The first practical hands-on guide to repairing the damage done by irresponsible forest activity, explaining how to increase the resilience of landscapes and the communities they support. Pools expert knowledge from world authorities in the field, using research backed by respected institutions such as ITTO and the IUCN. It is an addition to the Earthscan Forestry Library, the indispensable resource for practitioners, planners, policy makers and students. This book, authored and collected by leading international authorities in the field of forestry, is the first comprehensive, practical treatment of Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR). As an approach to conservation, FLR provides a complementary framework to sustainable forest management and the ecosystem approach in landscapes in cases where forest loss has caused a decline in the quality of ecosystem services. The main aim of FLR is not to re-establish pristine forest, even if this were possible, rather the objective is to strengthen the resilience of landscapes and thereby keep future management options open. It also aims to support communities as they strive to increase and sustain the benefits they derive from the management of land. The result here is an indispensable, easy-to-read handbook for practitioners in all aspects of forestry and natural resource management.


Federal law requires hospitals to treat patients in need of emergency medical care regardless of whether or not they are lawfully present in the United States. And hospitals are prohibited from discharging those patients unless and until there is an assurance that their continuing medical needs will be met by another facility. Yet the federal government does not provide funding for the care of undocumented migrants after their need for emergency care has passed but their need for ongoing medical treatment lingers. Several hospitals have made the decision to privately repatriate, at the hospitals' expense, undocumented patients needing long-term medical care. That is, the hospitals have hired transport to return these medically needy individuals to the care and custody of their native countries. Yet there is no legal authority for hospitals to enforce federal immigration law in this way. To the contrary, repatriation is subject to challenge on due process, equal protection, and preemption grounds. It may also be the basis for civil tort actions, statutory claims, and criminal charges. There is no question that hospitals face significant problems in treating undocumented migrants with long-term medical needs. The answer, however, cannot be private action that amounts to institutionalized vigilantism. There must be a public solution. I propose a new administrative process whereby hospitals can call upon the Department of Homeland Security to initiate the expedited removal and transfer of medically needy undocumented migrants.


Silicate garnet is a key rock-forming mineral, and various synthetic nonsilicate garnets find important use in a number of technological areas. Garnet's crystal structure provides the basis upon which many microscopic–macroscopic property relationships may be understood. Most rock-forming garnets are substitutional solid solutions and, thus, mineral scientists are focusing their efforts on investigating local structural properties, lattice strain, and thermodynamic mixing properties. Nonsilicate compositions are used, or have potential use, in various scientific and industrial areas because of their magnetic, optical, lasing, and ion-conducting properties. Research on garnet is multidisciplinary and involves scientists in the materials and mineral sciences, physical and inorganic chemistry, and solid-state physics.


The lifetime of Mei-Yu fronts over southern China ranges from 3 to 22 days (Chen, 1983), with a nearly continuous cloud band accompanying the front. It is the goal of this study to estimate the cloud and radiative effects on the Mei-Yu front during the TAMEX IOP-2 periods.
The present radiative transfer model is based on a broadband method and involves the transfer of IR and solar radiation for both clear and cloudy regions. To perform radiative transfer calculations and to compare this with observed cloudiness, a diagnostic cloud scheme is adopted in this paper. This cloud scheme is similiar to Geleyn's (1981) approach. After we obtained the model-predicted cloud covers, we then divided into low, middle and high clouds, which overlapped each other to a maximum or minimum degree.
Predicted cloudiness during the TAMEX IOP-2 periods, with the use of ECMWF/WMO analysis data sets, has shown a reasonable degree of success. The nearly continuous cloud band over the Mei-Yu front is well simulated. This cloud band is dominated by middle-level cloud with several high-level deep cumulus clouds embedded in it. However, the cloud ness in general is underestimated by the model, especially for high-level cloud.
Observing the model-predicted cloud cover and OLR fields, we find that the OLR patterns are basically related to the predicted cloud cover. In the Mei-Yu frontal zone the computed OLR value is less than 220 Wm^(-2)and it also has several minimum centers within it. Comparing the predicted OLR patterns with the satellite derived OLR data, we find that simulated patterns are in agreement with the observations. Nevertheless, the OLR fluxes over the Mei-Yu frontal zone and the tropical convection areas, are slightly larger than the observations.
The distributions of the computed radiative heating and cooling rate have very different vertical profiles. For the net radiative heating rates, it is seen that maximum heating for the three computed periods is less than 3.5℃/day and is all located below the high-level cloud base. Neverthless, the biggest net cooling along the Mei-Yu front is much greater than the heating (>6℃/day) rate and is all concentrated in the upper troposphere. It is also noted that cooling over the Taiwan area is greater than 6℃/day for both the 1200 UTC 16 and 0000 UTC 17 periods.


Although the private rented sector in Northern Ireland is relatively small when compared to the other tenures, it performs a number of important functions in addressing housing needs. The PRS is not homogeneous and is made up of a number of sub-markets. Rugg, Rhodes and Jones, (2002) have summarised a number of demand groups for private renting, including "life-stage" users, young people renting a property before entering owner occupation, short-term emergency users, such as households experiencing relationship breakdown, older renters that have been in living in privately rented housing for some time and "residual users", namely households on low incomes. This paper examines data from the Northern Ireland House Condition Survey, the Continuous Household Survey and interviews tenants and estate/letting agents. The paper presents evidence indicating that those living in the PRS are increasingly "residual users" i.e., those that have traditionally been housed in the social sector and outlines the reasons for this phenomenon.


A panel of 11 murine monoclonal antibodies directed against dengue type 2 was evaluated for antigen specificity by dot immunobinding assay and Western blot analysis and for in vitro and in vivo biological activities. Nine of the 11 monoclonal antibodies reacted with viral E-glycoprotein based on the Western blot analysis; one reacted with a 36 Kd protein present in dengue-infected C6/36 mosquito cells. The nine E-glycoprotein-reactive monoclonal antibodies also neutralized dengue 2 virus in a plaque reduction assay. Of the neutralizing monoclonal antibodies, five passively protected mice in vivo against lethal intracerebral dengue 2 challenge. The protective monoclonal antibodies were directed against viral determinants that fell into at least three spatially separate families of epitopes on E-glycoprotein, the antigenicities of which were preserved after heat/detergent denaturation.


ABSTRACT This article considers support programmes for direct entrant (DE) student transitions as a widening participation strategy. We reflect upon one induction and support project with 27 students transitioning from further education into the second year of undergraduate social science degree programmes in a Scottish university. We use focus group data to discuss what works (barriers to successful transitions, project successes and limitations) and primarily who works; how responsibility for supporting DE student transitions is distributed and which students benefit. Original findings confirm existing evidence that becoming an 'independent learner' is a challenge for DE students. However, analysis problematizes and significantly expands existing understandings of relationships with staff and peer support, and contributes new insight into how the materiality and everyday logistics of the university relate to DE student transitions. We argue for more institutionally embedded approaches to supporting student transitions, including resourcing academic staff to develop and provide this support.


This thesis focuses on advancing the state-of-the-art 3D object detection and localization in autonomous driving. An autonomous vehicle requires operating within a very unpredictable and dynamic environment. Hence a robust perception system is essential. This work proposes a novel architecture, AVOD, an Aggregate View Object Detection architecture for autonomous driving capable of generating accurate 3D bounding boxes on road scenes. AVOD uses LIDAR point clouds and RGB images to generate features that are shared by two subnetworks: a region proposal network (RPN) and a second stage detector network. The proposed RPN uses a novel architecture capable of performing multimodal feature fusion on high resolution feature maps to generate reliable 3D object proposals for multiple object classes in road scenes. Using these proposals, the second stage detection network performs accurate oriented 3D bounding box regression and category classification to predict the extents, orientation, and classification of objects in 3D space. AVOD is differentiated from the state-of-the-art by using a high resolution feature extractor coupled with a multimodal fusion RPN architecture, and is therefore able to produce accurate region proposals for small classes in road scenes. AVOD also employs explicit orientation vector regression to resolve the ambiguous orientation estimate inferred from a bounding box. Experiments on the challenging KITTI dataset show the superiority of AVOD over the state-of-the-art detectors on the 3D localization, orientation estimation, and category classification tasks. Finally, AVOD is shown to run in real time and with a low memory overhead. The robustness of AVOD is also visually demonstrated when deployed on our autonomous vehicle operating under low lighting conditions such as night time as well as in snowy scenes. Furthermore, AVOD-SSD is proposed as a 3D Single Stage Detector. This work demonstrates how a single stage detector can achieve similar accuracy as that of a two-stage detector. An analysis of speed and accuracy trade-offs between AVOD and AVOD-SSD are presented.


This short report aims to give some insight into current publication patterns for high-quality qualitative health research, using the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 database. We explored patterns of publication by range and type of journal, by date and by methodological focus. We also looked at variations between the publications submitted to different Units of Assessment, focussing particularly on the one most closely aligned with our own research area of primary care. Our brief analysis demonstrates that general medical/health journals with high impact factors are the dominant routes of publication, but there is variation according to the methodological approach adopted by articles. The number of qualitative health articles submitted to REF 2014 overall was small, and even more so for articles based on mixed methods research, qualitative methodology or reviews/syntheses that included qualitative articles.


