Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) can serve as a vehicle for gene therapy. Angiopoietin-1 (ANGPT1) plays an important role in the regulation of endothelial cell survival, vascular stabilization, and angiogenesis. We hypothesized that ANGPT1 gene-modified MSCs might be a potential therapeutic approach for severe acute pancreatitis (SAP) in rats. Human umbilical cord-derived MSCs with or without transfection with lentiviral vectors containing the ANGPT1 gene were delivered through the tail vein of rats 12 h after induction of SAP. Administration of MSCs alone significantly reduced pancreatic injury and inflammation, as reflected by reductions in pancreatitis severity scores and serum amylase and lipase levels as well as reducing the serum levels of proinflammatory cytokines (TNF-α, IFN-γ, IL-1β, and IL-6). Furthermore, administration of ANGPT1-transfected MSCs resulted in not only further reductions in pancreatic injury and serum levels of proinflammatory cytokines, but also promotion of pancreatic angiogenesis. These results suggest that MSCs and ANGPT1 have a synergistic role in the treatment of SAP. ANGPT1 gene-modified MSCs may be developed as a potential novel therapy strategy for the treatment of SAP.


This thesis presents the theory, implementation and applications of the harmonic sinusoid modeling of pitched audio events. Harmonic sinusoid modeling is a parametric model that expresses an audio signal, or part of an audio signal, as the linear combination of concurrent slow-varying sinusoids, grouped together under harmonic frequency constraints. The harmonic sinusoid modeling is an extension of the sinusoid modeling, with the additional frequency constraints so that it is capable to directly model tonal sounds. This enables applications such as object-oriented audio manipulations, polyphonic transcription, instrument/singer recognition with background music, etc. The modeling system consists of an analyzer and a synthesizer. The analyzer extracts harmonic sinusoidal parameters from an audio waveform, while the synthesizer rebuilds an audio waveform from these parameters. Parameter estimation is based on a detecting-grouping-tracking framework. The detecting stage finds and estimates sinusoid atoms; the grouping stage collects concurrent atoms into harmonic groups; the tracking stage collects the atom groups at different time to form continuous harmonic sinusoid tracks. Compared to standard sinusoid model, the harmonic model focuses on harmonic groups of atoms rather than on isolated atoms, therefore naturally represents tonal sounds. The synthesizer rebuilds the audio signal by interpolating measured parameters along the found tracks. We propose the first application of the harmonic sinusoid model in digital audio editors. For audio editing, with the tonal events directly represented by a parametric model, we can implement standard audio editing functionalities on tonal events embedded in an audio signal, or invent new sound effects based on the model parameters themselves. Possibilities for other applications are suggested at the end of this thesis.


Growing urbanization trends, together with a greater environmental awareness, are transforming cities into game changers in the sustainability game. Cities are under pressure in both developed as well as developing economies. In developed countries, the challenge is to be able to tackle a lack of infrastructure, such as clean water and sanitation and mass transit transport systems. In developed countries, the challenges are distinct, but not less. There are growing needs for a renewal of infrastructures, such as water, transportation and energy systems, which deteriorate over time, and the related increasing challenges regarding the sustainability of the systems. Drivers of change include lower costs, greater levels of efficiency, better response to natural disasters (resilience), an ability to provide a good service, among others. Cities, regulators and operators are focused on improving innovation and develop truly smart cities and smart infrastructure. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) have been at the forefront of infrastructure development and management, however, questions exist regarding existing models which are usable for smart infrastructure. Our thesis is that existing models of PPP need to be significantly restructured, to be able to provide an adequate response to the smart infrastructure challenges and to be a driving force to make cities smarter. Greater flexibility is necessary, as is a profound change of the existing regulatory and procurement models, in order to ensure that the private sector will continue to have a pivotal role with regards to infrastructure, financing and management.


Cutting through memories, pinning down facts, stitching up fabrications, unpicking the past - an interactive, animated memoir, created in Flash, exploring aspects of my relationship with my dressmaking mother and her complicated influence on me. Life's mysteries are rarely uncovered by a logical, linear process of deduction. You arrive at answers, ideas, suspicions, intuitions… haphazardly in fragments. Over time you build the picture, piece by piece, shuffling and rearranging, until you start to see a pattern emerging. The structure of 'Fitting the Pattern' attempts to replicate this experience, hence it is a memoir in pieces that the reader can explore, to some extent, in a non-linear fashion. The visual design of the piece is based on the aesthetics of dressmaking patterns, specifically, imagery drawn from online open source sewing patterns (burdastyle.com). An affordance of such a design is that dressmaking patterns are instructional by nature so I was able to design an intuitive navigational system that provides signals and guidance to the user without breaking out of the narrative sphere and disrupting a potentially immersive experience. There are certain parallels between my mother's creative craft process and my own in new media. These similarities, as well as our differences, are embedded in the digital media and text, literally drawn out through animation and dramatised through interactivity. Custom cursors designed as digital dressmaking tools fuse the interactive process into the narrative world, so the reader becomes actively involved in constructing and/or unpicking the narrative. Like most of the interactive elements in ʻFitting the Pattern', these dressmaking tool symbols have multiple functions - they are navigation bar buttons; they are custom cursors; and they are active narrative elements, like animated characters, literally playing their part in the story whilst simultaneously activating the reading/story experience. The piece ends with a randomly generated sequence that functions as a metaphor for the intimate perplexity of the mother-daughter relationship and interconnected life patterns. http://www.crissxross.net/elit/fitting_the_pattern.html


Aims. The complex physics of close binary stars is made even more challenging by the proximity effects that affect it. Understanding the influence of these proximity effects is one of the most important tasks in theoretical stellar astrophysics. It is crucial to know how the specific intensity is distributed over the stellar disk for a correct modelling of the light curves of eclipsing binaries and planetary transits. To provide theoretical input for light curve modelling codes, we present new calculations of gravity- and limb-darkening coefficients for a wide range of effective temperatures, gravities, metallicities, and microturbulent velocities. Methods. We computed limb-darkening coefficients for several atmosphere models, which cover the transmission curves of the Kepler, CoRoT, and Spitzer space missions as well as more widely used passbands (Stromgren, Johnson-Cousins, Sloan). In addition to these computations, which were made adopting the least-square method, we also performed calculations for the bi-parametric approximations by adopting the flux conservation method to provide users with an additional tool to estimate the theoretical error bars. To facilitate the modelling of the effects of tidal and rotational distortions, we computed the gravity-darkening coefficients y(λ) using the same models of stellar atmospheres as for the limb-darkening. Compared to previous work, a more general differential equation was used, which now takes into account local gravity variations and the effects of convection. Results. The limb-darkening coefficients were computed with a higher numerical resolution (100 μ points instead of 15 or 17, as is often used in the ATLAS models), and five equations were used to describe the specific intensities (linear, quadratic, root-square, logarithmic, and a 4-coefficient law). Concerning the gravity-darkening coefficients, the influence of the local gravity on y(λ) is shown as well as the effects of convection, which turn out to be very significant for cool stars. The results are tabulated for log g's ranging from 0.0 to 5.0, -5.0 ≤ log [M/H] < +1, 2000 K ≤ T eff ≤ 50 000 K and for five values of the microturbulent velocity. ATLAS and PHOENIX plane-parallel atmosphere models were used for all computations.


Using dispersed nanostructures to induce an energy filtering effect is an easy and effective mechanism to optimize the performance of bulk thermoelectric materials. Compared with other nanostructures, core-shell nanostructures possess more interfaces and multiple potential barriers, which would lead to a significant impact on the thermal and electrical properties of materials. In this paper, after BiCuSeO alloy doping into SnTe, SnO2 layers were formed at the interfaces and the BiCuSeO nanoparticles were wrapped in the SnO2 shell during the following high temperature solid state reaction. The formation of SnO2 layers could be observed and confirmed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). BiCuSeO@SnO2 core-shell nanostructures can introduce multiple potential barriers to enhance the energy filtering effect. Once the BiCuSeO doping concentration was over 3%, the carrier concentration could decrease to about 10% while the mobility increases to 350% compared to the values of the undoped sample at room temperature. Meanwhile, the Seebeck coefficients were improved to 176.05 μV K-1 at 835 K. Additionally, due to the scattering of core-shell nanostructures for the phonons, a lower thermal conductivity is achieved with a value of 1.04 W m-1 K-1 at 835 K in Sn1.03Te-5% BiCuSeO. Combined with the improvement of thermal and electrical properties by the BiCuSeO@SnO2 core-shell, a high ZT value of ∼1.21 was achieved for Sn1.03Te-5% BiCuSeO at 835 K, which was enhanced by 190% compared to pristine SnTe.


Dying Swans interrogates cultural images of the agile and able performer. It concerns the photographic parody of famous dance images: images are recreated in homage to the originals, but subjects – usually female, young and able - are replaced by an obese, gay, drag performer. This project is an hybrid of two independent projects driven by themes which intersect, but is an independent investigation in its own right into documentation and media images of dance and the disruption between expectation - driven by age, gender and hetero-normativity – and image. By examining cultural representations of the tragedy inherent in dance (that dancers are either too old or too injured), it questions cultural obsessions with youth, photoshop and the erasure of age from performance.

