coverage of seaports to
the extent that the concept of a captive market is no longer valid. The aim of this paper is to assess
the competitiveness level of hub-ports and to analyse the impact of inter-port competition on the
Mediterranean container market structure. In doing so, the research is divided into five sections. The
first section comprises a general introduction that includes research aims and the research plan. The
second section reviews the literature related to port competition and the methodologies being used to
assess ports' competitiveness. The third section demonstrates the area of study, research problem
and methodologies used to measure the impact of port competitiveness on the Mediterranean port
market structure. The fourth section assesses the competitiveness of hub-ports in the Mediterranean
container market. The last section introduces a comprehensive conclusion for the research outcomes.


Using questions to elaborate knowledge, is widely used in learning today. In this position paper we argue that there are new benefits to reap from using ICT in a learning process based on the Socratic method, and outline practical steps of an approach for collaborative e-learning using questions.


There has been a long debate in the theoretical and empirical economic circles on how host country's exports respond to inward foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper examines whether FDI stimulates export performance of the recipient countries using the case of China. It contributes to the literature by investigating the relationship of FDI and export performance using disaggregated manufacturing sectors from 1995 to 2005. The empirical results suggest that FDI flows into China have statistically significant and positive effects on its exports and it exhibits differences across sectors.


Equal access to education is among the basic human rights and a component of well being. Yet, the educational gaps between various groups in many countries are staggering. This paper employs an education Gini index to measure inequality in educational attainment. It presents both the direct and indirect methods of calculating the education gini index, and generates a quinquennial dataset on education Gini for population age over fifteen, for 85 countries from 1960 to 1990. Preliminary empirical analysis finds that, first, education inequality for most of the countries has been declining during the three decades, with a few exceptions. Second, education inequality measured by education Gini is negatively associated with the average years of schooling. This implies that countries with a higher education attainment level are most likely to achieve better education equality than those with lower attainment levels. Third, a clear pattern of education Kuznets Curve exists if the standard deviation of education is used. Fourth, gender-gaps are clearly related to the education inequality, and over time, the impact of gender-gaps on inequality has become stronger. Fifth, per capita GDP (PPP) increments are negatively associated with education inequality, and they are positively related to the average years of schooling of the labor force, after controlling for initial income levels. JEL Classification code: C43, D63, I32, J24, O11, O15


Event timing and interventions are important and intertwined cues to causal structure, yet they have typically been studied separately. We bring them together for the first time in an experiment where participants learn causal structure by performing interventions in continuous time. We contrast learning in acyclic and cyclic devices, with reliable and unreliable cause– effect delays. We show that successful learners use interventions to structure and simplify their interactions with the devices and that we can capture judgment patterns with heuristics based on online construction and testing of a single structural hypothesis.


Phthalic acid, di-n-butyl ester known as di-n-butyl phthalate, is an organic chemical compound that belongs to the group of endocrine disruptor compounds that have a documented negative impact on mammalian endocrine systems. Di-n-butyl phthalate is used widely as a plasticizer in the manufacture of artificial materials, which is why it is found in all types of environmental samples including those from water basins. The aim of the study was to describe the impact of di-n-butyl phthalate on the development of the reproductive system of European pikeperch (Sander lucioperca) during the sex differentiation period (age 61–96 days post hatch). A total of 240 fish were divided into 6 groups (40 fish per tank). Treatments consisted of a control group (0 g di-n-butyl phthalate·kg-1 feed) and five trial groups with 0.125, 0.25, 0.5, 1, and 2 g di-nbutyl phthalate·kg -1 feed, respectively. Histological changes of the fish gonads, sex ratio, survival and growth of fish were evaluated. Di-n-butyl phthalate seriously disturbed sex differentiation process of pikeperch. Histopathological analyses revealed that the administration of 2 g di-n-butyl phthalate·kg-1 significantly affected the sex ratio. The feminization process (intersex gonads) at concentrations of 1 g and 2 g di-n-butyl phthalate·kg -1 were observed. All analyzed concentrations delayed testicular development. Phthalate did not have a significant impact on the survival or growth rates of the pikeperch. This is the first report of disruption sex differentiation processes in fish by di-n-butyl phthalate. Xenobiotics, EDCs, phthalates, gonadal development, fish


