The understanding that neuroinflammation contributes to neurodegeneration and neuropathic pain is an emerging feature in a growing number of nervous system pathologies. Despite the immunoprivileged status of the central nervous system (CNS), its resident macrophages, microglia, with the help of other immune cells recruited from the blood, can mount robust attacks against intraparenchymal targets. Microglia also contributes to the repair of the CNS after injury and eliminates toxic molecules produced during degenerative diseases, but only modestly, possibly due to physiological adaptations that limit inflammation and its potentially devastating side effects in the CNS. Further, the complex networks of nerve cells, supportive and regulatory glial cells such as astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes in the brain and spinal cord, Schwann cells in peripheral nerves and satellite glial cells in the dorsal root ganglia as well as other cells like endothelial cells, can secrete immunoregulatory factors capable of mediating neuroinflammation.

Although some inflammatory stimuli induce beneficial effects that help to limit disease, for instance, the killing of infectious microorganisms and elimination of damaged cells, uncontrolled inflammation may result in the production of neurotoxic factors that amplify underlying disease states. In addition, in some neuroinflammatory diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS), a breakdown of tolerance to self-antigens occurs by some unknown mechanism, leading immune cells to degrade the myelin sheath that surrounds axons. In contrast, cerebral tumor cells seem to use self-tolerance to "trick" immune cells and invade the brain tissue. After years of research in neuroimmunology, the challenge still remains of gaining a better understanding of how the activity of immune cells is regulated in the CNS, in the hope of finding a safe way to neutralize or stimulate them for therapeutic purposes.

Learning more about how inflammatory responses are induced within the nervous system and the mechanisms by which these responses ultimately contribute to pathology is fundamental in addressing the question of whether inhibition of these responses will be a safe and effective means of reversing or slowing the course of disease. It will be a challenge to design therapeutic agents that safely and effectively target only the detrimental mechanisms that contribute to disease pathogenesis. An understanding of the factors that dictate the switch from a protective to a deleterious inflammatory response will make it possible to devise interventions to limit tissue damage.

This special issue entitled "Mediators of neuroinflammation," features review articles, original research articles, and clinical studies that portray and expand the current knowledge of the specific mediators of neuroinflammation including inducers, sensors, transducers, amplifiers, and effectors of neuroinflammation. The review entitled, "Cytokines and chemokines at the crossroads of neuroinflammation, neurodegeneration, and neuropathic pain," describes how cytokines and chemokines mediate neuroinflammation, with a focus on bacterial meningitis, brain abscesses, Lyme neuroborreliosis, human immunodeficiency virus encephalitis, and neuropathic pain. The protective as well as harmful effects of cytokines and chemokines are described, with an emphasis on how prolonged inflammation, continual activation and recruitment of effector cells can establish a feedback loop that perpetuates inflammation, and ultimately results in neuronal injury.

There are two review articles that focus on the role of inflammation in ischemia in this special issue. The review entitled, "TLR2 and TLR4 in the brain injury caused by cerebral ischemia and reperfusion," describes the participation of Toll-like receptors, (TLR2 and TLR4) and the resultant downstream signaling pathways that contribute to brain injury caused by cerebral ischemia and reperfusion. The review entitled "Development and treatments of inflammatory cells and cytokines in spinal cord ischemia-reperfusion injury," deals with development of inflammation in spinal cord ischemia-reperfusion injury and reviews the mediators and possible treatment options.

MS, a multifactorial neurological disease characterized by the presence of inflammatory brain infiltrates and subsequent neurodegeneration, is the focus of two review articles in this special issue. The review entitled "Role of regulatory T cells in pathogenesis and biological therapy of multiple sclerosis," outlines the role of regulatory T cells in the pathogenesis and treatment of MS, while the review entitled "MicroRNAs as novel regulators of neuroinflammation" describes how microRNAs fine-tune the immune response in MS by functioning as crucial posttranscriptional regulators.

The three research articles featured in this special issue focus on the therapeutic potential of certain drugs in limiting neuroinflammation, hypertension, and demyelination. The dysfunction of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) is a characteristic feature in several CNS disorders including MS. The ability of a quinolizidine alkaloid derivative called Matrine (MAT) in preventing BBB disruption in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, a mouse model of MS, is described in a research article entitled "Inhibitory effect of matrine on blood-brain barrier disruption for the treatment of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis," reporting that MAT strengthens BBB integrity by protecting the basement membrane and tight junction proteins by regulating the balance between matrix metalloproteinases (MMP2, MMP9) and tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMP1, TIMP2). The therapeutic potential of Scutellarin, a flavone that is used in the Orient as an herbal medication, is evaluated in the research article entitled "Scutellarin attenuates hypertension-induced expression of brain toll-like receptor 4/nuclear factor kappa B," in which a rat model of hypertension is used to describe the role of Scutellarin in lowering blood pressure and promoting neuroprotection by suppressing the proinflammatory TLR4/NF-κB signaling pathway. The aim of the research article entitled "Sildenafil (Viagra) protective effects on neuroinflammation: the role of iNOS/NO system in an inflammatory demyelination model" is to study the effect of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS/NO) on inflammatory demyelination and to clarify the neuroprotective effect of Sildenafil (Viagra) using the rat cuprizone model of demyelination, in which oligodendrocyte death and demyelination are independent of immune and inflammatory responses. The authors report that Sildenafil has a direct beneficial effect on oligodendrocytes, protecting these cells and improving myelination. Sildenafil also showed anti-inflammatory effects mainly through iNOS inhibition.

Inflammatory mediators are produced in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Osteopontin (OPN) is a proinflammatory cytokine that has been shown to play an important role in various neuroinflammatory diseases. The clinical study featured in this special issue, entitled "Elevated osteopontin levels in mild cognitive impairment and alzheimer's disease", evaluates the correlation between the levels of OPN in the cerebrospinal fluid and plasma and the cognitive deficits in the patients with AD, MCI and other non-inflammatory neurological diseases. The clinical study, entitled "Eosinophil-derived neurotoxin is elevated in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis" is aimed at discovering a new diagnostic marker for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive neurodegenerative disease characterized by the loss of certain motor neurons and severe spongy vacuolation of the white matter. Mediators of neuroinflammation, such as members of the family of damage-associated molecular patterns, including reactive oxygen species and eosinophil-derived neurotoxin (EDN), have been shown to play a role in the pathogenesis of ALS. A comparison of the levels of EDN in the serum samples of patients with ALS, AD, and Parkinson's disease and healthy controls revealed a 2.7-fold increase of EDN in ALS patients, suggesting that EDN could serve as a new biomarker for ALS.

Together, the reviews, research articles, and clinical studies that are featured in this special issue enhance our knowledge base of key mechanisms in neuroinflammation.


Abstract. The influence of the sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) on a quasi-2-day wave (QTDW) with westward zonal wave number 3 (W3) is investigated using the Thermosphere–Ionosphere–Mesosphere Electrodynamics General Circulation Model (TIME-GCM). The summer easterly jet below 90 km is strengthened during an SSW, which results in a larger refractive index and thus more favorable conditions for the propagation of W3. In the winter hemisphere, the Eliassen–Palm (EP) flux diagnostics indicate that the strong instabilities at middle and high latitudes in the mesopause region are important for the amplification of W3, which is weakened during SSW periods due to the deceleration or even reversal of the winter westerly winds. Nonlinear interactions between the W3 and the wave number 1 stationary planetary wave produce QTDW with westward zonal wave number 2 (W2). The meridional wind perturbations of the W2 peak in the equatorial region, while the zonal wind and temperature components maximize at middle latitudes. The EP flux diagnostics indicate that the W2 is capable of propagating upward in both winter and summer hemispheres, whereas the propagation of W3 is mostly confined to the summer hemisphere. This characteristic is likely due to the fact that the phase speed of W2 is larger, and therefore its waveguide has a broader latitudinal extension. The larger phase speed also makes W2 less vulnerable to dissipation and critical layer filtering by the background wind when propagating upward.


The historical profession and its attendant scholarship are composed of different specializations and sub-disciplines. Among these, political, economic, and social history are well known. Recently, historical research has encompassed such fields as environmental, gender, and ethnic history to complement such diverse specialties as history of science, history of technology, and history of exploration. In the past twenty years, cultural history has emerged in France, with characteristics that have engaged newly honed orientations toward the historical examination of cultural production and cultural objects, if not processes. Informed by philosophical and historiographic analysis, as well as by interdisciplinary interventions in historical research and scholarship, contemporary French cultural history focuses on the history of publishing, scholarship, mass media and spectacles, libraries, and museums, as well as opera and music. Not confined to these, contemporary French cultural history privileges specialization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French phenomena, in the main, but its historiographic innovation and publication extend to an international audience. This cursory and exploratory essay attempts to situate contemporary French cultural history as a specialization and as a vector in the contemporary historiographic landscape.


Dolos concrete armor units are widely used to protect coastal structures. New developments in armor unit strength design permit the armor unit designer to optimize the dolos parameters to achieve an efficient armor layer with respect to both hydrodynamic stability and structural strength. This paper outlines an overall design methodology for dolosse, concentrating primarily on new strength design techniques. These new design techniques are based on a combined deterministic and probabilistic framework wherein the most probable maximum tensile stress in a dolos armor layer can be determined for static and pulsating loads. This design methodology is applied to most of the existing dolos structures throughout the world. It is shown that unreinforced dolosse above approximately 20 tons are typically underdesigned with respect to strength and that dolos-to-dolos impacts should be minimized for these large units. Special strengthening measures that can be economically employed including increasing the member thickness, structural reinforcement, and higher strength concrete are examined.


