It is eleven o'clock on a hot morning in the city of Salvador, in the northeastern coastal state of Bahia, Brazil [. . .] A large group of men have donned long white tunics, they have decorated themselves with white terrycloth turbans, each with a large plastic sapphire-blue gem sewn on the front. They wear white leather sandals, sapphire-blue socks, and many strands of plastic beaded necklaces, worn crossing their torsos. Among this gathering of hundreds of men is an old black man carrying a staff and wrapped in a white toga-like sheet, wearing dark brown leather sandals. Behind him there is a crowd of yet more men dressed similarly, dancing and playing instruments, one man dancing while carrying a stuffed goat. The sash adorning their bodies reads Filhos de Gandhy. Sons of Gandhi. Gandhi, the slain pacifist who helped free India from British Raj, but he was not black, nor did he wear terrycloth turbans with plastic gems on them, nor did he parade on the street's playing percussion instruments during carnival time. How did a stuffed goat fit in Gandhi's program? The men start to spray the crowd with pungent Alfazema eau de cologne as a blessing often used in Candomble, the syncretized religion of Afro-Brazil. The procession begins. What is going on here? -Pravina shukla The figure of Mahatma Gandhi fascinated me as a pre-teen living in sao Paulo.1 I remember the enthusiasm with which I watched richard attenborough's movie Gandhi in the early 80s. By then I had not yet seen, either live or on tv, images of the Bahian carnaval group Filhos de Gandhy,2 but I knew quite well Gilberto Gil's musical tribute to the group. through Gil, I first learned about this group of male performers who evoked the orishas and Gandhi as a prodigal son and protegee of oshala, the creator deity, "king of the white cloth." like other Brazilians, I must have "Brazilianized" Gandhi in my imagination, and because of it, I must have felt a sense of kinship with the historic figure portrayed in the film. I remember how when I later came across images of this semi-religious carnaval group, or afoxe, I was enchanted by what I perceived as beautiful, poetic, political, and "carnavalistically" sacred. nothing in my state of enchantment was threatened by a critical positioning or by uncomfortable perceptions of corruption, contradictions, or exotifications. years went by. I persisted in following the group's development, its portrayal by the media, and its analysis by scholars. Even if my enchantment remained unbroken, as I zoomed into the group's symbolism, certain metaphorical, incongruent enigmas increasingly intrigued me. Gil's song "Filhos de Gandhi" was composed after he returned from his london exile.3 Gil commented that the group had been one of the "strongest emblems" of his childhood and that his post-1972 participation in the group was a stimulus to "thicken the stew" (renno 146).4 other factors contributed to the national popularity of the Filhos de Gandhy. towards the end of the 1970s, two major government tourist agencies-BaHIatUrsa (state of Bahia) and EMtUrsa (city of salvador)-began sponsoring the Filhos de Gandhy. By the 1980s, the bloco was able to put 10,000 "sons" on the street and had become an international trademark for Bahia and salvador. nowadays, the Filhos de Gandhy is occasionally accused of having been co-opted by government bureaucracies (oliveira 303). the trajectory of the Filhos de Gandhy from the 1970s onward was inevitably conditioned by the consolidation of the cultural and telecommunications industries that took place during that time period, leading to the present transformation of carnaval into a mega-event in which each carnaval group functions as an industry within itself (and as such deals with other private and state industries, including those that promote sexual and afrocentric tourism).5 Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), the pioneer of satyagraha, the principle of non-violence as a form of protest and revolution, inspired generations of activists. …


Mono-, di- and trivalent pseudorotaxanes with tetralactam macrocycle hosts and axles containing diamide binding stations as the guests have been synthesised. Their threading behaviour was analyzed in detail by NMR experiments and isothermal titration calorimetry. An X-ray crystal structure of the monovalent pseudorotaxane confirms the binding motif. Double mutant cycle analysis provides the effective molarities and insight into the chelate cooperativity of multivalent binding. While the second binding event in a trivalent pseudorotaxane exhibits a slightly positive cooperativity, the third binding is nearly non-cooperative. Nevertheless, the enhanced binding affinities resulting from the multivalent interaction are the basis for a highly efficient synthesis of di- and trivalent rotaxanes through stoppering the axle termini by "click" chemistry. Evidence for the multiply threaded geometry comes from NMR spectroscopy as well as tandem mass-spectrometric fragmentation experiments of mass-selected rotaxane ions in the gas phase. Furthermore, the trivalent rotaxane can be controlled by external stimuli (chloride addition and removal) which lead to an elevator-type movement of the wheel along the axle.


Body-centric applications include wearable communication systems that can be integrated in many different applications, as for instance in military, security forces, sport, fashion, or medical. In the latter, the quality of life of patients can be greatly improved by the use of implants or wearable systems allowing the continuous monitoring of health related parameters (heart beat, level of glucose, temperature, etc). Ultra-Wideband (UWB) systems have been developed for some of the mentioned applications, and improved antenna designs are needed, especially when the application requires its use in the vicinity of lossy media, such as the human body. This dissertation starts with a thorough review of the state of the art on UWB antennas for selected applications. The theoretical framework for small antennas in the vicinity of lossy media is studied. This is important to understand and characterize the effects of the human body on the antenna behaviour, the radio channel parameters and, hence, the system performance. This thesis focuses on the study of body-worn UWB antennas in the presence of the human body and investigates the effects of their feeding structures and polarization with respect to the body, both in timeand frequency-domain through a combination of full-wave simulations and measurement campaigns. A new simple technique to mitigate the human body effects on the antenna performance is introduced and implemented. An example of an efficient low-profile UWB antenna suitable for wearable applications is proposed. Several experimental investigations are also carried out to study the body proximity influence on the time behaviour of UWB-Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) antennas in an on-body scenario. An effective approach is also proposed to design band-reject UWB-WBAN antennas by using patch loading, which can be utilized to diminish the interference to the existing wireless communication systems. Finally, this thesis focuses on the diversity gain of UWB diversity antennas. To this aim, two compact printed UWB diversity antennas employing polarization and spatial diversities have been fabricated and the effect on the diversity gain is investigated.


We present an improved method for rendering heterogeneous translucent materials with existing BSSRDF models. In the general BSSRDF models, the optical properties of the target object are constant. Sone et al. have proposed a method to combine with existing BSSRDF models for rendering heterogeneous materials. However, the method generates more bright and blurred images compared with correctly simulated images. We have experimented with various BSSRDF models by the method and rendered heterogeneous materials. As a result, the rendered image with the better dipole model is the closest to the result of Monte carlo simulation. If incorporating the better dipole model into the method proposed by Sone et al., we can render more realistic images of heterogeneous materials.


Coupling is a convenient word that describes a wide variety of interactions or feedback processes, including those that we do not fully understand. Examples in Earth science include ocean-atmosphere coupling, climate-tectonics coupling, and core-mantle coupling. The word is also very popular in discussions of plate boundary earthquake processes.

As a vague expression, fault coupling is a perfectly adequate term, describing some kind of mechanical interaction between rocks of each side of a fault. For those of us who try to infer fault processes from geodetic measurements, coupling usually indicates a state of no or low current slip. If a fault is fully locked, we may say it is "coupled" or "fully coupled." If a plate boundary fault is slipping at the long-term plate convergence rate, we may say it is "decoupled." Fault segments that are slipping more slowly than the plate convergence rate are then "partially" coupled. To avoid awkward expressions such as "negatively" or "overly" coupled, an equivalent description has been used in the literature; that is, to define a "coupling ratio" with values ranging from negative to greater than unity. For describing kinematics, these expressions would not be wrong. However, with one additional step, our usage of the word coupling can lead to confusion. That step is to describe a fault that is not slipping as "strongly coupled."


The read/write web, or Web 2.0, offers ways for users to personalise their online existence, and to develop their own critical identities though their control of a range of tools. Exerting control enables those users to forge new contexts, profiles and content through which to represent themselves, based upon the user-centred, participative, social networking affordances of specific technologies. In turn these technologies enable learners to integrate their own contexts, profiles and content, in order to develop informal associations or communities of inquiry. Within educational contexts these tools enable spaces for learners to extend their own formal learning into more informal places though the fusion of web-based tools into a task-oriented personal learning environment. Where students are empowered to make decisions about the tools that support their personal approaches to learning, they are able develop further control over their learning experiences and move towards their own subject-based mastery. Critically, they are able to define with whom to share their personal approaches, and how they can best connect the informal learning that occurs across their life to their formal, academic work. The personal definition or fusion of tools and tasks is afforded through individual control over the learning environment. The flowering of personal learning aims, mediated by technologies and rules of engagement, occurs within task-specific loops where learners can interpret and process epistemological signals. In turn, where those loops are located within broader, personalised environments students can make contextual sense of their learning and extend their own educational opportunities. Moreover, they can extend their own academic decision-making through application in other contexts, and as a result manage their own academic uncertainties. This is evidenced through a thematic study of the voices of both learners and tutors, which highlights how the read/write web can be used proactively by educators, using specific tasks to enable learners to fuse their informal and formal learning spaces, and thereby enhance their decision-making confidence. The structuring of learning spaces that enable users and social networks to manage their educational processes is enhanced by read/write web approaches and tools, and in this paper is defined through a Fused Learner Integration model.