Mark Edward's project is to explore the ageing body by writing from the perspective of the third age. His project reflects on ageing, as both a gay man and performance artist, positioned in an hegemony of youth driven performance and media agendas. His work questions the cultural expectation of 'dancing your age', and what this might be, through examination of popular representations of the dancing body, and by so doing he examines the cultural meanings aligned with what it is to be ageing and a performer in contemporary media. His thesis is that social and cultural influences, including the contemporary media, seem to be moving contemporary society to a body normative which involves the removal of the (hi)stories and creases age naturally brings in an attempt to have currency, or make faces marketable. He explores Schwaiger's concept of the ageing body as an 'inflexible mask' (Schwaiger, 2006: 14-5).

Dr Helen Newall's project is a photographic exploration of the seams and disruptions between performance photo-documentation and the performance itself. Sontag, Barthes. Sontag states that performance simultaneously exists and annihilates itself. Newall proposes that the photograph edits and resituates performance by distilling the ephemeral flow into a series of split second moments which the innocent viewer (ie someone who has not seen the performance but sees the images) then expands out into a performance which did not exist: the photographs become a metonym not only for moments absent in performance documentation, but for moments which never existed. The expansion that the viewer makes is thus a disruption from what existed and which is now lost and that which is supposed. There is myth making in this disruption, which creates a sort of scar tissue that re-skins performance into something that it never was. The photograph often does not capture physical exertion, but effortless poise held in perpetuity. It idealizes the heroic dance legend even as the performance itself is past its dance by date.

In Dying Swans, Newall and Edward position the ageing drag performer and dancer, as being similar in their fates. The archetype of the physically and/or mentally injured dancer – Black Swan, The Red Shoes, Benjamin Button – is a potent tragedy of beauty cut short. Dance (and youth) is thus situated as a fragile and ephemeral thing, rather than as the hard physical slog which gets harder with age and which is usually what pushes the swans out of the lake. This is when most dancers are put out of their misery. But if not, when we watch an ageing dancer, what do we see? Are we watching the given performance, or are we watching a metonym for the performer they once were? How do we watch the ageing performer without seeking the myth of who they once were and what they could once do? It examines in Drag Culture the on-the-body 'photoshopping' of the male physique into a female physique and how ageing is equally unacceptable here. And asks whether the comedy inherent in an ageing drag artist situated as a dying swan or a fire bird (or even a fired bird!) is really our defense mechanism against the truths of ageing that such images expose? The poster is a discourse of word and image. The Dying Swans project will culminate in the autumn of 2013 in an exhibition of words and images.


The Internet has become a worldwide phenomenon. It is undeniable that the Net has forcefully entered everyday life, ceasing to be a useful tool only for a small circle of researchers and academics, to become a new and versatile means of mass communication. And measuring Internet access and calculating the number of Internet users is not easy. By using the domain names registered in the ".it" as an endogenous metric, the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the Italian National Research Council (IIT-CNR) carried out a research on Internet diffusion in Italy taking into account some major categories of users (enterprises, non-profit organizations, individuals, professionals and public bodies) and territorial distribution (nation, macro-area, region and province). This research has made it possible to carry out an initial analysis of the digital divide in Italy.


We distributed fourteen controllable street lamps in a city square and recorded three comparative and one 'usual' condition, operating the public lighting as if it were an interactive stage. First tested was adaptive lighting that responded to people's occupancy patterns. Second was a mobile phone application that allowed people to customise color and responsive behaviours in the overhead lighting system. Third was ambient lighting, responding to wind velocity. The study extends the discussion on multiuser interaction design in public lighting by asking: how can interactions using mobile phones, thermal tracking and wind inputs afford new social behaviors, without disturbing the usual public functions of street lighting? This research lays foundational work on the affordances of mobile phones for engagement and interaction with public lighting. The study indicates the use of personal phones as a tool for interaction in this setting has potential to provide a stronger ownership to urban place.


Next generation bio-alcohols produced from non-food based sources like cellulosic biomass are promising renewable energy sources. The present study investigates engine performance, combustion characteristics, and emissions of a small single cylinder direct injection diesel engine fueled by four kinds of next generation bio-alcohol isomer and diesel fuel blends with a constant blending ratio of 3:7 (mass). The tested bio-alcohol isomers here are n-butanol and iso-butanol (C4 alcohol), and n-pentanol and iso-pentanol (C5 alcohol). To obtain simultaneous reductions in NOx and smoke emissions, the experiments employed supercharging combined with EGR (Exhaust Gas Recirculation). The boost pressures were fixed at two conditions, 100 kPa (naturally aspirated operation) and 120 kPa (supercharged operation) provided with a roots blower type supercharger. The EGR rates were varied from 0 to 25% using a cooled EGR technique. The results showed that both with and without supercharging, all the bio-alcohol blended diesel fuels improved the trade-off relation between NOx and smoke emissions at all EGR rates while maintaining good engine performance, when compared with diesel fuel operation. It was also found that regardless of boost pressure and EGR rate, the ignition delays of the tested bio-alcohol isomer blends are in the order of iso-butanol > n-butanol > iso-pentanol > n-pentanol. Overall, it was concluded that, except for the changes in the ignition delays the influence of bio-alcohol isomer blends on the engine performance, combustion characteristics, and emissions are relatively small. Keywords—Alternative fuel, Butanol, Diesel engine, EGR, Next generation bio-alcohol isomer blended fuel, Pentanol, Supercharging


It is often assumed that more realism is always desirable. In particular, many techniques for locomotion in Virtual Reality (VR) attempt to approximate real-world walking. However, it is not yet fully understood how the design of more realistic locomotion techniques influences effectiveness and user experience. In the previous VR studies, the effects of interaction fidelity have been coarse-grained, considering interaction fidelity as a single construct. We argue that interaction fidelity consists of various independent components, and each component can have a different effect on the effectiveness of the interface. Moreover, the designer's intent can influence the effectiveness of an interface and needs to be considered in the design. Semi-natural locomotion interfaces can be difficult to use at first, due to a lack of interaction fidelity, and effective training would help users understand the forces they were feeling and better control their movements. Another method to improve locomotion interaction is to develop a more effective interface or improve the existing techniques. A detailed taxonomy of walking-based locomotion techniques would be beneficial to better understand, analyze, and design walking techniques for VR. We conducted four user studies and performed a meta-analysis on the literature to have a more in-depth understanding of the effects of interaction fidelity on effectiveness. We found that for the measures dependent on proprioceptive sensory information, such as orientation estimation, cognitive load, and sense of presence, the level of effectiveness increases with increasing levels of interaction fidelity. Other measures which depend more on the ease of learning and ease of use, such as completion time, movement accuracy, and subjective evaluation, form a u-shape uncanny valley. For such measures, moderate-fidelity interfaces are often outperformed by lowand high-fidelity interfaces. In our third user study, we further investigated the effects of components of interaction fidelity, biomechanics and transfer function, as well as designers' intent. We learned that the biomechanics of walking are more sensitive to changes and that the effects of these changes were mostly negative for hyper-natural techniques. Changes in the transfer function component were easier for the user to learn and to adapt to. Suitable transfer functions were able to improve some locomotion features but at the cost of accuracy. To improve the level of effectiveness in moderate-fidelity locomotion interfaces we employed an effective training method. We learned that providing a visual cue during the acclimation phase can help users better understand their walking in moderate-fidelity interfaces and improve their effectiveness. To develop a design space and classification of locomotion techniques, we designed a taxonomy for walkingbased locomotion techniques. With this taxonomy, we extract and discuss various characteristics of locomotion interaction. Researchers can create novel locomotion techniques by making choices from the components of this taxonomy, they can analyze and improve existing techniques, or perform experiments to evaluate locomotion techniques in detail using the presented organization. As an example of using this taxonomy, we developed a novel locomotion interface by choosing a new combination of characteristics from the taxonomy. How Does Interaction Fidelity Influence User Experience in VR Locomotion?


The Food Market Survey studies the inflow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and its annual Growth rate in the Food Processing industries. The survey also analyses export of Food products and points out strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to the food processing industries in India. The Global Food Microbiology market record research current and upcoming improvement potentialities to assist interest for the Food Microbiology Testing over the discern time frame. The U.S. Marketplace for Food Microbiology and grocery store totalled almost $56.Four billion in 2014. This market is projected to technique $61.Four billion in 2015 and $69.4 billion by means of 2020, registering a compound annual boom fee (CAGR) of 2.5% via 2021.Food safety Testing Market is anticipated to be close US$ 7 Billion before the finish of year 2024. At the point when we talk about sanitation it is an overall concern which energizes a wide scope of zones of step by step life. During the time the impacts, earnestness and sorts of foodborne afflictions have changed are up 'til now contrasting across over nations and networks. Food Allergy is one of the maximum commonplace styles of meals hypersensitive reactions that outcomes in itchiness, belly pain, swelling, sneezing, diarrhea, and cardiac arrest. Global Food Allergy Market to develop at a CAGR of 89.Sixty eight% during the period 2019-2023.