Abstract Background: Two recent evaluations reported that risk of febrile neutropenia (FN) may be higher when pegfilgrastim prophylaxis (PP) is administered on same day as chemotherapy rather than per recommendation (1–3 days following chemotherapy). Such evidence is based largely on the experience of younger privately insured adults and may not be generalizable to older patients in US clinical practice. Methods: A retrospective cohort design and data from Medicare Claims Research Identifiable Files (January 2008–September 2015) were employed. Patients were aged ≥65 years, had breast cancer or non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, received chemotherapy with intermediate/high risk for FN, and received PP in ≥1 cycle; cycles with PP were stratified based on administration day (same-day ["Day 0"] vs. 1–3 days following chemotherapy ["Days 1–3"]) and were pooled for analyses. Adjusted odds ratios (ORs) for FN during the cycle were estimated for patients who received PP on Day 0 versus Days 1–3. Results: Study population included 65,003 patients who received PP in 261,184 cycles; in 5% of cycles, patients received PP on Day 0. Incidence proportion for FN in cycle 1 was 11.4% for Day 0 versus 8.4% for Days 1–3; adjusted OR was 1.4 (p < .001). Incidence proportion for FN when considering all cycles was 7.7% for Day 0 and 6.0% for Days 1–3; adjusted OR was 1.3 (p < .001). Adjusted ORs when considering all cycles and only inpatient FN episodes (1.3, p < .001) and the narrow definition for FN (1.5, p < .001) were similar. Conclusions: Among Medicare patients receiving chemotherapy and PP in US clinical practice, PP was administered before the recommended timing in 5% of cycles and FN incidence was significantly higher in these cycles. Along with prior research, study findings support recently updated US practice guidelines indicating that PP should be administered the day after chemotherapy.


Background: Pyopneumothorax is defined as a collection of pus and air in the pleural cavity. It may be localised (encapsulated) or it may involve the entire pleural cavity. In India, Pyopneumothorax with pre-existing disease is treated with antimicrobial multiple antituberculous drugs and Intercostal drainage tube or surgery.

Aims & Objective: (1) To know the age and sex incidence. (2) To study clinical presentation and characteristics of mode of onset (3) To obtain relationship with smoking. (4) To emphasise the importance of radiological and other investigations as an aid to diagnosis and management. (5) To find out the underlying lung pathology if any. (6) To decide the response to various modes of treatment. (7) To understand the complications of Pyopneumothorax.

Material and Methods: This is a progressive study of 50 Indoor patients with pyopneumothorax admitted in the civil hospital, Ahmedabad in consecutive 3 years. Traumatic pyopneumothorax patients were excluded from the Study. The response to various modes of treatment and complications were noted.

Results: The age incidences indicate that it was high in 21-30 years of age. Most common complaints were cough followed by dyspnoea and chest pain. The mycobacterium tuberculosis was the most common etiological factor. The best modality of treatment was intercostal drainage by tube with antibiotic coverage.

Conclusion: Tuberculosis is main etiology in country like India. Intercostal drainage with under water seal was the treatment of choice in most of the patients. The commonest complication following ICD was surgical emphysema.


A secure multicast communication is important for applications such as pay-per-view and secure videoconferencing. A key tree approach has been proposed by other authors to distribute the multicast group key in such a way that the rekeying cost scales with the logarithm of the group size for a join or depart request. The efficiency of this key tree approach critically depends on whether the key tree remains balanced over time as members join or depart. In this paper, we present two merging algorithms suitable for batch join requests. To additionally handle batch depart requests, we extend these two algorithms to a batch balanced algorithm. Simulation results show that our three algorithms not only maintain a balanced key tree, but their rekeying costs are lower compared with those of existing algorithms


Background. There are a number of studies showing that general practice is oneof the most stressful workplaces for health care workers. Since the Baltic States regained independence in 1990, a reform of the health care systems took place in which a new role and more responsibilities were allocated to general practitioners.This study aimed to explore the psychosocial stress level among Lithuanian general practitioners (GPs) and examine the relationship between their psychosocial stress and work characteristics.Methods. A cross-sectional study was madeof 300 Lithuanian general practitioners. Psychosocial stress was investigated with a questionnaire based on the Reeder scale. Job demands were investigated with the Karasek scale. The analyses included descriptive statistics, interrelationship analysis between the different characteristics, and multivariate logistic regression to estimate odd ratios for each of the independent variables in the model.Results. The study shows that 48% of the respondents could be classified as suffering from work related psychosocial stress by the Reeder scale. The highest job strain prevalence was among widowed, single and female GPs. The lowest job strain prevalence was among males and GPs of older age. Job strain occurs when job demands are high and jobdecision latitude is low.Conclusions. The greatest risk tophysical and mental health from stress occurs to general practitioners facing high psychological workload demands combined with low decision latitude in meeting those demands. High job demands, patient load more than 18 patients per day and young age of general practitioners can predict a statistically significant effect on job strain.


Rat pancreatic α- and β-cells are critically dependent on hormonal signals generating cyclic AMP (cAMP) as a synergistic messenger for nutrient-induced hormone release. Several peptides of the glucagon-secretin family have been proposed as physiological ligands for cAMP production in β-cells, but their relative importance for islet function is still unknown. The present study shows expression at the RNA level in β-cells of receptors for glucagon, glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP), and glucagon-like peptide I(7-36) amide (GLP-I), while RNA from islet α-cells hybridized only with GIP receptor cDNA. Western blots confirmed that GLP-I receptors were expressed in β-cells and not in α-cells. Receptor activity, measured as cellular cAMP production after exposing islet β-cells for 15 min to a range of peptide concentrations, was already detected using 10 pmol/l GLP-I and 50 pmol/l GIP but required 1 nmol/l glucagon. EC50 values of GLP-I- and GIP-induced cAMP formation were comparable (0.2 nmol/l) and 45-fold lower than the EC50 of glucagon (9 nmol/l). Maximal stimulation of cAMP production was comparable for the three peptides. In purified α-cells, 1 nmol/l GLP-I failed to increase cAMP levels, while 10 pmol/l to 10 nmol/l GIP exerted similar stimulatory effects as in β-cells. In conclusion, these data show that stimulation of glucagon, GLP-I, and GIP receptors in rat β-cells causes cAMP production required for insulin release, while adenylate cyclase in α-cells is positively regulated by GIP.


This is a companion paper to Impact Preliminary Working Paper No OP-73 in which Rimmer and Powell report on a new implicitly directly additive demand system (AIDADS) which (in Cooper and McLaren's 1992b terminology) is effectively globally regular. In OP-73 AIDADS is fitted to a six-commodity disaggregation of a 35-year Australian time series of consumption. Unlike the linear expenditure system and the Rotterdam model, the new system allows marginal budget shares to vary as a function of income. In the current paper we also work at a six-commodity level, fitting AIDADS to an international cross section of 30 countries in 1975. The data are from the International Comparisons Project of Kravis, Heston and Summers (1982) and previously were analyzed by Theil and Clements (1987) using a combination of additive preferences and Working's (1943) model in differential form. The present results overcome two potential shortcomings of the earlier work by replacing Working's model with a more regular specification of Engel effects and by providing and estimating an explicit functional form in the levels of the variables. A rough comparison can be made between the time-series estimates of OP-73 and the cross-sectional ones reported here. We found the two sets of results broadly consistent (although the rate of decline in Food's marginal budget share was less in the Australian time series than in the international cross section). Overall, the new system performed well empirically. It seems suitable for modelling demand for broad consumption aggregates (say up to about a dozen commodities) in situations in which there may be very large variations in income per head.


A preliminary laboratory testing program was conducted to investigate the potential effect of vegetation on the hydraulic conductivity of soils used to construct levee structures. The testing program was conducted using a silty sand soil with a simulated root system. Testing apparatus included rigid-wall-double-ring permeameters and flexible-wall permeameters. The simulated roots were made using Balsa wood having a square cross section of 1.65 by 1.65 mm and approximately 12 to 25 mm in length. The measured hydraulic conductivity for specimens without simulated roots decreased as a function of the moisture content from approximately 1 × 10-3 cm/s to 5 × 10-4 cm/s. Values obtained using the flexible-wall device were less than those measured using the rigid-wall device by a factor of approximately 2. The addition of 1% simulated roots decreased the measured hydraulic conductivity, k. The reduction in k increased from less than 10% at a molding water content of 10% to approximately 50% at a water content of 25%. Similar behavior was observed in the case of specimens with 2% simulated roots. For γdry of 10 kN/m3, the estimated k values were 1 × 10-5 cm/s for the case of 2% roots versus 3 × 10-4 cm/s for the case of 1% roots. The k values decreased as the unit weight of the specimens was increased for both cases. In addition, the difference between k values obtained for specimens containing 1% and specimens containing 2% simulated roots increased as the dry unit weight of the specimens was increased.


We report the fabrication of a highly multi-mode square core jacketed air-clad fiber with a top-hat near-field intensity profile. Using this fiber to deliver Q-switched pulses at 1 μm we have successfully produced square shaped ablation marks in indium tin oxide (ITO) without the use of complex beam shaping optics.