The conventional wisdom is that legal writing and academic support go hand-in-hand. Most law schools assume that struggling students can be reliably identified for academic support through their first-year legal writing course, and that first-year legal writing instructors can fairly easily and effectively provide this support. Indeed, this is the prevailing view in current academic support and legal writing scholarship. Professor Koller's article challenges the conventional wisdom and instead points out several issues that should be considered if a law school relies on the first-year legal writing course as a component of, or in lieu of, an academic support program. First, Professor Koller argues that identifying students who may need academic support through a first-year legal writing course can give many "false positives" and "false negatives" due to the unique nature of the course. Second, Professor Koller points out that first-year legal writing courses do not provide "built-in" academic support, as is frequently assumed. Because the goals and challenges of the first-year course are so significant, there is often little opportunity for a professor to provide meaningful academic support. Finally, Professor Koller argues that the structure of the typical first-year legal writing course can encourage student dependence on faculty support, something that is counter-productive to a law school's academic support efforts. In light of these issues that are presented in the first-year, Professor Koller argues that the best use of a legal writing course in conjunction with academic support is as a vehicle for more advanced academic support in the upper-level curriculum. Professor Koller supports this argument with an illustration of the academic support model in place at the University of Maryland School of Law.


Research demonstrates that study abroad can have a positive impact on every domain of language competence, and that it is particularly helpful for the development of abilities related to social interaction. However, some results suggest that study abroad intensifies individual differences in achievement: Certain students thrive while others founder. Qualitative studies provide insight into the sources of these differences both in the stances that students adopt toward their host communities and in the ways in which they are received. Overall, the research points to a need for language learners' broader engagement in local communicative practices, for mindfulness of their situation as peripheral participants, and for more nuanced awareness of language itself. This article offers a rationale, based on the current state of the art in research, for including the expertise of language educators in the choice and design of study abroad programs. Students will benefit from programs specifically designed to foster language learning through observation, participation, and reflection.


Phenytoin is a frequently prescribed anticonvulsant/antiseizure drug due to its high efficacy. Erythroderma is an intense and widespread reddening of the skin due to inflammation which may often be associated with peeling of skin termed as exfoliative dermatitis. Erythroderma is a rare but severe Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR) of phenytoin. Here, we report a case of a patient who developed erythrodema during the treatment regimen including phenytoin prescribed for the treatment of alcoholic withdrawal seizures. ADR was confirmed by using the World Health Organization (WHO) and Naranjo's causality assessment scale. The erythroderma condition was managed clinically by withdrawing the causal medication and administration of anti-histamines and corticosteroids with other supportive therapy. This case explains the adverse drug reaction occurring drugs used for cure. Hence there is a strong need for a pharmacovigilance programme and its awareness all over the nation. Key words: Phenytoin, Erythroderma, Anticonvulsant, Adverse drug reaction, Alcohol withdrawl seizure.


We argue that the enumerators' occupational returns from the important census of 1880 were heavily edited prior to publication. The effect was to substantially reduce the number of individuals reported with an occupation. For youthful and older males and all women the editing was so substantial as to qualitatively affect the apparent trend in labor force participation for these groups over time. The stylized facts regarding labor market dynamics during the period of American industrialization and the historical stories constructed around them will now need to be reexamined. We contend that the editing was secretly authorized by Francis Amasa Walker, Superintendent of the Tenth Census of 1880 and one of the most prominent and decorated economists, statisticians, and public servants in America at this time. While other scholars have identified potential sources of bias in census figures, no one has heretofore suggested that the official statistics of the United States were covertly altered to present a picture different from information collected by census enumerators. If we are correct, the sociology of official nineteenth-century American statistics will require rethinking.