This paper introduces a new method of extracting features of a signal called Bipolar Pulse Active (BPA) features. The BPA extracts information from signals and decomposes them, using a series of harmonically related periodic triangular waveforms, into a finite set of Pulse Domain features. The BPA features contain information such as the rate of change between amplitudes, durations and frequencies within the original signal. The transformed signals can be further processed for some desirable application. In this paper, BPA feature is modified to describe its energy spectrum to be used in the application of Voice Activity Detection (VAD) of a speech signal.


In some political systems, it does not much matter who serves as the nation's top political leader. In Great Britain, with its tradition of collective leadership, for example, the rare Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, or Tony Blair is far outnumbered by the many Stanley Baldwins, Harold Wilsons, and John Majors, whose individual impact on governmental actions is modest. For the leaders of such political systems, personal effectiveness tends to be beside the point. If a higher power had set out to design a democracy in which the person at the peak of the political system made a difference, the result might well resemble the United States. American chief executives have taken advantage of the separation of powers and the constitutional grant of independent powers to the president to place their imprint on the nation's policies since the founding of the Republic, but until the 1930s, Congress typically took the lead in policy making, and the activities of the federal government had little impact on the nation and world. Then came the emergence of what is commonly called the modern presidency.(1) Spurred by the New Deft, World War II, and the entrepreneurial leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, there was a quantum increase in the scope and influence of the federal government. Meanwhile, the United States became a world and then a nuclear power. In the same period, the chief executive became the principal source of policy initiative, proposing much of the legislation considered by Congress. Presidents began to make an increasing amount of policy independent of the legislature, drawing on their sweeping administrative powers, and the Executive Office of the President was created, providing presidents with the organizational support needed to carry out their expanded obligations. The power of the modern American president manifests itself in its purest form in decisions of war and peace, but the occupant of the Oval Office is also of critical domestic importance. Not only does the president have the power of the veto and wide discretion over the implementation of laws and allocation of expenditures, his (and someday her) ability to command public attention and shape the national policy agenda also makes him politically potent, even when his opponents control Capitol Hill. Indeed, President Clinton scored significant political victories in 1998 on the very brink of the vote by the House of Representatives to impeach him. Qualities that Shape Presidential Performance In what follows, I present a series of observations about the qualities that have contributed to the effectiveness of modern American presidents. My remarks are distilled from an interpretative study of the modern presidents that I embarked on in the final months of the Nixon presidency and concluded in the seventh year of the Clinton presidency (Greenstein 2000). My initial stimulus was an interest in understanding why Richard Nixon, who in his first term had been responsible for such leadership feats as the opening to China and detente with the Soviet Union, was succumbing to a self-inflicted political disaster. Rather than only study Nixon, I decided to explore the full array of post-Herbert Hoover chief executives in the hope of identifying qualities that have served well and poorly in the modern Oval Office. In the years that followed, I immersed myself in the literature on my subjects, mined their unpublished papers, and interviewed large numbers of past and current presidential associates.(2) My observations fall under six broad headings, each of which pertains to a personal attribute that affects presidential job performance. The first, which relates to the outer face of presidential leadership, is the president's proficiency as a public communicator. The second, which bears on the inner workings of the presidency, is the president's organizational capacity: that is, his ability to rally his colleagues and structure their activities effectively. …


OBJECTIVE
Psychiatric classification is still a topic of considerable discussion and debate in spite of major advances in the past two decades. The debate involves categorical versus dimensional approaches, cutoff numbers of symptoms to define a case, degree of impairment, objective diagnostic criteria versus more theoretically based criteria, episodic versus trait-like symptoms, and the role of atypical and subclinical symptoms. All of these issues have been raised for the anxiety disorders and depression. This article presents the conceptualization of a relatively novel and testable approach to the diagnosis and classification of panic and agoraphobia, the panic-agoraphobic spectrum, and pilot data on a new questionnaire to assess it.

METHOD
Pilot testing of the Panic-Agoraphobic Spectrum Questionnaire was undertaken with 100 inpatients who had lifetime diagnoses of panic disorder, unipolar depression, comorbid panic and unipolar depressive disorders, or an eating disorder. The instrument emphasizes impairment related to 144 behaviors and experiences in seven panic-agoraphobic symptom domains.

RESULTS
Patients with panic disorder scored highest on the questionnaire, and those with comorbid depression showed even greater severity of illness. The scores of the patients with eating disorders and of the depressed patients differed from those of the other groups but also differed from 0.

CONCLUSIONS
The spectrum model of panic and agoraphobia is a flexible and comprehensive means of describing this clinical complex. The proposed model, complementary to the categorical approach, presumably expresses a unitary pathophysiology. Its usefulness is discussed in terms of its value for patient-therapist communication, outcome measures, identification of subtle personality traits, and subtyping of patients for research and treatment.


We propose and experimentally demonstrate a simple and flexible photonic scheme for generation and modulation of ultrawideband (UWB) using a phase modulator and a fiber delay interferometer (DI)-based multichannel frequency discrimination. By introducing a Gaussian signal to the phase modulator, the UWB polarity-switchable doublet pulses can be achieved by combining the pair of UWB monocycle pulses with inverted polarities at the DI outputs under proper time delay. Furthermore, the pulse shape modulation, pulse position modulation, and on-off keying can be performed by coding the electrical data patterns and adjusting the time delay between the two monocycle pulses. Only a laser source introduced in the architecture guarantees the excellent dispersion tolerance over 75 km optical fiber link for UWB pulse sequence, which has potential application in future high-speed UWB impulse radio over optical fiber access networks.


Digital anthropology has demonstrated that the externalization of the Self is a cultural technique for the construction of digital identities, in which the statement of the Self is realized through a steady multiplication. Self-images should not be considered according to their status of reality (truth vs. fiction) but to the effects of reality they produce, linked to the construction, reproduction and migration of images on the web. Considering the performative dimension of images, it is possible to highlight an irreducible surplus of meaning, particularly in the self-representations proposed in (and by) social media, where the image becomes an icon. We choose this term because of its high semantic value and its ambivalence between its different meanings in the religious, communicative and IT contexts. Instead of creating ambiguity, this intersection of perspectives makes the concept of 'icon' capable of describing a complex reality such as the digital image. To investigate the icon's effects of reality, we focus on an additional historical phenomenon, which is fundamental for the status of the image in the West.


Context: Aqueous extract of cassava leaves (Manihot esculenta Crantz) has a high rutin content. Rutin has benefits as an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, analgesic, and antidiabetic. The plant extract has low bioavailability and has a large molecular weight. Therefore, a carrier system like niosomes is required to allow aqueous leaves extract of cassava through to absorb in the body. Aims: The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of variation concentration of Span 40 that can trap aqueous extract of cassava leaves in niosomes optimally. Materials and Methods: Niosomes were done by thin-layer hydration method with concentration of Span 40 which was varied into three formulas: Formula A (100 μmol), Formula B (150 μmol), and Formula C (200 μmol). Statistical Analysis Used: The data analysis using SPSS analyzed by one-way ANOVA. Results: The rutin contained in cassava leaves of this research is 42.52%. Entrapment efficiency test used dialysis membrane method and the result showed that the increased concentration of Span 40 is used; the entrapment efficiency is also increasing. The result of SPSS test using one-way ANOVA of three formulas did not show significant difference (P > 0.05). Conclusions: Optimum concentration of Span 40 in trapping aqueous extract of cassava leaves is Formula A (100 μmol) which was 95.9%.


In the Mediterranean, the main water reuse application is and will long remain irrigation. Irrigation of public parks, landscape, golf courses, market gardening and orchards is expected to develop rapidly. Such uses require the microbial decontamination of reclaimed wastewater. Extensive reclamation technologies are well adapted to the Mediterranean context for their easy and cost effective OM however their ability to reliably meet health related standards have been questioned. The paper reviews the main factors of variations in the bacterial abatement provided by extensive treatment techniques - stabilisation reservoirs, ponds and infiltration percolation. Thanks to advances in the knowledge and modelling of disinfection mechanisms, the predictability of microbial decontamination by extensive technologies is being significantly improved; the development of better design tools leading to reliable treatments is foreseen. However, due to limitations in the microbial removal, extensive techniques cannot meet highly conservative requirements. Extensive techniques will play an important part in the development of water reuse and fresh water savings in the Mediterranean as far as water quality standards only aim at limiting health risks to an acceptable level.


Mafikeng, the capital of the North West Province, receives water from two sources, namely the Molopo eye and the Modimola dam. Once treated, the potable water is mixed and supplied to the city via distribution systems. This study was designed to assess the quality of drinking water in Mafikeng and also to determine whether the water from the two sources has an impact on the mixed water quality. Physico-chemical parameters and bacteriological quality (faecal coliforms (FCs), total coliforms (TCs), heterotrophic bacteria and Peudomonas spp.) was monitored at three drinking water sites weekly for 4 months. The results revealed that the physico-chemical quality of the water was generally acceptable. The pH ranged from 5.7 ± 0.18 to 8.6 ± 0.14, the temperature ranged from 18.3 ± 0.69 to 25.1 ± 0.69 °C and the total dissolved solids (TDS) ranged from 159.9 ± 22.44 to 364.4 ± 12.44 mg/l. These values are within the target water quality range for drinking water as prescribed by WHO, Department of Water Affairs and SANS 241. What is of concern was the microbial quality of the water. FCs, TCs, heterotrophic bacteria and Pseudomonas spp. were present in some of the treated water samples. The most significant finding of this study is that all drinking water samples were positive for Pseudomonas spp. (>100/100 ml).


