»Das qualitative Experiment als partizipative Methode in der Innovationsforschung«. The term "innovation" has become commonplace. We are surrounded by "innovations," in our daily life. Who develops innovations? Even more importantly, how are they developed? Research approaches for finding answers to these questions regarding social innovations in an organizational context is the focus of this article. Under the assumption that social innovations are a result of learning, action, and social processes in organizations, practitioners are seen as developers of social innovations. To provide insight into the developmental process of innovation, I will compare the grounded theory methodology that Tom Kehrbaum utilizes for innovation research to the qualitative-heuristic methodology by Gerhard Kleining. Both methodologies are chosen because they enable researchers to analyze social processes, which lead to the solution of a problem. The main focus of this discussion lies in the qualitative-heuristic methodology and its use of the qualitative experiment. The reason for this emphasis is anchored in the interactive approach of the researchers with the field, which is well-suited for examining the process of improving strategies for searching and finding solutions for problems.


A conspiracy theory or belief has typically been defined as an allegation of malevolent secrecy and plotting by a group of powerful actors, working in unison to fulfil sinister hidden goals at the expense of the general populace. Such beliefs tend to contradict common (and typically more benign) explanations for events and have the potential to reinforce or be used to 'justify' undesirable behaviours (e.g., discrimination, non-adherence to crucial healthcare practices, and environmental damage). However, the social psychological literature, specifically, concerning conspiracy beliefs is in its relative infancy. The overarching aim of this thesis is to provide greater coherency to future literature via a comprehensive examination of the measurement and prediction of conspiracy beliefs.  A review of the existing research illustrates that, to date, the literature has tended to take a 'fractionated' approach to the study of conspiracy beliefs. That is, studies have tended to focus on scenario-specific conspiracies, and isolated predictors of conspiracy belief. Demonstrating that belief in real-world conspiracies and a generalised tendency to believe in conspiracies are equivalent has theoretical implications of understanding exactly what leads to these beliefs. To address this issue Study 1 examined the development, validation, and comparison of a Specific Conspiracy Belief Scale and a Generalised Conspiracy Belief Scale. A comparison of the relationships between various psychological predictor variables and both of these conspiracy belief scales was conducted in Study 2. These studies revealed that the Generalised Conspiracy Belief Scale was equivalent in performance in terms of its relationship to various predictor variables, and reliability and validity, to previously used specific conspiracy belief measures. The advantage of using the single generalised measure is its ability to be used consistently and comparatively across a range of different conspiracy scenarios.  The review of the literature also revealed that although a number of predictor variables have been identified as being associated with conspiracy beliefs, studies have tended to only look at a relatively small subset of variables within a given study. Indeed, a critical analysis shows that the variables themselves may fall in to various (not necessarily independent) groupings or clusters: socio-political, personality, psychopathological, cognitive, and psychological control factors. Thus, the second goal of this thesis was to gain a better understanding of the relative contribution of the variety of variables that have been suggested as predicting conspiracy beliefs. A comprehensive analysis of the role played by a large number of potential predictor variables on their own and as part of domain groupings was performed within the context of a single population study. This issue formed a second aim of Study 2. The results showed that these variables can be reduced down to several common elements, which reveals there is no (as yet identified) single powerfully predictive psychological cause of conspiracy thinking. Rather, it is likely that psychopathological, socio-political, personality, and cognitive elements combine to explain individual differences in conspiracy belief.  Finally, the validity of the Generalised Conspiracy Belief Scale and the relationships between a subset of key predictor variables (identified in Study 2) and conspiracy beliefs in the context of a wider population sample was a focus of Study 3. By using a large New Zealand-wide sample, Study 3 also broadened the scope of the thesis to examine the potential contribution of key demographic variables and psychological predictor variables in the prediction of conspiracy beliefs. Combining the demographic and psychological variables together in a hierarchical multiple regression revealed that nearly a quarter of variance in conspiracy belief was explained by these factors. However, when removing the shared variance of these predictors a number of demographic and psychological variables became non-significant or weakly predictive at best – a finding which again suggests that there are common elements that predict conspiracy belief. The remaining unique predictors of conspiracy thinking suggests that one of these common elements represent a hostile, suspicious, cynical, and threat-based worldview. Finally, although demographic variables do impact conspiracy beliefs, their unique effect is very small, and their effect works indirectly by impacting psychological predictors of conspiracy thinking.  In conclusion, the current thesis has demonstrated that a single Conspiracy Belief Scale can serve as a useful and valid tool for future studies investigating conspiracy beliefs and that although individual psychological and demographic variables only weakly predict conspiracy beliefs on their own, they do cluster around potential themes which can aid in the development in a more comprehensive theoretical perspective on conspiracy.


The Watchtower sect, just like other universal religions, makes a strong claim on its members that they refuse blood transfusion as a fundamental part of their belief that God views blood as representing life. Thus it is important to note that commitment to religious beliefs will sometimes inevitably come into conflict with the role of the State, say to provide security and welfare to its members especially vulnerable ones like children. The lives of many Witnesses in Zambia may be at risk due to their unwillingness to undergo blood transfusion on religious grounds. This state of affairs places the Zambian Government in a dilemma as it has a constitutional duty to both respect people"s religious rights and protect people"s right to life. The aim of this research is to ethically assess the relationship between the Church and the State on blood transfusion among the Jehovah"s Witnesses of Mpika and Lusaka districts. The objectives of the study were : (i) to investigate the nature of the doctrinal position of the Jehovah"s Witnesses in Mpika and Lusaka on the rejection of blood transfusion; (ii) to explore the extent to which Jehovah"s Witnesses of Mpika and Lusaka share in the doctrinal position on the rejection of blood transfusion; (iii) to ascertain the awareness of Jehovah"s Witnesses of Mpika and Lusaka about the benefits and burdens of rejecting blood transfusion in Zambia; and, (iv) to examine the position of the State on the rejection of blood transfusion by Jehovah"s Witnesses. A total of 30 persons were interviewed. This number was sufficient for the study as it was supplemented by two focus group discussions among medical students at UNZA Ridgeway Campus and seven focus group discussions among Jehovah"s Witnesses at all Kingdom Halls under study.
The significance of the study highlights the ethical challenge that the Watchtower doctrine on blood transfusion presents to the relationship between the Church and the State. The research design was a case study. The study used a qualitative approach which involved an ethical assessment. The methods employed were in-depth interviews and focus group discussions.
The ethical framework of the study used to collect relevant data and inform the ethical assessment of the study included Rights theory and different ethical principles which comprised the principle of beneficence, the principle of nonmaleficence, the principle of autonomy and the principle of paternalism.
The study made the following recommendations: (i) the autonomy of a competent patient should be respected by medical practitioners if they refuse blood transfusion on religious grounds; (ii) the State should ensure that alternatives to blood transfusion are made available in hospitals and clinics so that patients have options to choose from ; (iii) the State should provide medical institutions with well trained personnel that minimize the possibility of blood loss; (iv) Medical practitioners should maintain frequent and close surveillance for signs and symptoms of postpartum to facilitate early intervention; (v) medical practitioners should use modern medical science as an objective basis for protecting children against being denied a life-saving medical procedure of blood transfusion by their parents on religious grounds; (vi) further research be carried out to determine the extent to which lives of children are lost as a result of religious objection of their parents to blood transfusion.


Allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) recipients remain at high risk of adverse outcomes from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) and emerging variants. The optimal prophylactic vaccine strategy for this cohort is not defined. T cell‐mediated immunity is a critical component of graft‐versus‐tumour effect and in determining vaccine immunogenicity. Using validated anti‐spike (S) immunoglobulin G (IgG) and S‐specific interferon‐gamma enzyme‐linked immunospot (IFNγ‐ELIspot) assays we analysed response to a two‐dose vaccination schedule (either BNT162b2 or ChAdOx1) in 33 HSCT recipients at ≤2 years from transplant, alongside vaccine‐matched healthy controls (HCs). After two vaccines, infection‐naïve HSCT recipients had a significantly lower rate of seroconversion compared to infection‐naïve HCs (25/32 HSCT vs. 39/39 HCs no responders) and had lower S‐specific T‐cell responses. The HSCT recipients who received BNT162b2 had a higher rate of seroconversion compared to ChAdOx1 (89% vs. 74%) and significantly higher anti‐S IgG titres (p = 0.022). S‐specific T‐cell responses were seen after one vaccine in HCs and HSCT recipients. However, two vaccines enhanced S‐specific T‐cell responses in HCs but not in the majority of HSCT recipients. These data demonstrate limited immunogenicity of two‐dose vaccination strategies in HSCT recipients, bolstering evidence of the need for additional boosters and/or alternative prophylactic measures in this group.


We present data layout transformation as an effective performance optimization for memory-bound structuredgrid applications for GPUs. Structured grid applications are a class of applications that compute grid cell values on a regu lar 2D, 3D or higher dimensional regular grid. Each output point is computed as a function of itself and its nearest neighbors . Stencil code is an instance of this application class. Examp les of structured grid applications include fluid dynamics and heat distribution that solve partial differential equations wi th an iterative solver on a dense multidimensional array. Using the information available through variable-length array syntax, standardized in C99 and other modern languages, we have enabled automatic data layout transformations for str uctured grid codes with dynamic array sizes. We first present a formulation that enables automatic data layout transformations for structured grid code in CUDA. We then model the DRAM banking and interleaving scheme of the GTX280 GPU through microbenchmarking. We developed a layout transformation methodology that guides layout transformations to statically choose a good layout given a model of the memory system. The transformation which distributes concurrent memory requests evenly to DRAM channels and banks provides substanti al speedup for structured grid application by improving their memory-level parallelism.