Objectives To analyse the association between serum α-foetoprotein (AFP) levels and sustained virological response (SVR) in treated patients. Methods One-hundred patients with chronic hepatitis C were treated with pegylated interferon α-2a plus ribavirin for 48 weeks. The primary endpoint was SVR. Linear regression analysis was performed to identify clinical, biological, and histological factors affecting baseline AFP levels. The association between pretreatment serum AFP and SVR was assessed by multivariate logistic regression analysis. Results Of 100 patients, 95 were infected with genotype 4, one with genotype 1, and four with undetermined genotype. The median serum AFP level was 4.5 ng/ml and AFP values ranged from 1.2 to 49.8 ng/ml. In multivariate analysis, higher fibrosis stage and higher steatosis score were independently associated with higher serum AFP levels. SVR rate was 61.0% (61/100), and was lower for patients with AFP levels above rather than below the median value (40.8% versus 80.4%, respectively, P<0.001). In multivariate analysis, including adjustment for age, gender, body mass index, steatosis score, fibrosis stage, ALT level, haemoglobin level, clotting time, HCV RNA viral load, and treatment dose received, a baseline serum AFP level above the median value was associated with a lower SVR rate (OR [95% CI]=0.10 [0.03–0.42], P<0.001). None of the seven patients with increased (above 15 ng/ml) pretreatment AFP achieved SVR. Conclusions In this study, higher baseline serum AFP levels independently predicted a lower SVR rate among patients with chronic hepatitis C. If confirmed with genotypes other than 4, these findings would suggest adding serum AFP to the list of factors predictive of treatment response.


The move towards a de-carbonized world, driven partly by climate science and partly by the business opportunities it offers, will need the promotion of environmentally friendly alternatives, if an acceptable Stabilization level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be achieved. This requires the harnessing and use of natural resources that produce no air pollution or greenhouse gases and provides comfortable coexistence of human, livestock, and plants. This article presents a comprehensive review of energy sources, and the development of sustainable technologies to explore these energy sources. It also includes potential renewable energy technologies, efficient energy systems, energy savings techniques and other mitigation measures necessary to reduce climate changes.
There is strong scientific evidence that the average temperature of the earth's surface is rising. This is a result of the increased concentration of carbon dioxide and other GHGs in the atmosphere as released by burning fossil fuels. This global warming will eventually lead to substantial changes in the world's climate, which will, in turn, have a major impact on human life and the built environment. Therefore, effort has to be made to reduce fossil energy use and to promote green energy, particularly in the building sector. Energy use reductions can be achieved by minimising the energy demand, rational energy use, recovering heat and the use of more green energy. This study was a step towards achieving this goal.
Globally, buildings are responsible for approximately 40% of the total world annual energy consumption. Most of this energy is for the provision of lighting, heating, cooling, and air conditioning. Increasing awareness of the environmental impact of CO2, NOx and CFCs emissions triggered a renewed interest in environmentally friendly cooling, and heating technologies. Under the 1997 Montreal Protocol, governments agreed to phase out chemicals used as refrigerants that have the potential to destroy stratospheric ozone. It was therefore considered desirable to reduce energy consumption and decrease the rate of depletion of world energy reserves and pollution of the environment. This article discusses a comprehensive review of energy sources, environment and sustainable development. This includes all the renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency systems, energy conservation scenarios, energy savings and other mitigation measures necessary to reduce climate change.


The bioarchaeological record has an abundance of scientific evidence based on skeletal indicators of trauma to argue for a long history of internal and external group conflict. However, the findings also suggest variability, nuance, and unevenness in the type, use, and meaning of violence across time and space and therefore defy generalizations or easy quantification. Documenting violence-related behaviors provides an overview of the often unique and sometimes patterned cultural use of violence. Violence (lethal and nonlethal) is often associated with social spheres of influence and power connected to daily life such as subsistence intensification, specialization, competition for scarce resources, climate, population density, territorial protection and presence of immigrants, to name just a few. By using fine-grained biocultural analyses that interrogate trauma data in particular places at particular times in reconstructed archaeological contexts, a more comprehensive view into the histories and experiences of violence emerges. Moreover, identifying culturally specific patterns related to age, sex, and social status provide an increasingly complex picture of early small-scale groups. Some forms of ritual violence also have restorative and regenerative aspects that strengthen community identity. Bioarchaeological data can shed light on the ways that violence becomes part of a given cultural landscape. Viewed in a biocultural context, evidence of osteological trauma provides rich insights into social relationships and the many ways that violence is embedded within those relationships.


Karyotypic and cytogenetic characteristics of catfish Mystus ngasep, a new species of bagrid catfish described from the Northeast India, Manipur was studied for the first time by examining 200 metaphase spreads chromosome from the kidney cells of 25 healthy specimens. The diploid chromosome number of this species was 2n=56 and the total fundamental arm number was determined as NF=90. The karyotype consisted of 12 Metacentric (m), 22 Submetacentric (Sm), 8 Subtelocentric (St) and 14 Telocentric (t) chromosomes. The chromosome formula can be represented as 2n= 12m + 22Sm + 8St + 14t. No heteromorphic sex chromosomes were cytologically detected. Chromosome number, formula and karyotype of Mystus ngasep differentiate it from other closely related species. The largest chromosome in this species is a pair of metacentric chromosomes and the present study is the first report on the karyology of this particular species which will pave the way for the future studies on this line of karyology for this genus. Thus, this study is of importance in the analysis of karyotypic evolutionary trends, classification and taxonomy of the genus Mystus and better understanding of the karyotype diversity and chromosome evolution processes.


Crunch Big Data to optimize marketing and more! Overwhelmed by all the Big Data now available to you? Not sure what questions to ask or how to ask them? Using Microsoft Excel and proven decision analytics techniques, you can distill all that data into manageable setsand use them to optimize a wide variety of business and investment decisions. In Decision Analytics: Microsoft Excel, best selling statistics expert and consultant Conrad Carlberg will show you howhands-on and step-by-step. Carlberg guides you through using decision analytics to segment customers (or anything else) into sensible and actionable groups and clusters. Next, youll learn practical ways to optimize a wide spectrum of decisions in business and beyondfrom pricing to cross-selling, hiring to investmentseven facial recognition software uses the techniques discussed in this book! Through realistic examples, Carlberg helps you understand the techniques and assumptions that underlie decision analytics and use simple Excel charts to intuitively grasp the results. With this foundation in place, you can perform your own analyses in Excel and work with results produced by advanced stats packages such as SAS and SPSS. This book comes with an extensive collection of downloadable Excel workbooks you can easily adapt to your own unique requirements, plus VBA code to streamline several of its most complex techniques. Classify data according to existing categories or naturally occurring clusters of predictor variables Cut massive numbers of variables and records down to size, so you can get the answers you really need Utilize cluster analysis to find patterns of similarity for market research and many other applications Learn how multiple discriminant analysis helps you classify cases Use MANOVA to decide whether groups differ on multivariate centroids Use principal components to explore data, find patterns, and identify latent factors Register your book for access to all sample workbooks, updates, and corrections as they become available at quepublishing.com/title/9780789751683.


Background and Purpose Few of the epidemiologic studies of epilepsy have utilized well-validated nationwide databases. We estimated the nationwide prevalence of treated epilepsy based on a comprehensive medical payment database along with diagnostic validation. Methods We collected data on patients prescribed of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment service, which covers the entire population of Korea. To assess the diagnostic validity, a medical records survey was conducted involving 6,774 patients prescribed AEDs from 43 institutions based on regional clusters and referral levels across the country. The prevalence of treated epilepsy was estimated by projecting the diagnostic validity on the number of patients prescribed AEDs. Results The mean positive predictive value (PPV) for epilepsy was 0.810 for those prescribed AEDs with diagnostic codes that indicate epilepsy or seizure (Diagnosis-E), while it was 0.066 for those without Diagnosis-E. The PPV tended to decrease with age in both groups, with lower values seen in females. The prevalence was 3.84 per 1,000, and it was higher among males, children, and the elderly. Conclusions The prevalence of epilepsy in Korea was comparable to that in other East Asian countries. The diagnostic validity of administrative health data varies depending on the method of case ascertainment, age, and sex. The prescriptions of AEDs even without relevant diagnostic codes should be considered as a tracer for epilepsy.


Geometric design procedures for the cycloidal drive with ceramic ball meshing elements were introduced. Using the theory of conjugate surfaces, the equations of meshing of the cycloid drive and the cycloid raceway profiles were derived. Design examples were presented to demonstrate the design procedure and feasibility. The ceramic balls were used as the meshing elements. Prototype of this research was made and tested with satisfying results. The results of this work are suitable for computeraided design and manufacture of industrial applications.


This paper investigates the finance-growth nexus where bank credit is decomposed into investment, consumption, and working capital credit. From a panel dataset of provinces in Indonesia, it documents that higher financial development measured by financial deepening and financial intermediation exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship with economic growth. This non-linear effect of financial deepening is driven by both investment credit and consumption credit. These results suggest that too much investment credit and, to a lesser extent, consumption credit are detrimental to economic growth. Ultimately, only financial intermediation associated with working capital credit has a positive and monotonic impact on economic growth.