A summary of the fundamental principles which form the basis of proton induced X-ray emission (PIXE) analysis, proton induced gamma-ray emission (PIGE) analysis, Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS) and instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) has been given which is followed by a brief description of the experimental facilities used in this work and their characterization. Knowledge of optimum experimental conditions is always helpful, therefore a programme has been developed to simulate the PIXE spectra and its uses have been described. Reference materials with certified elemental concentrations play an important role in ensuring the accuracy of the elemental analysis work. The FIXE technique has been applied to the analysis of new biological reference materials which consist of IAEA human diet samples and NIST leaf samples, to be introduced in the future. Homogeneity of these and two existing reference materials that is, IAEA soil-7 and Bowen's kale has also been determined at the mug scale. A subsample representative of a material is ascertained by determination of sampling factors for the elements detected in the material. Use of PIXE has been established in experimentally obtaining sampling factors for the above mentioned materials. PIGE analysis in conjunction with PIXE has been employed to investigate F and other elemental concentrations found in human teeth samples. The mean F concentration in enamel and dentine parts of teeth followed an age dependent model. The lowest F concentrations were observed in two out of three careous teeth. Concentrations of Ca and P were found to be higher in the enamel than in the dentine in all the teeth analyzed. Analysis of blood and its components in the study of elemental models in sickle cell disease in Nigerians has been carried out. A total of eight elements were detected. Comparision was made between controls and diseased groups which revealed that Cl, Ca and Cu were at significantly higher levels whereas K, Fe, Zn and Rb were at significantly lower levels in the whole blood of the sicklers as compared to the controls. Similar results were obtained for the erythrocytes except that Br was also found at significantly higher concentration in erythrocytes of the sicklers. Significantly higher concentrations of Cl, K, Fe and Cu were also observed in plasma of the sicklers as compared to that of the controls. Elemental status of the normal controls was found to be comparable to that of the Uzbekistanians (USSR) and North Americans but was better than that of the Bangladeshi population. PIXE and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used in the characterization of the Harmattan dust particulates collected at Kano and Ife, two cities of Nigeria. Most of the elements were found to be at higher concentrations as compared to those found in Recife (Brazil) and Toronto (Canada). The value of total suspended particulate matter (TSPM) at both collection sites was also above the relevant national (USA) air quality standards. FIXE in conjunction with RBS and INAA was employed in the analysis of soil samples taken at various depths from within and around two cement factories in Nigeria thereby detecting 31 elements. The results have been discussed with reference to elemental concentrations and Ca/Si ratio. The latter was found to offer a valid indicator of soil pollution by the cement dust.


James Orr - husband, father, reliable employee and all round model citizen - wakes one morning to find himself quite transformed.

There's no way he can go into the office, and the doctors aren't able to help. Waiting for the affliction to pass, he wanders the idyllic estate where he lives, with its pretty woodland, uniform streets and perfectly manicured lawns. But there are cracks in the veneer. And as his orderly existence begins to unravel, it appears that James himself may not be the man he thought he was.

A story that consistently confounds expectations, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr introduces a writer of extraordinary and disturbing talents.


Purpose
Sensing- and warning-based technologies are widely used in the construction industry for occupational health and safety (OHS) monitoring and management. A comprehensive understanding of the different types and specific research topics related to the application of sensing- and warning-based technologies is essential to improve OHS in the construction industry. The purpose of this paper is to examine the current trends, different types and research topics related to the applications of sensing- and warning-based technology for improving OHS through the analysis of articles published between 1996 and 2017 (years inclusive).

Design/methodology/approach
A standardized three-step screening and data extraction method was used. A total of 87 articles met the inclusion criteria.

Findings
The annual publication trends and relative contributions of individual journals were discussed. Additionally, this review discusses the current trends of different types of sensing- and warning-based technology applications for improving OHS in the industry, six relevant research topics, four major research gaps and future research directions.

Originality/value
Overall, this review may serve as a spur for researchers and practitioners to extend sensing- and warning-based technology applications to improve OHS in the construction industry.


A square trisection is a problem of assembling three identical squares from a larger square, using a minimal number of pieces. This paper presents an historical overview of the square trisection problem starting with its origins in the third century. We detail the reasoning behind some of the main known solutions. Finally, we give a new solution and three ruler-and-compass constructions. We conclude with a conjecture of optimality of the proposed solution.


The early part of the new millennium witnessed reports of a growing burden of cardiovascular disease in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). However the contribution of ischemic heart disease and stroke to this increasing burden relative to that caused by hypertensive heart disease, cardiomyopathy and rheumatic heart disease was not clear. Over the last decade, data from the continent has begun to clarify this issue and suggests three main points. The burden of ischemic heart disease relative to other causes of heart disease remains low particularly in the black Africans majority. Stroke caused predominantly by hypertension is now a major cause of disability and premature death. Third, the burden of risk factors for atherosclerosis is increasing rapidly in most urban and some rural regions. A concerted effort to understand the primary drivers of this increase in cardiac risk factors is required to prevent a future epidemic of atherosclerosis and its sequelae.


ABSTRACTFe-based oxygen carriers supported by Al2O3 and TiO2 were prepared as pellets for chemical looping combustion in this study. Over 90% conversions were obtained for most experiments operated in the TGA; however, experiments conducted with FeTi320 pellets exhibited higher conversions than those with FeAl320. The prepared pellets sintered at higher temperatures always exhibited higher crush strength. The crush strength of prepared FeAl320 and FeTi320 pellets were decreased for experiments conducted with greater starch content, because the more pore spaces are formed in the original places of the starch grains. For experiments conducted in the fixed bed reactor, the prepared pellets exhibited relatively high conversion. The conversions of FeTi320 were remained to be about 80% with increasing starch content because high porosity (approximately 50%) was formed for 0–20% starch contents of FeTi320 pellets after 10 redox cycles. Less porosity was formed after 20 redox cycles for experiments conducted with FeAl320 pellets prepared with higher starch contents. Therefore, the conversion of FeAl320 pellets was elevated with increasing starch content. Iron content for inner part of prepared pellets was significantly decreased after operated for 20 redox cycles, while iron content for outer part of pellets were increased. It is suggested that the iron ions may diffuse onto the surface of oxygen carriers to react with oxygen during the oxidation period.


Pipe freezing has become well established in industry as a method of short-term
isolation in order to carry out maintenance or repairs. A temporary plug is formed by
freezing the contents of the pipe (usually water although other fluids, including glycols
and hydrocarbons, are possible) over a short length. A review of related research and
theory showed that there was little published work on pipe freezing and so a 3 phase
experimental investigation was developed to with the aim of increasing knowledge in this
field. Phase 1 was to investigate the possibility of using the pipe freezing technique to form an
ice plug within a polymer (PVDF) pipe. One side of the plug would then be pressurised
to test if the ice plug could be used as temporary pipe isolation. Upon completion, it was
found that a pressure retaining ice plug could be formed within the section of pipe and
that the pipe showed no obvious signs of damage. Phase 2 was to investigate if a solid ice plug could be formed in a selection of polymer
pipes using liquid nitrogen as the coolant, without causing permanent deformation or
other damage to the pipes. Secondary objectives of the experiments were to determine,
the time taken for ice plugs to form and if the ice plugs could support a 10 bar differential
pressure. During these experiments, the method of plug formation within the pipe was
observed and the inner and outer pipe wall temperatures recorded with the aim of
explaining fully the processes involved in the formation of ice plugs within polymer pipes.
On completion of the experiments, it was found that, in most cases it was possible to
form ice plugs without apparent damage to the pipes. Phase 3 was to investigate the mechanisms by which the ice plug is retained within the
pipe and quantify the force needed to remove a fully formed ice core from a frozen pipe
section. Upon completion, it was found that the interaction of the differing rates of
contraction between the ice, metallic pipe and the polymer pipes and the adhesive
properties between the ice core and pipe wall were extremely difficult to quantify.


Sustainability in agriculture and associated primary industries, which are both energy-intensive, is crucial for the development of any country. Increasing scarcity and resulting high fossil fuel prices combined with the need to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, make the improvement of energy efficient farming and increased use of renewable energy essential.

This book provides a technological and scientific endeavor to assist society and farming communities in different regions and scales to improve their productivity and sustainability. To fulfill future needs of a modern sustainable agriculture, this book addresses highly actual topics providing innovative, effective and more sustainable solutions for agriculture by using sustainable, environmentally friendly, renewable energy sources and modern energy efficient, cost-improved technologies. The book highlights new areas of research, and further R&D needs. It helps to improve food security for the rapidly growing world population and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use in agriculture, which presently contributes 22% of the global carbon dioxide emissions. This book provides a source of information, stimuli and incentives for what and how new and energy efficient technologies can be applied as effective tools and solutions in agricultural production to satisfy the continually increasing demand for food and fibre in an economically sustainable way, while contributing to global climate change mitigation. It will be useful and inspiring to decision makers working in different authorities, professionals, agricultural engineers, researchers, and students concerned with agriculture and related primay industries, sustainable energy development and climate change mitigation projects.