Diabetes mellitus is not just a simple metabolic disorder, however, it is considered to be a cardiovascular disease of a metabolic origin. This is apparent especially when speaking about type 2 diabetes (DM II). The objective of our study was to determine whether a comprehensive spa treatment (procedures and drinking cure) may affect the level of the sympathetic tone of patients suffering from DM II. As an indicator of the sympathetic tone, selected electrocardiographic parameters derived from the heart rate variability and microwave alternans were chosen. There were 96 patients enrolled in our study: 38 patients with poorly controlled DM II and two control groups: 9 patients with compensated DM II and 49 patients, average age without diabetes or other disorders of the glucose metabolism. All received an identical spa treatment and continued their medical therapy. The electrophysiological examination of patients was performed before and after a three-week spa treatment using the KARDiVAR system. Parameters derived from the analysis of heart rate variability (HRV), microvolt T-wave alternans, and microvolt R-wave alternans were analyzed in order to evaluate the tones of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The control group showed a slight increase of parameter the index of activity of regulatory systems (IRSA) (4.4+/-1.3 vs. 3.8+/-1.4; p=0.006) after the spa treatment, while increased heart rate (80.9+/-11.0 vs. 74.6+/-9.6; p=0.028), reduced index of centralization (IC) (1.3+/-0.6 vs. 2.9+/-1.4; p=0.027) and reduced index of myocardium (IM) (9.9+/-7.4 vs. 18.0+/-6.3; p=0.041) were found in patients with a compensated DM II. Patients with a poorly compensated DM II showed a decreased IM (10.9+/-8.6 vs. 16.9+/-5.2; p=0.001) and also a reduced IRSA (4.1+/-3.5 vs. 6.3+/-1.9; p=0.001). The results proved favorable changes in ANS cardiovascular control of patients with DM II after a spa treatment, especially in terms of reducing the sympathoadrenal system activity (decreased IRSA), improving electrical stability of the myocardium and increasing centrally controlled heart rate variability without overloading the cardiovascular system (drop of IM).


Mammalian corticogenesis occurs through a complex process that includes neurogenesis, in which neural progenitor cells proliferate, differentiate, and migrate. It has been reported recently that neurogenesis occurs in the subventricular zone (SVZ), a region previously thought to be the primary site of gliogenesis. It has been recognized that in the SVZ, intermediate progenitor cells, derived from radial glial cells that are multipotent neural stem cells, produce only neurons. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying the regulation of neural stem cells and intermediate progenitor cells as well as their contribution to overall corticogenesis remain unknown. The docking protein FRS2alpha is a major mediator of signaling by means of FGFs and neurotrophins. FRS2alpha mediates many of its pleiotropic cellular responses by recruiting the adaptor protein Grb2 and the protein tyrosine phosphatase Shp2 upon ligand stimulation. Here, we report that targeted disruption of Shp2-binding sites in FRS2alpha leads to severe impairment in cerebral cortex development in mutant mice. The defect in corticogenesis appears to be due at least in part to abnormalities in intermediate progenitor cells. Genetic evidence is provided that FRS2alpha plays critical roles in the maintenance of intermediate progenitor cells and in neurogenesis in the cerebral cortex. Moreover, FGF2-responsive neurospheres, which are cell aggregates derived from neural stem/progenitor cells (NSPCs), from FRS2alpha mutant mice were smaller than those of WT mice. However, mutant NSPCs were able to self-renew, demonstrating that Shp2-binding sites on FRS2alpha play an important role in NSPC proliferation but are dispensable for NSPC self-renewing capacity after FGF2 stimulation.


Aim and objectives: The aim of this paper was to review published manuscripts on the use of midline catheters, the implications of study findings and recommendations for clinical practice in the acute care setting. Design: Modified integrative literature review Methods: Using key MeSH terms, we searched the electronic databases: CINAHL, Medline, and Embase. The Co- chrane and Joanna Briggs databases, Google Search Engine and the reference lists of published materials were also searched. Studies were included if they were in the English language and reported the use of midline catheters in adult acute care populations. Manuscripts that described midlines made of aquavene were excluded Results: Two hundred and thirty two (232) papers were identified using the search strategy. From these identified pa- pers, thirty (30) were included in the final review. Thematic analysis identified three major themes. These included: (i) ad- vantages of using midline catheters (ii) disadvantages of using midline catheters (iii) insertion and management issues. Conclusion: Midline catheters have both positive and negative implications for clinical practice. They can be used for extended periods of intravenous therapy without requiring repeated cannulations but are not without risk. Midline cath- eters have been associated with mechanical and chemical phlebitis along with intravascular thrombosis. As such they are not suitable across the entire adult acute population. Midline catheters reduce the number of repeated cannulations which reduces patient discomfort, increases patient satisfaction and also contributes to organisational efficiency. � /,


Dry Powder inhalers (DPIs) have
been one of the most promising developments in pulmonary drug delivery systems.
In general, DPIs are more effective than systemic administrations and convenient
to use. However, delivering high-dose antibiotics through a DPI is still a
challenge because high powder load may need a very large inhaler or increase
the incidence of local adverse effects. Spray drying has been increasingly
applied to produce DPI formulations for high-dose antibiotics; nevertheless,
many spray-dried particles are amorphous and physically unstable during
storage, particularly under the humid environment.

My research focuses on addressing
critical challenges in physical stability of DPIs for spray-dried high-dose
antibiotics. The effects of moisture-induced crystallization on physical
stability and aerosol performance of spray-dried amorphous Ciprofloxacin DPI
formulations stored at different humidity conditions were studied. Our study
not only provided a mechanistic understanding in the impact of crystallization
on aerosol performance but also developed novel approaches for improving
stability of spray-dried formulations used in DPI.

Our work has shown that
recrystallization of amorphous spray-dried Ciprofloxacin led to significant
changes in aerosol performance of DPIs upon storage, which cause critical
quality and safety concerns. These challenges have been solved through co-spray-drying
Ciprofloxacin with either excipient such as leucine or synergistic antibiotic
like Colistin. Co-spray-drying Ciprofloxacin with Colistin not only improved
physical and aerosol stability but also enhanced antibacterial activity which
is a great advantage for treating 'difficult to cure' respiratory infections
caused by multidrug resistant bacteria.

My research work is a sincere
effort to maximize the utility and efficacy of high-dose DPI, an effective
delivery tool for treating severe resistant bacterial respiratory infections.


The recent health care reforms include major changes to the composition (and, it is hoped, role) of health authorities. The research team at the Centre for Corporate Strategy and Change, Warwick Business School, will be undertaking a major study of these reforms, financed by the National Health Service (NHS) Training Authority. This study will need to come to some assessment of the past performance of District Health Authority members; define what is meant by performance in this context; and delineate the change agenda which will confront the new authorities.


The brown widow spider (Latrodectus geometricus) is thought to be native to South America or Southern Africa, but its distribution has expanded to most continents by human introduction. In the continental USA, L. geometricus was first documented in south Florida in the 1930's. In the early 2000's a population expansion occurred, and this species is now found in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and southern California. Introduced species may face many obstacles when establishing a new population. One common obstacle might be severe inbreeding following founder events or genetic bottlenecks. The purpose of this study was to quantify inbreeding depression in an introduced population of L. geometricus. I predicted that if inbreeding was common for many generations during the introduction, many deleterious alleles should have been purged resulting in lower genetic load and consequently minimal fitness differences between inbred and outbred offspring. To assess the consequences of inbreeding, I compared hatching number between clutches produced by full-sibling crosses and crosses between unrelated individuals. The percentage of unhatched eggs/clutch was roughly 3-fold higher in inbred relative to outbred offspring, indicating a fitness cost to inbreeding. The results suggest that significant inbreeding has been avoided during the introduction of this species in the southeastern US. This may be the result of multiple and continued introductions being common during the recent range expansion leading to a minimization of inbreeding. Thesis Mentor:____________________________ Dr. Scott Harrison Honors Director:____________________________ Dr. Steven Engel April 2017 Department of Biology University Honors Program Georgia Southern University


Abstract On many tidal flats, there is a transition from sand flat at the more energetic seaward margin to mudflat further inland. However, the ability of sand flats to attenuate incident wave energy is an important but poorly understood constraint on mudflat development and morphology. This paper presents the results of an instrumented field study of incident wave attenuation across Roberts Bank, the sandy intertidal portion of the Fraser River Delta. The attenuation of wave height was monitored at four stations along a shore-normal transect for a period of 2 months (December 23, 2003, to February 10, 2004). The attenuation varied with the relative wave height ratio (Hs h−1) along the seaward margin, with dissipation increasing as water depths decrease and/or incident wave heights increase. Under the most dissipative conditions observed (Hs h−1 ≈ 0.25), the exponential decay coefficient reached 0.00045. This decay coefficient is an order of magnitude smaller than predicted by a simple wave transformation model due to the relatively large wind fetch over the sand flat. Despite the maintenance of wave energy, the range of wave heights remains constrained in the landward direction, with the frequency of waves capable of entraining sediment on the sand flat decreasing from 11% at the outer flat to 2% at the inner stations. In response, bed elevation change and depth of sediment activation are greatest at the seaward margin and decrease exponentially landward. It is argued that the sand flat provides a natural barrier that defines the extent of mudflat development by limiting the potential for sediment resuspension and morphological change on the mudflat.


Peer education between undergraduate pharmacy students and high school pupils has the potential to be an effective teaching method for the delivery of health promotion interventions due to social and cognitive congruence that learners share with educators. The aim of this study was to: explore perceived impact on third year pharmacy students of being a peer educator; and to identify benefits of health promotion and change in knowledge of high school pupil learners. Interactive workshops covering public health topics relevant to 14-16 year olds were developed and co-designed with teachers, with workshop learning outcomes mapped to the appropriate curriculum. Pharmacy students were allocated to groups of four and provided with training prior to workshop delivery. Surveys of pupils and teachers evaluating the workshops were analysed using descriptive statistics; pharmacy students' perceptions were captured in an assessed continuing professional development record and analysed thematically. Pupils and teachers rated the workshops very highly; pharmacy students benefitted by feeling more prepared for future health promotion roles.


The argument that maritime Search and Rescue (SAR) operations act as a 'pull factor' of irregular seaborne migration has become commonplace during the Mediterranean 'refugee crisis'. This claim has frequently been used to criticize humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) conducting SAR off the coast of Libya, which are considered to provide "an incentive for human smugglers to arrange departures" (Italian Senate 2017: 9). In this policy brief, we scrutinise this argument by examining monthly migratory flows from Libya to Italy between 2014 and October 2019. We find no relationship between the presence of NGOs at sea and the number of migrants leaving Libyan shores. Although more data and further research are needed, the results of our analysis call into question the claim that non-governmental SAR operations are a pull factor of irregular migration across the Mediterranean sea.