A study to assess the effects of microhabitats on pathogens of Musca domestica and also assess Musca domestica health related diseases was carried out in Maiduguri, Borno state, Nigeria. A total of 400 hundred houseflies were randomly sampled by using sweep net from four sites namely: refuse dumps, toilets, tomato/vegetable shops and soft drink shops in two localities, Shuwari III and Maduganari wards. The external and internal parasites were isolated and recorded. Chi-square and percentage prevalence of external and internal parasites were calculated and recorded. There was no significant difference in the prevalence of external parasites sampled from the different sampling sites as 2 ( ) 2 15 14.68 df x cal < x tab (24.99) at 5% level of significance. The hind gut showed the highest parasites percentage prevalence of 48.45% while the fore gut recorded the least prevalence of 23.71%. Chi-square analysis showed no significant difference as 2 ( ) 2 10 13.75 df x cal < x tab (18.31) at 5% level of significance. Assessment of housefly related diseases in the two communities revealed that diseases of public health significance like diarrhoea/abdominal cases, dysentery/abdominal pains and Eye sore/infection were prevalent in the health facilities with the month of August recording the highest disease cases and chi-square analysis showed no significant difference in the prevalence of housefly related diseases between the two communities. 2 ( ) 2 5 0.99 df x cal < x tab (11.07) at 5% level of significance. The harbouring of more parasites by the hindgut than any other part of the gut is an indication that contamination of foods could be through faecal means than by regurgitation. Furthermore, with the collections of a lot flies around human vicinity and the implications of the contamination of such flies with parasites, adequate control measures must therefore be taken to control their numbers and to avoid transmission of houseflies related diseases to humans.


The implementation of lean manufacturing concepts has shown significant impacts on various industries. Numerous tools and techniques have been developed to tackle specific problems in order to eliminate wastes and carry out lean concepts. With the focus on "how to make a system leaner," little effort has been made on determining "how lean the system is." Lean assessment surveys evaluate the current status of a system qualitatively against predefined lean indicators. Lean metrics are developed to quantify performance of improvement initiatives, but each metric only focuses on one specific area. Value Stream Maps demonstrate the current and future states graphically with the emphasis on time-based performance only. A truly quantitative and synthesized measure for overall leanness has not been established. In some circumstances, being lean may not be the only goal for manufacturers. In order to compete in the rapidly changing marketplace, manufacturing systems should also be agile to respond quickly to uncertain demands. Nevertheless, being extremely agile may increase the cost of regular operations and reduce the leanness of the system. Similarly, being extremely lean may reduce flexibility and lower the agility level. Therefore, a manufacturing system should be agile enough to handle the uncertainty of demands and meanwhile be lean enough to deliver goods with competitive prices and lead time. In order to achieve the appropriate leanness level, a leanness measure is needed to address not only "how lean the system is" but also "how lean it should be." In this research, a methodology is proposed to quantitatively measure leanness level of manufacturing systems using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique. The production process of each work piece is defined as a Decision Making Unit (DMU) that transforms inputs of Cost and Time into output Value. Using a Slacks-Based Measure (SBM) model, the DEA-Leanness Measure is developed to quantify the leanness level of each DMU by comparing the DMU against the frontier of leanness. A Cost-Time-Value analysis is developed to create virtual DMUs to push the frontier towards ideal leanness so that an effective benchmark can be established. The DEA-Leanness Measure provides a unit-invariant leanness score valued between 0 and 1, which is an indication of "how lean the system is" and also "how much leaner the system can be." With the help of CostTime Profiling technique, directions of potential improvement can be identified by comparing the profiles of DMUs with different leanness scores. The leanness measure can also be weighted between Cost, Time and Value variables. The weighted DEALeanness Measure provides a way to evaluate the impacts of improvement initiatives with an emphasis on the company's strategic focus. Performing the DEA-Leanness measurement requires detailed cost and time data. A Web-Based Kanban is developed to facilitate automated data collection and real-time performance analysis. In some circumstances where detailed data is not readily available but a Value Stream Maps (VSM) has been constructed, the applications of DEALeanness Measure based on existing VSM are explored. Besides pursuing leanness, satisfying a customer's demand pattern requires certain level of agility. Based on the DEA-Leanness Measure, appropriate leanness targets can be identified for manufacturing systems considering sufficient agility level. The Online-Delay and Offline-Delay Targets are determined to represent the minimum acceptable delays considering inevitable waste within and beyond a manufacturing system. Combining the two targets, a Lean-Agile Performance Index can then be derived to evaluate if the system has achieved an appropriate level of leanness with sufficient agility for meeting the customers' demand. Hypothetical cases mimicking real manufacturing systems are developed to verify the proposed methodologies. An Excel-based DEA-Leanness Solver and a Web-Kanban System have been developed to solve the mathematical models and to substantiate potential applications of the leanness measure in real world. Finally, future research directions are suggested to further enhance the results of this research.


Preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) requires the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) to create several embryos, followed by biopsy of embryonic cells for genetic testing and transfer of selected embryos to the womb to establish a pregnancy. PGT-M refers to testing for nuclear DNA mutations causing monogenic disorders, with an autosomal dominant, autosomal recessive or X-linked transmission pattern, but also mitochondrial DNA mutations. It also refers to exclusion testing and to HLA typing with or without concurrent testing for a monogenic disorder. HLA typing of ART-created embryos was first reported in 2001. The aim is to establish a pregnancy that is HLA-compatible with an affected sibling who requires haematopoietic stem cell transplantation. HLA-typing can be performed with or without PGD for the exclusion of a single-gene disorder. The principle of the methods is based on haplotyping (i.e. determination of the group of alleles within a genetic segment on a single chromosome being inherited together). Therefore, genetic markers located close to the gene of interest are genotyped in DNA samples of the couple and relevant family members with known genetic status during preclinical work-up. Genetic markers that are informative, flank the locus of interest and allow discrimination of the parental haplotypes, are selected for use in the clinical test. The HLA typing was performed by using short tandem repeats (STRs) as microsatellite markers present in the HLA locus (Fig.). We analyzedtrophectoderm biopsy from 728 embryos and a total of 123 embryos (16.89%) were HLA compatible. PGT-M was tested for 8 different monogenic disorders in 82% (597/728) of all embryos, such as thalassaemia and sickle cell anaemia. For the remining 18% of embryos , the indication for HLA -matching was for healthy embryos could matched with the affected child so that cord blood from the future newborn can be used to transplant the sibling for other medical reasons.


We study parametric inference on a rich class of hazard regression models in the presence of right-censoring. Previous literature has reported some inferential challenges, such as multimodal or flat likelihood surfaces, in this class of models for some particular data sets. We formalize the study of these inferential problems by linking them to the concepts of near-redundancy and practical nonidentifiability of parameters. We show that the maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters in this class of models are consistent and asymptotically normal. Thus, the inferential problems in this class of models are related to the finite-sample scenario, where it is difficult to distinguish between the fitted model and a nested nonidentifiable (i.e., parameter-redundant) model. We propose a method for detecting near-redundancy, based on distances between probability distributions. We also employ methods used in other areas for detecting practical nonidentifiability and near-redundancy, including the inspection of the profile likelihood function and the Hessian method. For cases where inferential problems are detected, we discuss alternatives such as using model selection tools to identify simpler models that do not exhibit these inferential problems, increasing the sample size, or extending the follow-up time. We illustrate the performance of the proposed methods through a simulation study. Our simulation study reveals a link between the presence of near-redundancy and practical nonidentifiability. Two illustrative applications using real data, with and without inferential problems, are presented.


The dual income tax provides the self-employed entrepreneur with huge incentives to participate in tax minimizing income shifting to have more of his income taxed as capital income. The Norwegian split model is designed to remove these incentives, but it contains loopholes. The present paper concludes that the split model induces the self-employed entrepreneur to over-invest in firm real capital. In addition, the corporate organizational form serves as a tax shelter for high income entrepreneurs. The higher his income and the higher the difference between the marginal tax rates on labor and capital, the larger the incentives to incorporate.


The term "domestic violence" emerged in the United States with the rise of the women's movement in the 1970s. Before that, violence between partners was considered a private matter. A specific type of domestic violence, intimate partner violence, refers to violence between intimate partners. Public awareness campaigns help us identify one type of intimate partner violence in which one partner, typically the male partner, is the aggressor, and the other partner, typically the female, is the victim.


The assumption was tested that familiarity memory as indexed by a mid-frontal ERP old–new effect is modulated by retrieval orientation. A randomly cued category-based versus exemplar-specific recognition memory test, requiring flexible adjustment of retrieval orientation, was conducted. Results show that the mid-frontal ERP old–new effect is sensitive to the manipulation of study-test congruency—that is, whether the same object is repeated identically or a different category exemplar is presented at test. Importantly, the effect pattern depends on subjects' retrieval orientation. With a specific orientation, only same items elicited an early old–new effect (same > different = new), whereas in the general condition, the old–new effect was graded (same > different > new). This supports the view that both perceptual and conceptual processes can contribute to familiarity memory and demonstrates that the rather automatic process of familiarity is not only data driven but influenced by top–down retrieval orientation, which subjects are able to adjust on a flexible basis.