Objective: This study examined changes in parental influenza vaccination attitudes and intentions after participating in school-based educational influenza vaccination intervention. Methods: Participants were drawn from three counties participating in a school-based influenza vaccination intervention in rural Georgia (baseline N=324; follow-up N=327). Data were collected pre- and post-intervention from phone surveys with parents' with children attending middle- and high-school. Attitudes, beliefs, vaccination history, and intention to vaccinate were assessed. Results: Parents who participated in the intervention conditions reported significantly higher influenza vaccination rates in their adolescents, relative to a control group, as well as increased vaccination rates post-intervention participation relative to their baseline rates. Intervention participants reported greater intention to have their adolescent vaccinated in the coming year compared to control parents. Significant differences were observed post intervention in perceived barriers and benefits of vaccination. Conclusions: These findings suggest that a school-delivered educational influenza vaccination intervention targeting parents and teens may influence influenza vaccination in rural communities. Future influenza vaccination efforts geared toward the parents of rural middle- and high-school students may benefit from addressing barriers and benefits of influenza vaccination.


It is over twenty years since the journal carried material on wallpaper, so the article opens with a discussion of why the eighteenth-century industry remains so little known. It explores the collecting and exhibition initiatives which led to its scholarly study, drawing on materials including unpublished archives on the 1946 exhibition of Historical & British wallpapers. The article focuses on eighteenth-century innovations in manufacture, which have often been ignored in favour of a focus on stylistic development. It argues for the importance of links to the paper industry for the developing wallpaper trade, drawing on unpublished sources . New types of products which have been hitherto ignored by historians of wallpaper, such as papier mâche, are analysed to demonstrate the breadth of output. It also argues that links to the textile industry were of particular importance in design development and discusses methods of applying colour to create innovative and imitative patterns, arguing that these could be used to disrupt hierarchies within the home.


Objective: Social support provided to caregivers of children has been shown to be protective for caregiver health, parenting and child psychosocial outcomes. However, little work in Southern Africa provides insight on the relationship between caregiver social support and child wellbeing. This report discusses exploratory qualitative findings from a larger mixed methods study, on caregivers' perceptions of the pathways through which received support affects their children's lives. Methods: In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 adult primary caregivers of children (aged 10–17 years) living in an HIV-endemic resource-constrained urban South African community. Thematic analysis of the data was supported by NVivo. Results: Caregivers perceived the social support they received to positively affect their children's health and behaviour, both directly and through a positive influence on their (the caregivers') mental health, parenting and decision making. Information, advice and encouragement emerged as key types of support explaining perceived effects. Conclusion: Future research should continue to explore pathways explaining the relationship between caregiver social support and child psychosocial wellbeing with similar populations, and quantitatively investigate direct and indirect effects of potential mediating factors. Findings speak both to the importance of psychosocial support for parenting interventions and the potential to strengthen child-focused interventions through the broader family social network.


Objective To evaluate the impact of telling patients their estimated spirometric lung age as an incentive to quit smoking. Design Randomised controlled trial. Setting Five general practices in Hertfordshire, England. Participants 561 current smokers aged over 35. Intervention All participants were offered spirometric assessment of lung function. Participants in intervention group received their results in terms of "lung age" (the age of the average healthy individual who would perform similar to them on spirometry). Those in the control group received a raw figure for forced expiratory volume at one second (FEV1). Both groups were advised to quit and offered referral to local NHS smoking cessation services. Main outcome measures The primary outcome measure was verified cessation of smoking by salivary cotinine testing 12 months after recruitment. Secondary outcomes were reported changes in daily consumption of cigarettes and identification of new diagnoses of chronic obstructive lung disease. Results Follow-up was 89%. Independently verified quit rates at 12 months in the intervention and control groups, respectively, were 13.6% and 6.4% (difference 7.2%, P=0.005, 95% confidence interval 2.2% to 12.1%; number needed to treat 14). People with worse spirometric lung age were no more likely to have quit than those with normal lung age in either group. Cost per successful quitter was estimated at £280 (€366, $556). A new diagnosis of obstructive lung disease was made in 17% in the intervention group and 14% in the control group; a total of 16% (89/561) of participants. Conclusion Telling smokers their lung age significantly improves the likelihood of them quitting smoking, but the mechanism by which this intervention achieves its effect is unclear. Trial registration National Research Register N0096173751.


This paper analyses the differentials of productive values in Vietnamese micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and how market constraints have hindered their performance. Quantitative analyses suggest substantial differences in value addition among manufacturing MSMEs, and the crucial contribution of technology adoption to their development. We assess MSMEs' productive value, production organization and performance using qualitative analysis. Our case studies identify market failures hindering MSMEs' potential; explain their strengths and weaknesses; and assess how the market structure influences their production costs and business strategies. Drawing from these insights, we suggest policy options to strengthen capability and competitiveness of Vietnamese' MSMEs.Length: 23


THE most rapidly growing large urban areas are now in less-developed countries. High fertility and declining mortality, development strategies, and substantial rural-to-urban migration produce vast urban areas with populations in excess of ten million. These megacities are marked by chronic housing shortages, unemployment, and inadequate social services, but less recognized and less studied is the environmental degradation often associated with these areas. Mexico City is a prototype of this megaurbanization, and this article focuses on one aspect of environmental degradation, air pollution. The problem is relatively recent. In 1900 the city had approximately one-half million residents; by 1950, it had grown sixfold and was expanding rapidly. The pattern is consistent with a core-periphery dichotomy common in less-developed countries that has become known as the Mexican model of development (Ezcurra 1990; Mumme 1991). In this scheme the primary node wields disproportionate political and economic power that enables it to monopolize scarce resources. Second-order cities and rural regions lack crucial capital investments, a situation that results in a developmental gap that impels migration from the hinterlands. Subsequent political and resource allocations favor the already-dominant urban core and trigger additional cycles of migration and investment. Thus, even though one of four Mexicans already lives in Mexico City, the political, social, and economic primacy of this sprawling urban center provokes continued growth. With an estimated twenty-two million residents and a 4 percent growth rate, the urban area will soon add a million new residents each year and is projected to reach a population of thirty-three million by the end of the twentieth century (Ezcurra 1990, 585). Geographical setting compounds the effect of population. Built on the ruins of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, Mexico City was founded on a small island in one of five large, interconnected lakes. The elevated, mountain-rimmed site of the city initially proved fortuitous. The lakes provided transportation, water, and food; local forests supplied fuel and building materials; from the surrounding slopes came a variety of indigenous foodstuffs and European crops and livestock. Additionally, the climate of the highland site was free from most lowland tropical diseases. Still, the physical environment of the basin deteriorated. City-dwelling Spaniards and an expanding Mestizo population cut forests for fuel and building materials. The lakes ceased to be viewed as assets; instead, they were associated with devastating floods and were viewed as obstacles to urban expansion. For the next three hundred fifty years Mexico City grew slowly. In the 1940s, the Mexican development model designated the city as the industrial focus of Mexico. Despite an interior location and meager natural resources, industries and population in the city expanded markedly. With growth came new and in some cases unique environmental issues. Demand for water produced the first widely observed environmental dilemma. Overpumping of aquifers caused surface subsidence in much of the downtown. By 1950 industrial and vehicular emissions limited the accustomed views of nearby snow-capped volcanoes. Two decades passed, however, before deteriorating air quality prompted systematic measurement of the problem (Bravo 1987; de Bauer and Krupa 1990). Another decade lapsed before environmental legislation was earnestly enforced. Until recently, the priorities for many Mexico City residents were employment and improved living standards; public policy generally mirrored this concern. To some extent, environmental concerns are still submerged by matters of day-to-day existence. But serious questions are increasingly raised about the Mexican capital's environmental future. The article examines air pollution in the Valley of Mexico from a geographical perspective and explores the human and governmental response to that problem. …


On July 20, 1917, Russia became the world's first major power to grant women the right to vote and hold public office. Yet in the wake of the October Revolution later that year, the foundational organizations and individuals who pioneered the suffragist cause were all but erased from Russian history. The women's movement, when mentioned at all, is portrayed as meaningless to proletariat and peasant women, based in elitist and bourgeoisie culture of the tsarist era, and counter to socialist ideology. In this groundbreaking book, Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild reveals that Russian feminists in fact appealed to all classes and were an integral force for revolution and social change, particularly during the monumental uprisings of 1905-1917. Ruthchild offers a telling examination of the dynamics present in imperialist Russia that fostered a growing feminist movement. Based upon extensive archival research in six countries, she analyzes the backgrounds, motivations, methods, activism, and organizational networks of early Russian feminists, revealing the foundations of a powerful feminist intelligentsia that came to challenge, and eventually bring down, the patriarchal tsarist regime. Ruthchild profiles the individual women (and a few men) who were vital to the feminist struggle, as well as the major conferences, publications, and organizations that promoted the cause. She documents political party debates on the acceptance of women's suffrage and rights, and follows each party's attempt to woo feminist constituencies despite their fear of women gaining too much political power. Ruthchild also compares and contrasts the Russian movement to those in Britain, China, Germany, France, and the United States. "Equality and Revolution" offers an original and revisionist study of the struggle for women's political rights in late imperial Russia, and presents a significant reinterpretation of a decisive period of Russian - and world - history.