In this paper we present an onset detection algorithm that consists of two parts, the detection of transient peaks in an audio spectrum and the classification of the peaks, adapting a model derived from the Bayesian Theory of Surprise. The model is an unsupervised, robust adaptation of conjugate priors, providing the distributions of beliefs about the number of the transient peaks, in a time space as well as in a frequency space. The novelty points marked by the model are then classified according to their relevance in order to filter out non-onset events, caused for example by a background noise. It has been evaluated using a collection of over 170 music excerpts. Our experiments show that the new model can provide an overall performance close to the current state of the art solutions. We discuss the advantages of the presented approach and the ways to overcome its shortcomings and the possible directions of future research.


Synopsis A nearly complete mandible of a large tetrapodomorph sarcopterygian from the Frasnian Alves Beds is studied with the aid of computed tomography. The absence of cosmine, a small parasymphysial dental plate bearing dentition that is discontinuous with that of the coronoids, and the presence of an elongated posterior coronoid that bears two fang pairs restrict placement of the tetrapodomorph from the Alves Beds to Tristichopteridae, and suggest that is a member of the clade that is sister to the anatomically primitive Givetian genus Tristichopterus. Taxa from this segment of tristichopterid phylogeny include the Givetian–Frasnian Eusthenopteron and Frasnian Jarvikina, but the tristichopterid from the Alves Beds is distinguished from both by the presence of an organized row of well-developed teeth on the posterior coronoid. This character has been proposed as a synapomorphy of taxa crownward of Trischopteridae, but is widely distributed among tetrapodomorph fishes. Our reinterpretation of lower jaw material of Tinirau clackae suggests this species is a member of the Tristichopteridae rather than the 'Elpistostegalia', and likely includes material assigned to a second species and genus of tetrapodomorph from the Red Hill site, Bruehnopteron murphyi. Proposal of a formal taxonomic name for the tristichopterid from the Alves Beds is withheld pending the discovery or analysis of further material from these deposits.


Robert Bloom (1908-1994) was legendary in the education and performance world. Often hailed as one of the last performers of the Golden Era of classical music and a favorite of conductors ranging from Stokowski to Stravinsky to Shaw, Bloom was an orchestral oboist and English hornist, oboe soloist, chamber musician, teacher (Eastman, Yale, Hartt, Manhattan School of Music, Juilliard and Philadelphia's University of the Arts), composer, conductor, editor of masterworks of the 18th century, and, as a founding member of the Bach Aria group, a seminal influence in the post-WWII revival of Baroque music in America. In The Robert Bloom Collection and the Art of Robert Bloom CD and video archives, we see what his musical ideals were in 1)18th-century performance practices, 2) writing new music for the instrument and commissioning new works, and 3) and transcribing music for the oboe and English horn. As an oboist, I believe it is important that Bloom's teachings, historical performance practices and ideas for expanding repertoire are propagated. Therefore, the works chosen for this dissertation illustrated this legacy. My recitals included 1) some of Bloom's published 18th-century baroque elaborations (his term for ornamentation), as well Baroque works which I have elaborated, 2) works written by him and by other oboists/composers (Labate, Roseman) as well as a flute/oboe duo that I commissioned by Dr. Marcus Maroney and 3) transcriptions by both Bloom and myself (Bach, Donizetti, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Handel, Schumann and Telemann).

In these three dissertation recitals, I hope to have illustrated some of Robert Bloom's lasting contributions and impact on the oboe world, and to have demonstrated the potential for carrying forward this legacy by studying his teaching and emulating his example.


This work explores the moral status of laws prohibiting bestiality and whether they are justified in practice or justifiable in theory. Part I of the paper introduces us to bestiality by first testing our moral intuitions regarding the act. Through a list of 10 examples we are asked to considered whether we find some acts morally wrong and therefore prohibitable. Next the paper explores the current state of the law. It considers possible definitions of bestiality from the Church, secular law, and legal scholars. Each definition is criticized as overly broad, vague, and in at least one case too narrow. Instead, a new definition of bestiality is proposed which better comports with our moral intuitions and eliminates some of the problems associated with the prior definitions. Part II of the paper challenges the justification of laws prohibiting bestiality. Through the Harm Principle it explores whether such laws are justifiable by preventing Harm to Others, Harm to Self, Offense to Others, or Moral Legalism. In short, they are not. In order to make the laws justified, it would require we rewrite the statutes to comport with the preferable definition of bestiality discovered in Part I of the paper and justify those laws by elevating the status of animals in this country. But to afford animals so many rights would be inconsistent with our current commercialization of their species.


We aim to obtain an interpretable, expressive, and disentangled scene representation that contains comprehensive structural and textural information for each object. Previous scene representations learned by neural networks are often uninterpretable, limited to a single object, or lacking 3D knowledge. In this work, we propose 3D scene de-rendering networks (3D-SDN) to address the above issues by integrating disentangled representations for semantics, geometry, and appearance into a deep generative model. Our scene encoder performs inverse graphics, translating a scene into a structured object-wise representation. Our decoder has two components: a differentiable shape renderer and a neural texture generator. The disentanglement of semantics, geometry, and appearance supports 3D-aware scene manipulation, e.g., rotating and moving objects freely while keeping the consistent shape and texture, and changing the object appearance without affecting its shape. Experiments demonstrate that our editing scheme based on 3D-SDN is superior to its 2D counterpart.


This paper describes the Magnebike robot, a compact robot with two magnetic wheels in a motorbike arrangement, which is intended for inspecting the inner casing of ferromagnetic pipes with complex-shaped structures. The locomotion concept is based on an adapted magnetic wheel unit integrating two lateral lever arms. These arms allow for slight lifting off the wheel in order to locally decrease the magnetic attraction force when passing concave edges, as well as laterally stabilizing the wheel unit. The robot has the main advantage of being compact (180 × 130 × 220 mm) and mechanically simple: it features only five active degrees of freedom (two driven wheels each equipped with an active lifter stabilizer and one steering unit). The paper presents in detail design and implementation issues that are specific to magnetic wheeled robots. Low-level control functionalities are addressed because they are necessary to control the active system. The paper also focuses on characterizing and analyzing the implemented robot. The high mobility is shown through experimental results: the robot not only can climb vertical walls and follow circumferential paths inside pipe structures but it is also able to pass complex combinations of 90-deg convex and concave ferromagnetic obstacles with almost any inclination regarding gravity. It requires only limited space to maneuver because turning on the spot around the rear wheel is possible. This high mobility enables the robot to access any location in the specified environment. Finally the paper analyzes the maximum payload for different types of environment complexities because this is a key feature for climbing robots and provides a security factor about the risk of falling and slipping. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


What is the role of firms and markets in mediating the division of labor? This paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine law firms' boundaries. We find that firms' field scope narrows as market size increases and individuals specialize, indicating that firms' boundaries reflect organizational trade-offs. Moreover, we find that whether the division of labor is mediated by firms differs systematically according to whether lawyers in a particular field are mainly involved in structuring transactions or in dispute resolution. Our evidence is consistent with hypotheses in which firms' boundaries reflect variation in the value of knowledge-sharing or in the costs of monitoring, but not in risk-sharing. Our findings show how the incentive trade-offs associated with exploiting increasing returns from specialization lead the structure of the industry to be fragmented, but highly-skewed.


It is notably challenging to design an efficient and secure signature scheme based on error-correcting codes. An approach to build such signature schemes is to derive it from an identification protocol through the Fiat-Shamir transform. All such protocols based on codes must be run several rounds, since each run of the protocol allows a cheating probability of either 2/3 or 1/2. The resulting signature size is proportional to the number of rounds, thus making the 1/2 cheating probability version more attractive. We present a signature scheme based on double circulant codes in the rank metric, derived from an identification protocol with cheating probability of 2/3. We reduced this probability to almost 1/2 to obtain the smallest signature among code-based signature schemes based on the Fiat-Shamir paradigm, around 22 KBytes for 128 bit security level. Furthermore, among all code-based signature schemes, our proposal has the lowest value of signature plus public key size, and the smallest secret and public key sizes. We provide a security proof in the Random Oracle Model, implementation performances, and a comparison with the parameters of similar signature schemes.


Background: Epidemiologic evidence supported a role for vitamin D and vitamin D receptor (VDR) polymorphisms in cancer risk. Beyond VDR, the biologic effects of vitamin D are mediated by the vitamin D–binding protein (DBP), a key protein in vitamin D metabolism. Furthermore, the gene encoding the DBP (GC, group-specific component) has an important role in the vitamin D pathway. Several studies investigated DBP serologic levels and GC polymorphisms in association with cancer risk with controversial results. Thus, we carried out a meta-analysis to investigate these associations. Methods: We included 28 independent studies concerning the following tumors: basal cell carcinoma, bladder, breast, colon–rectum, endometrium, liver, esophagus, stomach, melanoma, pancreas, prostate, and kidney. Through random-effect models, we calculated the summary odds ratios (SOR) for serum DBP and the GC polymorphisms rs2282679, rs12512631, rs7041, rs4588, rs17467825, rs1155563, and rs1352844. Results: We found a borderline decrease in cancer risk for subjects with high compared with low levels of DBP [SOR, 0.75; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.56–1.00]. Dose–response meta-analysis indicates a nonsignificant decrease risk for an increase of 1,000 nmol/L of DBP (SOR, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.91–1.01). We found no significant alterations in cancer risk for subjects carrying any of the studied GC polymorphisms compared with wild-type subjects both in the main analysis and in analyses stratified by cancer type and ethnicity. Conclusions: We found trends toward significance, suggesting a role of DBP in cancer etiology, which should be confirmed in further studies. Impact: To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate GC polymorphisms and DBP serologic levels in association with any type of cancer. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 24(11); 1758–65. ©2015 AACR.