Last-mile transportation (LMT) refers to any service that moves passengers from a hub of mass transportation (MT), such as air, boat, bus, or train, to destinations, such as a home or an office. In this paper, we introduce the problem of scheduling passengers jointly on MT and LMT services, with passengers sharing a car, van, or autonomous pod of limited capacity for LMT. Passenger itineraries are determined so as to minimize total transit time for all passengers, with each passenger arriving at the destination within a specified time window. The transit time includes the time spent traveling through both services and, possibly, waiting time for transferring between the services. We provide an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation for this problem. Since the ILMTP, is NP-hard and problem instances of practical size are often difficult to solve, we study a restricted version where MT trips are uniform, all passengers have time windows of a common size, and LMT vehicles visit one destination per trip. We prove that there is an optimal solution that sorts and groups passengers by their deadlines and, based on this result, we propose a constructive grouping heuristic and local search operators to generate high-quality solutions. The resulting groups are optimally scheduled in a few seconds using another ILP formulation. Numerical results indicate that the solutions obtained by this heuristic are often close to optimal %, even when multiple destinations are allowed per group, and that warm-starting the ILP solver with such solutions decreases the overall computational times significantly.


A considerable amount of waste is generated in the food supply chains of both developing and developed countries. In an increasingly resource constrained world, it is imperative to reduce the high environmental, social and economic impacts associated with this type of waste. This necessitates the development and implementation of improved, targeted management practices. This paper discusses the various definitions and categorizations of food waste according to different international organizations, reviews the most up-to-date data on waste generated in the food supply chains as well as its environmental impact and assess the applicability of current waste management options. This analysis provides the basis for the development of a framework for increasing the effectiveness of food waste management practices through structured assessment and better informed selection of waste management methodologies for each food waste category. The usability of this novel framework is discussed. 


We describe a "cheat" attack, allowing an ordinary process to hijack any desirable percentage of the CPU cycles without requiring superuser/administrator privileges. Moreover, the nature of the attack is such that, at least in some systems, listing the active processes will erroneously show the cheating process as not using any CPU resources: the "missing" cycles would either be attributed to some other process or not be reported at all (if the machine is otherwise idle). Thus, certain malicious operations generally believed to have required overcoming the hardships of obtaining root access and installing a rootkit, can actually be launched by non-privileged users in a straightforward manner, there by making the job of a malicious adversary that much easier. We show that most major general-purpose operating systems are vulnerable to the cheat attack, due to a combination of how they account for CPU usage and how they use this information to prioritize competing processes. Furthermore, recent scheduler changes attempting to better support interactive workloads increase the vulnerability to the attack, and naive steps taken by certain systems to reduce the danger are easily circumvented. We show that the attack can nevertheless be defeated, and we demonstreate this by implementing a patch for Linux that eliminates the problem with negligible overhead.


Codes of conduct in autonomous vehicles When it becomes possible to program decision-making based on moral principles into machines, will self-interest or the public good predominate? In a series of surveys, Bonnefon et al. found that even though participants approve of autonomous vehicles that might sacrifice passengers to save others, respondents would prefer not to ride in such vehicles (see the Perspective by Greene). Respondents would also not approve regulations mandating self-sacrifice, and such regulations would make them less willing to buy an autonomous vehicle. Science, this issue p. 1573; see also p. 1514 Programming an acceptable morality into driverless cars presents large challenges. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) should reduce traffic accidents, but they will sometimes have to choose between two evils, such as running over pedestrians or sacrificing themselves and their passenger to save the pedestrians. Defining the algorithms that will help AVs make these moral decisions is a formidable challenge. We found that participants in six Amazon Mechanical Turk studies approved of utilitarian AVs (that is, AVs that sacrifice their passengers for the greater good) and would like others to buy them, but they would themselves prefer to ride in AVs that protect their passengers at all costs. The study participants disapprove of enforcing utilitarian regulations for AVs and would be less willing to buy such an AV. Accordingly, regulating for utilitarian algorithms may paradoxically increase casualties by postponing the adoption of a safer technology.


Abstract. Imparting knowledge of the physical processes of a system to a model and determining a set of parameter values for a hydrologic or water quality model application (i.e., parameterization) are important and difficult tasks. An exponential increase in the literature has been devoted to the use and development of these models over the years. Few articles, however, have been devoted to developing general parameterization guidelines to assist in hydrologic model application, which is the main objective of this article along with discussing a few important parameters and extracting several case studies from the literature. The following guidelines were extracted from reviewing a special collection of 22 articles along with other relevant literature: (1) use site-specific measured or estimated parameter values where possible, (2) focus on the most uncertain and sensitive parameters, (3) minimize the number of optimized parameters, (4) constrain parameter values to within justified ranges, (5) use multiple criteria to help optimize parameter values, (6) use "soft" data to optimize parameters, and (7) use a warm-up period to reduce model dependence on initial condition state variables. A few soil and hydrology related parameters common to many models are briefly described along with a discussion of measurement and estimation methods and parameter sensitivity (curve number, Manning's "n", soil bulk density and porosity, soil hydraulic conductivity, soil field capacity and wilting point, and leaf area index). Weather and management inputs are also discussed, as they are critical hydrologic system information that must be imparted to the model. Several case studies from previously reported research illustrate implementation of the parameterization guidelines. This research will help improve model parameterization, resulting in more consistency, better representation of the field or watershed, and a reduced range of parameter value sets resulting in acceptable model simulations.


Introduction Many patients who are discharged from the emergency department (ED) with a symptom-based discharge diagnosis (SBD) have post-discharge challenges related to lack of a definitive discharge diagnosis and follow-up plan. There is no well-defined method for identifying patients with a SBD without individual chart review. We describe a method for automated identification of SBDs from ICD-10 codes using the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. Methods We mapped discharge diagnosis, with use of ICD-10 codes from a one-month period of ED discharges at an urban, academic ED to UMLS concepts and semantic types. Two physician reviewers independently manually identified all discharge diagnoses consistent with SBDs. We calculated inter-rater reliability for manual review and the sensitivity and specificity for our automated process for identifying SBDs against this "gold standard." Results We identified 3642 ED discharges with 1382 unique discharge diagnoses that corresponded to 875 unique ICD-10 codes and 10 UMLS semantic types. Over one third (37.5%, n = 1367) of ED discharges were assigned codes that mapped to the "Sign or Symptom" semantic type. Inter-rater reliability for manual review of SBDs was very good (0.87). Sensitivity and specificity of our automated process for identifying encounters with SBDs were 84.7% and 96.3%, respectively. Conclusion Use of our automated process to identify ICD-10 codes that classify into the UMLS "Sign or Symptom" semantic type identified the majority of patients with a SBD. While this method needs refinement to increase sensitivity of capture, it has potential to automate an otherwise highly time-consuming process. This novel use of informatics methods can facilitate future research specific to patients with SBDs.


The technique, described by Nuberg and Yustova in 1955 to determine the convergence points of dichromats, was used at the National Bureau of Standards for three deuteranopic eyes, to obtain data on the deuteranopic convergence point. A study of the convergence point for deuteranopes obtained at NBS and by several other investigators has indicated a fairly wide range of values for this convergence point (1.08 to 2.30 for x, −0.08 to −1.30 for y). The NBS data for deuteranopic observers yield points that fall within this range.


In this paper, the author closely investigates the role Elena Garro's Recollections of Things to Come plays in Baroque theatre.  Though Baroque art is known for the theatre tropes which distort reality, Garro's text pushes theatre to a new level by integrating Baroque tropes of space, light, and time, with Baroque illusionism to create a triumphant, allegorical text about the Cristero Rebellion in Mexico.  Though many Latin American texts highlight the power of "reality blur"--the inability to distinguish between reality and fiction--Garro manipulates reality with such ease that readers are unaware of deception.  Ultimately, by culminating Baroque tropes with reality blur, character dualities, and the marvelous real, Garro fowards Recollections as a true manifestation of Baroque theatre.


The activity of speaking is conducted spontaneously and there is not much time devoted to preplanning and arranging the utterances the speaker intends to deliver. Briefly defined, gambits and routines refer to the words and phrases that facilitate the flow of conversations. As such, one way to help learners acquire oral proficiency is to teach gambits that support the social skills emphasized. The present study aimed to investigate the speaking fluency of Iranian intermediate EFL learners through conversational gambits and routines. To this end, the subjects of the present study consisted of an experimental group and a control group each containing 30 students who attended listening and speaking classes. To count the frequency of gambit tokens and identify their functions, the recorded data were analyzed utilizing Keller and Warner's classification of conversational gambits. The results of the t-test revealed that the experimental group possessed better speaking fluency based on the occurrences of gambit categories. There was a positive correlation between the number of gambits and the scores of fluency test. Evidently, the findings of the present study may have implications for EFL teachers and syllabus designers.


Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the widely-held belief that marketing holds customers in thrall and persuades them to buy things they otherwise would not. Design/methodology/approach – Rather than adopt a scientific approach to the mesmeric marketing phenomenon, it embraces an artistic perspective, focusing on three crucial cultural "moments" in the emergence of the great manipulator mindset. Findings – Whereas innumerable scientific experiments show that subliminal advertising does not work, except in certain circumstances, the cultural approach demonstrates that subliminals are, in fact, enormously successful. Regardless of scientific evidence to the contrary, most consumers believe that subliminal advertising not only works but is an established marketing practice. Practical implications – The paper suggests that marketers should place less reliance on the scientific paradigm. Marketing science has its place – a very important place – but not everything can be captured in a simultaneous equation or linear regression model. Cultural components analysis is just as significant as principal components analysis. Originality/value – Received wisdom concerning subliminal advertising is challenged and creatively reinterpreted from a supra-science standpoint.