Emotion is the most important element in the life of species on this earth. Research on animals and humans shows that emotional experiences facilitate the learning process and the experiences formation that are useful in anticipating future events. The emergence of threats or changes from the environment requires the anticipation of adaptive behavior. Emotions provide certain signals that cause the individual to avoid unpleasant consequences. The phenomenon of intuition, for example, has long been documented in ancient Greek writings, namely Phaedrus. In that work, Socrates, a famous Greek philosopher tells that he seemed to get his heart when he was about to make a mistake. By following his conscience, Socrates can avoid fatal mistakes. For humans, the unpleasant consequences of a decision are not only on physiological matters as is the case with animal species, but also include the social context. For example, conducting regulation of behavior so that it is always in accordance with the social norms of society. Thus, the emotional capacity is one of the assets that is useful in maintaining that individuals can always behave in a balanced way in society.


Although collective action problems in spatial association can produce undesirable outcomes like concentrated poverty, policy responses are rarely calibrated to address the underlying scarcities in a flexible or fine-grained manner. This paper examines what it would mean to view problems of spatial association as resource dilemmas. I argue that the rich literature surrounding the allocation and protection of entitlements can and should be used to gain analytic traction on group formation decisions that are capable of producing sustained, problematic spatial concentrations. My analysis centers on a single context: concentrated poverty in metropolitan neighborhoods. However, the article probes outward from that focal point to consider the relationship between property and association more generally and to identify conceptual stopping points for the application of property theory to matters of association. By doing so, I make the case for an appropriately limited notion of associational entitlements.


Forty-eight wood mice Apodemus sylvaticus were radio-tracked over an estimated 1500 h yielding 9000 fixes. The mice were living in three contiguous arable fields, and showed that they respond to weedy microhabitat patches within superficially homogeneous crops. Plant species' abundance and the composition of the seed bank were assessed in quadrats taken in areas in which (a) mice foraged, (b) through which mice travelled, or (c) at random within each home range. Wood mice avoided foraging in areas with a high abundance of bare earth, and selected areas with a high abundance of Alopecurus myosuroides, Stellaria media, Avena fatua, Galium aparine or Bromus sterilis. The food plants apparently selected by wood mice differed markedly between months and between sexes. This may relate to the energetic and nutritional demands incurred by the contrasting reproductive tactics of male and female wood mice. There were no differences between seed bank samples taken from quadrats where the mice foraged, travelled through, or which were selected at random. Our study, the first large-scale analysis of wood mouse microhabitat preference using radio-tracking, reveals that whereas the mice do not react to heterogeneity on the scale of the mosaic of crop fields, they are greatly influenced by the dispersion of food plants within the superficially homogeneous crop itself.


Telemetry-based study of alligator gar (Atractosteus spatula) movement in the lower Trinity River, Texas, indicated that fish primarily remained within discrete home ranges less than 60 river kilometers (rkm), supporting the potential for local-scale management. However, the temporal scale of inference was limited (22 months), which may inadequately represent fish movements and home range size at the lifetime (i.e., ≥50 years) scale. Therefore, we used otolith microchemistry to examine the long-term movements of alligator gar (n = 59; total length range 1152 to 2420 mm, age range 4 to 60 years) between the lower Trinity River and Trinity-Galveston Bay system. Strontium:calcium (Sr:Ca) concentrations were measured along laser-ablated transects from the otolith core (i.e., time at hatch) to the edge (i.e., time at capture) for fish collected throughout the system, documenting movements between the river (freshwater) and bay (saltwater). We identified two residence contingents among fish in the lower Trinity River that differed in prevalence across the system. Multiple logistic regression indicated that river residence, in which fish remained in the river over their entire lifetimes, was most common at the upstream end of the study reach (63% of fish). In contrast, transience, in which fish moved between the river and bay, was prevalent nearest the river mouth (82% of fish). Although our inferences from the otolith data suggest a somewhat greater degree of homogenization across the system than was captured via telemetry, our results generally suggest localized management of alligator gar in the lower Trinity River could be appropriate.


Highly siderophile element (HSE: Au, Re, Pd, Pt, Rh, Ru, Ir, Os) abundances in planetary silicate mantles provide constraints on accretion and differentiation, as well as late accretion additions after core formation. The first in situ analyses of the HSE in mare basalt sulfide and metal phases enable the determination of the distribution of these elements during fractional crystallization processes. Metals have low Ni/Co (<8) and strong HSE inter‐element fractionation (Pd/Ir = 18–100) and, with troilite (Ni/Co < 4.2, Pd/Ir = 14–74), host 75–100% of the HSE in mare basalts. The compositions of these metal and sulfide grains are inconsistent with assimilation of impact‐contaminated HSE‐rich regolith materials. Furthermore, regolith contamination cannot explain the threshold of abundances of iridium (~50 ppt) in mare basalt bulk rock compositions. Instead, bulk rock mare basalts have HSE patterns consistent with inheritance from partial melting of mantle sources with no residual metal or sulfide. Mare basalt HSE and siderophile element abundances can be accounted for by their mantle sources recording prior separation of a small lunar core, fractionating Ni/Co and Hf/W and removing ~99% of the HSE after lunar formation. Following this event, late accretion of ~0.02% of lunar mass led to limited enrichment of the HSE in chondritic‐relative abundances. Signatures of core formation preclude elevated HSE abundances in the lunar silicate interior and indicate that disproportional late accretion in the Earth–Moon system may, in part, be due to later core formation in the Moon relative to Earth.


Community smells appear in sub-optimal software development community structures, causing unforeseen additional project costs, e.g., lower productivity and more technical debt. Previous studies analyzed and predicted community smells in the granularity of community sub-groups using socio-technical factors. However, refactoring such smells requires the effort of developers individually. To eliminate them, supportive measures for every developer should be constructed according to their motifs and working states. Recent work revealed developers' personalities could influence community smells' variation, and their sentiments could impact productivity. Thus, sentiments could be evaluated to predict community smells' occurrence on them. To this aim, this paper builds a developer-oriented and sentiment-aware community smell prediction model considering 3 smells such as Organizational Silo, Lone Wolf, and Bottleneck. Furthermore, it also predicts if a developer quitted the community after being affected by any smell. The proposed model achieves cross- and within-project prediction F-Measure ranging from 76% to 93%. Research also reveals 6 sentimental features having stronger predictive power compared with activeness metrics. Imperative and indicative expressions, politeness, and several emotions are the most powerful predictors. Finally, we test statistically the mean and distribution of sentimental features. Based on our findings, we suggest developers should communicate in a straightforward and polite way.


At Cornell University, where Thomas Pynchon first submitted "Entropy" to an undergraduate writing class, one of his teachers can recall trying to get Pynchon to change the title to something that didn't sound so scientific. 1 Pynchon was quietly adamant, and when his story appeared a year later in The Kenyon Review, "Entropy" it was. And rightly so, for the story certainly explores a world constructed from the scientific metaphor, and in retrospect the title seems even more appropriate, a sign of how much the idea of entropy was to inform Pynchon's later fictions. Yet the single objection of Pynchon's teacher was not altogether without foresight, for it has proven all too easy in many discussions of Pynchon to overlook elements of his narrative skill because of a preoccupation with the entropy theme. Thus, whereas nearly all of Pynchon's critics, recognizing the importance of ideas from science and the history of science in his work, have commented on the relation of entropy to Pynchon's thought, comparatively slight attention has been paid to the manner in which the narrative itself is structured by his scientific metaphors. In "Entropy" Pynchon is not simply using ideas from science for thematic effect; the more pervasive application is to be found implicit in the form of the narrative.


Aims: This study aimed to assess the effect of educational program based on health belief model regarding safe childbirth on selected delivery mode among pregnant women. Material and methods: In this field trial 100 pregnant women had participated who were selected by cluster sampling method from several community health centers in Gonabad city. The subjects randomly allocated to one of intervention or control group. Intervention group received an educational program regarding safe childbirth based on health belief model. Control group received routine educations provided in community health centers. All subjects fulfilled the health belief, self-efficacy questionnaires and detected the mode of delivery before and one month after intervention. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 16 considering p<0.5 as statistically significant. Findings: Results showed that the mean and SD of age and gestational age of subjects were 27.38 ± 3.32 and 24.26± 4.35, respectively. One month after intervention two group were statically difference in term of Knowledge about modes of delivery (p<0.0001), perceived self-efficacy (p=0.047), perceived sensivity (p=0.001), perceived severity (p<0.0001), and perceived benefits (p=0.010). There was no difference between two groups in perceived barriers (p=0.404). Vaginal delivery were chosen more in intervention group (p=0.003). Conclusion: The educational programs based on health belief model improve the selection of vaginal delivery mode among pregnant women. We recommended using of health belief model for educational program in pregnant women.


The programmed death 1/programmed death 1 ligand (PD-L) pathway is instrumental in peripheral tolerance. Blocking this pathway exacerbates experimental autoimmune diseases, but its role in autoimmune kidney disease has not been explored. Therefore, we tested the hypothesis that the programmed death 1 ligands (PD-L1 and PD-L2), provide a protective barrier during T cell- and macrophage (Mφ)-dependent autoimmune kidney disease. For this purpose, we compared nephrotoxic serum nephritis (NSN) in mice lacking PD-L1 (PD-L1−/−), PD-L2 (PD-L2−/−), or both (PD-L1/L2−/−) to wild-type (WT) C57BL/6 mice. Kidney pathology, loss of renal function, and intrarenal leukocyte infiltrates were increased in each PD-L−/− strain as compared with WT mice. Although the magnitude of renal pathology was similar in PD-L1−/− and PD-L2−/− mice, our findings suggest that kidney disease in each strain is regulated by distinct mechanisms. Specifically, we detected increased CD68+ cells along with elevated circulating IgG and IgG deposits in glomeruli in PD-L2−/− mice, but not PD-L1−/− mice. In contrast, we detected a rise in activated CD8+ T cells in PD-L1−/− mice, but not PD-L2−/− mice. Furthermore, since PD-L1 is expressed by parenchymal and hemopoietic cells in WT kidneys, we explored the differential impact of PD-L1 expression on these cell types by inducing NSN in bone marrow chimeric mice. Our results indicate that PD-L1 expression on hemopoietic cells, and not parenchymal cells, is primarily responsible for limiting leukocyte infiltration during NSN. Taken together, our findings indicate that PD-L1 and PD-L2 provide distinct negative regulatory checkpoints poised to suppress autoimmune renal disease.