Graph kernels have emerged as a powerful tool for graph comparison. Most existing graph kernels focus on local properties of graphs and ignore global structure. In this paper, we compare graphs based on their global properties as these are captured by the eigenvectors of their adjacency matrices. We present two algorithms for both labeled and unlabeled graph comparison. These algorithms represent each graph as a set of vectors corresponding to the embeddings of its vertices. The similarity between two graphs is then determined using the Earth Mover's Distance metric. These similarities do not yield a positive semidefinite matrix. To address for this, we employ an algorithm for SVM classification using indefinite kernels. We also present a graph kernel based on the Pyramid Match kernel that finds an approximate correspondence between the sets of vectors of the two graphs. We further improve the proposed kernel using the Weisfeiler-Lehman framework. We evaluate the proposed methods on several benchmark datasets for graph classification and compare their performance to state-of-the-art graph kernels. In most cases, the proposed algorithms outperform the competing methods, while their time complexity remains very attractive.


Invoking the framework of religion and politics, this article contrasts the explicitly Judaic dimension to the 2009 elections in Israel with the implicitly Muslim one in 2007 in Nigeria. It also highlights the organizational, political, and theological similarities between fundamentalist (qua haredi) Judaism in Israel and fundamentalist (qua Sufi) Islam in Nigeria. Despite the obvious dissimilarities between Israel and Nigeria in terms of demography, standard of living, and dominant religion, both are relatively young democracies in which religious belief, practice and identification occupy key roles in their respective political behaviour and electoral politics. Both polities have also experienced increasing politicization of religion since independence. Proponents of legislating sharia in Nigeria and halacha in Israel unwittingly share compatible policies. Similarities in the organization, leadership, and political functionality of ultra-Orthodox and Sufi religious brotherhoods in the Jewish state and northern Nigeria transcend creedal differences.


Studies of cortical neurons in monkeys performing short-term memory tasks have shown that information about a stimulus can be maintained by persistent neuron firing for periods of many seconds after removal of the stimulus. The mechanism by which this sustained activity is initiated and maintained is unknown. In this article we present a spiking neural network model of short-term memory and use it to investigate the hypothesis that recurrent, or "re-entrant," networks with constant connection strengths are sufficient to store graded information temporarily. The synaptic weights that enable the network to mimic the input-output characteristics of an active memory module are computed using an optimization procedure for recurrent networks with non-spiking neurons. This network is then transformed into one with spiking neurons by interpreting the continuous output values of the nonspiking model neurons as spiking probabilities. The behavior of the model neurons in this spiking network is compared with that of 179 single units previously recorded in monkey inferotemporal (IT) cortex during the performance of a short-term memory task. The spiking patterns of almost every model neuron are found to resemble closely those of IT neurons. About 40% of the IT neuron firing patterns are also found to be of the same types as those of model neurons. A property of the spiking model is that the neurons cannot maintain precise graded activity levels indefinitely, but eventually relax to one of a few constant activities called fixed-point attractors. The noise introduced into the model by the randomness of spiking causes the network to jump between these attractors. This switching between attractor states generates spike trains with a characteristic statistical temporal structure. We found evidence for the same kind of structure in the spike trains from about half of the IT neurons in our test set. These results show that the behavior of many real cortical memory neurons is consistent with an active storage mechanism based on recurrent activity in networks with fixed synaptic strengths.


A composition is a sequence of positive integers, called parts, having a fixed sum. By an m-congruence succession, we will mean a pair of adjacent parts x and y within a composition such that x=y(modm). Here, we consider the problem of counting the compositions of size n according to the number of m-congruence successions, extending recent results concerning successions on subsets and permutations. A general formula is obtained, which reduces in the limiting case to the known generating function formula for the number of Carlitz compositions. Special attention is paid to the case m=2, where further enumerative results may be obtained by means of combinatorial arguments. Finally, an asymptotic estimate is provided for the number of compositions of size n having no m-congruence successions.


Background The first cause of mortality in patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) is cardiovascular disease (CVD). Accelerated atherosclerosis that occurs in SLE is considered one of the fundamental mechanisms of the increase of cardiovascular mortality in this group of patients. Among the factors that contribute to the accelerated atherosclerosis process, we include the classical CVD risk factors, as well as the inflammatory and specific SLE factors. Objectives To assess the CVR in SLE patients and the possibility of modifying it based on the accumulative damage and the disease activity. Methods Cross-sectional prospective study of SLE patients according to the SLICC-2012 criteria, from the Rheumatology Service of Arnau de Vilanova Hospital and La Fe Hospital. All patients had a complete blood-test with autoimmunity markers, and clinical, biometrics and treatment data were collected. Biostatistical analysis was performed with the R software version 3.2.3. Results 140 patients were evaluated; (95% women) with 33.39±13.63 year-old average at the diagnosis time with a 10.05±11.42 year-evolution of SLE. 15% of patients had had some kind of CVD; in them, we observe an increase of the classical cardiovascular risk factors comparing to the group who hadn't had any CVD manifestation. We found a statistically significant association between high scores in the SLICC-ACR index (P<0.001), dyslipemia (P=0.04), diabetes (P=0.02) and the presence of CVD in our patients. In addition, though it didn't get statistical significance, we observed a tendency to the association between CVD with the presence of hypertension, high levels of LDL-cholesterol and high scores in the SELENA-SLEDAI activity index. Finally, and also without statistical significance, we observed a marked difference between levels of IgM anticardiolipin and IgM beta2-glicoprotein, finding higher levels in the group of patients that had suffered any manifestation of CVD. Conclusions The CVD rate among our group of patients is 15%, clearly higher than the general Spanish population (8.53%). We confirm the weight of classical cardiovascular risk factors as a trigger of CVD in SLE; however, the accumulative damage of the disease calculated with the SLIC-ACR index has a determinant paper in the cardiovascular risk of our patients. Therefor it could be proposed as an additional factor of cardiovascular risk in SLE patients. On the other hand, the disease activity calculated with the SELENA-SLEDAI index seems to have a tendency of correlation between higher scores and the presence of CVD, though the years of disease evolution don't seem to influence in CVD. Nevertheless, more independent studies are needed to confirm this hypothesis. Disclosure of Interest None declared


For more than three centuries the collections of the Ashmolean Museum have occupied a position of primary importance in the history of collecting in Great Britain and an honourable position in the development of museums on a European scale. Many collection catalogues (especially those of the natural sciences), compiled by curators over the past two or three hundred years, have never before been published. This volume - a further volume, designated Part II is to follow - starts to bring these collections to a wider audience. Their independent importance is considerable, for they provide not only a record through time of the fluctuating content of the Ashmolean but also an index of the changing preoccupations of the collectors and donors who progressively enriched the museum, of the curators who tended it, and of the wider community of scholars for whom the collections represented a fundamental resource.


Abstract Studies of media and ecology are often reduced to questions of representation: understanding the cultural mediation of nature means looking to screen based content. However, given recent work in materialist media studies from Doug Kahn, Lisa Parks and Eugene Thacker in particular, a new possibility comes into view. We now know that before nature is mediated through culture, it is often passed through layers of technology. With that in mind, this paper offers a radical rethinking of the technological mediation of the ecological. Through a study of the technical apparatus as an active system of knowledge, two different sections of the paper will illustrate the 'tool-kit' that makes possible a technical study of ecology. The first looks to historical developments of hardware such as the telegraph, radio, and satellites to pinpoint examples where media technology has been used to pick up signals from the natural world. Framed by the philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk, it explores the way nature has been given form through its transduction into communication systems. The second section of this paper, addressing ecology on a different register, looks past the surface of digital media to the manner in which ecologies are mediated via computer code. In this section, by conducting a reverse-engineering of the software based eco-media videogame Mountain (O'Reilly, 2014), we encounter the ecological structure of code systems which could be applied to other data visualisation systems. These two methods of analysis suggest the possibilities of a technologically focused study of eco-media: in coming to grips with both global and internal ecologies through what Sloterdijk terms 'air conditioning' systems - the material processes that provide the atmosphere of everyday life - we investigate the possibilities for innovative, post-human, approaches to a natural world entwined with media and technology.


Upper Cretaceous strata exposed in the Book Cliffs of east–central Utah are widely used as an archetype for the sequence stratigraphy of marginal-marine and shallow-marine deposits. Their stratal architectures are classically interpreted in terms of accommodation controls that were external to the sediment routing system (allogenic), and that forced the formation of flooding surfaces, sequence boundaries, and parasequence and parasequence-set stacking patterns. Processes internal to the sediment routing system (autogenic) and allogenic sediment supply controls provide alternatives that can plausibly explain aspects of the stratal architecture, including the following: (1) switching of wave-dominated delta lobes, expressed by the internal architecture of parasequences; (2) river avulsion, expressed by the internal architecture of multistorey fluvial sandbodies and related deposits; (3) avulsion-generated clustering of fluvial sandbodies in delta plain strata; (4) 'autoretreat' owing to increasing sediment storage on the delta plain as it lengthened during progradation, expressed by progradational-to-aggradational stacking of parasequences; (5) sediment supply control on the stacking of, and sediment grain-size fractionation within, parasequence sets. The various potential allogenic controls and autogenic processes are combined to form a sequence stratigraphic solution set. This approach avoids anchoring of sequence stratigraphic interpretations on a specific control and acknowledges the non-unique origin of stratal architectures.