Orchid industry has a particular situation within ornamental plants in Malaysia. As, 46% of total floriculture industry was occupied by orchid flowers in 2011. Most cut orchid flowers are ethylene sensitive in the spite of having acceptable longevity and postharvest life. When they are packed for export they show ethylene injury symptoms such as bud and floret abscission and short vase life. 1-MCP can control ethylene production and action and probably reduces the ethylene sensitivity. Another possible reason for the short span life may be microbial blockage in xylem conduits. Aqueous ozone can be a good candidate for improving the water conductivity in cut stems by its microbial growth inhibition effect. 1-mythylcyclopropane (1-MCP) and aqueous ozone were used for controlling ethylene sensitivity and inhibition of xylem blockage in two ethylene-sensitive cut orchids, Dendrobium 'Darren Glory' and Mokara 'Calypso Jumbo'. Three experiments were conducted at Department of Crop science, Faculty of Agriculture, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Serdang, Selangor Darul Ehsan.
In experiment one, inflorescences of 12 cut orchid hybrids consisted of six cut Dendrobium hybrids (Dendrobium 'Darren Glory', D. 'Sonia Red', D. 'Sonia White', D. 'Sonia Bom', D. 'Shavin White' and D. 'Jacqueline Concert' x D. 'Rinappa') and six Mokara hybrids (Mokara 'Calypso Jumbo', M. 'Chao Praya Classic', M. 'Citi Gold', M. ' Boy Blue', M. 'Red' and M. 'Chak Kuan Blue') were determined for their ethylene sensitivity levels. Inflorescences were treated with 0 and 10 μL/L ethylene gas for 24 hours in 79 L chambers. The chambers were aerated and stems of flowers were trimmed and placed in PE bags containing vase solution [dіstіllеd water + 250 mg/L 8-hydroxyquіnolіnе cіtrаtе (8-HQC) + 150 mg/L citric аcіd + 4% sucrose, pH=3.5]. Weight loss, vase life, ethylene production and anthocyanin content and expression of ACC synthase and ACC oxidase genes of florets were determined. Results showed that exposure to ethylene caused reduction of vase life tremendously. This was manifested by epinasty, premature wilting and abscission in florets and buds for all hybrids. Weight loss and anthocyanin degradations increased when flowers were exposed to ethylene. After exposure to ethylene, higher expressions of both ACS and ACO genes were found in fully open florets. However, different hybrids showed distinct responses to ethylene sensitivities and degrees of deterioration. Therefore, they can be categorized into two groups, sensitive and less sensitive. Dendrobium 'Darren Glory', D. 'Jaquelyne Concert' x D. 'Rinappa', Mokara 'Calypso Jumbo', M. 'Chаo Prаyа Clаssіc'(MCPC) and M. 'Red' exhibited the utmost epinasty, weight loss and anthocyanin content degradation in sepals and petals thus, can be considered as sensitive group while the rest were less sensitive.
In the second experiment, the inflorescences of two very sensitive (Dendrobium 'Darren Glory' and Mokara 'Calypso Jumbo') and two less sensitive (D. 'Sonia Bom' and M. 'Citi Gold') hybrids that were determined in experiment first, were studied. Inflorescences were divided into two groups and placed in two 79 L chambers. For fumigation of 0 and 300 nL/L 1-MCP, a small vial containing 37.92 mg Ethylbloc was taped to the one chamber's internal wall. Then, 190 μL/L deionized water was added to the vial. Both chambers were immediately sealed for 4 hours. Then inflorescences of each chamber divided into two subgroups and after labeling the four 39.5 L chambers inflorescences were placed inside them gently. The chambers were hermetically-sealed. Then, two separate 1μL/L ethylene gas, balanced with nitrogen, were injected into the one chamber of each subgroup. After 24 hours the chambers were opened and each inflorescence's basal stem was trimmed to 12 cm from the first open floret. Then, each inflorescence was placed in the bottle with а cylіndrіcаl polyethylene bag containing 60 ml distilled water and kept in the laboratory at means temperature, relative humidity and light intensity of 25 oC, 78% and 6.57 μmol/m2/s, respectively. The results showed that weight loss in all four hybrids after 1-MCP fumigation even with exogenous ethylene treatment remarkably declined except MCG which did not show any variation to the responses of all treatments. Vase life responses of highly sensitive and less sensitive hybrids to the 1-MCP were positive but almost different. Maximum vase life extension was observed in highly sensitive hybrid (MCJ) about 59% with 300 nL/L 1-MCP treatment and minimum extension was occurred in less sensitive hybrid (MCG) around 39%. So it can be suggested that the effectiveness of 1-MCP on the control of ethylene sensitivity in highly sensitive hybrids was more.
In the third experiment, effects of 1-MCP and aqueous ozone on postharvest quality of two very sensitive cut flowers; Dendrobium 'Darren Glory' and Mokara 'Calypso Jumbo' were studied. The inflorescences were treated with 0 and 300 nL/L 1-MCP. After four hours, the chambers were aerated and the stems were trimmed to 12 cm from the basal end of the first open floret. Each inflorescence was put into a bottle containing 250 mL of distilled water (control treatment) and 5.2 mg/L aqueous ozone.Ethylene production, microbial growth, bud opening, 1-aminocyclopropan oxidase activity (ACO) and vase life were measured. Results showed 1-MeCP can control the ethylene production within 5 day after harvest in both studied cut orchids very well and also ethylene production and ACO activity in D. 'Darren Glory' was higher than M. 'Calypso Jumbo'. Aqueous ozone (5.2 mg/L) declined microbial (bacteria, fungi and yeast) growth when it used as the vase solution and every 24 hours replenished and consequently it was effective on decreasing xylem blockage and the micro-graphs from the xylem showed it clearly. In the forth experiment effects of 4 concentrations of 1-MCP and optimum concentration of aqueous ozone on postharvest quality of sensitive cut flower; Mokara 'Calypso Jumbo' were studied.
The inflorescences were fumigated with 0, 100, 200, 300 and 400 nL/L 1-MCP. After four hours fumigation, the stems were trimmed to 12 cm from the basal end of the first open floret. First 30 inflorescences with and without 1- MCP fumigation were cut with scalpel into two parts: one had only buds and another one had only open florets. Stem ends were placed in distilled water and ozonized water and then used for ACC content and ACC oxidase activity measurements. Remaining fifty intact inflorescences were placed into the bottles each one, containing 250 mL of distilled water or 3.9 mg/L aqueous ozone based on the combination treatments. Ozonized water was renewed at every 24 hours, but for the rest treatments, vase water was not changed until end of vase life.
The results showed that fumigation of the cut Mokara 'Calypso Jumbo' flowers with 100 nL/L 1-MCP, followed by using 3.9 mg/L aqueous ozone as the vase water could be recommended as the best postharvest treatments to maintain quality and extend vase life of MCJ orchid hybrids. In addition, these treatments for MCJ were very effective in extending vase live, increasing water uptake and percentage bud opening and also controlling the bacterial growth in vascular system
Therefore, optimum postharvest treatments for the cut orchid flowers depended on hybrids. Pretreatment of the cut orchid flowers with 100-300 nL/L 1-MCP, followed by using 3.9 mg/L aqueous ozone as the vase solution could be recommended as the optimum postharvest treatments to maintain quality and extend vase life of both the DDG and MCJ orchid hybrids. In addition, 1-MCP pretreatment for MCJ was very effective in extending vase lives and increasing percentage bud opening. Additionally, aqueous ozone can effectively decreased number of bacteria in vase water and vascular vessels. Another important finding of this experiment was the cause of short vase life in the two cut orchid hybrids. The main reason for the short vase life was due to ethylene sensitivity of the cut flowers and not due to xylem blockage.