This paper describes a novel upper‐bound formulation of limit analysis. This formulation is an innovative variant of an existing two‐field mixed formulation based on the augmented Lagrangian method also developed by the authors. A natural approach is used to describe the deformation of each finite element. Furthermore, and in contrast to the previous formulation, two independent field approximations are now both used to define the velocity field, defined globally and at element level. It is shown that this feature allows a governing system of uncoupled linear equations to be obtained. Some numerical examples in plane strain conditions are presented in order to illustrate the current model performance. In conclusion, the potential and advantages of this new approach are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Ordered domains such as numbers and dates are common in real-life datasets. The SQL standard includes an ORDER BY clause to sort the results, and there has been research work on formalizing, reasoning about, and automatically discovering order dependencies among columns in a table. However, a crucial assumption made in research and practice is that the order over a column is syntactic: numbers are ordered numerically, strings lexicographically and dates chronologically. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to relax this assumption. We present a generalized definition of order compatibilities that allows semantic orders such as (low, medium, high) or (excellent, very good, good, average, poor). We show that in general, validating whether there exists a semantic order relationship between columns is NP-complete, with some tractable special cases. We give an algorithm to automatically discover semantic order relationships in the data, we provide examples of interesting orders found by our algorithm that were missed by existing algorithms, and we show that the NP-complete validation cases do not occur frequently in practice.


During the ICARTT-ITOP Experiment in summer 2004 plumes from large wildfires in North America were transported to Central Europe at 3–8 km altitude above sea level (a.s.l.). These plumes were studied with the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt) research aircraft Falcon which was equipped with an extensive set of in situ aerosol and trace gas instruments. Analyses by the Lagrangian dispersion model FLEXPART provided source regions, transport times and horizontal extent of the fire plumes. Results from the general circulation model ECHAM/MADE and data from previous aerosol studies over Central Europe provided reference vertical profiles of black carbon (BC) mass concentrations for year 2000 conditions with forest fire activities below the long-term average. Smoke plume observations yielded a BC mass fraction of total aerosol mass with respect to PM 2.5 of 2–8%. The ratio of BC mass to excess CO was 3–7.5 mg BC (g CO) −1 . Even after up to 10 days of atmospheric transport, both characteristic properties were of the same order as for fresh emissions. This suggests an efficient lifting of BC from forest fires to higher altitudes with only minor scavenging removal of particulate matter. Maximum aerosol absorption coefficient values were 7–8 Mm −1 which is about two orders of magnitude above the average European free tropospheric background value. Forest fire aerosol size distributions were characterised by a strong internally mixed accumulation mode centred at modal diameters of 0.25–0.30 µm with an average distribution width of 1.30. Nucleation and small Aitken mode particles were almost completely depleted.


With the increasing use of information and communications technology (ICT), researchers are able to use computer software tools to find, organize, manipulate, analyze, and share relevant information. However, there are hundreds of such tools to select from, for various research-related uses. I have collected over 700 research tools that can help researchers do their work efficiently. Research Tools consists of a hierarchical set of nodes. It has four main nodes: (1) Searching the literature, (2) Writing a paper, (3) Targeting suitable journals, and (4) Enhancing visibility and impact. In this presentation, the four main nodes are described.


Identification of kinetic models and estimation of reaction and mass-transfer parameters is an important task for monitoring, control and optimization of industrial processes. A methodology called Extent-based Model Identification has been developed to separate the effects of reaction, mass transfer, and inlet and outlet flows for homogeneous and gas-liquid reaction systems. The decoupled effects, called extents, are used to decompose the model identification task incrementally into sub-problems of lower complexity, in which measured data are first transformed into extents and these extents are then modeled individually [1-3]. For the analysis of surface catalytic reaction systems, it is important to separate the coupled effects of transport phenomena and reactions. Therefore, the methodology of Extent-based Model Identification has been extended to gas-solid and gas-liquid-solid systems involving catalytic processes at the surface of a solid catalyst, described by Langmuir-Hinshelwood types of kinetic models. From measurements in the fluid and solid phases, the extent of each individual dynamic process is computed. A model is postulated for that process and the corresponding extent is simulated and compared with the computed extent. This procedure allows performing model identification and parameter estimation individually for each phenomenon and species (diffusion of substrates and products, adsorption of substrates, desorption of products and solid-phase reactions). [1] Bhatt et al., Ind. & Eng. Chem. Res., 2011, 50, 12960-12974 [2] Srinivasan et al., Chem. Eng. J., 2012, 208, 785-793 [3] Billeter et al., Anal. Chim. Acta, 2013, 767, 21-34


Understanding and Applying Design Thinking The intent of this project was to gain an in-depth understanding of design thinking, both by internalizing its principles and fundamentals and applying them to an actual design challenge. I began with an extensive review of the literature and also interviewed an experienced design thinking practitioner. I then completed an 8-week online course in design thinking offered by the University of Virginia, which provided instruction in a 15-step approach to design thinking as well as key tools to use in the approach. Finally, I applied this approach to a design challenge owned by a leading consultancy in New York City. I detailed key learnings I had from both applying the process as well as comparing the approach to the Thinking Skills Model of Creative Problem Solving (Puccio, Murdock, & Mance, 2007). I concluded with both professional and personal actions that I plan to take as a result of learnings from this project.


Northwest Mexico's irrigation landscape, known today as El Distrito de Riego 038, or El Valle del Mayo, issues from historical struggles to build an official order out of a diverse world of signs, symbols, processes, places, and peoples. It is the ancestral home of the Yoreme (Mayo), an indigenous group for whom colonisation and agricultural development have meant the loss of autonomy and of the seasonal mobility required to subsist in an arid land. It is also the birthplace of President Alvaro Obregon, a one-time chickpea farmer who transformed late19th century irrigation praxis into the laws and institutions of 20th century water management. Reshaping territory for the ends of centralising ('federalising') water resources has always proved exceedingly difficult in the Mayo. But this was particularly so in the beginning of the federalisation process, a time of aggressive modernisation under the direction of President Porfirio Diaz (1876-1910). Research on Mexican hydraulic politics and policy, with some important exceptions, has tended to focus on the scale and scope of centralisation. Scholars have paid less attention to the moments and places where water escapes officials' otherwise ironclad grasp. This paper explores water governance (and state formation more broadly) in the late 19th century, on the eve of Mexico's 1910 Revolution, as an ongoing, ever-inchoate series of territorial claims and projects. Understanding the weaknesses and incompleteness of such projects offers critical insight into post-revolutionary and/or contemporary hydraulic politics.


Allergic reactions to chemicals, food products or even insect bites are encountered all over the world with a variety of manifestations. Symptoms range from the development of a minor rash to life threatening anaphylactic reactions. Rarely, such allergic reactions can precipitate acute organ involvement – in our case, acute coronary syndrome. Acute coronary syndrome or ST-Segment elevation myocardial infarction resulting from an allergic reaction, also referred to as Kounis syndrome, is rarely described and not clearly understood (1). We present a case of Kounis syndrome secondary to a bee sting in a patient with previously treated coronary disease.


Videos recorded with current mobile devices are increasingly geotagged at fine granularity and used in various location- based applications and services. However, raw sensor data collected is often noisy, resulting in subsequent inaccurate geospatial analysis. In this study, we focus on the challenging correction of compass readings and present an automatic approach to reduce these metadata errors. Given the small geo-distance between consecutive video frames, image-based localization does not work due to the high ambiguity in the depth reconstruction of the scene. As an alternative, we collect geographic context from OpenStreetMap and estimate the absolute viewing direction by comparing the image scene to world projections obtained with different external camera parameters. To design a comprehensive model, we further incorporate smooth approximation and feature-based rotation estimation when formulating the error terms. Experimental results show that our proposed pyramid-based method outperforms its competitors and reduces orientation errors by an average of 58.8%. Hence, for downstream applications, improved results can be obtained with these more accurate geo-metadata. To illustrate, we present the performance gain in landmark retrieval and tag suggestion by utilizing the accuracy-enhanced geo-metadata.


Spanish language classes now have a reference source to encourage critical thinking and debate important, current topics in Spain, Mexico, and the rest of Latin and South America. Issues in the Spanish-Speaking World offers 14 original and engaging chapters, each introducing a major issue in the headlines and providing pro and con positions for student debate, papers, and class presentations. Highlights include the Basque question, indigenous rights, the Christopher Columbus controversy, bullfighting, and the war on drugs in Colombia. Each chapter concludes with a Resource Guide and useful vocabulary to facilitate expression in Spanish.