For high-intensity, linearly polarized light, above-threshold ionization results from the time difference between the instant of ionization and the electric field maximum. Cold plasmas suitable for recombination extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) lasers can be produced if appropriate wavelength-ionizing radiation is used. Multiphoton ionization intensities are calculated for representative XUV laser schemes.


High-resolution Doppler-free spectra of Sm were measured in the 635–690-nm wavelength region by means of Doppler-free spectroscopy with a single-mode diode laser and a long vapor cell. Isotope shifts were determined to an accuracy of better than 8 MHz for 20 transitions originating mostly from the 4f66s2 7FJ (J=0 to J=6) to 4f66s6p9D°, 9F°, and  7G° levels. Specific mass shifts, field shifts, and changes in the mean-square nuclear charge radii were evaluated by King-plot analysis.


OBJECTIVE
To assess the human resources impact of Malawis rapidly growing antiretroviral therapy (ART) programme and balance this against the survival benefit of health-care workers who have accessed ART themselves.

METHODS
We conducted a national cross-sectional survey of the human resource allocation in all public-sector health facilities providing ART in mid-2006. We also undertook a survival analysis of health-care workers who had accessed ART in public and private facilities by 30 June 2006, using data from the national ART monitoring and evaluation system.

FINDINGS
By 30 June 2006, 59 581 patients had accessed ART from 95 public and 28 private facilities. The public sites provided ART services on 2.4 days per week on average, requiring 7% of the clinician workforce, 3% of the nursing workforce and 24% of the ward clerk workforce available at the facilities. We identified 1024 health-care workers in the national ART-patient cohort (2% of all ART patients). The probabilities for survival on ART at 6 months, 12 months and 18 months were 85%, 81% and 78%, respectively. An estimated 250 health-care workers lives were saved 12 months after ART initiation. Their combined work-time of more than 1000 staff-days per week was equivalent to the human resources required to provide ART at the national level.

CONCLUSION
A large number of ART patients in Malawi are managed by a small proportion of the health-care workforce. Many health-care workers have accessed ART with good treatment outcomes. Currently, staffing required for ART balances against health-care workers lives saved through treatment, although this may change in the future.


Numerical Simulation of Admiralty Inlet, WA, with Tidal Hydrokinetic Turbine Siting Application Kristen M. Thyng Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor James J. Riley Mechanical Engineering Tidal hydrokinetic energy has been recognized as a potential source of sustainable, renewable energy. In order to properly site turbines for commercial-scale development, the complex flow conditions in a potential deployment region must be understood. Viable locations for turbines are limited by many factors, including underwater space that is above the bottom boundary layer, below shipping traffic, within areas of strong currents, and yet avoids additional fatiguing stresses. The primary area of interest in the Puget Sound for commercial tidal energy development is Admiralty Inlet, which includes potentially disruptive flow features such as vortices and strong turbulence. This dissertation seeks to increase the body of knowledge of these features both from an oceanographic perspective and as they pertain to turbine site characterization. The primary means of studying Admiralty Inlet in this document is through numerical simulation of the region using the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS). The model output is found to compare well with field data, capturing eddy fields, turbulence properties, relative tidal phases, and illuminating many flow features. Horizontal velocities in the simulation are, on average, approximately 75% the size of those found in the data. This speed deficiency is inherited from the forcing model in which the Admiralty Inlet simulation is nested. The model output also shows that the flow field of this fjord-like estuary is largely affected by a headland on the northeast side of the Inlet. Vortices generated by this headland, Admiralty Head, are found to vary considerably depending on the tidal cycle. The eddies can persist beyond the half-cycle of generation to significantly affect the horizontal speed and other flow field properties in the subsequent half-cycle. Detailed analysis of the vertical vorticity governing equation shows that advection, tilting, stretching, and boundary generation are the most significant processes dictating the behavior of the vorticity. Turbulence modeling in the simulation is carried out via a k-ε turbulence closure scheme. Comparisons of model output with high resolution field data show the model to perform reasonably well: predicted Reynolds stress and turbulent dissipation rate values are usually within a factor of two of the field data. The turbulent kinetic energy from the simulation compares well with field data that is restricted to the frequency range of classical turbulence. The energy density spectrum of the data is found to follow Kolmogorov's theory beyond the inertial subrange. Using this fact and Taylor's frozen field approximation, an inferred calculation for the turbulent kinetic energy is derived that spans the full frequency range of the data set. The output from the inferred calculation compares well with the full turbulent kinetic energy from the field data. Maps of metrics for tidal turbine siting are generated that address many considerations for turbine placement, and can be adjusted for the model's speed deficiency with a simple multiplication factor. Among the possible best locations for turbine deployment are north of Point Wilson on the west side of Admiralty Inlet and near the center of the channel between Point Wilson and Admiralty Head. These locations have a strong tidal resource available along with highly bi-directional tidal currents and low turbulence levels.


The number of unaccompanied minors (UAMs) arriving in the European Union (EU) has been increasing dramatically over recent years resulting in the formulation of EU policy directives around safeguarding and well-being. Notably, the majority of UAMs enter Europe irregularly through two main gateways to the European continent: via Italy, using the Central Mediterranean Sea route; or through Greece, transiting through the Eastern Mediterranean route from Turkey, mostly via sea. Profiles of UAMs travelling via the two different routes are significantly diverse, reflecting Italy's and Greece's geographical proximity to North Africa and the Middle East, respectively. Although Italy has witnessed a decline since 2018 (Todaro and Romano 2019), the two countries have faced a significant increase in UAMs, and this has required a considerable reorganisation of the reception systems and, more generally, of their welfare systems. However, difficulties in securing adequate reception for UAMs seeking protection have persisted in both countries. Through an analysis of the impact of the pandemic on the Italian and Greek reception systems and social interventions with UAMs, we utilised a multiple embedded case study approach within a comparative analysis, to identify key changes in the main services which should be guaranteed to minors—namely, hosting/housing, guardianship, foster care, family/relatives reunification, school integration, language, job training for care leaving, and preparation for leaving care after 18 years (Di Rosa 2017; Buchanan and Kallinikaki 2018; Barn et al. 2020). Against a background of critical reviews of the main issues related to policies and reported social work practice in a context of COVID-19 precarity, set within a wider EU framework, this paper contributes to the literature with an analysis of the current situation and the tightening of the conditions of reception, inclusion and integration that await UAMs in these gateway countries today. We conclude that with the suspension of key services and amenities, and with a practical halt to the due process of immigration and asylum, social workers are facing a difficult challenge to prevent the deterioration of UAMs' mental health and well-being.


Activation of receptor tyrosine kinases requires ligand binding. Tao et al. propose that, in the case of a receptor for vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) called the kinase insert domain receptor (KDR), a structural feature in the receptor's ectodomain ensures that this is the case. When mutant receptors lacking certain extracellular immunoglobulin-like domains were expressed in endothelial cells, receptor activation and stimulation of downstream signaling events were observed in the absence of ligand. These mutants were still able to bind to ligand, although they did not require this interaction. The authors propose that in the absence of VEGF, the threedimensional structure does not allow the juxtaposition of the catalytic domains between KDR monomers that facilitates transphosphorylation. VEGF binding could cause a conformational change in the monomers that would relieve this structural constraint and allow receptor dimerization. This may be a general strategy for receptors to prevent aberrant, ligand-independent signaling. Q. Tao, M. V. Backer, J. M. Backer, B. I. Terman, Kinase insert domain receptor (KDR) extracellular immunoglobulin-like domains 4-7 contain structural features that block receptor dimerization and vascular endothelial growth factor-induced signaling. J. Biol. Chem. 276, 21916-21293 (2001). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Thirty five Nile Tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus L. 1758) eggs or fry at the ages of 2 and 14 days post fertilization (dpf) were randomly selected and put into a 1L plastic bottle incubator. These were then immersed either in 0, 250 or 500μg/L of 17α-methyltestosterone (MT) for 6, 12, 24, 48, 72 and 96h separately. Controls were established using eggs or fry at the same age groups immersed only in ethanol (250μL/L) instead of MT at the same amount and duration. At the end of the treatment, they were washed and nursed in 10L plastic containers and 100L glass aquaria which were replenished with water according to their growth. They were fed with 40% protein pellet until 62 - 65dpf then dissected for gonadal sex determination using aceto-carmine squash method. The results showed that both the 250 and 500μg/L MT induced (P


Porcine Circovirus Type 2 (PCV2) is the obligate infectious agent in Postweaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome (PMWS) of pigs. We vaccinated dams twice before and once during pregnancy with an inactivated PCV2 vaccine and monitored health status, antibody titers in dams and piglets and growth parameters of their progeny. Two producer farms, run under the supervision of the Swiss Swine Health Organisation and categorized in the highest health status, were selected for the study. Historically, PMWS was diagnosed in animals of one farm at the weaning stage, whereas in the other farm, pigs wasted during the fattening period. Groups of dams in each farm were randomly chosen for vaccination or sham injection. Compared to historical data. cases of PMWS decreased 4-12-fold among all animals of
both farms. In sera of vaccinated dams only low concentration of PCV2 DNA was detected and no case of PMWS was diagnosed in their progeny. Vaccination increased serum antibodies of dams significantly accompanied with significant increased colostral antibody titers in their offspring. However. after weaning. progeny from vaccinated dams showed a significant increased daily weight gain and shortened fattening period compared to controls. This is the first demonstration of an effect of subclinical circovirus infection on growth performance of fattening pigs that can be controlled by vaccination of dams.