Lycium barbarum, commonly known as wolfberry, has been used as a traditional Chinese medicine for the treatment of infertility and sexual dysfunction. However, there is still a scarcity of experimental evidence to support the pro-sexual effect of wolfberry. The aim of this study is to determine the effect of Lycium barbarum polysaccharides (LBP) on male sexual behavior of rats. Here we report that oral feeding of LBP for 21 days significantly improved the male copulatory performance including increase of copulatory efficiency, increase of ejaculation frequency and shortening of ejaculation latency. Furthermore, sexual inhibition caused by chronic corticosterone was prevented by LBP. Simultaneously, corticosterone suppressed neurogenesis in subventricular zone and hippocampus in adult rats, which could be reversed by LBP. The neurogenic effect of LBP was also shown in vitro. Significant correlation was found between neurogenesis and sexual performance, suggesting that the newborn neurons are associated with reproductive successfulness. Blocking neurogenesis in male rats abolished the pro-sexual effect of LBP. Taken together, these results demonstrate the pro-sexual effect of LBP on normal and sexually-inhibited rats, and LBP may modulate sexual behavior by regulating neurogenesis.


An intense fascination with the experience of time has long been recognised as a distinctive feature of the writing of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863). This collection of essays, however, represents the first sustained critical examination of Thackeray's 'time consciousness' in all its varied manifestations. Encompassing the full chronological span of the author's career and a wide range of literary forms and genres in which he worked, Thackeray in Time repositions Thackeray's temporal and historical self-consciousness in relation to the broader socio-cultural contexts of Victorian modernity. The first part of the collection focusses on some of the characteristic temporal modes of professional authorship and print culture in the mid-nineteenth century, including periodical journalism and the Christmas book market. Secondly, the volume offers fresh approaches to Thackeray's acknowledged status as a major exponent of historical fiction, reconsidering questions of historiography and the representation of place in such novels as Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond. The final part of the collection develops the central Thackerayan theme of memory within four very different but complementary contexts. Thackeray's absorption by memories of childhood in later life leads on to his own subsequent memorialisation by familial descendants and to the potential of digital technology for preserving and enhancing Thackeray's print archive in the future, and finally to the critical legacy perpetuated by generations of literary scholars since his death.