China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the mid-eighteenth century. This book challenges this view, showing that the economic expansion of southeastern Chinese rivaled the colonial ambitions of Europeans overseas. In a story that dawns with the Industrial Revolution and culminates in the Great Depression, the book explains how sojourners from an ungovernable corner of China emerged among the commercial masters of the South China Sea. The book focuses on Chaozhou, a region in the great maritime province of Guangdong, whose people shared a repertoire of ritual, cultural, and economic practices. It traces how Chaozhouese at home and abroad reaped many of the benefits of an overseas colonial system without establishing formal governing authority. Their power was sustained instead through a mosaic of familial, fraternal, and commercial relationships spread across the ports of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Swatow. The picture that emerges is not one of Chinese divergence from European modernity but rather of a convergence in colonial sites that were critical to modern development and accelerating levels of capital accumulation. The book reveals how the transoceanic migration of Chaozhouese laborers and merchants across a far-flung maritime world linked the Chinese homeland to an ever-expanding frontier of settlement and economic extraction.


Retinoids are used to treat various skin diseases. They add valuable impact of when used early in the treatment of dermatological conditions. Overall vitamin A derivatives are underused, with isotretinoin is the most used. This paper aims to develop prescribers' knowledge about their benefits, to improve their usability and aids in alleviating patient concerns to improve therapeutic outcomes in dermatological conditions. In acne vulgaris, adapalene gel and tretinoin cream showed equal efficacy. In psoriasis the combination of acitretin and PUVA was superior to PUVA alone. Acitretin showed a reduction of 41% in the Nail Psoriasis Severity Index and similar efficacy to potent steroids and calcipotriol. In chronic hand eczema, alitretinoin showed 50% improvement in patient's refractory to steroid treatment. In photoaging and aging, retinoids were shown to increase the synthesis and decrease the degradation rate of collagen and hyaluronate, reducing the impact of aging. In rosacea, topical and systemic isotretinoin showed complete remission in 24% of the patients compared to only 14 % with antibiotics (metronidazole and doxycycline). In lichen planus, isotretinoin demonstrated clinical and histopathological efficacy. In cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, bexarotene used alone or with PUVA or narrow band UVB, showed a response between 80.0% to 84.0%. Lastly in Kaposi sarcoma alitretinoin gel showed superiority to all other agents and better tolerance. This review highlights the benefit of timely use of vitamin A derivatives to encourage wider use.


The objective is to experimentally determine the damping levels that can be achieved by cocuring constrained viscoelastic damping layers in a composite beam. Beams were clamped in a cantilever condition and excited using piezo actuators. Natural frequencies were identified using frequency response data. Transient response data were collected using strain gages and analyzed using logarithmic decrement, Hilbert transform-based, and moving block damping identification algorithms. Two sets of experiments were performed. First, benchtop tests of four fully constrained layer rectangular-cross-section laminated composite beams were conducted. The cocured beam consisted of a six-ply graphite epoxy (Gr/Ep) composite host structure, a damping layer of viscoelastic material (VEM) that varied in thickness from 0 to 15 mils in 5 mil increments, and a 2-ply Gr/Ep constraining layer. The natural frequency exhibited a gradual increase with VEM thickness, and damping increased from 0.75% in the beam with no VEM to 5.40% in the beam with a 26.2% volume fraction (15 mil layer) of VEM. The second set of experiments involved two 1-cross-section laminated composite beams in rotation. Each I-beam flange had a layup identical to that of the beams used in the benchtop experiments, with damping layer thicknesses of 10 or 15 mils, and the web layup was the same as the flange, minus the VEM layer. These beams were tested at rotational speeds from 0 to 750 rpm in a vacuum chamber, and transient response data were analyzed. The natural frequency increased quadratically as rotational speed increased. Further, as the viscoelastic layer thickened from 10 to 15 mils, the increase in damping remained nearly constant even as the rotational speed increased. At 0 rpm this increase was 33.8%, while at 750 rpm the increase was 33.3%. Structural damping decreased as a function of rpm, due to centrifugal stiffening.


We present Emu, a system that semantically enhances multilingual sentence embeddings. Our framework fine-tunes pre-trained multilingual sentence embeddings using two main components: a semantic classifier and a language discriminator. The semantic classifier improves the semantic similarity of related sentences, whereas the language discriminator enhances the multilinguality of the embeddings via multilingual adversarial training. Our experimental results based on several language pairs show that our specialized embeddings outperform the state-of-the-art multilingual sentence embedding model on the task of cross-lingual intent classification using only monolingual labeled data.


The standard plan for the assessment of the variation due to a measurement system involves a number of operators repeatedly measuring a number of parts in a balanced design. In this article, we consider the performance of two types of (unbalanced) assessment plans. In each type, we use a standard plan augmented with a second component. In type A augmentation, each operator measures a different set of parts once each. In type B augmentation, each operator measures the same set of parts once each. The goal of the paper is to identify good augmented plans for estimating the gauge repeatability and reproducibility (GR&R), a ratio that compares the contribution of the measurement system to the overall process variation. We show that, if there are three or more operators or if we include the possibility of part-by-operator interaction, then use of an appropriate augmented plan can produce substantial gains in efficiency for estimating GR&R compared with the best standard plan with the same total number of measurements.


Abstract. Identifying lateral migration rates of meandering rivers is
relevant both for fluvial geomorphology and to support river management.
Lateral migration rates for contemporary meandering systems are often
reconstructed based on sequential remote-sensing images or historical maps;
however, the time frame for which these sources are available is limited and
hence likely to represent fluvial systems subjected to human influence. Here,
we propose to use scroll bar sequences as an archive to look further back in
time using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of sand-sized
quartz grains. We develop a modelling procedure for the joint Bayesian
analysis of (OSL) dating results and historical map data. The procedure is
applied to two meanders from the Overijsselse Vecht, a medium-sized sand-bed
river in the Netherlands. We obtained nine samples for OSL dating from scroll
bars and combined OSL dating results with historical map data for the period
1720–1901 CE (Common Era). The procedure we propose here incorporates the
strengths of both data types for reconstructing fluvial morphodynamics over
longer time frames. Using an iterative modelling approach, we translate
spatial uncertainty of historical maps into temporal uncertainty of channel
position required for Bayesian deposition modelling. Our results indicate
that meander formation in the Overijsselse Vecht system started around 1400
CE, and lateral migration rates were on average 2.6 and
0.9 m yr−1 for the two investigated
bends, until river channelization around 1900 CE.


The category of covenant is considered to be the dominant and cohesive idea in the theology of the OT. It is the means through which Israel conceptualise its relation with Yahweh. Although the term "covenant" is variously and even contradictorily defined, its applicability to Israel's conceptualisation of its relationship with Yahweh is pervasive and well-known. The covenant relationship between Israel and Yahweh is considered to be its constitution, its vocation, and its salvation. From a theological view point, the essential components of Malachi's oracles are the person-hood of Yahweh - the God of Israel, Yahweh's covenant relationship with Israel, and the all-pervasive message of unreserved and enthusiastic personal response of Israel to the truth assertions of the prophetic voice. This article thus demonstrates the significance of covenant as the central and cohesive theological motif connecting and coordinatingseveral themes present in the book of Malachi as well as illuminating its message. In Malachi, one observes that certain religious fundamentals were compromised. In order to deal with the indifference and its adverse consequences in the gradual decline towards an unstructured existence and to hold together a society that upholds values and maintains an ancient faith, Malachi was skill-full and creative in his employment of the covenant theme to the advantage of his ministerial context. The article presents precise background and historical information about the book of Malachi that are crucial to an understanding of its theme and message, the book's literary style, theme and structure, examines the various covenant themes and then concludes by synthesising these themes with the overall message of the book's context.


The turn of agrarian sciences and agricultural extension from reductionist and transfer of technology, respectively, towards systemic approaches has transformed agricultural/rural development thinking in the last decades. Nevertheless, the emergence of Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS) has to confront a number of gaps among which the expert – lay knowledge gap is of major importance. This paper aims at exploring such a gap as well as obstacles to participatory development from a Critical Realist point of view. Critical realism (CR) with its realist, differentiated and stratified ontology aims at interpreting the world in order to ultimately bring about transformation. CR allows for new insights on the nature of knowledge as well as on development research and practice. It thus provides useful guidelines concerning the emerging 'intermediation' functions within AIS.


We present ground-based spectroscopic verification of 6 Y dwarfs (see also Cushing et al.), 89 T dwarfs, 8 L dwarfs, and 1 M dwarf identified by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Eighty of these are cold brown dwarfs with spectral types ⩾T6, six of which have been announced earlier by Mainzer et al. and Burgasser et al. We present color–color and color–type diagrams showing the locus of M, L, T, and Y dwarfs in WISE color space. Near-infrared and, in a few cases, optical spectra are presented for these discoveries. Near-infrared classifications as late as early Y are presented and objects with peculiar spectra are discussed. Using these new discoveries, we are also able to extend the optical T dwarf classification scheme from T8 to T9. After deriving an absolute WISE 4.6 μm (W2) magnitude versus spectral type relation, we estimate spectrophotometric distances to our discoveries. We also use available astrometric measurements to provide preliminary trigonometric parallaxes to four of our discoveries, which have types of L9 pec (red), T8, T9, and Y0; all of these lie within 10 pc of the Sun. The Y0 dwarf, WISE 1541−2250, is the closest at 2.8+1.3−0.6 pc; if this 2.8 pc value persists after continued monitoring, WISE 1541−2250 will become the seventh closest stellar system to the Sun. Another 10 objects, with types between T6 and >Y0, have spectrophotometric distance estimates also placing them within 10 pc. The closest of these, the T6 dwarf WISE 1506+7027, is believed to fall at a distance of ∼4.9 pc. WISE multi-epoch positions supplemented with positional info primarily from the Spitzer/Infrared Array Camera allow us to calculate proper motions and tangential velocities for roughly one-half of the new discoveries. This work represents the first step by WISE to complete a full-sky, volume-limited census of late-T and Y dwarfs. Using early results from this census, we present preliminary, lower limits to the space density of these objects and discuss constraints on both the functional form of the mass function and the low-mass limit of star formation.