Advancements in computer architectures have resulted in an exponential increase in the speed
of processors and memory capacity. However, memory latencies have not improved to the same
extent, thus access times are increasingly limiting peak performance. To address this, several layers
of cache are added to computer architectures to speed up apparent memory access and instruction
are reordered to maximize memory throughput.
This worked well for single-processor systems, but because of physical limits, modern computer
architectures gain performance by adding more processors instead of increasing the clock speed.
In multi-processor systems, the cache and instruction reordering make communication complex,
because reads and writes of one processor may be observed in a different orders by different processors.
To mitigate this, some computer architectures add complex hardware at the cost of performance,
power requirements and die size. Other architectures employ a relaxed memory model and
add synchronization instructions, memory barriers, to the instruction set. This means the software
has to deal with the complexity. By placing memory barriers, an ordering on reads and writes can
be enforced, causing processors to synchronize.
However, memory barriers are expensive instructions and need only to be placed where absolutely
needed if performance is of importance. To this end, we present our tool, LLMC. The target of
LLMC is concurrent programs written in LLVM IR, an intermediate representation language with
numerous front-ends, e.g. for C, C++, Java, .NET, and Erlang. Using the model checker LTSmin, we
explore the state space of these programs in search of assertion violations, deadlocks and livelocks.
We do this for the memory models TSO, PSO and a limited version of RMO. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first tool that model checks LLVM IR programs running on PSO and a
limited version of RMO. We applied LLMC to a well-known concurrent queue, the Michael-Scott
queue, and were able to confirm the necessity of the required memory barriers for correctness
under RMO.


Abstract We study the adoption and implementation of a new mobile communication application (app) among a sample of 132 New York City public schools. The app provides a platform for sharing general announcements and news, as well as engaging in personalized two-way communication with individual parents. We provide participating schools with free access to the app and randomize schools to receive intensive support (training, guidance, monitoring, and encouragement) for maximizing the efficacy of the app. Although user supports led to higher levels of communication within the app in the treatment year, overall usage remained low and declined in the following year when treatment schools no longer received intensive supports. We find few subsequent effects on perceptions of communication quality or student outcomes. We leverage rich internal user data to explore how take-up and usage patterns varied across staff and school characteristics. These analyses help to identify early adopters and reluctant users, revealing both opportunities and obstacles to engaging parents through new communication technology.


In my Julius Stone Memorial Address, I explored the hypothesis that everyday decisions made by the professionals who manage norms and institutions which seem to lie in the background of global politics may be more important to global wealth and poverty than what we customarily think of as the big political and economic decisions made by parliaments and presidents or brought about by war and peace. If you have the energy to protest, criticise and change the distribution of wealth and status in our newly globalised world, it can be hard to locate points at which allocative decisions can be politically contested. The urgent political disputes that become international front-page news can seem peripheral to the decisions responsible for the distribution of things in the world. Although meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the G–7 (Group of Seven) provide useful backdrops for street protest and media attention, it is not clear that the decisions being taken inside those meeting rooms are either meaningfully responsible for global distributions of wealth and power or contestable in conventional political terms. Although it is easy to think of international affairs as a rolling sea of politics over which we have managed to throw but a thin net of legal rules, in truth the situation today is more the reverse. There is law at every turn — and only the most marginal opportunities for engaged political contestation. The footprint of national rules and national adjudication extends far beyond their nominal territorial jurisdiction. Private ordering, standards bodies, financial institutions and payment systems, tax systems, trade regimes — all are managed by legal expertise. Indeed, to say the world is covered in law is also to say we are increasingly governed by experts — legal experts. Even the story of the war in Iraq is overwhelmingly one of law, of military force mobilised, coordinated and legitimated by law. The difficulty is to understand more adequately what these experts do, the nature and limits of their vocabulary, and the possibilities for translating their work into politically contestable terms — or promoting the experience of responsible human freedom among the experts who govern our world. 2 SYDNEY LAW REVIEW [VOL 27:000


Durum wheat (Triticum durum Desf.) is a major cereal crop grown globally, but its production is often hindered by droughts. Breeding for adapted root system architecture should provide a strategic solution for better capturing moisture. The aim of this research was to adapt low-cost and high-throughput methods for phenotyping root architecture and exploring the genetic variability among 25 durum genotypes. Two protocols were used: the "clear pot" for seminal root and the "pasta strainer" to evaluate mature roots. Analysis of variance revealed significant segregation for all measured traits with strong genetic control. Shallow and deep root classes were determined with different methods and then tested in yield trials at five locations with different water regimes. Simple trait measurements did not correlate to any of the traits consistently across field sites. Multitrait classification instead identified significant superiority of deep-rooted genotypes with 16 to 35% larger grains in environments with limited moisture, but 9 to 24% inferior in the drip irrigated site. Combined multitrait classification identified a 28 to 42% advantage in grain yield for the class with deeper roots at two environments where moisture was limited. Further discrimination revealed that yield advantage of 37 to 38% under low moisture could be achieved by the deepest root types, but that it also caused a 20 to 40% yield penalty in moisture-rich environments compared with the shallowest root types. In conclusion, the proposed methodologies enable low-cost and quick characterization of root behavior in durum wheat with significant distinction of agronomic performance.


There is a growing demand for non-invasive methods to diagnose tendon injuries and monitor the healing processes of their repair. One particular target is to assess the quality of tendon tissue, which requires imaging modalities, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), that capture structural features of the extracellular matrix (ECM). However, to date there has been limited understanding of the physiological source of intratendinous MRI signal. This paper presents a novel image analysis method, based on low level features, which capture the intrinsic structural properties in order to identify ECM damage. More specifically, continuous intrinsic dimensionality (ciD), based on local image descriptors and derived from the monogenic signal, is used to examine the disruption of 1D structures. The damage measure is summarized using confidence values derived from the bi-modality of local non-parametric probability density functions. Areas of normal and disrupted ECM are detected on MR images of healthy and damaged samples.


SUMMARY The aim of this study was to develop, perfect and validate the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) technique using mitochondrial (mt) and ribosomal (ITS-2) DNA for the accurate identification of Dicrocoelium dendriticum in molluscs and ants, the first and second intermediate hosts, and their early detection. The first primers that were designed amplified a 169 pb mtDNA fragment of D. dendriticum permitted the detection of a single D. dendriticum metacercaria from the Formica rufibarbis and Formica pratensis abdomen, as well as the detection of the brainworm in the head of the ants collected in tetania. Although these primers did not amplify Dicrocoelium chinensis DNA and permitted detected D. dendriticum in the molluscs, they did not discriminate Brachylaimidae metacercariae found in the same mollusc. The PCR that was designed to amplify a 93 bp fragment of the ITS-2 is D. dendriticum specific as it did not amplify D. chinensis, Brachylaimidae and other trematodes. This technique is very sensitive since it permitted the detection of D. dendriticum in the molluscs from the first day post-infection, the brainworm in the head of the ants and only 1 D. dendriticum metacercaria from the abdomen of the ants. Both techniques are important, mainly the latter.


This research used syntax theory to analyse modifiers. It was to examine the use of modifiers in authentic writing by describing the kinds of modifiers, what the modifiers modified in this case the heads, and their positions. And the writer counted the frequency of the occurrence of the modifiers to find out which types of that were mostly found in the source of data. The writer had taken four different selected articles in Reader's Digest Magazine as her source of data. They were humour, true story, religion, and family. The data from the four articles was analysed based on Nelson Francis's theory of structure of modification. She studied different topics of the selected articles thoroughly. To collect the data, the writer used qualitative approach. She did not start with a hypothesis and did not make any generalization. She was actively involved in collecting and analysing the data. From the analysis, there were various modifiers, heads, positions and the structure of modification. Besides single word, there were phrase and clause that appeared as heads and modifiers. The single word covered noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and function word. Function word as single word modifiers preceding the heads were mostly found in the selected articles. Nouns as heads were also found. While the structure of modification which consisted of function word and noun that occurred in true story had the most number of occurrence.


The Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever is a viral disease, widespread amongst domestic as well as wild animals, and probably may affects humans too. This virus belonging to Bunyaviridae family contains viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerase catalyzing the biosynthesis of the RNA strands. As a consequence of inhibition of a target enzyme protein, namely, RNA-dependent RNA polymerase there is a probability of the prevention of virus replication in the host cells. In the present investigation, RNA-dependent RNA polymerase sequence was retrieved from NCBI followed by its domain analysis to find out the effective part of the sequence later on 3D structure of the domain modeling by comparative homology modeling approach, including a thorough screening of the homologous sequences to domain by sequence alignment technique. Template coordinates are then used as outline for modeling the domain structure. The computed models of RNA-dependent RNA polymerase domain was validated and then optimized by employing Ramachandran plot. Homology models of RNA-dependent RNA polymerase domain was finally taken into consideration to focus on the prediction of the specific ligand binding site by docking against antiviral drug Ribavirin, with an aid of AutoDock4.2. The results obtained from the present studies provide new insights into the broad screening of certain putative marker inhibitors of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase concomitant with their application in the relevant drug designing.

 Key words: Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus, homology modeling, Ribavirin, RNA-dependent RNA polymerase.


A low-diameter, fast interconnection network is going to be a prerequisite for building exascale machines. A two-level direct network has been proposed by several groups as a scalable design for future machines. IBM's PERCS topology and the dragonfly net-work discussed in the DARPA exascale hardware study are examples of this design. The presence of multiple levels in this design leads to hot-spots on a few links when processes are grouped together at the lowest level to minimize total communication volume. This is especially true for communication graphs with a small number of neighbors per task. Routing and mapping choices can impact the communication performance of parallel applications running on a machine with a two-level direct topology. This paper explores intelligent topology aware mappings of different communication patterns to the physical topology to identify cases that minimize link utilization. We also analyze the trade-offs between using direct and indirect routing with different mappings. We use simulations to study communication and overall performance of applications since there are no installations of two-level direct networks yet. This study raises interesting issues regarding the choice of job scheduling, routing and mapping for future machines.