Melting and subsolidus relations in the (Mg,Fe)SiO3-(Mg,Fe)CO3, (Mg,Fe)2SiO4(Mg,Fe)CO3, and (Mg,Fe)O-(Mg,Fe)CO3 systems have been investigated at 14, 15, 16 and 25 GPa, 1973 K and 2173 K, using a 1000 t uniaxial multi anvil split sphere apparatus. The ironmagnesium partition coefficients between magnesite and silicates or oxides have been measured in subsolidus assemblages. Iron is always partitioned preferentially in the silicate and oxide phases, the order of increasing partitioning being pyroxene, olivine, silicate perovskite, wadsleyite and magnesiowi•stite. A thermodynamic model of iron-magnesium distribution between magnesite and all these phases, based on Gibbs free energy minimization, is established. Melting of pyroxenemagnesite and olivine-magnesite pseudo binary systems is eutectic, with eutectic points close to 1973 K and 60 mol % carbonate at 15 GPa in both systems. In the more complex mantle system, it is likely that such melts would form in the transition zone by heating and homogenization of deep subducted carbonates. The melts formed in the olivine-carbonate system are characterized by high Mg+Fe/Si ratios and thus unlikely to be primary kimberlitic magmas, a conclusion in agreement with previous tudies in the peridotire-CO2 system. On the other hand, the observed pyroxene-magnesite m lts formed at transition zone conditions have Mg+Fe/Si ratios that are comparable to those of natural kimberlites, suggesting that melting of carbonated pyroxenites at high pressures could be a source of kimberlitic magmas.


Output growth estimates for the regions of the UK are currently published at the annual frequency only and are released with a long delay. Regional economists and policymakers would benefit from having higher frequency and more timely estimates. In this paper we develop a mixed frequency Vector Autoregressive (MF-VAR) model and use it to produce estimates of quarterly regional output growth. Temporal and cross-sectional restrictions are imposed in the model to ensure that our quarterly regional estimates are consistent with the annual regional observations and the observed quarterly UK totals. We use a machine learning method based on the hierarchical Dirichlet-Laplace prior to ensure optimal shrinkage and parsimony in our over-parameterised MF-VAR. Thus,this paper presents a new, regional quarterly database of nominal and real Gross Value Added dating back to 1970. We describe how we update and evaluate these estimates on an ongoing, quarterly basis to publish online (at www.escoe.ac.uk/regionalnowcasting) more timely estimates of regional economic growth. We illustrate how the new quarterly data can be used to contribute to our historical understanding of business cycle dynamics and connectedness between regions.


Water molecules in hydrated salts often have a well-defined geometrical arrangement and form an excellent model system for studying the effects of the hydrogen-bond environment on vibrational energy relaxation. Hydrated lithium nitrate contains two distinct types of crystal water molecules. One water molecule makes strong and weak hydrogen bonds; the other water molecule makes two bifurcated hydrogen bonds. We use femtosecond two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy to probe the vibrational relaxation dynamics of the OD stretch vibration of dilute HDO molecules in lithium nitrate trihydrate. In the temperature range from 22 to 295 K we observe a decrease in vibrational lifetime from 3.8 ± 0.2 to 2.8 ± 0.1 ps for the strongly hydrogen-bonded species, from 5.41 ± 0.08 to 4.14 ± 0.05 ps for the bifurcated hydrogen-bonded species, and from 10.4 ± 0.2 to 8.8 ± 0.4 ps for weakly hydrogen-bonded species. This temperature dependence is opposite to that of the OD stretch vibration of dilute HDO:H2O ice, for which the...


Increases in dopamine concentration in limbic brain regions have been postulated to underlie the reinforcing effects of psychostimulant drugs in laboratory animals. However, neither the qualitative nor the quantitative relationship between drug-induced increases in brain dopamine and the reinforcing effects of psychostimulant drugs have been investigated in humans. Positron emission tomograph and [(11)C]raclopride, a dopamine D(2) receptor radioligand that competes with endogenous dopamine for occupancy of the D(2) receptors, were used to measure changes in brain dopamine after different doses of i.v. methylphenidate in 14 healthy controls. In parallel, measures for self-reports of drug effects were obtained to assess their relationship to methylphenidate-induced changes in brain dopamine. The intensity of the "high" induced by methylphenidate was significantly correlated with the levels of released dopamine (r = 0.78, p <.001); subjects having the greatest increases were those who perceived the most intense high. This relationship remained significant after partialing out for dose and concentration of methylphenidate in plasma. Furthermore, subjects for whom methylphenidate did not increase dopamine did not perceive a high. These results represent the first clear demonstration that stimulant-induced high, a mood descriptor that reflects reinforcing effects of drugs in humans, is associated with increases in brain dopamine, and also that there is a quantitative relationship between levels of D(2) receptor occupancy by dopamine and the intensity of the high.


The ability to move in complex environments is a fundamental requirement for robots to be a part of our daily lives. While in simple environments it is usually straightforward for human designers to foresee the different conditions a robot will be exposed to, for more complex environments the human design of high-performing controllers becomes a challenging task, especially when the on-board resources of the robots are limited. In this article, we use a distributed implementation of Particle Swarm Optimization to design robotic controllers that are able to navigate around obstacles of different shape and size. We analyze how the behavior and performance of the controllers differ based on the environment where learning takes place, showing that different arenas lead to different avoidance behaviors. We also test the best controllers in environments not encountered during learning, both in simulation and with real robots, and show that no single learning environment is able to generate a behavior general and robust enough to succeed in all testing environments.


The Elizabeth Cu mine in E-central Vermont is a concordant ore body lying within medium to high-grade metamorphic rocks of the Gile Mountain formation, believed to be Ordovician in age. The major structural features of the district are the E-dipping eastern limb of the Green Mountain anticlinorium, and the Strafford dome, which is marked by the development of an abnormal "Christmas tree" pattern of minor folds. Due to a flat northerly plunge, the easterly part of this structure crops out as a series of recumbent dextral folds in which the older rocks appear on the inside of the northerly-plunging V structures. Minor sinistral folds and flexures are common in the area, and both pre- and post-date the dextral folds associated with the Strafford dome. The Elizabeth ore bodies are bedded within the rock sequence at the contact of amphibolite and mica schists and are structurally related to the "Christmas-tree" pattern of folds. The ore is localized in fold positions and on straight limbs between fold positions. Schist breccia within the ore, ore infilling the space between parted bedding planes in drag fold positions, and veins filled with ore suggest that the ore was introduced into permeable zones formed during deformation and dated as middle and/or late Devonian (Acadian). It is believed that the major ore control in the district was the crushed and folded contact of thick competent amphibolite beds with incompetent schists interbedded with quartzites.


Runtime and scalability of large neural networks can be significantly affected by the placement of operations in their dataflow graphs on suitable devices. With increasingly complex neural network architectures and heterogeneous device characteristics, finding a reasonable placement is extremely challenging even for domain experts. Most existing automated device placement approaches are impractical due to the significant amount of compute required and their inability to generalize to new, previously held-out graphs. To address both limitations, we propose an efficient end-to-end method based on a scalable sequential attention mechanism over a graph neural network that is transferable to new graphs. On a diverse set of representative deep learning models, including Inception-v3, AmoebaNet, Transformer-XL, and WaveNet, our method on average achieves 16% improvement over human experts and 9.2% improvement over the prior art with 15× faster convergence. To further reduce the computation cost, we pre-train the policy network on a set of dataflow graphs and use a superposition network to fine-tune it on each individual graph, achieving state-of-the-art performance on large hold-out graphs with over 50k nodes, such as an 8-layer GNMT.


Context represents a broad range of aspects, comprising for example the conversational setting (including speaker and hearer), mutual knowledge, inter- and intratextual information. Crucially, research targeting the temporal dynamics of language processing in discourse suggests that these different features affect processes in two discrete stages. Based on findings from time-sensitive electrophysiology, this article provides an overview over previous investigation of language comprehension in context, demonstrating that the human parser appears to be driven by two principled processes: i) a highly expectation-based mechanism that is fed by numerous contextual features (reflected in N400-effects), and ii) a mechanism that is concerned with the updating of propositional content and is driven by considerations of cooperativeness and speaker intention (reflected by a Late Positivity).


In 1904 a contingent Boer and British war veterans from the Second Anglo Boer War (1899-1902) took part in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, better known as the World's Fair. From mid-July until the end of November they performed the Battle of Colenso, the Battle of Paardeberg, and the escape of De Wet daily. The trainer was Frank Fillis, a well-known South African entertainer and owner of Fillis' Circus. These shows were so realistic that the Boer War Spectacle soon became the most popular show at the Fair. The highlight of the show was Gen. Piet Cronje, who was widely critised for taking part in it. In South Africa people mockingly referred to this venture as the ""Boeresirkus"". Nothing came of the expected financial gain and reconciliation between Boer and Briton. Gen. Cronje in vain tried through several court cases, to obtain moneys owed to him by the various managers of the spectacle. Regular skirmishes occurred between Boer and Briton which led to injuries and even death. The interest for South African sport history is that this show produced Africa's first Olympians. The third Olympiad was organised as part of the Fair and three of the South African participants at the Boer War Show took part in the Olympic marathon. They were Robert Harris, Len Tau and Jan Mashiani. The latter two were probably Tswanas and not Zulus as previously believed. A Boer tug-of-war team also took part in this Olympic event.


In 1925 Pierre Auger reported on his observations of low energy electrons associated with core-ionised atoms in cloud chamber experiments. He was able to correctly identify the mechanism for their production, and such electrons are now known as Auger electrons. Typically Auger electrons have energies in the range 10 eV to 2 keV. The short distance that such low energy electrons travel in solids ensures that Auger electrons come from the surface layers. The data generated by the AES technique are complex.