The Scientific Board of the California Medical Association presents the following inventory of items of progress in obstetrics and gynecology. Each item, in the judgment of a panel of knowledgeable physicians, has recently become reasonably firmly established, both as to scientific fact and important clinical significance. The items are presented in simple epitome and an authoritative reference, both to the item itseffand to the subject as a whole, is generallygiven for those who may be unfamiliar with a particular item. The purpose is to assist busy practitioners, students, research workers or scholars to stay abreast of these items ofprogress in obstetrics and gynecology thathave recently achieved


Taiwan is subjected to significant storm surges, waves, and coastal inundation during frequent tropical cyclones. Along the west coast, with gentler bathymetric slopes, storm surges often cause significant coastal inundation. Along the east coast with steep bathymetric slopes, waves can contribute significantly to the storm surge in the form of wave setup. To examine the importance of waves in storm surges and quantify the significance of coastal inundation, this paper presents numerical simulations of storm surge and coastal inundation during two major typhoons, Fanapi in 2010 and Soulik in 2013, which impacted the southwest and northeast coasts of Taiwan, respectively. The simulations were conducted with an integrated surge-wave modeling system using a large coastal model domain wrapped around the island of Taiwan, with a grid resolution of 50 300 m. During Fanapi, the simulated storm surge and coastal inundation near Kaohsiung are not as accurate as those obtained using a smaller coastal domain with finer resolution (40 150 m). During Soulik, the model simulations show that wave setup contributed significantly (up to 20%) to the peak storm surge along the northeast coast of Taiwan. Three-D model simulations yield more accurate water level results and significant vertical variations in horizontal velocity at stations where wave-surge interaction is more pronounced. The simulated storm surge generally agreed well with the observed data at nearly 40 stations.


Drugs currently approved to coat stents used in percutaneous coronary interventions do not discriminate between proliferating vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) and endothelial cells (ECs). This lack of discrimination delays reendothelialization and vascular healing, increasing the risk of late thrombosis following angioplasty. We developed a microRNA-based (miRNA-based) approach to inhibit proliferative VSMCs, thus preventing restenosis, while selectively promoting reendothelialization and preserving EC function. We used an adenoviral (Ad) vector that encodes cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p27(Kip1) (p27) with target sequences for EC-specific miR-126-3p at the 3' end (Ad-p27-126TS). Exogenous p27 overexpression was evaluated in vitro and in a rat arterial balloon injury model following transduction with Ad-p27-126TS, Ad-p27 (without miR-126 target sequences), or Ad-GFP (control). In vitro, Ad-p27-126TS protected the ability of ECs to proliferate, migrate, and form networks. At 2 and 4 weeks after injury, Ad-p27-126TS-treated animals exhibited reduced restenosis, complete reendothelialization, reduced hypercoagulability, and restoration of the vasodilatory response to acetylcholine to levels comparable to those in uninjured vessels. By incorporating miR-126-3p target sequences to leverage endogenous EC-specific miR-126, we overexpressed exogenous p27 in VSMCs, while selectively inhibiting p27 overexpression in ECs. Our proof-of-principle study demonstrates the potential of using a miRNA-based strategy as a therapeutic approach to specifically inhibit vascular restenosis while preserving EC function.


The present work was carried out to study the humoral immunological memory in the frog, Rana tigrina using adult and tadpoles. The antigens used for immunization were in a soluble and particulate form. Human gamma globulin (HGG) is a soluble antigen while Salmonella typhi (s. typhi) in particulate form. Moreover, proliferative responses were also studied by observing histological sections of spleen. To determine the effective route of immunization a pilot study was carried out on adult frogs by using particulate antigens, S. typhi. In this study various routes were used such as intraperitoneal (ip), intramuscular (im) and via dorsal lymph sac. Antigen was administered both in saline as well as in adjuvant (Freund's complete adjuvant). In either case it was found that dorsal lymph sac route immunized the animals better than that of intramuscular or intraperitoneal, when treated two, four and six weeks after immunization. In further studies dorsal lymph sac (dls) route was used in adult frogs. In tadpoles, however, intraperitoneal route was used, as it was difficult to administer antigen via dorsal lymph sac being absent or poorly developed.

In adult frogs soluble antigen HGG was used to determine humoral anti HGG antibodies following immunization at day 0 (primary treatment) and then four weeks after (challenge) and tested for antibodies two, four and six weeks after the challenge. It was found that those frogs, which received only one dose of HGG either as primary treatment or as a challenge, produced low antibody titres when compared with those frogs, which received HGG both in primary treatment as well as in the challenge. Moreover, use of adjuvant had not significant enhancing affect, rather it decreased the antibody titres when compared with that of the use of antigen in saline. Studies on humoral antibody production using particulate antigens, S. typhi showed similar results. The use of S. typhi in both primaries as well as in challenge produced higher anti-S. typhi antibodies as compared to that of the frogs, which received S. typhi either during primary or in the challenge. Moreover, in this case the use of adjuvant had enhancing effect.

The use of antigen HGG or S. typhi for immunizing tadpoles (stage 50) also showed some noticeable results. When tadpoles were primed during stage 50 and were allowed to metamorphose and tested four weeks after, the froglets showed no significant anti-HGG or anti-S. typhi antibodies. A batch of tadpoles were primed during stage 50 with an antigen, were then allowed to metamorphose. Four weeks after metamorphosis the froglets received challenge of the antigen in saline or in adjuvant, mounted good antibody titres when compared to control, which had received no antigen in larval conditions but only the challenge as froglets. This indicates that immunization during larval conditions primed the animals and this persisted even during metamorphosis. In these studies the use of adjuvant affected antibody production positively.

The study of pyrininophilic responses were carried out by immunizing frogs or tadpoles, then three weeks after the challenge spleens were removed for phyrininophilia and studied by following methyl green pyronin staining. The forgs, which received antigens (HGG or S. typhi) only in single dose (primary treatment or the challenge) showed less pyriminophilia as pyrininophilic cells were uniformly distributed throughout the spleen. The frogs, which received antigen in both primary as well as in challenge, produced intensive pyrininophilic response. It can be seen as heavy clusters or clumps of cells in white pulp and on the peripheral regions of the spleen. When antigen was administered during larval stages only the metamorphosing froglets exhibited little or no pyrininophilia in their spleens. On the other hand, those froglets, which received antigen both in larval as well as in the challenge (after metamorphosis) produced very high splenic proliferation. Same results have been obtained by cytospin smear method.

In these studies it was found that peak time for proliferative responses is 3 weeks after the challenge while for humoral antibody production is 4 weeks after the challenge


The pre-computation of data cubes is critical to improving the response time of On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) systems and can be instrumental in accelerating data mining tasks in large data warehouses. However, as the size of data warehouses grows, the time it takes to perform this pre-computation becomes a significant performance bottleneck. This paper presents a fast parallel method for generating ROLAP data cubes on a shared-nothing multiprocessor based on a novel optimized data partitioning technique. Since no shared disk is required, this method can be applied on highly scalable processor clusters consisting of standard PCs with local disks, connected via a data switch. The approach taken, which uses a ROLAP representation of the data cube, is well suited to large data warehouses on high dimensional data, and supports the generation of both fully materialized and partially materialized cubes. In comparison with previous approaches, our new method does significantly improve the scalability with respect to both, the number of processors and the I/O bandwidth (number of parallel disks). We have implemented our new parallel shared-nothing data cube generation method and evaluated it on a PC cluster, exploring relative speedup, scaleup, sizeup, output sizes and data skew. For a fact table with 16 million rows and 8 attributes, our parallel data cube generation method achieves close to optimal speedup for as many as 32 processors, generating a full data cube in under 7 minutes. For a fact table with 256 million rows and 8 attributes, our parallel method achieves optimal speedup for 32 processors, generating a full data cube consisting of ≈ 7 billion rows (200 Gigabytes) in under 88 minutes. 1 Research partially supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. 2 Corresponding author.


The advances in using composite materials in different structural application lead to the need of continuous, robust, and structural health monitoring (SHM) systems. One of the most promising techniques for SHM is electromechanical impedance (EMI) technique which depends mainly on the coupling nature of piezoelectric ceramics. Piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS) can be employed as both a well-controlled actuator and sensor at the same time for diagnostic algorithms based on EMI technique. The study presented in this paper interested in EMI technique application to detect damage in composite laminated plates by applying synchronized system of PWAS array operated remotely by exerting harmonic analysis in desired frequency ranges. Frequency ranges are selected upon modal analysis of the healthy tested structure. Harmonic analysis is carried out for different damage scenarios. Extracted electrical charge spectrum data from each PWAS for the previous scenarios can be processed to plot electrical impedance for each case. The modeling process was carried out using a finite element commercial package, ANSYS v.15.0 in which multiphysics-based modeling can be used for such structure made of laminated composite material. The extracted resultant spectrum, for healthy structure, is used as a datum in which it is related to its damaged counterparts through damage identification indices such as root mean square deviation (RMSD), and damage detection index (DDI). These indices were used as indicators for the changes in the modal parameters and hence, yielded reasonable results for both damage quantification and localization purposes.


We report the demonstration of a technique using resonant degenerate four-wave mixing to produce high-resolution, background-free images of atomic distributions in flames. Comparison with laser-induced-fluorescence methods and applications of the method to species of interest in combustion are briefly discussed.