Inducible promoters are important in regulating the expression of resistance genes when plants are attacked by insects or pathogens. Evaluation of the Shpx6b peroxidase promoter from the tropical forage legume Stylosanthes humilis[ Curtis MD, Rae AL, Rusu AG, Harrison SJ & Manners JM (1997) A peroxidase gene promoter induced by phytopathogens and methyl jasmonates in transgenic plants. Molecular Plant Microbial Interactions 10: 326–338] in transgenic tobacco plants Nicotiana tabacum L. (Solanaceae) demonstrated that this promoter could drive expression of both the β‐glucuronidase (GUS uidA gene of E. coli) and green fluorescent protein (GFP) reporter genes in leaf tissues during attack by chewing insects – larvae of potato tuber moth (PTM) Phthorimaea operculella Zeller (Lepidoptera: Gelechiidae) and sucking insects – green peach aphids Myzus persicae Sulzer (Homoptera: Aphididae). Strong GUS expression was present in tissues next to cells damaged by PTM larvae 24 h after infestation. With aphid infestation, GUS expression was limited to sites of feeding, and was observed 48 h after infestation. The expression of GFP mirrored that of GUS expression for both treatments, but was normally detected 48 h after infestation. Similarly, the exogenous application of methyl jasmonate (MeJa) induced GUS uniformly across leaf tissue, and mechanical wounding activated GUS expression at wound sites, similar to PTM larvae. GFP expression was observed 48 h after treatment, and for mechanical wounding GFP was localised in a manner similar to PTM damage. For MeJa treatment, GFP expression was more pronounced in cells around the midrib, and it was not uniformly induced across the leaf tissue. GUS reporter gene levels were also assayed to quantify expression, and the results were consistent with the observed histological patterns of expression. The results presented here show that the Shpx6b promoter switches on the expression of linked genes after damage by insect herbivores, and could be useful in regulating the expression of heterologous genes for insect and/or pathogen resistance in transgenic plants.


The study investigated the relationships among demographic variables (class grades, school types, major field, parent's education level, etc.), psychological type, thinking style, critical thinking, and creative thinking in senior high school students. The study explored the extent to which students' inclinations and perceived competence to engage in creative thought, as well as their ability to think critically, can be predicted by one aspect of their personality and their psychological preferences. 1119 male senior high school students (grades 10 and 11) participated in the present study. The Thinking Styles Inventory, Chopsticks Creativity Test, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator were administered to the participants. The present study, anchored in Sternberg's theory of mental self-government and Jung's theory of personality types, serves to lend partial support to the evidence of the relationships of thinking styles to personality types. The present findings show the scales across the TSI and MBTI inventories are, in general, related in predictable ways. ********** It is widely recognized that the development of creative and critical thinking can be beneficial for both the individual student and society (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). However, a range of views regarding the relationship between the two kinds of thinking exists in the literature. One of the most influential conceptions of critical thinking is proposed by Robert Ennis (1985). He defines critical thinking as "reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do," and he details numerous proficiencies, tendencies, and dispositions that constitute such reasonable reflective thinking. Creative thinking is associated with certain personal characteristics, such as flexibility and fluency. Some view the two kinds of thinking as being opposed to one another (Torch, 1993), others acknowledge complementary functioning (Bleedorn, 1993; Menssen, 1993), and it is also argued that there is a problem in attempting to distinguish two separate kinds of thinking. It is suggested simply that the focus should be on good thinking in the context of the rules, methods and criteria of specific domains (Bailin, 1993). For example, a number of researchers emphasize that critical thinking involves not only logical, but also creative (intuitive) aspects (Meyers, 1986; Brookfield, 1987; Garrison, 1991; Paul, 1993). Given this controversy, the study investigated the relationship between the two, namely whether a certain measurements of creativity are associated with specific measurements of critical thinking. Sternberg and Lubart (1995) contend that thinking styles are one of the six major resources that give rise to creativity. Sternberg (1988a, 1988b, 1994, 1997) proposed a theory of mental self-government that defines intellectual styles as an interface between intelligence and personality. Analogous to the three branches of the U.S. government, the theory postulates 13 thinking styles that fall along five dimensions of mental self-government: function, form, level, scope, and leaning. Sternberg emphasized the five dimensions and 13 thinking styles, though not exhaustive; represent important stylistic aspects of intellectual functioning. The first dimension is the function of the mental self-government, including the legislative, executive and judicial thinking styles. The legislative function is concerned with formulating ideas and creating rules. The executive function is concerned with carrying out plans and implementing rules initiated by others. The judicial function mainly involves comparing and evaluating ideas, rules, and procedures. The second dimension, the form of mental self-government, concerns various styles of goal-setting and self-management behaviors, such as prioritizing (Hierarchic), pursuing goals single-mindedly (Monarchic), having multiple goal pursuits (Oligarchic), and taking a random approach to goals and problems (Anarchic). …


Denitrifying bioelectrochemical systems (d-BES) are a promising technology for nitrate removal from wastewaters. Microbial community monitoring is required to pave the way to application. In this study, for the first time flow cytometry combined with molecular biology techniques is exploited to monitor and determine the structure–function relationship of the microbiome of a denitrifying biocathode. Stable cathode performance at poised potential (−0.32 V vs. Ag/AgCl) was monitored, and different stress-tests were applied (reactor leakage, nitrate concentration, buffer capacity). Stress-tests shifted the reactor microbiome and performance. The monitoring campaign covered a wide range of nitrate consumption rates (from 15 to 157 mg N LNCC−1 d−1), current densities (from 0 to 25 mA LNCC−1) and denitrification intermediates (nitrite and nitrous oxide consumption rates varied from 0 to 56 mg N LNCC−1 d−1). The reactor microbiome (composed of 21 subcommunities) was characterized and its structure–function relationship was revealed. A key role for Thiobacillus sp. in the bioelectrochemical reduction of nitrate was suggested, while a wider number of subcommunities were involved in NO2− and N2O reduction. It was demonstrated that different bacteria catalyze each denitrification step in a biocathode. This study contributed significantly to understanding denitrifying biocathodes, paving the way for their knowledge-driven engineering.


International audience

 In their 1987 paper Kraskiewicz and Pragacz defined certain modules, which we call KP modules, over the upper triangular Lie algebra whose characters are Schubert polynomials. In a previous work the author showed that the tensor product of Kraskiewicz-Pragacz modules always has KP filtration, i.e. a filtration whose each successive quotients are isomorphic to KP modules. In this paper we explicitly construct such filtrations for certain special cases of these tensor product modules, namely Sw Sd(Ki) and Sw Vd(Ki), corresponding to Pieri and dual Pieri rules for Schubert polynomials.


Billy was a champion soccer star, playing for Chelsea in the 1930s. But that was before war broke out...Billy the Kid is told through the voice of an 80 year old man, who looks back on his life as Chelsea's champion striker until the outbreak of war in 1939 and on through his subsequent life. Billy joins Chelsea as a football apprentice, rises through the reserves to become a real champion. His passion for football sees him through the war years - even as a prisoner of war he organises a friendly against the Italians - but, having been injured by a mine he cannot play for Chelsea on his return to England. Billy turns to vagrancy and alcohol and for years he wanders up and down the country. He re-settles in London in a derelict house and is befriended by a family who move him to a shed in their garden. He, in turn, helps their son with his football who in his turn becomes a Chelsea player. Billy becomes a Chelsea Pensioner and his 80th birthday is celebrated when Chelsea play at home. A novel for both children and adults which deals with some difficult issues. Michael Morpurgo's storytelling is superb and this will be a welcome follow up to the previous Morpurgo/Foreman collaboration - Farm Boy.


The Effects of Distracting Background Audio on Spontaneous Speech Kacy Nicole Chapman Department of Communication Disorders, BYU Master of Science This study examined the changes that occur in spontaneous speech when speakers are distracted by background audio. Forty young adults answered open ended questions under five audio conditions (pink noise, movie dialogue, heated debate, classical music, and contemporary music) and a silent condition. Acoustic parameters assessed during the sessions included mean and variability of the fundamental frequency (F0), mean and variability of intensity, speaking time ratio, and disfluency ratio. It was hypothesized that there would be significant increases in the mean and variability of F0 as well as the mean and variability of intensity. There were statistically significant increases in mean and variability of intensity and mean F0 across most audio conditions. There were no significant changes in variability of intensity in the pink noise condition and no significant changes in variability of F0 in any audio condition. We hypothesized that the speaking time ratio would decrease in the presence of background audio compared to the silent baseline. Results demonstrate significant increases in speaking time ratio except for the classical music condition. It was expected that the disfluency ratio of speech production for each participant would increase in the presence of background audio, with informational masking demonstrating the most increase. Results revealed a significant increase in disfluency ratios across background audio conditions except for the pink noise and classical music conditions. Participants reported the heated debate and contemporary music to be the most distracting. These results have potential clinical implications regarding the type of environment where therapy is given, and what type of everyday situations might cause the most difficulties with fluency as well as the processing and production of speech.


The global network FLUXNET supplies environmental scientists with valuable data on ecosystem exchange processes along with meteorological measurements. Ecosystem characteristics at these sites can be efficiently complemented by remote sensing data from the MODIS sensors on-board the NASA satellites Terra and Aqua. The ORNL DAAC makes resampled MODIS key products as so called 'Land Product Subsets' available. These subsets comprise selected MODIS products in a 7x7 km grid centered on FLUXNET sites. One of these products is the leaf area index (LAI). Despite the frequent application of MODIS LAI data in ecosystem models, there is still no consensus on its usage and the employment of the additionally provided quality criteria (QC). In this study, we analyze the effects of various QC filters, spatial aggregations and sensor choices on magnitude and temporal dynamics of LAI data at six FLUXNET sites. Additionally, we assess the sensitivity of a simple soil-vegetation-atmosphere-transfer (SVAT) model on differently post-processed LAI times series. It is found that it is advantageous to combine the products of both sensors. The consideration of quality assessments is essential, but the QC application is not straightforward for forest sites and the QC choice can have significant effects on the resulting LAI time series with considerable consequences on the outcome of subsequently applied SVAT models.