This thesis argues that the drama of George Chapman (1559-1634) can be read in light of his deep ambivalence towards the political elite of the Jacobean court. It suggests that Chapman's lack of success in securing courtly patronage, and his constant battle with indebtedness (which resulted in several court appearances and two imprisonments) left him divided in attitude towards the system of courtly reward – he resented his lack of success but continued to struggle to fit in and gain the approval of the powerful figures of the era. I argue that this gave him a critical perspective on many of the important issues of the time. My work examines the configuration of English national identity in his plays, positing an idea of Englishness which is separate from, and often critical of, the monarchy, and which relies on a structural parallel with the French court in order to imagine English identity. It then considers the ways in which money and debt are dealt with in several plays, arguing that Chapman felt deeply concerned by the perennial indebtedness of Jacobean culture but was also aware of the necessity of maintaining his own credibility and supply of credit. It further examines the representation of patronage, suggesting that Chapman saw the soliciting of aristocratic patronage in distinctly sexual terms, almost as a form of artistic prostitution. It then considers the many situations in the plays where royal patronage towards a favourite breaks down, and argues that this often results in allegations of treason which Chapman shows to originate in the paranoia or suspicions of the monarch. Finally, it looks at the concept of virtue in the plays, arguing that Chapman viewed virtue as fundamentally unsustainable in a corrupt court setting, but that he saw some form of engagement in public life as being a moral obligation on the virtuous man. Throughout I argue that Chapman was deeply radical in his social outlook, critical of inherited privilege and government by personal or absolutist rule. The social tensions and political struggles presented in his plays were to find their full expression in the violence of the Civil War and in the trial and execution of Charles I.


Objective. The use of transcranial, low intensity focused ultrasound (FUS) is an emerging neuromodulation technology that shows promise for both therapeutic and research applications. Among many, one of the most exciting applications is the use of FUS to rehabilitate or augment human sensory capabilities. While there is compelling empirical evidence demonstrating this capability, basic questions regarding the spatiotemporal extent of the modulatory effects remain. Our objective was to assess the basic, yet often overlooked hypothesis that FUS in fact alters sensory-evoked neural activity within the region of the cerebral cortex at the beam's focus. Approach. To address this knowledge gap, we developed an approach to optically interrogate patterns of neural activity in the cortex directly at the acoustic focus, in vivo. Implementing simultaneous wide-field optical imaging and FUS stimulation in mice, our experiments probed somatosensory-evoked electrical activity through the use of voltage sensitive dyes (VSDs) and, in transgenic mice expressing GCaMP6f, monitored associated Ca2+ responses. Main results. Our results demonstrate that low-intensity FUS alters both the kinetics and spatial patterns of neural activity in primary somatosensory cortex at the acoustic focus. When preceded by 1 s of pulsed ultrasound at intensities below 1 W cm−2 (Isppa), the onset of sensory-evoked cortical responses occurred 3.0  ±  0.7 ms earlier and altered the surface spatial morphology of Ca2+ responses. Significance. These findings support the heretofore unconfirmed assumption that FUS-induced sensory modulation reflects, at least in part, altered reactivity in primary sensory cortex at the site of sonication. The findings are significant given the interest in using FUS to target and alter spatial aspects of sensory receptive fields on the cerebral cortex.


by tailored compositions DTU Orbit (06/06/2019) Ceramic materials for energy and environmental applications: Functionalizing of properties by tailored compositions Stable social development requires novel approaches for energy production, distribution and storage combined with reasonable restrictions of the environmental impact. The fuel cell-based technologies, as well as the separation of gases from mixtures, particularly implemented into innovative power plant concepts, are therefore in the scientific and political focus. At the very core of these technologies are selected materials from a number of classes ranging from purely organicand inorganic-based matrices to the precious metals and alloys that all ought to meet well defined operation-relevant conditions and efficiencies. Depending on the targeted application, each material foreseen as a base for component development has to be evaluated individually and its properties have to be modified in terms of corresponding application requirements. In order to elaborate tailored ceramic materials for gas separation and ion/electron transport at the relevant operating conditions and stability ranges, improved electrical or ionic conductivities and permeation rates are required. That can be achieved by doping and substitution which are actors on a nano-scale that usually lead to macroscopic impacts. This chapter is dedicated to the fascinating world of tailoring ceramic materials for energy and environmental applications. Selected approaches to tune ceramics will be discussed to illustrate the versatile effects that compositional variation can have on the macroscopic properties, e.g. the conductivity of protons, oxygen ions and/or electronic carriers, stability, etc. The present chapter will therefore consider the structural features of selected material classes, as well as the principles of transport in bulk and microporous solids. It will furthermore illustrate and discuss the effects of selected additives and substituents on sinterability, electrical/electrochemical properties and stability of selected ceramic materials for energy and environmental applications. The material variety will cover ceramic materials with different crystal structures like fluorites, perovskites, pyrochlores, fergusonites, as well as selected zeolite structures. © 2013 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.


Hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) is usually a mild illness that occurs mainly in young children, but can also affect older children and adults. It is caused by a number of different enteroviruses, particularly coxsackieviruses. People can be infected with these viruses but not develop symptoms of the disease. Outbreaks of HFMD can occur among groups of children, for example in child care centres. It is not related to the footand-mouth disease that affects cattle, sheep and pigs.


Abstract Silicified microbes found on the discharge aprons around modern geysers and hot springs commonly appear to be preserved superbly. This can be attributed to their rapid silicification, which often begins while they are alive. In geological terms, therefore, they are silicified instantaneously. Thus, it might be expected that these microbes should be good replicas of the living organisms and, therefore, easy to identify in terms of extant taxa. Silicified microbes found on the discharge aprons around geysers and hot springs of North Island, New Zealand, are preserved through replacement and/or encrustation. Organic matter is typically absent, and examples of sheaths being partly replaced or coated by other minerals, such as iron oxide, have not yet been recognized. Accordingly, the cellular-level information needed for microbe identification must be gleaned from features preserved in the silica. Unfortunately, the silicification processes commonly destroy and/or disguise most of the taxonomic features that are necessary for reliable identification in terms of extant taxa. Silicification may, for example, obscure the presence of a sheath and/or significantly alter the size of the microbes. The loss and/or modification of such important taxonomic features means that the identification of silicified microbes is fraught with problems and must be approached with caution.


In these essays, the object of inquiry is the multifaceted interplay of part and whole, especially with reference to the individual's relationship to society. The first section, on Algernon Charles Swinburne, is centered on Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject, which is concerned with boundaries, the intolerable which cannot be ignored, the criminal who flaunts his crimes, the repetitive obsessions that can turn into fascination and masochism. In Swinburne's world, love is not generative, although passion exists in excess. Along with the sexual deviations (sado-masochism, lesbianism, incest, necrophilia) that are a hallmark of Swinburne's poetry, sterility and infertility mark the erotic relationships that he presents in his earliest and most famous collection, Poems and Ballads (1866). This focus on sterility challenges Victorian ideology in its refusal to endorse values of family and reproduction. This interest is further involved in Swinburne's oeuvre through its presence in his two "Greek" dramas, Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Erechtheus (1876). In these works, rather than the central drama of sterility being played out in erotic relationships, it is embodied in the relationship between parent and child. Here, cannibalism and child-murder find a place in the tensions between individual and society, subjectivity and law. The second section, on Virginia Woolf's late novels The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941), engages with recent Woolf criticism which argues that through representations of art and audience such as the village pageant written by Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts Woolf envisions art as a primary mediator between the citizen and authority. The times in which these last novels were written, as well as Woolf's explicit political program in Three Guineas (1938) and the various draft versions of The Years make this position reasonable and lend it a great deal of importance. However, in these novels I argue that resistance to authority takes place in the individual mind and mostly in the everyday, quotidian interactions of life rather than in the experience of art as such. Claims to a unified community in Between the Acts are, I argue, overstated, as we see connections between individuals that are fleeting, but no less valuable for this fleetingness. The Years and Between the Acts have more in common than is often thought, and both identify communion in the everyday.


This paper describes an image analysis technique developed to identify icebergs depicted in synthetic aperture radar images of Antarctica and to determine the outlines of these icebergs. The technique uses a pixel bonding process to delineate the edges of the icebergs. It then separates them from the background water and sea ice by an edge-guided image segmentation process. Characteristics such as centroid position and iceberg area are calculated for each iceberg segment and placed in a file for input to appropriate statistical data analysis software. The technique has been tested on three ERS-1 SAR sub-images in which it succeeded in identifying virtually all segments containing icebergs of size 6 pixels or larger. The images were first passed through an averaging filter to reduce speckle. This process produced a pixel size of 100 m x 100 m. As implemented, the technique over-estimates iceberg areas by about 20% on average and the detection rate falls off rapidly for icebergs less than six pixels in size. Performance in these areas is expected to improve when additional stages, based on a more detailed analysis of pixel intensity, are implemented.