This paper presents a machine learning approach to predict the amount of compute memory needed by jobs which are submitted to Load Sharing Facility (LSF® ) with a high level of accuracy. LSF® is the compute resource manager and job scheduler for Qualcomm chip design process. It schedules the jobs based on available resources: CPU, memory, storage, and software licenses. Memory is one of the key resources and its proper utilization leads to a substantial improvement in saving machine resources which in turn results in a significant reduction in overall job pending time. In addition, efficient memory utilization helps to reduce the operations cost by decreasing the number of servers needed for the end-to-end design process. In this paper, we explored a suite of statistical and machine learning techniques to develop a Compute Memory Recommender System for the Qualcomm chip design process with over 90% accuracy in predicting the amount of memory a job needs. Moreover, it demonstrates the potential to significantly reduce job pending time.


In a recent article in the University of Chicago Law Review, Professors Ian Ayres and Katharine Baker propose the crime of "reckless sexual conduct," criminalizing unprotected first-encounter sexual intercourse. The goals of this proposal are to combat the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases by requiring condom use and to reduce acquaintance rape by "forcing" communication. While the goals are admirable, the proposal is deeply flawed. As public health legislation, it is overinclusive, thereby punishing the morally innocent, and its conception of consent as an affirmative defense fundamentally misunderstands criminal responsibility. As rape reform, which is arguably the true aim of the statute, the proposal is morally and constitutionally impermissible: it punishes the innocent and improperly allocates the burden of proving consent to the defendant. The proposed statute also distracts from rape reform by attempting to circumvent the critical normative questions about consent and offering a second-best solution in consent's place. Finally, the compromise verdicts that the authors seek, offered as a solution to the "sticky norms" problem, may ultimately undermine the seriousness of the very rapes the authors hope to prevent.


Rolling a ball on a plane is a standard example of nonholonomy reported in many textbooks, and the problem is also well understood for any smooth deformation of the surfaces. For nonsmoothly deformed surfaces, however, much less is known. Although it may seem intuitive that nonholonomy is conserved (think e.g. to polyhedral approximations of smooth surfaces), current definitions of "nonholonomy" are inherently referred to systems described by ordinary differential equations, and are thus inapplicable to such systems. In this paper, we study the set of positions and orientations that a polyhedral part can reach by rolling on a plane through sequences of adjacent faces. We provide a description of such reachable set, discuss conditions under which the set is dense, or discrete, or has a compound structure, and provide a method for steering the system to a desired reachable configuration, robustly with respect to model uncertainties. Based on ideas and concepts encountered in this case study, and in some other examples we provide, we turn back to the most general aspects of the problem and investigate the possible generalization of the notion of (kinematic) nonholonomy to nonsmooth, discrete, and hybrid dynamical systems. To capture the essence of phenomena commonly regarded as "nonholonomic," at least two irreducible concepts are to be defined, of "internal" and "external" nonholonomy, which may coexist in the same system. These definitions are instantiated by examples.


Chicory (Cichorium intybus L. var sativum Bisch.), a relatively new high-value crop in Chile, was introduced for commercial production of inulin. Inulins are polysaccharides extracted from chicory tap roots that are used in processed foods because of their beneficial gastrointestinal properties. Approximately 3,000 ha of chicory are grown for local processing in the BioBio Region near Chillan in south central Chile. Recently, a severe rot of 1 to 3% of mature roots in the field and after harvest has been observed in most fields, which caused yield and quality losses. Typical symptoms include a brown discoloration and a soft, watery decay of the root. Tissue pieces from symptomatic roots were placed on water agar and clarified V8 juice agar medium amended with antibiotics (1) for isolation of the causal pathogen. A Phytopthora sp. had been consistently isolated from root lesions, and axenic cultures were obtained using single-hypha transfers. The species was provisionally identified as Phytopthora cryptogea (Pethybridge and Lafferty, 1919) on the basis of morphological and cultural characteristics (1). Mycelia grew between 5 and 30°C with optimal growth at 20 to 25°C and no growth at 35°C. All isolates produced hyphal swellings and nonpapillate, persistent, internally proliferating, and ovoid to obpyriform sporangia with mean dimensions of 45 × 31 μm in sterile soil extract. The isolates were of A1 mating type because they produced oospores only when paired with reference isolates of P. cinnamomi A2 on clarified V8 juice agar amended with thiamine, tryptophan, and β-sitosterol (1) after 20 days at 20°C in the dark. On the basis of morphological and sequence data from cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 and 2, internal transcribed spacer 2, and β-tubulin (GenBank Accession Nos. JQ037796 to JQ037798, respectively), the pathogen was identified as P. cryptogea. Pathogenicity tests were conducted using three isolates of P. cryptogea by placing a 7-mm-diameter disk from a 1-week-old V8 agar culture on 10 wounded and nonwounded healthy chicory roots (2). Control roots were mock inoculated with agar plugs. The inoculated roots were incubated at 20°C in a moist chamber. Root rot symptoms, identical to those observed both in field and storage, developed after 4 to 6 days only on wounded sites inoculated with the pathogen, and P. cryptogea was reisolated from these inoculated plants. Mock-inoculated roots remained healthy. This experiment was completed twice and similar results were obtained. To our knowledge, this is the first report of Phytophthora root rot of chicory caused by P. cryptogea in Chile. References: (1) D. C. Erwin and O. K. Ribeiro. Phytophthora Diseases Worldwide. The American Phytopathological Society, St. Paul, MN, 1996. (2) M. E. Stanghellini and W. C. Kronland. Plant Dis. 66:262, 1982.


BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES
Shared decision making in patients with glomerular disease remains challenging because outcomes important to patients remain largely unknown. We aimed to identify and prioritize outcomes important to patients and caregivers and to describe reasons for their choices.

DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS
We purposively sampled adult patients with glomerular disease and their caregivers from Australia, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Participants identified, discussed, and ranked outcomes in focus groups using the nominal group technique; a relative importance score (between zero and one) was calculated. Qualitative data were analyzed thematically.

RESULTS
Across 16 focus groups, 134 participants (range, 19-85 years old; 51% women), including 101 patients and 33 caregivers, identified 58 outcomes. The ten highest-ranked outcomes were kidney function (importance score of 0.42), mortality (0.29), need for dialysis or transplant (0.22), life participation (0.18), fatigue (0.17), anxiety (0.13), family impact (0.12), infection and immunity (0.12), ability to work (0.11), and BP (0.11). Three themes explained the reasons for these rankings: constraining day-to-day experience, impaired agency and control over health, and threats to future health and family.

CONCLUSIONS
Patients with glomerular disease and their caregivers highly prioritize kidney health and survival, but they also prioritize life participation, fatigue, anxiety, and family impact.


Second near-infrared (NIR-II) window responsive phototheranostic agents have a precise spatiotemporal potential for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. In this study, a full-spectrum responsive ZrO2-based phototheranostic agent was found to achieve NIR-II photoacoustic (PA) imaging-guided tumour-targeting phototherapy. Initially, the ZrO2-based phototheranostic agent was fabricated through NaBH4 reduction to form boron-doped oxygen-deficient zirconia (ZrO2-x-B), an amino-functionalised SiO2 shell and a further covalent connection with hyaluronic acid (HA), namely, ZrO2-x-B@SiO2-HA. In the ZrO2-x-B@SiO2-HA system, the oxygen vacancy and boron doping resulted in full-spectrum absorption, enabling a high NIR-II photothermal conversion, high-resolution PA imaging ability and a remarkable production of reactive oxygen species (ROS). The surface modification of HA provided ZrO2-x-B@SiO2-HA with water dispersibility and a targeting capability for CD44 overexpressed cancer cells. Furthermore, in vitro and in vivo experiments showed that NIR-II activated ZrO2-x-B@SiO2-HA had a targeted photothermal/photodynamic effect for cancer elimination under the real-time guidance of NIR-II PAs. Hence, ZrO2-x-B@SiO2-HA displays a precise NIR-II radiation-activated phototheranostic potential for PA imaging-guided cancer-targeting photothermal/photodynamic therapy.


The disadvantages experienced by adult persons with disabilities are well documented. However, limited evidence is available on the extent of differences in comparison with the non-disabled population. In this study, selected indicators of social status and mental wellbeing derived from past research, were used with national samples of adult persons in Ireland with a disability (n = 440) and without a disability (n = 880) recruited through household quota sampling. In addition, comparisons were drawn with equivalent data derived from a contemporaneous national census. Although many of the differences were statistically significant, the effect sizes were mostly medium to low. Moreover, when the inter-relationships among the various indicators was taken into account using Discriminant Analysis, persons with disabilities were less likely to be employed; they reported lower levels of social engagement and had poorer emotional wellbeing. They were also older, more likely to be single and have no children. The study illustrates the potential of using comparative data to monitor the impact of national actions taken to reduce the inequalities experienced by persons with disability as well as highlighting the arenas into which professional supports need to be focused.