A high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC) method was developed for simple and rapid chemical analyses of multi-ingredient botanicals. The method was based on comparison of the fingerprint of the marketed multi-ingredient botanical with the fingerprints of the extracts of its component plants and of a handmade mixture of the constituent extracts in a ratio as similar as possible to that of the market product, when labeled. Planar chromatography analysis was completed by a densitometric scansion. The analyses revealed a good correspondence between the market products and the handmade mixture of standard extracts.


The use of criminal informants in the U.S. justice system has become a flourishing socio-legal institution. Every year, tens of thousands of criminal suspects, many of them drug offenders concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods, informally negotiate away liability in exchange for promised cooperation, while law enforcement at the local, state and federal levels rely on ever greater numbers of criminal actors in making basic decisions about investigations and prosecutions. While this marriage of convenience is fraught with peril, it is nearly devoid of judicial or public scrutiny as to the propriety, fairness, or utility of the deals being struck. At the same time, it is a quintessential expression of some of the most contentious characteristics of the modern criminal system: law enforcement discretion, secrecy, and the increasing informality of the adjudication process. The informant institution is also an under-appreciated social force in low-income, high-crime, urban communities in which a high percentage of residents - as many as fifty percent of African American males in some cities - are in contact with the criminal justice system and therefore potentially under pressure to snitch. By relying heavily on snitching, particularly in drug-related cases, law enforcement officials create large numbers of informants who remain at large in the community, engaging in criminal activities while under pressure to provide information about others. These snitches are a communal liability: they increase crime and threaten social organization, interpersonal relationships, and socio-legal norms in their home communities, even as they are tolerated or under-punished by law enforcement because they are useful. This Article conceptualizes the informant institution as an engine of the modern criminal system, both in its operation and its expressive value. Informing shapes the practice of plea bargaining, it heavily influences prosecutorial discretion, and is a major symptom of the increasingly administrative, non-public, non-adversarial nature of the U.S. justice system. For all these reasons, the informant institution has a potentially significant normative impact on systemic legal values; the expressive value of the widespread practice of rewarding criminals even as they continue to commit crimes warrants careful scrutiny. The Article also hypothesizes the harms imposed by the informant institution on socially disadvantaged, high-crime communities in which snitching is common. These harms may include increased crime, the erosion of trust in interpersonal, familial and community relationships and other psychological damage created by pervasive informing, the communal loss of faith in the state, and the undermining of law-abiding norms flowing from law enforcement's rewarding of and complicity in snitch wrongdoing. Because what ails the informant institution is centrally a function of the increasingly secretive discretionary exercise of criminal law enforcement authority, the Article proposes reforms primarily of the sunshine variety. The reforms aim to reduce the secretiveness and lack of accountability surrounding the informal adjudication of informant liability, and to increase legislative control over and public awareness of this quintessentially secretive executive practice.


Cellular therapy is emerging as a promising alternative to conventional immunosuppression in the fields of hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplantation, autoimmune disease, and solid organ transplantation. Determining the persistence of cell-based therapies in vivo is crucial to understanding their regulatory function and requires the combination of an extremely sensitive detection technique and a stable, long-lifetime cell labeling agent. This paper reports the first application of laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) to perform single cell detection of T cell populations relevant to cellular immunotherapy. Purified human CD4(+) T cells were labeled with commercially available Gd-based magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agents, Omniscan and Dotarem, which enabled passive loading of up to 10(8) Gd atoms per cell. In mixed preparations of labeled and unlabeled cells, LA-ICP-MS was capable of enumerating labeled cells at close to the predicted ratio. More importantly, LA-ICP-MS single cell analysis demonstrated that the cells retained a sufficient label to remain detectable for up to 10 days post-labeling both in vitro and in vivo in an immunodeficient mouse model.


In contrast to many other biotic forces, such as competition and predation, the role played by habitat modification by plants and sessile animals in natural communities has not been given the experimental attention it deserves. To test the hypothesis that habitat modification by seaweed canopies can have direct positive effects on rocky intertidal com- munities, we quantified habitat amelioration by Ascophyllum nodosum canopies and its consequences on understory organisms in the Gulf of Maine, USA. At the upper and lower elevational borders of the algal canopy, we examined the recruitment, growth, and survi- vorship of common benthic organisms in canopy removal, canopy control, and shaded canopy removal plots intended to mimic canopy habitat modification. The algal canopy greatly reduced potential physical stresses, particularly at high tidal heights. Maximum daily rock temperatures were 5?-10?C lower and evaporative water loss was an order of magnitude less under the canopy than in canopy removal plots. The response of understory organisms to canopy removal, however, was species specific and somewhat idiosyncratic. Nonetheless, in general, at the high intertidal border of the canopy the re- cruitment, growth, and survival of understory organisms were enhanced by the canopy, whereas at the low intertidal border canopy effects were negative or neutral. Nearly half of the interactions we studied were positive in the high zone. In contrast to positive canopy effects on understory organism recruitment and growth at high tidal heights, consumer pressure was severe under the canopy, particularly at low tidal heights. Green crab predation is likely responsible for limiting understory mussel densities, while grazing by the snail, Littorina littorea, keeps understory substrate clear of algal recruits. The amelioration of harsh physical conditions by algal canopies can have strong direct positive effects in high rocky intertidal communities by enhancing organism recruitment, growth, and survival. These canopy effects, however, may often be offset by increased consumer pressure at low tidal heights. These types of habitat modification effects are likely to be pervasive in many other terrestrial and marine communities exposed to harsh physical conditions.


Evidence-Based Medicine is a relatively new movement that seeks to put clinical medicine on a firmer scientific footing. I take it as uncontroversial that medical practice should be based on best evidence the interesting questions concern the details. This paper tries to move towards a coherent and unified account of best evidence in medicine, by in particular exploring the EBM position on RCTs (randomised controlled trials) in assessing causal claims from clinical medicine (especially of course concerning the efficacy of various drug therapies). I argue that even the qualified endorsement of RCTs that a more detailed and sympathetic reading of the EBM literature provides is not clearly based on solid epistemological grounds. I do this by examining four arguments that have been given that claim to show the special 'validity' of data obtained from RCTs. Finally, I discuss a case (involving a new treatment ECMO for neonates suffering from a particular condition) that shows how closely intertwined are ethical judgments and epistemological judgments about the power of certain types of trial.


This study presents a multi-objective optimization environment in which passive energy conservations measures of a high performance house in Toronto are evaluated. The optimization environment was created using the jEPlus software suite where the case study house acted as the reference building. The study house simulation model was calibrated using a data-driven procedure, and acceptable CV(RSME) and NMBE tolerances were reached in accordance with ASHRAE calibration requirements. The optimization varied passive energy efficiency parameters in search of configurations yielding optimal building performance and life cycle cost. The optimization results showed that energy savings of 33% relative to building code minimum were justified at the point of minimal life cycle cost via passive energy saving measures alone before considering active systems. These results suggest that improved thermal envelopes are economically advantageous with good building practice. However, they suggest that the current Passive House standard does not coincide with the economic minimum for the local economic and environmental climate.


The Thomas Creek Prospect lies at the southern end of the Sorell Peninsula, western
Tasmania and consists of intrusions believed to be coeval with copper mineralisation
within a dioritic intrusive complex. The prospect is hosted by the Noddy Creek
Volcanics, which are geochemically correlated to the calc-alkaline Mt Read
Volcanics.
Widespread (600 by 400 m) but low grade copper mineralisation is hosted by diorites
and feldspar~augite porphyritic andesite intrusions, which have been intruded by
chalcopyrite-bearing porphyritic micromonzodiorites. Early disseminated magnetite,
pyrite and chalcopyrite formed prior to and synchronous with pervasive feldsparsilicate
alteration. Various chalcopyrite-bearing vein generations (actinolite,
tounnaline, K-feldspar- smectite, epidote and carbonate) have overprinted the earlyformed
magnetite and feldspar-silicate alteration assemblages.
The "immobile" elements (Ti and P) were mostly mobilised during the fonnation of
pervasive K-feldspar hydrothermal alteration at Thomas Creek. A subset of the
geochemical data set exhibits coherent behaviour, indicating that the diorites and
porphyritic micromonzodiorites form a co-magmatic fractionation series. Coherent
behaviour ofBa, Rb, Sr and K20 has been recognised for the igneous suite. Both
primary and secondary K-feldspar appear to be intrusion-related. Fe, S, P, Zn and Cu
appear to have been lost during fractionation due to devolatilisation of the
micromonzodiorite magmas.
Sulphur isotope values of sulphides at Thomas Creek range from -4.9 to 11.5%o.
Sulphides in the early formed magnetite and feldspar-silicate alteration assemblages
have similar s34s ranges (5.3 to 9.3%o). The isotopic range in the porphyritic
micromonzodiorites (8.2 to 11.5%o) is believed to have formed in response to
fractionation and devolatilisation of 32s-rich hydrothermal fluids, resulting in
isotopically lighter signatures (-4.9 to 7.7%o) in veins related to the intrusions. Sulphur isotope geothennometry, utilising co-existing pyrite-chalcopyrite pairs, indicates
mineralisation temperatures in veins ranged from 254 to 611 °C.
Four stages of mineralisation have been recognised at Thomas Creek: 1:- early
magnetite and feldspar-silicate alteration; 2:- emplacement of Cu-bearing
micromonzodiorite intrusions and precipitation of coeval actinolite and tourmaline
veins; 3:- K-feldspar- smectite vein formation; and 4:- epidote and carbonate veining_
Phases 1 and 2 represent periods of magma emplacement with some mixing of
magmatic-hydrothermal water with seawater-derived fluid. Phase 3 veins appear to be
of magmatic character, with minimal seawater influence. Phase 4 probably represents
final incursion of seawater-derived fluids as the magmatic system waned.
Thomas Creek can be correlated to Mt Lyell copper-gold mineralisation, based on
similarity of sulphur isotope distribution and ore mineralogy. Mineralisation at the
Thomas Creek Prospect is believed to represent the root zone of a Mt Lyell-type
hydrothermal system_ There are also some similarities with the alkaline porphyry CuAu
deposits of British Columbia, with Thomas Creek possibly being the submarine
analogue of a porphyry system formed in a back arc environment.