There are at least three electrons involved in the process, and there are many possible configurations for the atom. These possibilities led to spectra that are not readily interpreted in detail. Theory lags behind experiment in this area. In principle, it should be possible to find information about the chemical environment of atoms from Auger spectra. While there are clear changes in spectral lineshapes, there is no simple way to go from the spectra to an understanding of the chemical bonding of the atom. There are a number of experiments currently underway which aim to improve our understanding of the Auger process. Synchrotron experiments with tunable energy x-rays are providing new insight. Experiments that use positrons to excite Auger emission have also produced further recent understanding. Coincidence experiments between photoelectrons and Auger electrons have also made recent advances. Auger photoelectron coincidence spectroscopy reduces the complexity of Auger spectra by only counting those electrons that occur as a consequence of selected ionisations. The effect is to reduce the complexity of the spectra, and to isolate processes that are often clouded by the simultaneous occurrence of other effects.


The micro hydraulic mobile water treatment plant is an emergency water treatment unit which is fast to deploy, simple to operate and has a low energy and chemical consumption. The mobile treatment plant has been operated successfully after several natural disasters in Indonesia. Currently more than 30 installations are used on a daily basis in Indonesia. Water quality control is done manually on a daily basis and a large database of results is available. These water quality data have been compared with computer model water quality calculations in order to optimize coagulant dosage.


Collective emotions are at the heart of any society and become evident in gatherings, crowds, or responses to widely salient events. However, they remain poorly understood and conceptualized in scientific terms. Here, we provide first steps towards a theory of collective emotions. We first review accounts of the social and cultural embeddedness of emotion that contribute to understanding collective emotions from three broad perspectives: face-to-face encounters, culture and shared knowledge, and identification with a social collective. In discussing their strengths and shortcomings and highlighting areas of conceptual overlap, we translate these views into a number of bottom–up mechanisms that explain collective emotion elicitation on the levels of social cognition, expressive behavior, and social practices.


Subject / term: Economics (Nationalekonomi) / VT2008Title: The Impact of Openness on the Swedish EconomyAuthor(s): Nsiah Samuel Osei & Ojeabulu GodspowerSupervisor: Christos PaphristodoulouIntroduction:Over the decades there has been continues debate amongst economist on the relation betweenopenness and economic performance. From the comparative advantage theory of Heckscher-Ohlin, Openness can be an influencing factor in improving the economic performance of acountry. Based on Heckscher-Ohlin theory, a country will export products it has comparativeadvantage in to improve its overall economic performance.Problem:The purpose of this thesis work is to determine empirically, the type of economic growth thatoccurs as a result of the Openness of the Swedish Economy.Method: We will perform traditional Ordinary Least Square regression analysis on thevariables listed in the theoretical part of this thesis. We will also plot stationary andUnstationary time series graphs in relation with GDP, Exports and Imports.Results: The regression results shows that export has been more than import in Sweden andthat the type of growth experienced in Sweden was Pro-trade biased


Rural and regional Australia have had a hard time of late. The economies of Sydney and Melbourne are growing, but much of the rest of their states are not. The population of regional areas is stagnating and agriculture is struggling. Perhaps worst of all there is a feeling that no-one in Canberra or in the booming coastal periphery cares about this. The people of Orange have apparently spoken. Outside Sydney, behind what seems like an impervious sandstone curtain, not all is well. Even the largest towns in regional New South Wales are struggling to retain their populations and have faced difficult economic times through the present decade, although the drought years have faded away. Agriculture still matters, for employment and exports, but mechanisation has cost jobs. Farming is still how people see rural and regional Australia, but it is certainly not the only thing. There is more to rural Australia than agriculture, and most places have shifted away from the mass production of agricultural commodities move over the wheat-sheep belt towards the marketing of rural lifestyles and landscapes. Farming becomes valuable as scenery. City people can be tempted for weekends away and old-fashioned farm stays have evolved. But that works most easily for NSW coastal towns like Berry and Kiama that are within striking distances of capital cities. More distant inland places have had to work a little harder to diversify. Ironically, Orange is one of the towns that have led the way in terms of change. An enormously successful FOOD (Food of Orange District) festival has drawn in city crowds and tempted some to remain. At the other end of the state, the Tamworth Country Music Festival has grown every year and been a massive boost to regional income.


We present a system that can match and reconstruct 3D scenes from extremely large collections of photographs such as those found by searching for a given city (e.g., Rome) on Internet photo sharing sites. Our system uses a collection of novel parallel distributed matching and reconstruction algorithms, designed to maximize parallelism at each stage in the pipeline and minimize serialization bottlenecks. It is designed to scale gracefully with both the size of the problem and the amount of available computation. We have experimented with a variety of alternative algorithms at each stage of the pipeline and report on which ones work best in a parallel computing environment. Our experimental results demonstrate that it is now possible to reconstruct cities consisting of 150K images in less than a day on a cluster with 500 compute cores.


In compressed sensing, a small number of linear measurements can be used to reconstruct an unknown signal. Existing approaches leverage assumptions on the structure of these signals, such as sparsity or the availability of a generative model. A domain-specific generative model can provide a stronger prior and thus allow for recovery with far fewer measurements. However, unlike sparsity-based approaches, existing methods based on generative models guarantee exact recovery only over their support, which is typically only a small subset of the space on which the signals are defined. We propose Sparse-Gen, a framework that allows for sparse deviations from the support set, thereby achieving the best of both worlds by using a domain specific prior and allowing reconstruction over the full space of signals. Theoretically, our framework provides a new class of signals that can be acquired using compressed sensing, reducing classic sparse vector recovery to a special case and avoiding the restrictive support due to a generative model prior. Empirically, we observe consistent improvements in reconstruction accuracy over competing approaches, especially in the more practical setting of transfer compressed sensing where a generative model for a data-rich, source domain aids sensing on a data-scarce, target domain.


There is increasing emphasis from funding agencies on transdisciplinary approaches to integrate science and end‐users. However, transdisciplinary research can be laborious and costly and knowledge of effective collaborative processes in these endeavors is incomplete. More guidance grounded in actual project experiences is needed. Thus, this article describes and examines the collaborative process of the Ecological Effects of Sea Level Rise in the Northern Gulf of Mexico transdisciplinary research project, including its development, implementation, and evaluation. Reflections, considerations, and lessons learned from firsthand experience are shared, supported with examples, and connected to relevant scholarly literature.


The poet John Keats coined the term negative capability to describe the kind of open mindedness that is capable of tolerating the unknown or only half-known. He also described a similar idea regarding our ability to disregard our own knowledge and allow the mind to become a thoroughfare for all thoughts. This capability may be considered from the perspective of the psychology of science as an epistemic virtue, which plays an important role within the scientific study of anomalous phenomena or what might be more succinctly termed anomalistics. Have scientists developed sufficient negative capability to deal adequately with the claims of the paranormal? As an illustration, we analyze the role of negative capability within the recently published correspondence between sociologist Marcello Truzzi and mathematician and science journalist Martin Gardner. Gardner defended a kind of hardline skepticism favoring prejudice and pejorative labels whereas Truzzi promoted a softer skepticism with more symmetry and a courteous effort toward those who strive diligently to follow the rules of science. Both forms of skepticism have different epistemological grounds and this inner-demarcation is analyzed through the perspective of the psychology of science and its assessment of individual's epistemic vices and virtues. This inner-demarcation has an impact on the wider issue of demarcation between science and pseudoscience. We conclude that negative capability should be a salient factor in future research and may be encouraged and developed by the educational opportunities provided by anomalistics and its characteristic skeptic-proponent dialogues.


In  or shortly thereafter, a Dutch ship was laden with all sorts of materials and products, mostly metals, but also textiles from the booming wool industries in both Flanders and Holland, a shipment of leather and exotic ivory. It was a ship of considerable size (at least  last) and departed from the Dutch Republic at a time of profound troubles. The Eighty Years' War between the Republic and Spain was far from settled. War at sea was unremitting and intensifying, with Dunkirk privateers an unruly menace to Dutch shipping. Spanish rule in the southern Low Countries was highly militarised, and constant campaigns were waged against it from the North. Central Europe was devastated by the Thirty Years' War, which had entered a new phase through new alliances. The heavy and strategically valuable cargo of the Dutch ship was assembled from North and South, as well as from a range of places in central Europe. The ship departed for a destination that it never reached. It sank off the coast of Texel, where it was discovered  years later. From  to  the wreck site and finds were subject to archaeological research, producing information on the ship, its setting and historical context as well as on the production and distribution of the individual shipments in the cargo, and informing us about the structure of early modern industry and trade, operating despite and because of the war. The present study, initiated by Wilma Gijsbers in  and supported by the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE), the Maritime Archaeology Programme at the University of Southern Denmark (MAP-SDU) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO; a one-year Odyssee grant), is the first to bring together all this evidence and evaluate it as a whole. Central to the study is the analysis of the ship and cargo assemblage as excavated, which is presented in Part  and  of this article. This is combined with an analysis of the discovery, its impact and the efficiency of fieldwork methodology in Part , and with reflections on the contribution the project makes to our understanding of production, trade and international relations in the specific historical context in Part .


Turbulence plays a key role in the conversion of the energy of large-scale fields and flows to plasma heat, impacting the macroscopic evolution of the heliosphere and other astrophysical plasma systems. Although we have long been able to make direct spacecraft measurements of all aspects of the electromagnetic field and plasma fluctuations in near-Earth space, our understanding of the physical mechanisms responsible for the damping of the turbulent fluctuations in heliospheric plasmas remains incomplete. Here we propose an innovative field–particle correlation technique that can be used to measure directly the secular energy transfer from fields to particles associated with collisionless damping of the turbulent fluctuations. Furthermore, this novel procedure yields information about the collisionless energy transfer as a function of particle velocity, providing vital new information that can help to identify the dominant collisionless mechanism governing the damping of the turbulent fluctuations. Kinetic plasma theory is used to devise the appropriate correlation to diagnose Landau damping, and the field–particle correlation technique is thoroughly illustrated using the simplified case of the Landau damping of Langmuir waves in a 1D-1V (one dimension in physical space and one dimension in velocity space) Vlasov–Poisson plasma. Generalizations necessary to apply the field–particle correlation technique to diagnose the collisionless damping of turbulent fluctuations in the solar wind are discussed, highlighting several caveats. This novel field–particle correlation technique is intended to be used as a primary analysis tool for measurements from current, upcoming and proposed spacecraft missions that are focused on the kinetic microphysics of weakly collisional heliospheric plasmas, including the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS), Solar Probe Plus, Solar Orbiter and Turbulence Heating ObserveR (THOR) missions.