Sustainability has been a primary concern for the forestry professionals. This paper is concerned with the continuing evolution of approaches to monitor sustainable forest management. It summarises the existing knowledge base and primary techniques and strategies for achieving socially and environmentally acceptable SFM in various forest formations.  Service innovation is one means for the improved monitoring of SFM through the introduction of scientifically based criteria and indicators. This set has been developed on the basis of Dry Forest Asia Initiative. In addition, their implementation has played a key role in interactions with local beneficiaries. Yet, research on the link between service innovation and natural resource management is scant. The paper identifies innovation orientation, external partner collaboration, and information capability as operant resources along with the operand resources captured under the 8 criteria and their respective field level indicators. These antecedents are analyzed to know impact of overall service innovation on social economic development of the area. Keywords: sustainable forest management, service innovation, C&I, community participation


Background A growing number of studies have sought to examine the health associations of workplace social capital; however, evidence of associations with overweight is sparse. We examined the association between individual perceptions of workplace social capital and overweight among Japanese male and female employees. Methodology/Principal Findings We conducted a cross-sectional survey among full-time employees at a company in Osaka prefecture in February 2012. We used an 8-item measure to assess overall and sub-dimensions of workplace social capital, divided into tertiles. Of 1050 employees, 849 responded, and 750 (624 men and 126 women) could be linked to annual health check-up data in the analysis. Binomial logistic regression models were used to calculate odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals for overweight (body mass index: ≥25 kg/m2, calculated from measured weight and height) separately for men and women. The prevalence of overweight was 24.5% among men and 14.3% among women. Among men, low levels of bonding and linking social capital in the workplace were associated with a nearly 2-fold risk of overweight compared to high corresponding dimensions of social capital when adjusted for age, sleep hours, physiological distress, and lifestyle. In contrast, among women we found lower overall and linking social capital to be associated with lower odds for overweight even after covariate adjustment. Subsequently, we used multinomial logistic regression analyses to assess the relationships between a 1 standard deviation (SD) decrease in mean social capital and odds of underweight/overweight relative to normal weight. Among men, a 1-SD decrease in overall, bonding, and linking social capital was significantly associated with higher odds of overweight, but not with underweight. Among women, no significant associations were found for either overweight or underweight. Conclusions/Significance We found opposite gender relationships between perceived low linking workplace social capital and overweight among Japanese employees.


This essay examines the role played by George Beckford in grappling critically with the complicated legacy of the plantation system. It focuses on the transition from his role in the New World group to his participation in the Abeng newspaper group in Jamaica, in 1969. The essay argues that it was Beckford's participation in the Abeng group that helped to pave the way for his expanded concept of dispossession as well as his concept of the culture of dread. The essay examines how this twin set of concepts displaced the dominant New World theoretical model of dependency.


Halicephalobus gingivalis infects equines and humans and is reported to be usually fatal in equines. Generally, a diffuse granulomatous inflammation is seen with neurological signs. The authors here present the case of an infected mare that had to be euthanased due to extensive mandible osteolysis, with only bony remnants left. The nematode was clearly identified on histological kidney samples. Interestingly, the affected mare did not present any neurological or renal signs. The only sign noticed was severe mandible deformation, which led to the original referral for suspected mandible fracture. No previous reports describe such a massive mandible osteolysis provoked by this nematode.


Leukemia is defined as an aberrant hyper-proliferation of immature blood cells that do not form solid tumor masses (i.e., liquid cancer). Usually, leukemia could be either of the myeloid or lymphoid lineages, and is classified as acute or chronic in nature. Chronic leukemias tend to have more mature cells and are rare in pediatric patients. Acute leukemias, on the other hand, are typically less mature and commonly occur in patients of all ages and are potentially rapidly fatal if not readily treated. The acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common childhood malignancy. Similar to AML, and in some cases, on the same disease spectrum, are the myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). The present review is focused on the recent perspectives of pediatric leukemia.


By the time of his death in 323 B.C., Alexander III of Macedonia had built an empire that stretched from the eastern Mediterranean coast through Asia Minor and into the Indus valley. Even before his sudden death, Alexander had achieved mythical status throughout his kingdom, and in the centuries that followed his life became the subject of countless chronicles and biographies. N. G. L. Hammond, the foremost expert on ancient Macedonian history, here presents a new account of Alexander's fabled career. Based on a thorough analysis of the ancient sources and enriched by a lifetime of research, Hammond's narrative pronounces the Macedonian conqueror a man truly deserving of the title Alexander the Great. According to Hammond, Alexander was a visionary statesman and general, the force behind a kingdom which rose above racism and nationalism to enjoy peace and prosperity. His intellect and charismatic personality, which earned him the respect, admiration, and devotion of his subjects, also help explain Alexander's endurance as a source of fascination into the present day.


Biopolymers as chitosan which is one of the emerging sorption material for the removal of metal ions was applied to determine germanium(IV), even at low concentrations. A selective, sensitive and rapid method was described for preconcentrative determination of Ge(IV) using the synthesized 2-amino-4-(m-tolyazo)pyridine-3-ol (ATAP), which was chemically immobilized on chitosan. The sorbent synthesized material was selective to Ge(IV) within a best response time of 10 min. The procedure was selective in presence of other diverse anions and cations. Under the optimum experimental conditions, calibration plots were linear over the concentration range of 2.5 to 75 ng mL−1 of Ge(IV). The obtained results are 100 times lower than by the direct determination of Ge(IV) by FAAS. The developed method is repeatable with a relative standard deviation of 2.55%. The developed sorbent was applied successfully to determine Ge(IV) in environmental samples. Unlike most preconcentration methods, the present enrichment work allowed for a rapid and reliable determination of Ge(IV) in real water and soil samples by the simple, rapid and routinely available spectrophotometric technique.


This article has examined more than half a century of operation of provincial and territorial hate speech laws in Canada. This examination has confirmed that free speech sensitivity has long been an integral and enduring feature of the administration and interpretation of legislative regimes for the regulation of hate speech—a finding that should come as a shock to no-one. What is surprising is the way in which free speech sensitivity has impacted on the operation of hate speech laws, and the effects of that influence on the quality of the protection provided to victims by existing provincial and territorial laws.... One of the chief objectives of hate speech prohibitions in provincial and territorial human rights statutes is to draw a line between free speech which must be protected (or at least tolerated), and hate speech which must be outlawed and sanctioned because of its harmful effects. Such line-drawing exercises are never simple and almost always controversial. However, the extent of the uncertainty and controversy has been exacerbated in Canada by the multi-layered influences of free speech sensitivity described above, as well as ongoing differences amongst decisionmakers regarding the legitimate scope of hate speech prohibitions. The net result is that the contours of unlawful hate speech in Canada are anything but sharp. On the contrary, the boundary between free speech and hate speech remains contested and fluid.


Previous research indicates that the reward positivity (RewP), an electrophysiological correlate of sensitivity and biases towards rewarding stimuli, is modulated by affective and motivational variables. Studies have provided evidence that states and traits associated with negative affect and reduced approach motivation are correlated with smaller RewP amplitudes. However, the possible confound of affective valence and motivational direction was not addressed in these studies. In the present study, we examined if anger, an emotion associated with negative affect and increased approach motivation, would affect RewP amplitude. We also investigated if RewP amplitude was related to the motivational properties of reward stimuli. One hundred male participants completed two emotion inductions intended to elicit feelings of either neutrality or anger. Each was followed by a simple gambling task, in which correct choices were followed by images of women in lingerie or swimwear. Although the RewP was elicited following each induction, there was no difference in amplitude between the neutral and anger induction. However, RewP amplitude was positively correlated with how much participants liked the reward stimuli, and this correlation was statistically larger following the anger induction. These results support a motivational interpretation for the differences in RewP amplitude reported in previous studies, suggesting that motivational direction and intensity, rather than affective valence, underlie differences in RewP amplitude. Moreover, the RewP appears to be affected by interactions between motivational state and the motivational value of reward stimuli.


To cite: Masson L, Arnold KB, Little F, et al. Sex Transm Infect 2016;92: 186–193. ABSTRACT Background Untreated sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and bacterial vaginosis (BV) cause genital inflammation and increase the risk of HIV infection. WHO-recommended syndromic STI and BV management is severely limited as many women with asymptomatic infections go untreated. The purpose of this crosssectional study was to evaluate genital cytokine profiles as a biomarker of STIs and BV to identify women with asymptomatic, treatable infections. Methods Concentrations of 42 cytokines in cervicovaginal lavages from 227 HIV-uninfected women were measured using Luminex. All women were screened for BV by microscopy and STIs using molecular assays. Multivariate analyses were used to identify cytokine profiles associated with STIs/BV. Results A multivariate profile of seven cytokines (interleukin (IL)-1α, IL-1β, tumour necrosis factor-β, IL-4, fractalkine, macrophage-derived chemokine, and interferon-γ) most accurately predicted the presence of a treatable genital condition, with 77% classification accuracy and 75% cross-validation accuracy (sensitivity 72%; specificity 81%, positive predictive value (PPV) 86%, negative predictive value (NPV) 64%). Concomitant increased IL-1β and decreased IP-10 concentrations predicted the presence of a treatable genital condition without a substantial reduction in predictive value (sensitivity 77%, specificity 72%, PPV 82% and NPV 65%), correctly classifying 75% of the women. This approach performed substantially better than clinical signs (sensitivity 19%, specificity 92%, PPV 79% and NPV 40%). Conclusions Supplementing syndromic management with an assessment of IL-1β and IP-10 as biomarkers of genital inflammation may improve STI/BV management for women, enabling more effective treatment of asymptomatic infections and potentially reducing their risk of HIV infection.