Since the climate conferences in Paris and Marrakesh the outstanding question is not if but how and how fast to enable a decarbonization of the European electricity sector. Nuclear power has a difficult time to survive in electricity markets in all Western countries, such as the U.S., Europe, Japan, etc., and is getting increasingly under pressure due to high costs, and the falling costs of alternative sources, such as renewable energies in combination with storage technologies. This paper compares different approaches to decarbonize the electricity sector in Europe using a specific model developed by the authors called dynEL-MOD. We find that, renewables carry the major burden of decarbonization. Scenario analysis suggests that only in the case of a breakthrough of CCTS some biomass-CCTS plants can play a role by 2050 through their negative CO2-emissions. Nuclear power (3rd or 4th generation), on the contrary, is unable to compete with other fuels even by then, and will, therefore, rely on dedicated national programs to survive until 2050. Incorporating the climate targets makes the investment into any additional fossil capacity uneconomic from 2025 onwards, resulting in a coal and natural gas phase-out in the 2040s. The model is run using different foresight assumptions. Limited foresight thus results in stranded investments of fossil capacities in the 2020s. Using a CO2 budgetary approach, on the other hand, leads to an even sharper emission reduction in the early periods before 2030, reducing overall costs.


This essay examines the second of two virtually unknown texts coauthored by Frances Whipple (Green McDougal) and Elleanor Eldridge, both of Providence, Rhode Island: Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge (1838) and Elleanor's Second Book (1839). Whereas the Memoirs exclusively chronicles Eldridge's life and misfortunes, Elleanor's Second Book contains only an abbreviated biography of its eponymous African and indigenous heroine. After its biographical opening section, Elleanor's Second Book shifts to several stories about white women representing a variety of class locations. These characters are juxtaposed against the "colored" Eldridge, as Whipple, Eldridge's de facto amanuensis, conforms to Rhode Island's rhetorical institutionalization of a black-white racial binary. This label and Whipple's condescending and unguarded use of racist terminology and stereotypes of black and indigenous people expose the differences that the two women bring to their collaborative project. Whipple's ambivalence about her literary subject becomes apparent in the descriptions of Eldridge she offers through the narrator and white female characters in Elleanor's Second Book. The essay argues that despite the rhetorical failures in both texts that ensue from Whipple's complicated race politics, contemporary scholars of American literature should not ignore the biographies' sociopolitical and economic underpinnings, as the latter provide crucial insights into the study of early African American literature as well as early U.S. women's literature.


I describe and compare sources of data on citations in economics and the statistics that can be constructed from them. Constructing data sets of the post-publication citation histories of articles published in the "Top 5" journals in the 1970s and the 2000s, I examine distributions and life cycles of citations, compare citation histories of articles in different sub-specialties in economics and present evidence on the history and heterogeneity of those journals' impacts and the marginal citation productivity of additional coauthors. I use a new data set of the lifetime citation histories of over 1000 economists from 30 universities to rank economics departments by various measures and to demonstrate the importance of intra- and interdepartmental heterogeneity in productivity. Throughout, the discussion summarizes earlier work. I survey research on the impacts of citations on salaries and non-monetary rewards and discuss how citations reflect judgments about research quality in economics.


Research investigating technology adoption has assumed that the individual accepting the technology has only one technology in mind when making their adoption decision. Models such as the UTAUT, TAM, PCI assume that the decision whether or not to adopt the technology occurs within a bubble – there is no explicit understanding in these models that no other technologies exist outside of the one technology under study and that a user has no other acceptance perceptions towards any other comparable technologies. Drawing upon prior work from the marketing literature on choice, we suggest three theoretical approaches to conceptualizing choice and three mathematical approaches to measuring the choice comparison. We report upon a study of technology choice among 60 MBA students, who were given an open source and online spreadsheet application to use for one-month. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings and suggest new avenues of research on technology choice.


We present limits for the compactification scale in the theory of Large Extra Dimensions (LED) proposed by Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos, and Dvali. We use 11 months of data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT) to set gamma ray flux limits for 6 gamma-ray faint neutron stars (NS). To set limits on LED we use the model of Hannestad and Raffelt (HR) that calculates the Kaluza-Klein (KK) graviton production in supernova cores and the large fraction subsequently gravitationally bound around the resulting NS. The predicted decay of the bound KK gravitons to γγ should contribute to the flux from NSs. Considering 2 to 7 extra dimensions of the same size in the context of the HR model, we use Monte Carlo techniques to calculate the expected differential flux of gamma-rays arising from these KK gravitons, including the effects of the age of the NS, graviton orbit, and absorption of gamma-rays in the magnetosphere of the NS. We compare our Monte Carlo-based differential flux to the experimental differential flux using maximum likelihood techniques to obtain our limits on LED. Our limits are more restrictive than past EGRET-based optimistic limits that do not include these important corrections. Additionally, our limits are more stringent than LHC based limits for 3 or fewer LED, and comparable for 4 LED. We conclude that if the effective Planck scale is around a TeV, then for 2 or 3 LED the compactification topology must be more complicated than a torus.


The largest natural permanent surface waters in Namibia occur in the wetlands of East Caprivi and are fed by two of Namibia's five perennial rivers. The wetlands are divided into five geographically distinct zones with a total surface area of abut 5 000km. Two of the areas (Lake Liambezi and the eastern floodplain) are only intermittently inundated when the Zambezi River is in flood, while the Kwando River, the Linyanti Swamp and the Chobe Marsh are permanent. In wet years, the five systems form acontinuous water body.


This paper is about our experiences of space in the Equator project (www.equator.ac.uk), in particular, the way in which multiple spaces, both virtual and physical, can co-exist. By this we mean that people and objects may have locations in and relationships to both physical space and one or more virtual spaces, and that these different spaces together interact to give an overall system behaviour and user experience. The concepts we develop in this chapter are driven partly by practical experience, and partly by previous theoretical work such as the models and taxonomies of spatial context in (Dix et al., 2000), the models for mixed reality boundaries (Koleva et al., 1999) and capturing human spatial understanding exposed in sources such maps, myths and mathematics (Dix, 2000). We are also building on established work on informal reasoning about space from the AI and GIS communities (Grigni et al, 1995; Papadias et al., 1996) similar to Allen's well known temporal relations (Allen, 1991).


Aims: Randomised trials have shown that direct stenting (DS) is associated with improved markers of reperfusion during primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI) for ST elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). However, data evaluating its impact on long-term clinical outcomes are lacking. We set out to evaluate the effect of DS on mortality in a contemporary population of patients undergoing PPCI for STEMI. Methods: Consecutive patients undergoing PPCI for STEMI at two high-volume UK heart attack centres between September 2008– December 2010 (n=1562) were included in the analysis. Local databases were analysed for patient demographics, as well as details on PPCI strategy, including use of DS versus predilatation (PD) followed by stenting, manual thrombus aspiration (MT) and glycoprotein IIb/IIIa inhibitors (GPIs). National databases were interrogated for in-hospital, 30-day and one-year mortality. To determine the impact of PPCI strategy on one-year survival, multivariate logistic analysis was performed. Results: Altogether 489 patients underwent DS (31.3%) and 1073 (68.7%) received PD prior to stenting. Patients receiving DS had reduced mortality at 30 days (2.04 versus 4.66%, p=0.01) and one year (3.27 versus 8.48%, p=0.0001). After multivariate adjustment, PD remained an independent predictor of one-year mortality (odds ratio 2.42, 95% confidence interval 1.08–5.45, p=0.032) along with age, cardiogenic shock, number of diseased vessels, and left main or proximal left anterior descending artery intervention. However, neither GPI use nor MT improved survival in either univariate or multivariate analyses. Conclusions: In a contemporary, unselected population of patients undergoing PPCI for STEMI, DS – when compared with stenting after PD – is independently predictive of improved 30-day and one-year survival.


Electricity market prices across organized wholesale electricity markets in the United States have declined significantly in recent years, prompting several nuclear power stations to consider early retirement before the end of their licensed operation or useful lifespans. This paper explores three possible explanations for observed declines in day-ahead electricity prices received by 19 nuclear generators in the PJM electricity market region: (1) the impact of declining natural gas prices; (2) the growth of wind generation in the American Midwest; and (3) stagnant or declining demand for electricity. I employ time series linear regression with time fixed effects to empirically estimate the effect of each explanatory variable on the average day-ahead locational marginal price (LMP) earned by 19 nuclear generating stations (with 33 individual reactors) located in PJM (encompassing roughly one-third of the U.S. nuclear fleet) as well as weighted average PJM day-ahead market prices. The paper uses daily average observations from January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2016 (n = 3,288). I employ a variety of alternative specifications to further explore geographic heterogeneity in causal effects on different generators across the PJM region and interrogate the impact of using price time series from different natural gas trading hubs. I find that natural gas price declines are the dominant driver of reduced electricity prices at the 19 nuclear power stations over this period. The growth of wind energy has an order of magnitude smaller cumulative effect and is only statistically significant for nuclear generators located in the western portion of the PJM region (in proximity to vast majority of installed wind capacity in the region). Finally, declining demand also has a relatively small but statistically significant effect on prices across all generators.


Due to an increasing awareness of the importance of sustainable energy use, multiobjective optimization problems for upper-level energy systems are continually being developed and improved. This paper focuses on the modeling and optimization of the Helsinki district heating system and establishing the basis for modeling the Finnish power network. The optimization of the district heating system is conducted for a twenty four hour winter demand period. Partial load behavior of the generators is included by introducing non-linear functions for costs, emissions, and the exergetic efficiency. A fuel cost sensitivity analysis is conducted on the system by considering ten combinations of fuel costs based on high, medium, and low prices for each fuel. The solution sets, called Pareto fronts, are evaluated by post-processing techniques in order to determine the best solution from the optimal set. Because units between some of objective functions are non-commensurable, objective values are normalized and weighted. The results indicate that for today's fuel prices the best solution includes a dominating usage of natural gas technologies, while if the price of natural gas is higher than other fuels, natural gas technologies are often not included in the best solution. All of the necessary costs, emissions, and operating information is provided for the the Finnish power network in order to employ a multiobjective optimization on the system.