This article presents evidence of the original public meaning of the Necessary and Proper Clause. I show that the meanings of "necessary" we have inherited from John Marshall's discussion in McCulloch v. Maryland - a choice between "indispensably requisite" on the one hand and mere "convenience" on the other - is undercut by the available evidence. The truth lies somewhere in between. While these findings will, of course, be of interest to originalists, they should also interest the many constitutional scholars who consider original meaning to be one among several legitimate modes of constitutional analysis, as well as those scholars for whom original meaning is the starting point of a process in which it is "translated" into modern terms. By either account, it is important to get the original meaning right, even if it is not alone dispositive of today's cases and controversies. This is the companion to two previous articles - "The Original Meaning of the Commerce Clause" 68 U. Chi. L. Rev. 101(2002) and "New Evidence on the Original Meaning of the Commerce Clause" 55 U. Ark. L. Rev. 847 (2003) - in which I presented evidence of the public meaning of Congress's power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." To determine the constitutionality of any particular legislation and evaluate judicial applications of the Commerce Clause, however, we must also consider the meaning of the Necessary and Proper Clause. For the expansive post-New Deal reading of congressional power owes as much to the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Necessary and Proper Clause as it does to its expansive reading of the Commerce Clause.


Interpreting and explaining the behavior of deep neural networks is critical for many tasks. Explainable AI provides a way to address this challenge, mostly by providing per-pixel relevance to the decision. Yet, interpreting such explanations may require expert knowledge. Some recent attempts toward interpretability adopt a concept-based framework, giving a higher-level relationship between some concepts and model decisions. This paper proposes Bottleneck Concept Learner (BotCL), which represents an image solely by the presence/absence of concepts learned through training over the target task without explicit supervision over the concepts. It uses self-supervision and tailored regularizers so that learned concepts can be human-understandable. Using some image classification tasks as our testbed, we demonstrate BotCL's potential to rebuild neural networks for better interpretability11Code is avaliable at https://github.com/wbw520/BotCL and a simple demo is available at https://botcl.liangzhili.com/.


Deep learning techniques have been successfully applied in many areas of computer vision, including low-level image restoration problems. For image super-resolution, several models based on deep neural networks have been recently proposed and attained superior performance that overshadows all previous handcrafted models. The question then arises whether large-capacity and data-driven models have become the dominant solution to the ill-posed super-resolution problem. In this paper, we argue that domain expertise represented by the conventional sparse coding model is still valuable, and it can be combined with the key ingredients of deep learning to achieve further improved results. We show that a sparse coding model particularly designed for super-resolution can be incarnated as a neural network, and trained in a cascaded structure from end to end. The interpretation of the network based on sparse coding leads to much more efficient and effective training, as well as a reduced model size. Our model is evaluated on a wide range of images, and shows clear advantage over existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both restoration accuracy and human subjective quality.


Three-dimensional molecular dynamics simulation of epitaxial growth of fcc aluminum film with a negative misfit of 0.05, under atomic deposition, has been carried out. An embedded atom method (EAM) potential is employed for computing atomic interaction in aluminum. Formation of misfit dislocation appears in the simulated growth process. Atomistic analysis of the film shows that, in the beginning the misfit dislocation consists of two Shockley partial dislocations with a stacking fault zone between them. The Burgers vectors of the two partial dislocations are of 〈211〉/6 type, and the width of the stacking fault is ~1.8 nm, which agrees well with theoretical calculation. During further deposition growth, the dislocation pair can slide, but their distance remains stable. Further analysis shows that the dislocation pair forms in a local surface disordering-ordering process, like the local melting-crystallization. Atomic scale squeezed-out tetrahedrons are found to form near the surface and soon slide back in the anor of statistical fluctuation. Under some circumstances, however, a squeezed-out tetrahedron causes disorder of its neighboring atoms, and developes into the observed local disorder zone, which later becomes the nucleation site for the formation of the Shockley dislocation pair.


This study explored how academics in a Ghanaian university conceptualized and engaged with OER through a qualitative approach (in-depth interviews). "Access" emerged as the most dominant theme in how OER was conceptualized. Academics regarded OER positively; emphasizing its role in reducing the knowledge imbalances between the Global North and Global South and enhancing academic practices. Whilst some quality concerns about OERs were expressed, the reputation of sharing-institutions turned out as a significant factor in determining quality of the materials. Overall, the study revealed a deep-seated culture and practice of (re)use, revise, remix and redistribution of e-resources – akin to open practices, only that, this occurred locally among faculty, and at highly informal levels without the application of relevant open licences due to low awareness. In effect, the existing practices among faculty signal open-readiness.


A new approach to the recognition of temporal behaviours and activities is presented. The fundamental idea, inspired by work in speech recognition, is to divide the inference problem into two levels. The lower level is performed using standard independent probabilistic temporal event detectors such as hidden Markov models (HMMs) to propose candidate detections of low level temporal features. The outputs of these detectors provide the input stream for a stochastic context-free grammar parsing mechanism. The grammar and parser provide longer range temporal constraints, disambiguate uncertain low level detections, and allow the inclusion of a priori knowledge about the structure of temporal events in a given domain. To achieve such a system we provide techniques for generating a discrete symbol stream from continuous low level detectors and for enforcing temporal exclusion constraints during parsing. We demonstrate the approach in several experiments using both visual and other sensing data.


The global spread of carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (CPE) has become a public health problem. Not all CPE are resistant to carbapenems creating a diagnostic and therapeutic challenge. Furthermore, as resistance to carbapenems can also be mediated by other β-lactamases combined with defects in membrane permeability, their detection can be difficult by microbiology laboratories that lack molecular tools, which may limit and often delay the correct antibiotic selection. There is only limited evidence regarding infection control measures to contain the spread of CPE. However, recomendations have been published from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Prevention Center and Disease Control (ECDC). Because of the lack of randomized control trials, treatment regimens are mostly based on observational clinical studies. Several of those studies have reported that combination therapy with two or more in vitro-active agents including a carbapenem is superior to monotherapy. On the other hand, a new β-lactamase inhibitor in combination with ceftazidime has shown clinical efficacy Against KPC and some OXA-type producing Enterobacteriaceae.


We report on the first results of a large‐scale comparison study of central pit craters throughout the solar system, focused on Mars, Mercury, Ganymede, Rhea, Dione, and Tethys. We have identified 10 more central pit craters on Rhea, Dione, and Tethys than have previously been reported. We see a general trend that the median ratio of the pit to crater diameter (Dp/Dc) decreases with increasing gravity and decreasing volatile content of the crust. Floor pits are more common on volatile‐rich bodies while summit pits become more common as crustal volatile content decreases. Uplifted bedrock from below the crater floor occurs in the central peak upon which summit pits are found and in rims around floor pits, which may or may not break the surface. Peaks on which summit pits are found on Mars and Mercury share similar characteristics to those of nonpitted central peaks, indicating that some normal central peaks undergo an additional process to create summit pits. Martian floor pits do not appear to be the result of a central peak collapse as the median ratio of the peak to crater diameter (Dpk/Dc) is about twice as high for central peaks/summit pits than Dp/Dc values for floor pits. Median Dpk/Dc is twice as high for Mars as for Mercury, reflecting differing crustal strength between the two bodies. Results indicate that a complicated interplay of crustal volatiles, target strength, surface gravity, and impactor energy along with both uplift and collapse are involved in central pit formation. Multiple formation models may be required to explain the range of central pits seen throughout the solar system.


Aging brings about dramatic changes in the skeleton and other organ systems. Major skeletal diseases associated with aging include osteoporosis and attendant fractures (hip, spine and wrist or Collies) and osteoarthritis and its resulting need for various joint replacements. The prosthetic joint market in the United Sates is between $4-5 billion annually and estimates have suggested that this number will increase by upwards of 10% annually as our population continues to age. The average life expectancy of hip and knee replacements is around 10 years, after which replacement of the prosthetic device becomes highly likely. A strain gage sensor that could be incorporated into the prosthetic implant represents a significant advance in terms of assessing the stability of the implant and potentially enables the surgeon to intervene preemptively before failure actually occurs. This poster outlines the fabrication of printable strain gage sensors for use in prosthetic implants and bone biology studies. The authors have completed the preliminary and feasibility studies and are looking for a partner to fund the project. The proposed strain gages are fabricated employing desktop inkjet printers and can be printed on flexible substrates. Special inks based on carbon nanotubes (CNT) and copper nanoparticles are prepared and used in the printing process. The proposed strain gage sensors have several advantages over the conventional metallic alloy gages currently used in biomedical studies. First, CNT-based strain sensors have gage factors of up to 25. In contrast, metallic gages have gage factors of 1.2. The improved gage factors translate into better sensor sensitivity and correspondingly into the detection of smaller strain variations. The commercially available metallic gages have a relatively large size. In contrast, the proposed strain sensors can be made very small due to the fine resolution of inkjet printers and can be custom shaped in different geometries. Furthermore, the sensors can be arranged in arrays enabling the measurement of strain at different points along the bone or the prosthetic implant. Finally, CNT-based strain sensors have better biocompatibility when compared to the metallic gages. Their biocompatibility has been demonstrated in several studies. The estimated cost of chemicals and reagents to prepare enough ink to fill several cartridges is around $780. Equipment and lab facilities are available at UMKC. Carbon nanotubes are commercially available from NanoLab Inc. Copper nanoparticles and other chemicals can be acquired from Sigma-Aldrich. A timeline of one year will be needed to fine tune the fabrication process and characterize the strain gages.