Although the Jews initially came to Iran as a foreign and non-Iranian group, they soon settled down and began a long process of cultural and social interaction with other groups in the Iranian plateau. Part of the history of this process, which has lasted nearly three thousand years, has been told in a number of Jewish documents, texts, memoirs and literary works which have been largely influenced by the Iranian culture.
The article begins by reviewing a number of Biblical texts which shed some light not only on the ancient history of Iran, its kings and life in the royal courts but also on the life style of the jewish communities and their interrelationship with the non-Jewish communities. The bulk of the article, however, discusses a dozen Jewish memoirs and autobiographies that were written during the Safavid, Afshar, Qajar or Pahlavi periods.
Numerous events and episodes described in these sources, which the author believes have been largely ignored by the Iranian historiographers, draw a detailed picture of the social life of the jewish communities in Iran, particularly in Kashan, Herat and Mashhad and describe their inter-ethnic relations in various periods of Iranian history. Furthermore, these sources provide vivid accounts of forced conversion of Jews, characteristics and policies of a number of powerful Iranian notables as well as certain economic features of the late Safavid period.
According to the author, the periods where Jewish communities in Iran flourished and their members could play a significant role particularly in the social, cultural and educational life of the country coincided with the existence of relatively tolerant political systems. Conversely, whenever the reins of government were controlled by the dominant religion, conducive to the recurrence of religious intolerance and inter-sectarian tensions, the Jewish community in Iran was forced into seclusion and inertia.


During the last two decades there has been a proliferation of studies evaluating the psychophysical and neural attributes of heat-induced pain. Experiments using radiant and contact heat-induced pain have produced different observations thereby broadening our appreciation of the importance of acknowledging how a noxious heat stimulus is delivered; moreover manipulations of stimulus parameters have now provided a foundation for understanding the underlying neural mechanisms of heat-induced pain and their biological significance. The psychophysical attributes of heat-induced pain include highly reliable thresholds for most body regions, minimal adaptation to maintained noxious stimuli, an exquisite sensitivity to small changes in stimulus intensity, slow temporal summation for some types of heat-induced pain (i.e., second pain) but not for others (i.e., first pain), spatial summation---especially for suprathreshold noxious temperatures---and the perceived spread of pain well beyond the actual body area stimulated (i.e., radiation). The present body of information indicates that the pain system is optimally adapted for conveying precise information about intensity, and is less concerned with other stimulus features, such as spatial patterns or boundaries.


We compare the most common methods for selling a company or other asset when participation is costly: a simple simultaneous auction, and a sequential process in which potential buyers decide in turn whether or not to enter the bidding. The sequential process is always more efficient. But pre-emptive bids transfer surplus from the seller to buyers. Because the auction is more conducive to entry - precisely because of its inefficiency - it usually generates higher expected revenue. We also discuss the effects of lock-ups, matching rights, break-up fees (as in takeover battles), entry subsidies, etc.


Increasingly, conservation efforts are being extended towards agricultural and pastoral areas outside large reserves. This indicates a change from the view of the landscape as islands of native habitat in a hostile matrix, to one in which the landscape is regarded as a patchwork of differing levels of disturbance. This latter view considers the whole of the landscape as the biological resource. These trends are discussed in relation to land bird species near Armidale on the New England Tablelands, north-east New South Wales, Australia. We assess the conservation status of 137 species of land birds. Of these, six species are locally extinct, 18 are thought to be declining and 35 are vulnerable due to their dependence on healthy woodland. Only 33 species are abundant and widely distributed on the Tablelands. The remaining 45 species tend to be habitat specialists that are marginal to the Armidale Plateau, and may never have been common in the study area. Most of the species that are dependent on large areas of continuous woodland (>400 ha) are in this last group, and it is demonstrated that an emphasis on these species may result in a conservation strategy that is inappropriate for most of the land birds in the region. Indeed, this could result in the extinction of species that at present are secure. An alternative strategy, specific to areas outside large reserves, is proposed that aims to maintain local species richness. In this management plan, priority is given to core species that are tolerant of intermediate levels of habitat fragmentation.


We study the role of information and confidence in the spread of financial shocks through interbank markets. Confidence in financial institutions has only recently been introduced in computational models studying the stability of financial networks (Arinaminpathy, Kapadia, & May, 2012). However, so far it has been assumed that all agents have complete information about the system. Here we add realism to a model of interbank markets by introducing uncertainty into what banks know about other banks. In our model, information spreads through the lending network and the quality of information depends on the proximity of the information source. Instead of having complete information, banks receive information that is delayed, noisy, or local. This affects their confidence and the resulting lending decisions. We show that introducing uncertainty leads to a substantial increase in the probability of whole-system collapse after an idiosyncratic bank failure. In contrast, when the same shock is distributed among multiple smaller banks, uncertainty mitigates the impact of the shock. The consequences of a large bank's failure are the most difficult to predict. Our study demonstrates the need for a better understanding of the role of information asymmetries in systemic risk in financial networks.


Frontline workers play a crucial role in implementing activation policies. Nevertheless, research on what competencies are required for activation work is limited. We explored activation competency based on a survey of 1,735 frontline workers in the Norwegian labour and welfare administration. Factor analysis revealed two distinct underlying dimensions in activation competency: market competency and user‐oriented competency. We found that the social workers in the study viewed themselves as having significantly less market competency and slightly more user‐oriented competency than non‐social workers have, but the differences were small. The results also indicate that these effects are partially mediated by attitudes towards conditionality. The results give reason to treat activation competencies as twofold and raise the question of whether social work education improves frontline workers' competency in activation work compared with frontline workers with other educational backgrounds.


This tutorial describes TuLiP, the Temporal Logic Planning toolbox, a collection of tools for designing controllers for hybrid systems from specifications in temporal logic. The tools support a workflow that starts from a description of desired behavior, and of the system to be controlled. The system can have discrete state, or be a hybrid dynamical system with a mixed discrete and continuous state space. The desired behavior can be represented with temporal logic and discrete transition systems. The system description can include uncontrollable variables that take discrete or continuous values, and represent disturbances and other environmental factors that affect the dynamics, as well as communication signals that affect controller decisions. A control design problem is solved in phases that involve abstraction, discrete synthesis, and continuous feedback control. Abstraction yields a discrete description of system dynamics in logic. For piecewise affine dynamical systems, this abstraction is constructed automatically, guided by the geometry of the dynamics and under logical constraints from the specification. The resulting logic formulae describe admissible discrete behaviors that capture both controlled and environment variables. The discrete description resulting from abstraction is then conjoined with the desired logic specification. To find a controller, the toolbox solves a game of infinite duration. Existence of a discrete (winning) strategy for the controlled variables in this game is a proof certificate for the existence of a controller for the original problem, which guarantees satisfaction of the specification. This discrete strategy, concretized by using continuous controllers, yields a feedback controller for the original hybrid system. The toolbox frontend is written in Python, with backends in C, Python, and Cython. The tutorial starts with an overview of the theory behind TuLiP, and of its software architecture, organized into specification frontends and backends that implement algorithms for abstraction, solving games, and interfaces to other tools. Then, the main elements for writing a specification for input to TuLiP are introduced. These include logic formulae, discrete transition systems annotated with predicates, and hybrid dynamical systems, with linear or piecewise affine continuous dynamics. The working principles of the algorithms for predicate abstraction and discrete game solving using nested fixpoints are explained, by following the input specification through the various transformations that compile it to a symbolic representation that scales well to solving large games. The tutorial concludes with several design examples that demonstrate the toolbox's capabilities.


In conversations between native and nonnative speakers, problems in understanding may occur quite frequently. If one of the speakers tries to repair the trouble, negotiation of meaning will take place. This article describes the roles native and nonnative speakers of Dutch play in negotiating meaning in informal and institutional conversations and the influence of language proficiency and setting on the role distribution. Interaction data were used from a large longitudinal adult second language acquisition project (Perdue, 1993a/b). The relative distribution of the three main negotiation moves (trouble indicators, trouble clarifications and confirmation checks) showed that asymmetry occurs in both types of conversation at all three moments of measurement indicating that language proficiency is indeed a factor causing asymmetry (c.f. Deen, 1997). The nonnative speaker and the native speaker held complementary roles, the former mainly indicating trouble and the latter clarifying and checking. The influence of setting on the asymmetry was less clear because there was little difference between the two settings. The semi-authenticity of the data may partly explain this outcome. Furthermore, it could be shown that the use of confirmation checks by the native speaker could be an indicator of dominance but only when there is competition between the two speakers.