Engineering robust protein production and purification of correctly folded biotherapeutic proteins in cell‐based systems is often challenging due to the requirements for maintaining complex cellular networks for cell viability and the need to develop associated downstream processes that reproducibly yield biopharmaceutical products with high product quality. Here, we present an alternative Escherichia coli‐based open cell‐free synthesis (OCFS) system that is optimized for predictable high‐yield protein synthesis and folding at any scale with straightforward downstream purification processes. We describe how the linear scalability of OCFS allows rapid process optimization of parameters affecting extract activation, gene sequence optimization, and redox folding conditions for disulfide bond formation at microliter scales. Efficient and predictable high‐level protein production can then be achieved using batch processes in standard bioreactors. We show how a fully bioactive protein produced by OCFS from optimized frozen extract can be purified directly using a streamlined purification process that yields a biologically active cytokine, human granulocyte‐macrophage colony‐stimulating factor, produced at titers of 700 mg/L in 10 h. These results represent a milestone for in vitro protein synthesis, with potential for the cGMP production of disulfide‐bonded biotherapeutic proteins. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2011; 108:1570–1578. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


Migrating cells need to integrate promigratory diffusible signals that act through heterotrimeric guanine nucleotide-binding protein (G protein)-coupled receptors (GPCRs) with integrin-mediated cues from the extracellular matrix. Penela et al. found that overexpression of GPCR kinase 2 (GRK2, a serine/threonine kinase implicated in GPCR regulation) in epithelial-derived cell lines promoted migration toward fibronectin. A catalytically inactive mutant had effects similar to those of wild-type GRK2, whereas knockdown of endogenous GRK2 decreased migration toward fibronectin (but not collagen), which was also attenuated in fibroblasts derived from GRK2+/– mouse embryos. Indeed, wound healing in skin was decreased in the GRK2+/– mice. Pharmacological analysis indicated that GRK2-dependent stimulation of migration toward fibronectin depended on a pertussis toxin-sensitive GPCR and on the lipid messenger sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P). Fibronectin promoted internalization of the S1P1 receptor (indicative of its occupancy by S1P) and increased S1P concentration (both in cytosol and in conditioned medium). Moreover, cells overexpressing GRK2 migrated more rapidly in response to exogenous S1P than did control cells, whereas S1P-induced migration was decreased in cells with decreased GRK2 abundance. Increased or decreased GRK2 expression was paralleled by activation of extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK1/2) in response to either S1P or adhesion to fibronectin; further, treatment with pertussis toxin or a sphingosine kinase inhibitor decreased the latter response. The effects of GRK2 on S1P-dependent ERK1/2 signaling and migration were independent of β-arrestin-1 and -2; rather, they involved the dynamic phosphorylation of GRK2 and its association with the scaffolding protein GIT1. The authors thus conclude that GRK2 integrates adhesion- and S1P-based signals to promote epithelial cell migration. P. Penela, C. Ribas, I. Aymerich, N. Eijkelkamp, O. Barreiro, C. J. Heijnen, A. Kavelaars, F. Sánchez-Madrid, F. Mayor Jr., G protein-coupled receptor kinase 2 positively regulates epithelial cell migration. EMBO J. 27, 1206-1218 (2008). [PubMed]


Every day, new surveys are planned, distributed, or reported by health care professionals. Surveys are an inexpensive and convenient research tool used with increasing frequency as an approach to gather and collate information on attitudes and behaviors for a specific topic. However, surveys can squander the valuable time of respondents who may derive little, if any, benefit from participation. Similar to any other research methodology, a careful design is needed to avoid introducing bias and to obtain meaningful information. A recent study evaluating the quality of surveys addressing clinical topics in transfusion medicine (TM) identified common deficiencies in the quality and design, including the failure to report validity and reliability, to address nonresponse error, to report funding and ethics/consent considerations, and to discuss the generalizability of results. Instructions to authors for reporting survey results are lacking in most journals. Inadequate survey design, analysis, and reporting can prevent accurate data collection and compromise the interpretation of the results, which is of critical relevance considering the high citation rates for some of these surveys. Further, survey results might be used to inform policies when no higher level of evidence is available. In this article, the authors seek to provide practical recommendations for designing high‐quality surveys based on personal experience and published literature and to address frequently missing key elements in survey‐based studies related to clinical TM.


Use this guide to research the health care industry from a business perspective. Research careers in the health care sector.


In this chapter, the emergence and use of the forms and functions of the most frequent diminutive suffixes occurring in the longitudinal data of a Greek monolingual child from age 1;8 to 3;0 are studied and compared to childdirected speech, which is rich in diminutives and hypocoristics. Furthermore, the distinction between pragmatic and semantic functions of diminutives as compared to simple nouns is explored, focussing on the innovative use of a nonstandard suffix in this particular mother-child dyad. Since diminutives occur in a high number of singular and plural forms both type- and tokenwise from 1;9 on, the relation between derivational and inflectional morphology in early child Greek is discussed.