'The humanist idea of education is among the permanently influential legacies of the Italian Renaissance. Four short Latin treatises published between 1400 and 1460 define it admirably: Pier Paolo Vergerio's De ingenuis moribus et liberalibus adolescentiae studiis; Leonardo Bruni's De studiis et literis; the De liberorum educatione of Aeneas Sylvius, who later became Pope Pius II; and Battista Guarino's De ordine docendi et studendi. Translated into English by William Harrison Woodward and framed, on the one hand, by his description of the famous school founded by Vittorino da Feltre in 1424 at the court of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, and, on the other, by a judiciously balanced analysis of the aims and methods of the humanist educators, these important texts form the heart of a book that has remained for almost seventy years the fundamental study of early Renaissance educational theory and practice.' From the foreword by Eugene F. Rice Jr.


DNA Damage Pathways Revealed Despite the dynamic nature of cellular responses, the genetic networks that govern these responses have been mapped primarily as static snapshots. Bandyopadhyay et al. (p. 1385; see the Perspective by Friedman and Schuldiner) report a comparison of large genetic interactomes measured among all yeast kinases, phosphatases, and transcription factors, as the cell responded to DNA damage. The interactomes revealed were highly dynamic structures that changed dramatically with changing conditions. These dynamic interactions reveal genetic relationships that can be more effective than classical "static" interactions (for example, synthetic lethals and epistasis maps) in identifying pathways of interest. A network comparison of genetic interactions mapped at two conditions reveals genetic responses to DNA damage in yeast. Although cellular behaviors are dynamic, the networks that govern these behaviors have been mapped primarily as static snapshots. Using an approach called differential epistasis mapping, we have discovered widespread changes in genetic interaction among yeast kinases, phosphatases, and transcription factors as the cell responds to DNA damage. Differential interactions uncover many gene functions that go undetected in static conditions. They are very effective at identifying DNA repair pathways, highlighting new damage-dependent roles for the Slt2 kinase, Pph3 phosphatase, and histone variant Htz1. The data also reveal that protein complexes are generally stable in response to perturbation, but the functional relations between these complexes are substantially reorganized. Differential networks chart a new type of genetic landscape that is invaluable for mapping cellular responses to stimuli.


Purpose : The main focus of this paper is to ascertain whether customer's decision to use e-banking is influenced by socioeconomic classifications. It further seeks to identify the kinds of e-banking services provided to customers, and also examines the most frequently patronized e-banking service. Methodology/approach : In all, 241customers of three state-owned retail banks from Kumasi Metropolis, one of the most urbanized metropolis in Ghana, were used as sample for the survey. A well-structured questionnaire was used to obtain relevant information from the customers. Responses gathered from the customers were mainly analyzed using a binary logistic regression. Findings : Internet banking, ATM, E-Zwich and mobile phone banking were the commonly identified e-banking services offered by the banks. Among such services, ATM was the most frequently patronized service whereas internet banking recorded very low patronage. From the chi-squared test of association, customer's operational bank and occupational status were found to have significantly informed the decision to use e-banking. With respect to the logit analysis, customer's operational bank, occupational status and monthly income were significant socioeconomic classification variables that informed customer's decision to use e-banking. Practical implications : This paper may serve as scientific basis for banks to consider customers' socioeconomic classifications, in designing any e-banking marketing strategies in targeting customers in urban communities in Ghana. Originality/value : With the use of a logit regression, this paper has identified occupational status, customer's bank and monthly income as significant socioeconomic variables that inform a Ghanaian customer's decision to use e-banking.


The Japanese people face a cultural and ecological challenge in seeking a new relationship between themselves and the Japanese monkeys (Macaca fuscata). Monkeys are a major agricultural pest. Monkey habitat often lies within a short distance from fields and villages, and vice versa, especially in mountainous areas. The idealized solution is a form of coexistence where humans and monkeys somehow negotiate a harmonious compromise. A word used often in Japanese is kyosei, to live in common, implying a more intimate relation than mere side-by-side coexistence. In practice, kyosei is a word used by policy makers or scholars, but less often used by primatologists and agricultural officials. Primatologists aid agricultural extension programs that encourage farmers to implement practical measures to reduce the attractiveness of farmland and villages as feeding sites to monkeys. However, agricultural extension programs may be operationalizing kyosei by encouraging rural communities to reformulate their relationship with monkeys.


Near the headwaters of a small creek, a group of hunter-gatherers made their camp and began to craft stone tools, leaving thousands of sharp stone flakes and chips discarded on the ground. At one time or another, similar scenes have played out almost the world over. But the remarkable thing about this one, as detailed on page 1599 of this week9s issue of Science, is that it happened near Buttermilk Creek, Texas—about 15,500 years ago. That9s long before the Clovis hunters, once thought to be the very first people in America, had appeared. The ancient tools also offer a first glimpse into how the distinctive fluted Clovis points may have developed over millennia. Although some previous claims of pre-Clovis artifacts have been controversial, other archaeologists say the new research is highly convincing.


Background: Hypertension is one of the leading causes of death worldwide which imposes heavy costs on global health economy annually. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of training program based on BASNEF model on blood pressure control. Materials and Methods: The present study was a quasi-experimental study that was conducted on 158 female patients with hypertension who used primary health care centers. Method of sampling was multistage. In the first stage, 20 primary health care centers were randomly selected and randomly divided into control and interventional groups. Then 79 female patients from each group were randomly selected. Data collection tool was a questionnaire the validity and reliability of which were confirmed by experts and Cronbach's alpha coefficient. Data was collected and analyzed by SPSS version 16 using descriptive and analytical statistics. Results: The mean age of intervention and control groups was 62.05 ± 13.13 and 63.25 ± 13.17, respectively. The results showed that in intervention group, the mean of systolic blood pressure significantly decreased from 139/67 to 124/73 mmHg x. Also the mean of diastolic blood pressure significantly went down from 85.88 to 80.27 mm Hg(p <0/001).The enabling factors with effect of 0.329 among the model structurs was the strongest predictor of hypertension. Conclusion: Educational program based on BASNEF model provided better results in the control of blood pressure compared to other conventional training.


Background Academic procrastination is the irrational delay in the beginning or completion of an academic task within the desired time frame. It has many negative consequences on students, for example, wasting time, loss of opportunities, decreased productivity, and lack of success in addition to serious emotional and health problems. Aim The purpose of this study was to assess procrastination among a sample of college students in different academic areas, identify the possible reasons of this behavior, and examine the role of causal attributions and various executive functions (EFs) of students in academic procrastination. Participants and methods Eighty college students from Mansoura University participated in this study and were diagnosed by the staff members of the Committee of Postponing Exams in the Department of Psychiatry using Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed., text revision. After being diagnosed, they were asked to complete three questionnaires; the Procrastination Assessment Scale-Students, Executive Skills Questionnaire, and the Causal Dimension Scale II. Results The results show that the age of the procrastinating students ranges between 18 and 32 years. The men (n = 48) represent 60% of the procrastinators. Most of the students procrastinate during the second and third years of their college study (30 and 32.5%, respectively). Students from the Faculty of Engineering represent 25% of the procrastinators. The commonest psychiatric diagnosis among the procrastinating students is obsessive compulsive disorder (27.5%), followed by malingering (17.5%), and generalized anxiety disorder (12.5%). Reasons of procrastination, for example, aversiveness of the task and low frustration tolerance, tendency to feel overwhelmed and poor time management, and peer influence, have significant positive correlation (P ≤ 0.01) with procrastination among students. Several EFs have a significant negative correlation (P ≤ 0.001) with presence of procrastination among students, for example, working memory, organization, time management, emotional control, task initiation, and sustained attention and flexibility. Finally, locus of causality and stability have a significant positive correlation (P ≤ 0.001) with procrastination among students, whereas personal control has a highly significant negative correlation (P ≤ 0.001), with the presence of procrastination among students. There are 11 significant predictors of procrastination, for example, difficulty in making decision, dependency and help seeking, laziness, anxiety, rebellion against control, fear of success, response inhibition, sustained attention, metacognition, goal-directed persistence, and external control. Conclusion and recommendations Procrastination is more common among male students with obsessive compulsive disorder. Several EFs, for example, working memory, organization, time management, emotional control, task initiation, and flexibility as well as locus of causality, stability, and personal control are impaired among procrastinating students and significantly correlated with the occurrence of procrastination. Finally, many variables can be considered as predictors of procrastination among students, for example, difficulty in making decision, dependency and help seeking, laziness, anxiety, rebellion against control, fear of success, response inhibition, sustained attention, metacognition, goal-directed persistence, and external control. All previous data represent cues for the development of strategies among students to prevent the aggravation of this problem.


BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The prevalence of tympanic plate fractures, which are associated with an increased risk of external auditory canal stenosis following temporal bone trauma, is unknown. A review of posttraumatic high-resolution CT temporal bone examinations was performed to determine the prevalence of tympanic plate fractures and to identify any associated temporal bone injuries. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A retrospective review was performed to evaluate patients with head trauma who underwent emergent high-resolution CT examinations of the temporal bone from July 2006 to March 2012. Fractures were identified and assessed for orientation; involvement of the tympanic plate, scutum, bony labyrinth, facial nerve canal, and temporomandibular joint; and ossicular chain disruption. RESULTS: Thirty-nine patients (41.3 ± 17.2 years of age) had a total of 46 temporal bone fractures (7 bilateral). Tympanic plate fractures were identified in 27 (58.7%) of these 46 fractures. Ossicular disruption occurred in 17 (37.0%). Fractures involving the scutum occurred in 25 (54.4%). None of the 46 fractured temporal bones had a mandibular condyle dislocation or fracture. Of the 27 cases of tympanic plate fractures, 14 (51.8%) had ossicular disruption (P = .016) and 18 (66.6%) had a fracture of the scutum (P = .044). Temporomandibular joint gas was seen in 15 (33%) but was not statistically associated with tympanic plate fracture (P = .21). CONCLUSIONS: Tympanic plate fractures are commonly seen on high-resolution CT performed for evaluation of temporal bone trauma. It is important to recognize these fractures to avoid the preventable complication of external auditory canal stenosis and the potential for conductive hearing loss due to a fracture involving the scutum or ossicular chain.


Three papers shed new light on Wnt signaling by characterizing the function of a low density lipoprotein (LDL) receptor-like protein (LRP). Tamai et al. showed in Xenopus that LRP6 acts as a Wnt coreceptor. Injection of LRP6 mRNA into early embryos resulted in the formation of a new dorsal axis and increased expression of Xnr3, a gene transcriptionally activated by Wnt signaling. Injection of Wnt-5a and LRP6 into adjacent cells in a four-cell-stage embryo also yielded axis duplication, indicating that LRP6 probably acts in Wnt-responding cells. Experiments with LRP6 truncation mutants demonstrated that the cytoplasmic tail is important for downstream Wnt signal transduction, whereas the LRP6 NH2-terminal binds Wnt and then binds Frizzled (Fz) in a Wnt-dependent manner. Pinson et al. screened for lethal recessive mutants in mice and identified LRP6 using a gene trapping method. LRP6-/- mice had severe developmental abnormalities similar to those in mice with Wnt signaling defects. By crossing mice harboring Wnt3a mutants [vestigial tail (vt)] with LPR6-deficient mice, the authors demonstrated that tail abnormalities were more severe in mice carrying both mutations, thus indicating that LRP6 and Wnt3a lie in the same signaling path. Wehrli et al. identified arrow in Drosophila as the gene most similar to LRP5 and LRP6 of humans. They demonstrate that overexpression of Wingless (the Wnt counterpart in flies) cannot compensate for the arrow phenotype. Similar to the observations in Xenopus, Arrow is important for cells that respond to Wingless (the Wnt counterpart in flies). Additional overexpression and loss of function experiments strongly suggest that Arrow and DFz2, a Drosophila Frizzled protein, act as coreceptors for Wg. Kamai, T., Semenov, M., Kato, Y., Spokony, R., Liu, C., Katsuyama, Y., Hess, F., Saint-Jeannet, J.-P., and He, X. (2000) LDL-receptor-related proteins in Wnt signal transduction. Nature 407: 530-535. [Online Journal] Pinson, K.I., Brennan, J., Monkley, S., Avery, B.J., Skarnes, W.C. (2000) An LDL-receptor-related protein mediates Wnt signalling in mice. Nature 407: 535-538. [Online Journal] Wehrli, M., Dougan, S.T., Caldwell, K., O'Keefe, L., Schwartz, S., Vaizel-Ohayon, D., Schejter, E., Tomlinso, A., and Dinardo, S. (2000) arrow encodes an LDL-receptor-related protein essential for Wingless signalling. Nature 407: 527-530. [Online Journal]


Birnbaum-Saunders (BS) distribution is a model with positive domain thatis used in many fields including reliability and environmental studies. Thisarticle introduces a generalized version of the BS distribution which arisesfrom the shape mixture of skew normal distribution. A feasible EM typealgorithm is developed to obtain maximum likelihood (ML) estimates of pa-rameters of the new model. The asymptotic standard errors of ML estimatesare obtained via the information-based approximation. The robustness andapplication of the proposed methodology is illustrated through simulationstudies and air pollution analysis.


In most online learning algorithms, the weights assigned to the misclassified examples (or support vectors) remain unchanged during the entire learning process. This is clearly insufficient since when a new misclassified example is added to the pool of support vectors, we generally expect it to affect the weights for the existing support vectors. In this paper, we propose a new online learning method, termed Double Updating Online Learning, or DUOL for short. Instead of only assigning a fixed weight to the misclassified example received in current trial, the proposed online learning algorithm also tries to update the weight for one of the existing support vectors. We show that the mistake bound can be significantly improved by the proposed online learning method. Encouraging experimental results show that the proposed technique is in general considerably more effective than the state-of-the-art online learning algorithms.


Nitric oxide (NO) plays a central role in the physiololgy and pathology of diverse tissues. Different studies provide data suggesting that the endothelial cell nitric oxide synthase (NOS3) expression in peritumoral microvessels might be a prognostic indicator in breast cancer patients. However, the putative contribution of common NOS3 germline variants to breast cancer risk remained unknown. A recent work comprising 269 breast cancer patients and 244 controls suggested that NOS3 Glu298Asp polymorphism is associated to breast cancer risk (OR=1.9). We performed an independent analysis of these results in 440 unrelated patients and 321 controls from Spanish population. Although our study was 90% powered to detect ORs >/=1.55, did not find any significant difference in the Glu298Asp allele distribution between cases and controls (P > 0.42). These putative reasons for this result are discussed.


BACKGROUND
Since the promulgation of emergency department (ED) thoracotomy>40 years ago, there has been an ongoing search to define when this heroic resuscitative effort is futile. In this era of health care reform, generation of accurate data is imperative for developing patient care guidelines. The purpose of this prospective multicenter study was to identify injury patterns and physiologic profiles at ED arrival that are compatible with survival.

METHODS
Eighteen institutions representing the Western Trauma Association commenced enrollment in January 2003; data were collected prospectively.

RESULTS
During the ensuing 6 years, 56 patients survived to hospital discharge. Mean age was 31.3 years (15-64 years), and 93% were male. As expected, survival was predominant in those with thoracic injuries (77%), followed by abdomen (9%), extremity (7%), neck (4%), and head (4%). The most common injury was a ventricular stab wound (30%), followed by a gunshot wound to the lung (16%); 9% of survivors sustained blunt trauma, 34% underwent prehospital cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), and the presenting base deficit was >25 mequiv/L in 18%. Relevant to futile care, there were survivors of blunt torso injuries with CPR up to 9 minutes and penetrating torso wounds up to 15 minutes. Asystole was documented at ED arrival in seven patients (12%); all these patients had pericardial tamponade and three (43%) had good functional neurologic recovery at hospital discharge.

CONCLUSION
Resuscitative thoracotomy in the ED can be considered futile care when (a) prehospital CPR exceeds 10 minutes after blunt trauma without a response, (b) prehospital CPR exceeds 15 minutes after penetrating trauma without a response, and (c) asystole is the presenting rhythm and there is no pericardial tamponade.


It is generally believed that the Earth's atmosphere did not contain oxygen until around 2500 million years ago (Mya) when oxygen-evolving photosynthetic bacteria arose. At around 800–500 Mya, the oxygen concentration increased sharply to reach the 21% we have today. So, it seems highly likely that life arose as anaerobic organisms, which then evolved to tolerate oxygen and finally, to use it as a terminal acceptor for the energy-producing oxidative processes in the respiration of aerobic bacteria and mitochondria in eukaryotic cells. The respiratory processes employed by typical aerobic organisms today have a wide range of mechanisms to deal with the troublesome side effects of living with a high oxygen concentration.


In Switzerland all honey bee colonies are infested by the ectoparasite Varroa jacobsoni. Every year more than 90% of the colonies are treated with strips that contain the pyrethroids fluvalinate or flumethrin. Extended use of pyrethroids, however, results in residues accumulating in the wax and, thus, the quality of bee products is jeopardised. In different regions of Italy the efficiency of the varr acide Apistan is now reported to be insufficient'. Recent tests suggest that strains of mites resistant to fluvalinate have appeared in northern Italy. It is therefore necessary to find new ways of integrated varroa control. The active substances used should be found in nature and should be without risk for consumers of bee products. Moreover, the residues produced should not accumulate in wax. Besides formic, lactic and oxalic acids, 'Apilife VAR', a product which has been authorized for use in Italy, fulf ils such requirements. Apilife VAR is composed of a vermiculite tablet 5 x 9 x 1 cm (porous ceramic sponge), impregnated with a mixture of thymol (76%), eucalyptol (16.4%), methol (3.8%) and camphor (3.8%). The varroacidal effect of the principal active substance (thymol) has been described in studies performed in Italy and Russia'.


Now part of a two-volume set, the fully revised and updated second edition of The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Infant Development, Volume 1: Basic Research provides comprehensive coverage of the basic research relating to infant development. Updated, fully-revised and expanded, this two-volume set presents in-depth and cutting edge coverage of both basic and applied developmental issues during infancy. Features contributions by leading international researchers and practitioners in the field that reflect the most current theories and research findings. Includes editor commentary and analysis to synthesize the material and provide further insight. The most comprehensive work available in this dynamic and rapidly growing field.