The occurrence of thrombosis and phlebitis after intravenous injection of 10 mg diazepam, 4 mg lorazepam, or 1-2 mg flunitrazepam was studied on the second or third and the seventh to 10th days. A significantly higher incidence occurred with all drugs on days 7 to 10 than on days 2 and 3. Painless thrombosis occurred much more often with diazepam than with the other two benzodiazepines. Its incidence was greater in small hand or arm veins than in large antecubital vessels. Lorazepam and flunitrazepam therefore have clear advantages over diazepam.


Pseudo-nitzschia blooms often occur in coastal and open ocean environments, sometimes leading to the production of the neurotoxin domoic acid that can cause severe negative impacts to higher trophic levels. Increasing evidence suggests a close relationship between phytoplankton bloom and bacterial assemblages, however, the microbial composition and succession during a bloom process is unknown. Here, we investigate the bacterial assemblages before, during and after toxic and non-toxic Pseudo-nitzschia blooms to determine the patterns of bacterial succession in a natural bloom setting. Opportunistic sampling of bacterial community profiles were determined weekly at Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf by 454 pyrosequencing and analyzed together with domoic acid levels, phytoplankton community and biomass, nutrients and temperature. We asked if the bacterial communities are similar between bloom and non-bloom events and if domoic acid or the presence of toxic algal species acts as a driving force that can significantly structure phytoplankton-associated bacterial communities. We found that bacterial diversity generally increases when Pseudo-nitzschia numbers decline. Furthermore, bacterial diversity is higher when the low-DA producing P. fraudulenta dominates the algal bloom while bacterial diversity is lower when high-DA producing P. australis dominates the algal bloom, suggesting that the presence of algal toxin can structure bacterial community. We also found bloom-related succession patterns among associated bacterial groups; Gamma-proteobacteria, were dominant during low toxic P. fraudulenta blooms comprising mostly of Vibrio spp., which increased in relative abundance (6–65%) as the bloom progresses. On the other hand, Firmicutes bacteria comprising mostly of Planococcus spp. (12–86%) dominate during high toxic P. australis blooms, with the bacterial assemblage showing the same bloom-related successional patterns in three independent bloom events. Other environmental variables such as nitrate and phosphate and temperature appear to influence some low abundant bacterial groups as well. Our results suggest that phytoplankton-associated bacterial communities are strongly affected not just by phytoplankton bloom in general, but also by the type of algal species that dominates in the natural bloom.


The fishery and population dynamics of Trichiurus lepturus (Linnaeus) from Veraval was studied for the period 2003-2006. The average annual catch was 18,813 t, forming 27.63% of the total trawl catches at Veraval. September to December was the most productive period in terms of catch and catch rate. The length-weight relationship showed that growth was allometric and there was no significant variation between the sexes. The growth parameters L- and K were 134.1 cm and 0.29 respectively and the length attained at the end of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 years were 35.28, 60.16, 78.77, 92.70 and 103.12 cm respectively. The growth performance index (o) was 3.717 and longevity was 10.29 years. Recruitment pattern was trimodal with two major peaks during May - June and August -October and one minor peak during January - March and the length at first capture was 14.11 cm. The natural mortality, fishing mortality and total mortality were 0.51, 0.93 and 1.44 respectively and exploitation ratio was 0.64. The maximum sustainable yield was 14,565 t which was lower than the average annual catch indicating over-exploitation of the species. The yield per recruit and biomass per recruit was 43.34 g and 46.6 g respectively and increase in relative yield by 142.41% would be obtained by decreasing the present level of fishing by 60%.


Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an emerging biomedical imaging modality that has been developed over the last 15 years. More recently, OCT has been used for the intraoperative imaging of tumor margins in breast cancer and axillary lymph nodes providing a real time in-vivo assessment of the tissue morphology. Traditional OCT images are limited by only being able to observe morphological structures. As diagnostic medicine continues to push for earlier detection, one must develop functional imaging modalities that would detect molecular information in-vivo allowing a real-time microscopic analysis of the tissue specimen. A novel modality of OCT called magnetomotive-OCT (MMOCT) has been developed by our group, employing an induced modulated magnetic field with a magnetic contrast agent to create the added contrast to structural OCT images. Modified protein microspheres with a BSA protein shell functionalized with RGD peptide sequences for targeting and an oil core have been designed and synthesized. Magnetic nanoparticles (Fe3O4) and Nile Red dye have been encapsulated into its oil core. These microspheres have previously been demonstrated to target cancer cells by functionalizing them with a layer of RGD peptides and could be functionalized with monoclonal antibodies. Preliminary results show that these magnetic microspheres, which are 2.0- 5.0 microns in size, are readily detectable under MM-OCT when embedded in a 5% agarose gel, in a 3-D scaffold of macrophage cells previously incubated with the microspheres, and when injected in-vivo into a tumor from an NMUcarcinogen rat animal model for breast cancer.


The following eighteen species of Thysanoptera Terebrantia have been found on flax in the British Isles: Melanthrips fuscus (Sulzer), Aeolothrips fasciatus (L.), Anaphothrips obscurus (Muler), Aptinothrips rufus (Gmelin), Chirothrips manicatus Hal., Limothrips cerealium Hal., L. denticornis Hal., Stenothrips graminum Uzel, Taeniothrips atratus (Hal.), T. vulgatissimus (Hal.), Thrips angusticeps Uzel, T. discolor Hal., T. flavus Schrank, T. fuscipennis Hal., T. major Uzel, T. minutissimus L., T. physapus L., T. tabaci Lindeman. Each species is described briefly with notes on habits of adults and larvae, place of pupation, number of generations in the year, hibernation, time of occurrence on plants, plants and objects on which found, host plants of larvae and adults, importance to flax, record of locality and collector on flax, distribution, including altitudes, in the British Isles. More species occur in the south than in the north of Great Britain, and species common to both regions usually occur in greater numbers in the south. The insects breed on certain species of crop plants, weeds or trees of arable land. No damage of economic importance to flax by Thysanoptera has been proven in the British Isles, and the flax thrips, Thrips lini Ladureau, has not been found. Taeniothrips vulgatissimus (Hal.) may breed on flax and its adults, and those of T. atratus (Hal.) may cause superficial damage to petals of flowers. Thrips angusticeps Uzel and T. tabaci Lindeman will probably breed on flax.


Nowadays the terms "identity" and "recognition" bear a double reality within itself. While it enjoys an indispensable and ubiquitous presence in the cultural, political, and economic spheres accelerated by modernity and capitalist conditions, it also embraces a tendency to be essentialized, reified, misunderstood or quickly dismissed. A lack of precision in their meaning and undifferentiated use can dampen the liberatory engine propelled by the politics of recognition. Therefore, those concepts are in great need for analytical and practical clarification. This paper sets to wrestle with such a question: how is it possible to address identity and recognition in light of authentic emancipatory mandate without being hijacked by capitalist and neoliberal maneuvers? Drawing insights from critical theories, we connect identity and recognition to an intersubjective, dialogic theory of justice. On the intersubjective and normative ground, identity and recognition are no longer picture-like and individualistic concepts, but deeply grounded in existential/ethical/moral concerns, and social solidarity. This theoretical reconstruction is accompanied by an empirical example from an ethnographic study. Through examining phenomenological moments of (mis-)recognition during interpersonal encounters in a multicultural counseling classroom, we analyze conditions for (mis-)recognition and theorize the practice of recognition.


Temporal relationships between concentrations of sex steroid-binding protein (SBP), corticosteroid-binding globulin (CBG), total and free estradiol, total and free testosterone, cortisol, and progesterone were studied in plasma obtained at 1- to 3-day intervals throughout gestation in six rhesus macaques. Concentrations of SBP and CBG were measured by diethylaminoethyl cellulose filter assays. Total and free steroids were estimated by radioimmunoassay and ultrafiltration dialysis, respectively. We found that SBP was elevated between days 30 and 50 and CBG between days 60 and 140; both then declined until term (167 days). Estradiol increased gradually throughout gestation. Testosterone was elevated between days 10 and 40, then declined, and rose slightly in late gestation until approximately 15 days before delivery, when it increased markedly. Free estradiol and testosterone increased dramatically before parturition. Progesterone was elevated between days 25 and 45 and declined to relatively constant levels thereafter. Cortisol was essentially unchanged throughout gestation. Our data show that in the pregnant rhesus, levels of SBP and CBG vary independently of one another, but both decline before term; concentrations of both total and free estradiol and testosterone increase markedly before parturition; in late gestation, elevated estrogen is not associated with increased levels of SBP or CBG (as it is in human females).


The ability to build maps is a key functionality for the majority of mobile robots. A central ingredient to most mapping systems is the registration or alignment of the recorded sensor data. In this paper, we present a general methodology for photometric registration that can deal with multiple different cues. We provide examples for registering RGBD as well as 3D LIDAR data. In contrast to popular point cloud registration approaches such as ICP our method does not rely on explicit data association and exploits multiple modalities such as raw range and image data streams. Color, depth, and normal information are handled in an uniform manner and the registration is obtained by minimizing the pixel-wise difference between two multi-channel images. We developed a flexible and general framework and implemented our approach inside that framework. We also released our implementation as open source C++ code. The experiments show that our approach allows for an accurate registration of the sensor data without requiring an explicit data association or model-specific adaptations to datasets or sensors. Our approach exploits the different cues in a natural and consistent way and the registration can be done at framerate for a typical range or imaging sensor.