This research endeavour aims at focussing on Total Quality Management techniques to address a significantly fulcrum-oriented aspect of Food processing, namely Food Fortification. This ethos has been chosen as the focal point of the research as it is extremely relevant in the backdrop of the Global Pandemic. The need of the hour is to make available a spectrum of locally grown, accessible and native dietary inclusions from the Indian diet, to attain, retain and maintain Holistic Wellness in the populace. The perspective and mind-set are Universally relevant due to many factors. They are designed to benefit paediatric to geriatric subjects. They are biochemically nodal in generating a quantum enhancement in immune profile of the subject and furthermore, the research can be extrapolated to commercial ,large-scale and entrepreneurial dimensions.The added advantage is a substantial capacity building in Trained and skilled Workforce equipped in making available Novel Nutritional Products for consumption which are backed with emphatic Organoleptic acceptance. The postscript, of course, is the ensuing commercial viability and sustainable Wellness at the societal level. The underlying research methodology is governed by certain commonalities.


The fear of suffering dementia may lead to people signing an Advance Euthanasia Directive to make provision for health care decisions in the event that he/she becomes unable to make those decisions. However, Advance Euthanasia Directives are rarely adhered to in the case of dementia because the symptoms of dementia conflict with the due care criteria; a person requesting euthanasia must be able to confirm this request at time of death and must be undergoing unbearable and hopeless suffering. Once dementia has progressed, the euthanasia 'wish' can no longer be confirmed, and assessing suffering in a person with dementia is nearly impossible. This means that for a euthanasia request to be successful you have to perform the euthanasia early enough, while the patient is still cognitively competent. The risk in doing so is that the patient may lose years of their life that could have been full of quality. Postponing euthanasia in dementia could result in euthanasia not being possible and the person with dementia living a life that they did not want. This paper addresses how to decide what 'on time' is when it comes to dying with dementia through literature review, information visualisation and public debate.


Forecasting population decline to a certain critical threshold (the quasi-extinction risk) is one of the central objectives of population viability analysis (PVA), and such predictions figure prominently in the decisions of major conservation organizations. In this paper, we argue that accurate forecasting of a population's quasi-extinction risk does not necessarily require knowledge of the underlying biological mechanisms. Because of the stochastic and multiplicative nature of population growth, the ensemble behaviour of population trajectories converges to common statistical forms across a wide variety of stochastic population processes. This paper provides a theoretical basis for this argument. We show that the quasi-extinction surfaces of a variety of complex stochastic population processes (including age-structured, density-dependent and spatially structured populations) can be modelled by a simple stochastic approximation: the stochastic exponential growth process overlaid with Gaussian errors. Using simulated and real data, we show that this model can be estimated with 20-30 years of data and can provide relatively unbiased quasi-extinction risk with confidence intervals considerably smaller than (0,1). This was found to be true even for simulated data derived from some of the noisiest population processes (density-dependent feedback, species interactions and strong age-structure cycling). A key advantage of statistical models is that their parameters and the uncertainty of those parameters can be estimated from time series data using standard statistical methods. In contrast for most species of conservation concern, biologically realistic models must often be specified rather than estimated because of the limited data available for all the various parameters. Biologically realistic models will always have a prominent place in PVA for evaluating specific management options which affect a single segment of a population, a single demographic rate, or different geographic areas. However, for forecasting quasi-extinction risk, statistical models that are based on the convergent statistical properties of population processes offer many advantages over biologically realistic models.


This on-line publication examines the interaction between ancient Roman wall-painting and the modern world and challenges many of the accepted theories concerning their original meaning, function and social context. Since their discovery in the lava buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the mid-eighteenth century, the wall-paintings have directly and indirectly shaped the cultural landscape of the modern world. This publication also systematically examines many of the post rediscovery filters that have skewered our understanding of the paintings in their original context. A typical example being Hollywood's melodramatic appropriation of Roman culture, supposedly predicated upon discoveries made at Rome and Pompeii, but in fact derived from nineteenth-century melodramatic sources, such as Giovanni Pacini's Opera, Karl Briullov's painting and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel, all of which were entitled The Last Days of Pompeii. The research also argues against the commonly held belief that the paintings were purely decorative – a misconception largely caused by their influence upon eighteenth-century neoclassicism and decorative imagery associated with the early industrial revolution. Having critiqued existing theories, the book proposes a radically new analysis of the sophisticated perspectival systems found in the paintings and their relationship to Roman atavistic and apotropaic beliefs, held in conjunction with practices that determined social status. Research for this publication was supported by AHRC, Southampton Solent University's Art and Design Capability Fund, the British School of Art and Archaeology Rome and various archaeological authorities in Italy. It is one of the first publication in 250 years to analyse the symbolic content of Roman wall-painting. Publications have hitherto primarily focused on purely formal issues or contextualised the paintings in relation to display and status.


Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with video cameras are a flexible support to ensure civil and military safety and security. In this thesis, a video processing chain is presented for moving object detection in aerial video surveillance. A Track-Before-Detect (TBD) algorithm is applied to detect motion that is independent of the camera motion. Novel robust and fast object detection and segmentation approaches improve the baseline TBD and outperform current state-of-the-art methods.


We present detailed structure and evolution calculations for the first transiting extrasolar planets discovered by the space-based CoRoT mission. Comparisons between theoretical and observed radii provide information on the internal composition of the CoRoT objects. We distinguish three different categories of planets emerging from these discoveries and from previous ground-based surveys: (i) planets explained by standard planetary models including irradiation; (ii) abnormally bloated planets; and (iii) massive objects belonging to the overlapping mass regime between planets and brown dwarfs. For the second category, we show that tidal heating can explain the relevant CoRoT objects, providing non-zero eccentricities. We stress that the usual assumption of a quick circularization of the orbit by tides, as usually done in transit light curve analysis, is not justified a priori, as suggested recently by Levrard et al. (2009), and that eccentricity analysis should be carefully redone for some observations. Finally, special attention is devoted to CoRoT-3b and to the identification of its very nature: giant planet or brown dwarf? The radius determination of this object confirms the theoretical mass-radius predictions for gaseous bodies in the substellar regime but, given the present observational uncertainties, does not allow an unambiguous identification of its very nature. This opens the avenue, however, to an observational identification of these two distinct astrophysical populations, brown dwarfs and giant planets, in their overlapping mass range, as done for the case of the 8 Jupiter-mass object Hat-P-2b. According to the presently published error bars for the radius determination and to our present theoretical description of planet structure and evolution, the high mean density of this object requires a substantial metal enrichment of the interior and is inconsistent at about the 2-sigma limit with the expected radius of a solar-metallicity brown dwarf. Within the aforementioned observational and theoretical determinations, this allows a clear identification of its planetary nature, suggesting that planets may form up to at least 8 Jupiter masses.


Most vertebrate organs, once formed, continue to perform the function for which they were generated until the death of the organism. The kidney is a notable exception to this rule. Vertebrates, even those that do not undergo metamorphosis, utilize a progression of more complex kidneys as they grow and develop. This is presumably due to the changing conditions to which the organism must respond to retain what Homer Smith referred to as our physiological freedom. To quote, "Recognizing that we have the kind of blood we have because we have the kind of kidneys we have, we must acknowledge that our kidneys constitute the major foundation of our physiological freedom. Only because they work the way they do has it become possible for us to have bones, muscles, glands, and brains. Superficially, it might be said that the function of the kidneys is to make urine; but in a more considered view one can say that the kidneys make the stuff of philosophy itself" ("From Fish to Philosopher," Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 1953). Different kidneys are used to make the stuff of philosophy at different stages of development depending on the age and needs of the organism, rather than the usual approach of simply making embryonic organs larger as the animal grows. Although evolution has provided the higher vertebrates with complex adult kidneys, they continue to utilize simple kidneys in embryogenesis. In lower vertebrates with simple adult kidneys, even more simple versions are used during early developmental stages. In this review the anatomy, development, and gene expression patterns of the embryonic kidney, the pronephros, will be described and compared to the more complex kidney forms. Despite some differences in anatomy, similar developmental pathways seem to be responsible for the induction and the response to induction in both evanescent and permanent kidney forms. Gene expression patterns can, therefore, be added to the morphological and functional data indicating that all forms of the kidney are closely related structures. Given the similarities between the development of simple and complex kidneys, the embryonic kidneys may be an ideal model system in which to investigate the genesis of multicomponent organ systems.


A brief review of techniques for measuring surface roughness and optical figure is given. One of the most promising of these techniques for measuring the roughness of optical surfaces is interferometry employing fringes of equal chromatic order (FECO). A FECO scanning interferometer is described, which has been used to determine statistics of polished surfaces having roughnesses under 100 A rms. The scanning interferometer resolves square surface elements 2 microm on a side and statistically characterizes the surface in terms of these elements. Height- and slope-distribution functions, rms roughness, rms slope, and modified autocovariance length distributions have been measured for selected optical surfaces. Nearly all surfaces had Gaussian distributions of heights and slopes, but none had Gaussian distributions of autocovariance lengths. Surfaces such as electropolished copper, electroless nickel, and single-point diamond-machined copper were found to have smaller rms slopes than other surfaces of comparable roughness and scattered less than predicted by simple scalar scattering theory.(1,2) On the other hand, heavily scratched surfaces such as polished potassium chloride had larger slopes and produced more scattering than expected from simple theory.