Forum Policy: Members of the Association are invited to submit letters commenting on any article published in PMLA, or on matters of scholarly and critical interest to readers gen erally. Such letters, if accepted by the Editor, will be sent to the author of the work com mented on, who will be invited to reply. The usual rules regarding courtesy and avoidance of personalities will be enforced, and the Editor reserves complete discretion in deciding whether or not to publish any letter. Letters should not exceed 1,000 words of text. Footnotes are dis couraged and should be included only when absolutely necessary.


Universities and community telecenters have somewhat parallel missions in society. These include the generation, storage and diffusion of knowledge and information. Yet, in most developing countries where telecenters strive to be demand-driven, universities are seldom perceived as relevant to telecenters sustainability. Focusing especially on Africa and using the nomenclature of the New Partnership for African Development, this paper examines the mutual benefits that universities and telecenters could gain from a stronger relationship, and lays out the kinds of steps that might be taken to build a partnership. The paper challenges the perception that "universities are irrelevant" and describes a comprehensive ICT development initiative that includes teaching, research and outreach.


A simple and sensitive HPLC method has been developed for the estimation of donepezil hydrochloride in pharmaceutical formulations. donepezil hydrochloride is a reversible inhibitor of acetyl cholinesterase, indicated for the treatment of mild to moderate dementia of the Alzheimer's type. The
HPLC method was developed by using Phenomenex Luna C 18 column (250 mm length, 4.6 mm internal diameter and 5 9m particle size) and a 50 : 50 v/v mixture of acetonitrile and 0.025 M phosphate buffer (pH adjusted to 7.00 after addition of 5.0 mL of triethylamine) as a mobile phase. The analyte was
monitored with UV detector at 228 nm. Typical retention time for donepezil hydrochloride was found to be 12.78 min. and the total run time for chromatography was maintained up to 18 min. The method was statistically validated for its linearity, accuracy and precision. Due to its simplicity and accuracy, the method can be used for routine quality control of donepezil hydrochloride in pharmaceutical formulations.


The object of the work is to perform the global analysis of the Cournot duopoly model with isoelastic demand function and unit costs, presented in Puu (1991). The bifurcation of the unique Cournot fixed point is established, which is a resonant case of the Neimark-Shacker bifurcation. New properties associated with the introduction of horizontal branches are evidenced. These properties di¤er significantly when the constant value is zero or positive and small. The good behavior of the case with positive constant is proved, leading always to positive trajectories. Also when the Cournot fixed point is unstable, stable cycles of any period may exist.


This paper describes a newly-developed compressed-air foam (CAF) system, based on an overhead fixed-pipe installation, and presents results showing its fire suppression performance. The CAF system generates foams by injecting compressed air into the flowing foam solution. The resulting foam is characterized by excellent fire-mitigation properties. This is because compressed-air foams, at the expansion ratios of between 1:4 to 1:10, consist of very small and uniform-in-size air bubbles. The system needs little water to operate and is able to provide effective protection against Class A and B fires. The system's performance was compared to the performance of water mist and sprinkler-based installations. The experiments confirmed that the CAF system is effective in suppressing Class A and B fires. For the scenarios evaluated, the compressed-air system generated foams with sufficient momentum to penetrate the fire plume and to reach the fuel surface. The experimental results indicate that, in an open space, the foam system performs much better than water mist in extinguishing wood crib and flammable liquid pool fires. In an enclosed space, both water mist and compressed-air foam perform equally well against flammable liquid fires. The suppression performance of the CAF system on large wood crib fires was much better than a sprinkler system.


With much advancement in the field of nanotechnology, bioengineering and synthetic biology over the past decade, microscales and nanoscales devices are becoming a reality. Yet the problem of engineering a reliable communication system between tiny devices is still an open problem. At the same time, despite the prevalence of radio communication, there are still areas where traditional electromagnetic waves find it difficult or expensive to reach. Points of interest in industry, cities, and medical applications often lie in embedded and entrenched areas, accessible only by ventricles at scales too small for conventional radio waves and microwaves, or they are located in such a way that directional high frequency systems are ineffective. Inspired by nature, one solution to these problems is molecular communication (MC), where chemical signals are used to transfer information. Although biologists have studied MC for decades, it has only been researched for roughly 10 year from a communication engineering lens. Significant number of papers have been published to date, but owing to the need for interdisciplinary work, much of the results are preliminary. In this paper, the recent advancements in the field of MC engineering are highlighted. First, the biological, chemical, and physical processes used by an MC system are discussed. This includes different components of the MC transmitter and receiver, as well as the propagation and transport mechanisms. Then, a comprehensive survey of some of the recent works on MC through a communication engineering lens is provided. The paper ends with a technology readiness analysis of MC and future research directions.


The processes in East and South Asian became a peculiar subject for global community of international relations in the field. The presented volume is a collection of papers dealing with the processes of regionalization in East and South Asia. We collected papers from different academic unit both from Europe and Asia. Taking regionalization as a core subject of the volume the readers will discover the complexity of ongoing processes in East and South Asia. We present collection of papers from a very different perspectives starting from the theoretical debates, through economic dimensions of integration to political and military scope of regionalization in East and South Asia. The whole volume presents the diversity of understanding among international relations scholars community. By shaping the diverse view we can possess the better and in depth understanding of East Asia.


JUSTIN GARY BRAM A "DIVIDE-AND-CONQUER" STRATEGY FOR NDE SIGNAL INVERSION IN GAS TRANSMISSION PIPELINES 2006 ADVISOR: SHREEKANTH MANDAYAM ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING Signal inversion in nondestructive evaluation (NDE) applications is a critical step before remediation decisions are made. The accuracy and confidence of the signal inversion results therefore play a key role in evaluating the effectiveness of the NDE procedure. Conventional NDE signal inversion algorithms that employ artificial neural networks treat all geometric regions of the NDE signal equally. Consequently, when the inversion algorithm is presented with input data that is significantly different from the training data, the performance of the network deteriorates significantly. This thesis presents a superior alternative for NDE signal inversion. Different geometric regions of the NDE signature are assigned different confidence levels; separate neural network inversion algorithms are applied to each region and the results are combined. The neural network inversion algorithm consists of radial basis functions that implement geometric transformations of the input NDE signals. It is shown that this "divide-and-conquer" strategy yields robust results, especially when applied to test data that the neural network has not seen before. While the algorithm is exercised theoretically using simple 1-D and 2-D defect geometries, the technique is also validated using NDE inspection images from a suite of test specimens representative of the in-line inspection of gas transmission pipelines.


As a sort of formalizing tool of knowledge representation, Description Logics have been successfully applied in Information System, Software Engineering and Natural Language processing and so on. Description Logics also play a key role in text representation, Natural Language semantic interpretation and language ontology description. Description Logics have been logical basis of OWL which is an ontology language that is recommended by W3C. This paper discusses the description logic basic ideas under vocabulary semantic, context meaning, domain knowledge and background knowledge.


Using top-down memory-driven information to guide actions is the common method for successful and efficient completion of most everyday activities. Many previous studies have demonstrated a role of the frontal and parietal cortices in top-down processing with a number of studies revealing attentional modulations and maintenance of neuronal activity during delays in these areas. These areas have been extensively studied in regards to explicit visual working mechanisms, but its role for motor learning is currently unclear. We have implemented a novel and equivalent saccade and pursuit sequence-learning paradigm inside an fMRI scanner to investigate how early motor learning is implemented in the brain and more specifically within this fronto-parietal network. To achieve this we used a multivariate analysis approach (MVPA) to a priori regions of interest (prefrontal, frontal and parietal cortices) to evaluate how patterns of activation within these areas change with increasing repetition i.e. during visuomotor learning. The results revealed patterns of activity within these areas that reflect early motor learning that is analogous to the dorsal attentional network, indicating an overlap in function for the fronto-parietal network in attention, working memory and early motor learning. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


This study contributes to the rapidly growing literature on women in tourism. It focuses on a group of 13 Caribbean countries. The study analyses the impact of women in apical positions within firms (top manager or owner) on firm performance – productivity, profitability and female employment. For this both a decomposition model and the Inverse Probability Weighted Regression Adjustment (IPWRA) estimator are used. The analysis finds that opportunities for women in these positions in the Caribbean are constrained to less productive and profitable firms, as elsewhere. However, those firms with females at the top employ more women, particularly in management roles.


Humans spend most of their lives in indoor environments; hence, indoor exposure to air pollution may constitute a large part of the total exposure to air pollution. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are well known for their mutagenicity and carcinogenicity and are ubiquitous in urban environments as a result of combustion from e.g. vehicular traffic. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons associated to air particulate matter in indoor environments originates from several sources including: cooking and heating, outdoor sources, smoking, candle and incense burning. Infiltration has been suspected to be one major source of indoor polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. In this study, four different air filter materials intended for mechanical ventilation were tested for their capability to remove particle bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and other genotoxic compounds from a real urban aerosol. Particles were sampled at two highly trafficked locations in Stockholm using a sampling system capable of sample particles in parallel, thus allowing sampling of filtered and un-filtered air simultaneously. The sampled particles were extracted and analysed for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and the genotoxicity of the organic extract was determined using Ames mutagenicity tests. Each air filters capability of removing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and reducing genotoxic effects was determined by comparing the filtered and un-filtered air samples. The results showed that all air filter materials had the capability of removing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and reduce genotoxic effects downstream the air filter, and that the magnitude of the reduction was correlated with the standardized particulate collection efficiencies of a 0.4 μm particles for the tested air filter materials. However, the filter with the lowest performance did not significantly reduce direct acting mutagens.