Higher education institutions (HeIs) across the globe are increasingly aware of the need to integrate sustainability education within the curricula. this triggered a number of studies were conducted by earlier researchers in embedding sustainability education within the curricula. thus, studies have been carried out to evaluate how students perceived sustainable development in their curricula, particularly in engineering and other related courses. few of these studies were conducted in built environment, most especially in quantity surveying. It is against this backdrop that necessitated this study. the purpose of this study is to establish the extent in which sustainable development is embedded in the construction related curriculum using the perception of quantity surveying students. the study adopted literature review, documentary reports among others as a secondary method of data collection. Primary data were collected through online questionnaire survey administered to 330 randomly selected quantity surveying students in a university in the uK. out of which 87 completed questionnaires were retrieved and suitable for the analysis. the quantitative data obtained were analysed using mean score, one-way analysis of variance (anoVa) and regression analysis. the study identified 46 sustainability topics, which were grouped into 6 categories (i.e. A–F). Based on these categories, the study found that students' knowledge level on sustainability was a little above 'basic/ limited knowledge with the overall mean score value of 2.38 on a 4 – point likert scale. the study further revealed that the students placed high importance on sustainability education, despite their knowledge level were found lower. The study findings would be used to establish the extent of sustainability within the curriculum in the quantity surveying programme. also, this study would be of great value to academic staff and university management boards to develop a framework for incorporating sustainability education in the curriculum.


Research reveals that gifted students at Springfield Middle School in Williamsport, Maryland possess stronger levels of self-efficacy than average students. For the purpose of this study, the term "gifted students" refers to students who are enrolled in above-grade-level classes at Springfield Middle School. Students must score high in tests and interviews in order to be placed in above-grade-level classes. According to Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory, increased levels of self-efficacy contribute to a person's ability to complete a task. Using the Children's Perceived Academic Self-Efficacy subscale from The Morgan-Jinks Student Efficacy Scale (MJSES), the study conducted at Springfield Middle School examined the correlation between students' self-efficacy level and their self-reported academic grades in English, math, science, and social studies. Also, the correlation between above-grade-level students' self-efficacy and their self-reported grades was compared to those of general students. The sample included 56 6 th , 7 th , and 8 th grade middle school students from a suburban area in Williamsport, Maryland. Through the use of a Chi Square Test of Independence, the results indicated that regardless of class level, students' self-efficacy in math and science are related to their grades in those subjects. Using independent t tests, no significant difference between the self-efficacy composite of grade-level and above-grade-level students was discovered.


Experiments were designed to examine whether or not insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I), which is produced by vascular cells in response to injury, affects the production of nitric oxide evoked by the inducible nitric oxide synthase in cultures of smooth muscle cells from the rat aorta. Nitric oxide production was assessed indirectly by the measurement of nitrite accumulation and nitric oxide synthase activity by determining the formation of L-citrulline from L-arginine. Nitric oxide synthase was induced in vascular smooth muscle cells that had been exposed to interleukin-1 beta (IL-1 beta) or tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha). IGF-I inhibited, in a concentration-dependent manner, the production of nitrite and L-citrulline evoked by IL-1 beta or TNF-alpha. The inhibition caused by IGF-I required the presence of the growth factor during the induction of nitric oxide synthase. Two IGF-I-related proteins, IGF-II and insulin, also inhibited, but to a smaller extent, the release of nitrite and the formation of L-citrulline stimulated by IL-1 beta. Under bioassay conditions, the perfusates from columns containing IL-1 beta-treated smooth muscle cells relaxed rings of rat aorta without endothelium that had been contracted with phenylephrine; these relaxations were reversed by nitro-L-arginine. Addition of IL-1 beta-treated vascular smooth muscle cells to indomethacin-treated platelets inhibited their aggregation to thrombin; methylene blue prevented this inhibition. Control smooth muscle cells or cells exposed to IGF-I alone did not have such effects.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)


A new generation of arc welder has recently become widely available at a price which is within reach of most amateurs and part-time mechanics, known as the MIG welder (metal-arc inert gas welder). In MIG welding the arc is ensheathed in a stream of inert gas which prevents the molten metal from oxidising. The stream of gas changes the character of the emitted radiation, and it is possible that this type of welder poses a greater threat to sight than previously recognised. Radiation in the ultraviolet range emitted by arc welders is absorbed by the unprotected cornea and lens, giving rise to a keratoconjunctivitis, or 'arc-eye,' which, though intensely painful, is not considered a threat to sight. Radiation in the visible and near infrared spectrum, however, penetrates the eye to be absorbed by the retina and may cause thermal or photochemical damage which may be permanent and sight-threatening. Retinal injuries resulting from exposure to ordinary electric welding arcs have been reported, but such injuries are uncommon. Two cases of retinal burns resulting from exposure to MIG welder emissions which presented on consecutive days to the Leicester Royal Infirmary are presented. This is the first report of such injuries relating specifically to MIG welding.


ABSTRACT Background: Previous reports have shown that vaccination rates of adult at-risk populations are low in Turkey. There are differing reports with regards to the effectiveness of the influenza and the pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (PPSV23) on the clinical outcomes of community acquired pneumonia (CAP). The purpose of this study was to analyze the influenza (FV) and pneumococcal vaccination (PV) status, the factors that influence the receipt of influenza/pneumococcal vaccine and the effects of prior vaccination on the clinical outcomes in adults hospitalized with CAP. Patients and Methods: Patients hospitalized with CAP between March 2009 and October 2013 and registered at the web-based Turkish Thoracic Society Pneumonia Database (TURCAP) were included in this multicentric, observational study. Of a total of 787 cases, data were analyzed for 466 patients for whom self-reported information on PV and FV was available. Results: In this adult population with CAP, the vaccination rate with both the pneumococcal and influenza vaccines was found to be 6%. Prior FV was found to be the sole variable that was associated with the receipt of PV [OR 17.8, 95% CI (25–75:8.56–37.01), p < 0.001]. Conversely, being vaccinated with PPSV23 was the only predictor of receipt of FV [OR 18.1, 95% CI (25 – 75:8.75 – 37.83), p < 0.001]. Compared to the unvaccinated cases, the chest radiograms of the vaccinated patients revealed less consolidation. The latter also reported fatigue, muscle pain and gastrointestinal symptoms less frequently. Although there was a trend for lower 30-day mortality and for lower rates of intensive care unit (ICU) admission, these did not reach statistical significance. A pneumonia severity index (PSI) score ≥ 90, CURB-65 score ≥3 and multilobar involvement, but not the vaccination status, were identified as independent determinants of ICU admission. Conclusions: This study showed that, among patients hospitalized with CAP, the FV and/or PV rates are low. Prior vaccination does not appear to significantly affect the clinical outcomes.


This study demonstrates that countries responded quite differently to calls for healthcare workers (HCWs) during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014. Using a new dataset on the scale and timing of national pledges and the deployment of HCWs to states experiencing outbreaks of the virus disease (principally, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone), it shows that few foreign nations deployed HCWs early, some made pledges but then fulfilled them slowly, and most sent no HCWs at all. To aid understanding of such national responses, the paper reviews five theoretical perspectives that offer potentially competing or complementary explanations of foreign government medical assistance for international public health emergencies. The study systematically validates that countries varied greatly in whether and when they addressed HCW deployment needs during the Ebola crisis of 2014, and offers suggestions for a theory-driven inquiry to elucidate the logics of foreign interventions in critical infectious disease epidemics.


Aged smoke from a prescribed fire (dominated by conifers) impacted Atlanta, GA on 28 February 2007 and dramatically increased hourly ambient concentrations of PM 2.5 and organic carbon (OC) up to 140 and 72 μg m −3 , respectively. It was estimated that over 1 million residents were exposed to the smoky air lasting from the late afternoon to midnight. To better understand the processes impacting the aging of fire plumes, a detailed chemical speciation of carbonaceous aerosols was conducted by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) analysis. Ambient concentrations of many organic species (levoglucosan, resin acids, retene, n -alkanes and n -alkanoic acids) associated with wood burning emission were significantly elevated on the event day. Levoglucosan increased by a factor of 10, while hopanes, steranes, cholesterol and major polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) did not show obvious increases. Strong odd over even carbon number predominance was found for n -alkanes versus even over odd predominance for n -alkanoic acids. Alteration of resin acids during transport from burning sites to monitors is suggested by the observations. Our study also suggests that large quantities of biogenic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and semivolatile organic compounds (SVOCs) were released both as products of combustion and unburned vegetation heated by the fire. Higher leaf temperature can stimulate biogenic VOC and SVOC emissions, which enhanced formation of secondary organic aerosols (SOA) in the atmosphere. This is supported by elevated ambient concentrations of secondary organic tracers (dicarboxylic acids, 2-methyltetrols, pinonic acid and pinic acid). An approximate source profile was built for the aged fire plume to help better understand evolution of wood smoke emission and for use in source impact assessment.