Effects of public infrastructure investment on the costs and productivity of private enterprises have proven difficult to quantify empirically. One piece of this puzzle that has received little attention is spatial spillovers. We apply a cost-function model to 1982-1996 state-level U.S. manufacturing data, to untangle the private cost-saving effects of inter- and intrastate public infrastructure investment. We implement two spatial adaptations-including a spatial spillover index in the theoretical model, and allowing for spatial autocorrelation in the stochastic structure. Recognizing such spillovers both increases the estimated magnitude and significance of cost savings from intrastate public infrastructure, and augments these productive effects. © 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


MathematicsMathematical signs have the power to squeeze hundreds of pages of work into a few neat lines. But as math gets more complex, the symbols can show their limitations. Byron Cook, a professor of computer science at Queen Mary, University of London, enlisted the help of New York–based artist Tauba Auerbach, a former professional sign writer whose artwork has played with language and technology, to create symbols for his solution to a 70-year-old puzzle called the halting problem. Through trial and error, Cook and Auerbach learned that new symbols should build on old ones, so they make intuitive sense at first glance. Although the verdict from his colleagues is still out, Cook says the new notation has made a "dramatic" difference to his own work. He estimates that more than 100 of his students and colleagues already recognize the symbols. Next, he hopes to have them implemented in LaTeX, the typesetting package that mathematicians commonly use to publish their work electronically.


The foundation of modern cosmology relies on the so-called cosmological principle which states an homogeneous and isotropic distribution of matter in the universe on large scales. However, recent observations, such as the temperature anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the motion of galaxies in the universe, the polarization of quasars and the acceleration of the cosmic expansion, indicate preferred directions in the sky. If these directions have a cosmological origin, the cosmological principle would be violated, and modern cosmology should be reconsidered. In this paper, by considering the preferred axis in the CMB parity violation, we find that it coincides with the preferred axes in CMB quadrupole and CMB octopole, and they all align with the direction of the CMB kinematic dipole. In addition, the preferred directions in the velocity flows, quasar alignment, anisotropy of the cosmic acceleration, the handedness of spiral galaxies, and the angular distribution of the fine-structure constant are also claimed to be aligned with the CMB kinematic dipole. Since CMB dipole was confirmed to be caused by the motion of our local group of galaxies relative to the reference frame of the CMB, the coincidence of all these preferred directions hints that these anomalies have a common origin, which is not cosmological or due to a gravitational effect. The systematical or contaminative errors in observation or in data analysis, which can be directly related to the motion of our local group of galaxies, can play an important role in explaining the anomalies.


The purpose of this thesis is to design an organisation attempting to facilitate cross-sectoral, action-oriented collaboration to influence systemic change towards sustainability, and to create a Design Guide for achieving this objective. To answer this, we conducted a participatory action research with Smart Urbanism: London (SU:LDN) as a case study. This is a start-up organisation whose goal is to introduce the paradigm of complexity thinking to the planning, design and delivery of cities in order to create a new, responsive and sustainable urban fabric. They intend to faciitate a mass collaboration across the relevant sectors. The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) was used as a lens for the overall research, the analysis of SU:LDN and the construction of the Design Guide.


PURPOSE
Socioeconomic status (SES) may influence cancer characteristics and behavior in several aspects. We analyzed PCa characteristics and behavior among low income uninsured men, and compare them to high income patients with health insurance in a developing country.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
A retrospective case-control study was performed on 934 patients with clinically localized PCa who underwent radical prostatectomy between March, 1999 and July, 2009. Patients were divided in two groups, according to their SES. In group 1 (n =380), all had low income, low educational levels and couldn ' t afford medical insurance. In group 2 (n =554), all had higher income, higher education and had medical insurance.

RESULTS
Patients from group 1 were older, had higher Gleason scores, higher rates of seminal vesicle and bladder neck involvement. The Kaplan Meier disease-free survival curve demonstrated that after a follow-up of four years, about 50% of uninsured patients had biochemical recurrence, versus 21% of insured patients (Log rank test: p < 0.001). A multivariate Cox regression analysis for the risk of disease recurrence demonstrated that only PSA levels, Gleason score, seminal vesicle involvement and SES were statistically significant variables. Patients with a low SES presented 1.8 times the risk of recurrence as compared to patients with a high SES.

CONCLUSIONS
Patients with low SES were older, presented more aggressive PCa characteristics and a high rate of disease recurrence. A low SES constituted an independent predictor for disease recurrence.


Abstract. Structured light scanners are intensively exploited in various applications such as non-destructive quality control at an assembly line, optical metrology, and cultural heritage documentation. While more than 20 companies develop commercially available structured light scanners, structured light technology accuracy has limitations for fast systems. Model surface discrepancies often present if the texture of the object has severe changes in brightness or reflective properties of its texture. The primary source of such discrepancies is errors in the stereo matching caused by complex surface texture. These errors result in ridge-like structures on the surface of the reconstructed 3D model. This paper is focused on the development of a deep neural network LineMatchGAN for error reduction in 3D models produced by a structured light scanner. We use the pix2pix model as a starting point for our research. The aim of our LineMatchGAN is a refinement of the rough optical flow A and generation of an error-free optical flow B̂. We collected a dataset (which we term ZebraScan) consisting of 500 samples to train our LineMatchGAN model. Each sample includes image sequences (Sl, Sr), ground-truth optical flow B and a ground-truth 3D model. We evaluate our LineMatchGAN on a test split of our ZebraScan dataset that includes 50 samples. The evaluation proves that our LineMatchGAN improves the stereo matching accuracy (optical flow end point error, EPE) from 0.05 pixels to 0.01 pixels.


We are concerned with the synthesis of strategies for sequential decision-making in non-deterministic dynamical environments where the objective is to satisfy a prescribed temporally extended goal. We frame this task as a Fully Observable Non-Deterministic planning problem with the goal expressed in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), or LTL interpreted over finite traces (LTLf). While the problem is well-studied theoretically, existing algorithmic solutions typically compute so-called strong-cyclic solutions, which are predicated on an assumption of fairness. In this paper we introduce novel algorithms to compute so-called strong solutions, that guarantee goal satisfaction even in the absence of fairness. Our strategy generation algorithms are complemented with novel mechanisms to obtain proofs of unsolvability. We implemented and evaluated the performance of our approaches in a selection of domains with LTL and LTLf goals.


Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a psychiatric condition often encountered by plastic surgeons in daily clinical practice. BDD is a body image disorder that causes patients to become preoccupied with small or imagined defects in appearance, which lead to the de velopment of social and occupational disabilities. Individuals with BDD exhibit fears of their "defects" being noticed by others, and feel ashamed, embarrassed, and uncomfortable when physically exposed during social activities. They have delusional thoughts, develop compulsive rituals and somatic preoccupation, seek cosmetic treatments, and refuse psy chological intervention. Patients with BDD are convinced that improving physical appea rance alone will improve their selfesteem. These patients often undergo cosmetic surgery or other related procedures to correct their "defective" image, often consulting several health professionals, especially plastic surgeons, before finding one who will perform their desired procedure. However, surgery does not resolve these imperfections; on the contrary, the results are often poor and can cause the patient to develop violent behavior toward the surgeon and worsen the patient's condition. The aim of this review was to describe BDD and its progression and treatment, and to make recommendations that will assist plastic surgeons and facilitate diagnosis and patient management in daily clinical practice, the reby allowing patients to understand the psychogenic origin of most preoccupations with appearan ce and the importance of undergoing psychological/psychiatric treatment. As a result, unnecessary aesthetic procedures can be avoided.


This article explains the Lisbon Treaty's provisions relating to competition policy and offers a dynamic interpretation of Article 102 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which could justify the consideration of an effects-based approach to those anti-competitive practices that are most harmful to the final consumers under the economic theory of consumer welfare. The implications of 'consumerprotection requirements' must shed special light on Article 12 TFEU. Therefore, this article examines the possibility of shifting the courts' teleological interpretation of Article 102, which is based on Protocol 27's 'undistorted competition', towards a legal balancing test of the Treaty's objectives. It also highlights the interpretation of undistorted competition within the internal market and the interplay between EU 'free' and fair and unfair competition rules. The balance of EU competition law should, therefore, be performed between Article 119 TFEU's free competition or economic freedom-based competition and Article 12 as ensuring a 'high level of protection', as embedded in the Treaty, for the final consumers. This article explains how consumer-protection requirements must be defined narrowly so that Article 12 may be applied to Article 102. Article 12 can, therefore, mandate a high level of consumer protection for the final consumers in implementing such a specific policy as the abuse of dominance.


INTRODUCTION The Canadian case Monsanto v Schmeiser has attracted considerable attention around the world. The Schmeiser litigation has, in particular, raised fears about the scope of patent liability in cases of genetic drift. Patent infringement is not dependent upon proof of knowledge on the part of the defendant. There is therefore the possibility that farmers who, through no fault of their own, end up with patented varieties of genetically-modified (GM) plants or animals on their land will be held liable for patent infringement in certain circumstances. Schmeiser has come to be representative of these concerns, because although it was held that the defendant was aware of the presence of the GM variety, at neither first instance nor on appeal to the Federal Court of Appeal was this finding treated as directly relevant to the question of infringement. In contrast, in its decision the Supreme Court of Canada showed greater awareness of the problem of innocent infringement. Most significantly, the majority construed elements of the test for patent infringement in such a way as to make it less likely that an entirely innocent defendant would be held to infringe. Unfortunately, however, the Court's approach also leaves a number of important questions unanswered and it is unclear what impact the decision will have in other jurisdictions. A further complicating factor is that although the defendant was found to have infringed, Monsanto was not awarded a financial remedy and had to pay its own costs. This has led some commentators to present the decision as a pyrrhic victory for Monsanto. This interpretation should be treated with caution, however, since it may distract attention from Schmeiser's potential significance.


Fusuline faunas including 29 species belonging to 19 genera/subgenera are described from the Thitsipin Formation in eight sections/localities on the Shan Plateau in eastern Myanmar. These fusulines broadly indicate a Midian (middle Permian, Guadalupian) age. The lower diversity and the presence of some genera, such as Monodiexodina and Eopolydiexodina, suggest that the Sibumasu Block belonged to the palaeobiogeographic Cimmerian Province during the Midian. Furthermore, quantitative cluster analysis of middle Permian fusulines from the Shan Plateau and adjacent Cimmerian blocks suggests close faunal affinities between the Sibumasu Block and the Baoshan Block in western Yunnan. More importantly, the widespread occurrence of fusulines Eopolydiexodina afghanensis and Jinzhangia shengi on the Shan Plateau is similar to that of contemporaneous fusuline faunas from the Baoshan Block and the South Qiangtang Block but different to that of the Tengchong and Lhasa Blocks, which are dominated by the characteristic Nankinella–Chusenella assemblage. This faunal discrepancy provides strong evidence that the Bangong–Nujiang suture passes through the Gaoligong Orogen in western Yunnan rather than through the Myitkyina ophiolites in northern Myanmar. Additionally, palaeobiogeographical analysis of these fusuline faunas from the Lhasa, Tengchong, South Qiangtang, Baoshan and Sibumasu Blocks implies that the Bangong–Nujiang Ocean might have been present before the Midian.


The objective of this study was to identify the characteristics of those who drove unlicensed before gaining their learner licence, to determine factors that could be considered when addressing unlicensed driving among young people. The study was based on data from the New Zealand Drivers Study (NZDS) which is a prospective cohort study of newly licensed car drivers in New Zealand. Study participants were recruited face-to face at driver licensing agencies and learner licence courses. Participants aged 15-24 years were included in this study. The data examined was from the baseline questionnaire which was self-administered at the time of obtaining a learner licence. This included socio-demographic characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity, residential location, deprivation), and behavioural factors such as sleepiness (how often have trouble staying awake), frequency and quantity of alcohol use, frequency of using cannabis, other recreational drugs, or party pills, and Zuckerman's impulsivity, sensation seeking, and aggression/hostility scale. An unlicensed car driver was anyone who had driven a car on a public road before they passed their learner licence test. Univariate logistic regression was used to determine the odds of being an unlicensed driver for each of the explanatory variables. Significant factors from these analyses were entered into a multivariate logistic regression model. The results from the multivariate analysis showed that the most important factors associated with unlicensed driving were: rural residential location, high deprivation, being Maori, hazardous alcohol use, cannabis use, sensation seeking and aggression. Some implications of these findings are discussed.


First-person videos (FPVs) captured by wearable cameras provide a huge amount of visual data. FPVs have different characteristics compared to broadcast videos and mobile videos. The video quality of FPVs are influenced by motion blur, tilt, rolling shutter and exposure distortions. In this work, we design image and video assessment methods applicable for FPVs. Our video quality assessment mainly focuses on three quality problems. The first problem is the video frame artifacts including motion blur, tilt, rolling shutter, that are caused by the heavy and unstructured motion in FPVs. The second problem is the exposure distortions. Videos suffer from exposure distortions when the camera sensor is not exposed to the proper amount of light, which often caused by bad environmental lighting or capture angles. The third problem is the increased blurriness after video stabilization. The stabilized video is perceptually more blurry than its original because the masking effect of motion is no longer present. To evaluate video frame artifacts, we introduce a new strategy for image quality estimation, called mutual reference (MR), which uses the information provided by overlapping content to estimate the image quality. The MR strategy is applied to FPVs by partitioning temporally nearby frames with similar content into sets, and estimating their visual quality using their mutual information. We propose one MR quality estimator, Local Visual Information (LVI), that estimates the relative quality between two images which overlap.To alleviate exposure distortions, we propose a controllable illumination enhancement method that adjusts the amount of enhancement with a single knob. The knob can be controlled by our proposed over-enhancement measure, Lightness Order Measure (LOM). Since the visual quality is an inverted U-shape function of the amount of enhancement, our design is to control the amount of enhancement so that the image is enhanced to the peak visual quality. To estimate the increased blurriness after stabilization, we propose a visibility-inspired temporal pooling (VTP) mechanism. VTP mechanism models the motion masking effect on perceived video blurriness as the influence of the visibility of a frame on the temporal pooling weight of the frame quality score. The measure for visibility is estimated as the proportion of spatial details that is visible for human observers.


Image segmentation is the process of partitioning an image into segments or subsets of pixels for purposes of further analysis, such as separating the interesting objects in the foreground from the un-interesting objects in the background. In many image processing applications, the process requires a sequence of computational steps on a per pixel basis, thereby binding the performance to the size and resolution of the image. As applications require greater resolution and larger images the computational resources of this step can quickly exceed those of available CPUs, especially in the power and thermal constrained areas of consumer electronics and mobile. In this work, we use a hardware tree-based classifier to solve the image segmentation problem. The application is background removal (BGR) from depth-maps obtained from the Microsoft Kinect sensor. After the image is segmented, subsequent steps then classify the objects in the scene. The approach is flexible: to address different application domains we only need to change the trees used by the classifiers. We describe two distinct approaches and evaluate their performance using the commercial-grade testing environment used for the Microsoft Xbox gaming console.


From the consolidation of productive concentration, the clusters in line with the principles and developmental theories are inducers of local development. Through an exploratory research methodology, the study aims, in particular, demonstrate references and official government data about the local productive arrangements, local and regional development, coopetition, innovation and entrepreneurship. The main results highlight the role of the government and its agencies as well as educational and research institutions to mediate actions of local development, while inducing agents for identifying and strengthening the territorial productive vocations. Therefore, although there is the identification of productive clusters, including through official government agencies, it is important to discuss among promoters of clusters to investigate economic, social and environmental concerns, and the potential and benefits for a systematic development for certain products or services. Keywords: Local clusters; Coopetition; Regional development; entrepreneurship; Innovation.


Performing in musical ensembles can be viewed as a dual task that requires simultaneous attention to a high priority �target� auditory pattern (e.g., a performer�s own part) and either (a) another part in the ensemble or (b) the aggregate texture that results when all parts are integrated. The current study tested the hypothesis that metric frameworks (rhythmic schemas) promote the efficient allocation of attentional resources in such multipart musical contexts. Experiment 1 employed a recognition memory paradigm to investigate the effects of attending to metrical versus nonmetrical target patterns upon the perception of aggregate patterns in which they were embedded. Experiment 2 required metrical and nonmetrical target patterns to be reproduced while memorizing different, concurrently presented metrical patterns that were also subsequently reproduced. Both experiments included conditions in which the different patterns within the multipart structure were matched or mismatched in terms of best-fitting meter. Results indicate that dual-task performance was best in matched-metrical conditions, intermediate in mismatched-metrical conditions, and worst in nonmetrical conditions. This suggests that metric frameworks may facilitate complex musical interactions by enabling efficient allocation of attentional resources.


Most of the currently available small molecule bulk heterojunction organic solar cells (BHJ OSCs) only utilize visible light and, to further increase the efficiency, the development of new organic materials that harvest near-infrared (NIR) light to produce an electric current is essential. Herein, a new A–π2–D–π1–D–π2–A type dimeric porphyrin-cored small molecule (CS-DP) is designed, synthesized and characterized. The use of CS-DP with a narrow bandgap (Eg) (1.22 eV) and the deep energy levels of the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) affords the highest power conversion efficiency of 8.29% in BHJ OSCs with PC71BM as an acceptor, corresponding to a short circuit current of 15.19 mA cm−2, an open circuit voltage of 0.796 V and a fill factor of 70% under AM 1.5G solar irradiation. The high device performance is attributed to the visible-near-infrared light-harvesting capability of CS-DP, and the super low energy loss feature. The energy loss (Eloss) lies between 0.43 and 0.51 eV in the system, which is related to the very small energy offset of the LUMOs between the CS-DP donor and PC71BM (ΔELUMO = 0.06 eV). The value of ΔELUMO, which is considered as a driving force for the photoinduced charge separation, is much smaller than the empirical threshold of 0.3 eV, but would not be a limiting factor in the charge separation process. The results indicate that there may be room for further improving the PCE for low bandgap dimeric porphyrin systems.