AACR Centennial Conference: Translational Cancer Medicine-- Nov 4-8, 2007; Singapore

C60

The IGF-I and mTOR signaling pathways are intimately involved in human cancers. These signaling pathways are also highly conserved evolutionally. We have used C. elegans, a genetically amenable system, to identify novel genes involved in these pathways. In C. elegans, loss-of-function mutations in the genes encoding DAF-2 (the insulin/IGF-I-receptor like molecule) and AGE-1 (the PI 3-kinase homolog), respectively, lead to dramatic increase of resistance towards ROS (reactive-oxygen species) and enhancement of animal lifespan. Consistently, null mutations in the daf-18 gene, which encodes the C. elegans homolog of PTEN tumor suppressor, cause sensitivity towards ROS and shorten animal lifespan. We have carried out functional genomic screens using RNAi to identify novel genes involved in regulation of ROS resistance and animal lifespan. In our primary screen, we screened for RNAi clones that could confer resistance towards paraquat, a ROS generating agent. The positive clones were then screen for ability to extend animal lifespan (secondary screen). To this date, we have screened one-third of the C. elegans genome to completion and identified 84 genes that are positive in these two sequential assays. Most of the genes identified are novel for their function in regulation of ROS resistance and animal lifespan. By genetic interaction tests, we have found that 29 of these genes potentially encode novel regulators of the DAF-2/insulin-receptor like signaling pathway. Our subsequent biochemical studies in mammalian cells have confirmed that some of their human homologs indeed function in the IGF-I (insulin-like growth factor I) signaling pathway. In addition, we have identified several genes that encode proteins likely function in the TOR (target-of-rapamycin) signaling pathway. Studying the functions of these genes may help to elucidate the mechanisms by which the TOR pathway is activated by a variety of stimuli. Our studies illustrate the power of functional genomic approach in identifying novel players in these important signaling pathways. These new molecules may serve as targets for developing anti-cancer chemotherapies.


A Quaternary Climate Record from a Uinta Mountains, USA, Fen Core with Emphasis on Sediment Pyrolysis Samuel Abraham Hillam Department of Geological Sciences, BYU Master of Science The northern slopes of the Uinta Mountains, Utah were previously glaciated and contain many landslides. The Tokewanna Landslide is very large and lacks Quaternary faults. Presumably, increased moisture was the failure trigger. A Quaternary climate record from a cored fen, developed in a small basin between hummocks, was reconstructed using sediment pyrolysis, biomass balance, and magnetic susceptibility. Pyrolysis is used to define Hydrogen Indices that are used to delineate wetter and drier conditions based on the kerogen type Type III being drier, and Type II wetter. The data were matched to a time/depth curve and compared to other Uinta Mountains climate studies. Pyrolysis, biomass balance, and magnetic susceptibility results indicate drier to wetter conditions from ~11,027 to ~8,800 cal yr BP. This was followed by an increase in precipitation, peaking ~8,060 cal yr BP, and then decreasing. Drying conditions ensued after ~4,800 cal yr BP, and from ~1,700 cal yr BP to modern. Regional studies suggest mid-Holocene Epoch warming; some also indicate increased precipitation during those periods. A study at nearby Little Lyman Lake (Tingstad et al., 2011) displays a plankton percent record similar to the wetness record of the study fen. The fen core record does not indicate wet conditions at its base as expected. The record begins ~11,000 cal yr BP and likely represents an incomplete history of this Holocene fen, as the base of the wetland deposits was not reached.


Methods of interpolation and quadrature have been used for over 300 years. Improvements in the techniques have been made by many, most notably by Gauss, whose technique applied to polynomials is referred to as Gaussian Quadrature. Stieltjes extended Gauss's method to certain non-polynomial functions as early as 1884. Conditions that guarantee the existence of quadrature formulas for certain collections of functions were studied by Tchebycheff, and his work was extended by others. Today, a class of functions which satisfies these conditions is called a Tchebycheff System. This thesis contains the definition of a Tchebycheff System, along with the theorems, proofs, and definitions necessary to guarantee the existence of quadrature formulas for such systems. Solutions of discretely observable linear control systems are of particular interest, and observability with respect to a given output function is defined. The output function is written as a linear combination of a collection of orthonormal functions. Orthonormal functions are defined, and their properties are discussed. The technique for evaluating the coefficients in the output function involves evaluating the definite integral of functions which can be shown to form a Tchebycheff system. Therefore, quadrature formulas for these integrals exist, and in many cases are known. The technique given is useful in cases where the method of direct calculation is unstable. The condition number of a matrix is defined and shown to be an indication of the the degree to which perturbations in data affect the accuracy of the solution. In special cases, the number of data points required for direct calculation is the same as the number required by the method presented in this thesis. But the method is shown to require more data points in other cases. A lower bound for the number of data points required is given.


A major focus of debate about rationing guidelines for COVID-19 vaccines is whether and how to prioritize access for minority populations that have been particularly affected by the pandemic, and been the subject of historical and structural disadvantage, particularly Black and Indigenous individuals. We simulate the 2018 CDC Vaccine Allocation guidelines using data from the American Community Survey under different assumptions on total vaccine supply. Black and Indigenous individuals combined receive a higher share of vaccines compared to their population share for all assumptions on total vaccine supply. However, their vaccine share under the 2018 CDC guidelines is considerably lower than their share of COVID-19 deaths and age-adjusted deaths. We then simulate one method to incorporate disadvantage in vaccine allocation via a reserve system. In a reserve system, units are placed into categories and units reserved for a category give preferential treatment to individuals from that category. Using the Area Deprivation Index (ADI) as a proxy for disadvantage, we show that a 40% high-ADI reserve increases the number of vaccines allocated to Black or Indigenous individuals, with a share that approaches their COVID-19 death share when there are about 75 million units. Our findings illustrate that whether an allocation is equitable depends crucially on the benchmark and highlight the importance of considering the expected distribution of outcomes from implementing vaccine allocation guidelines.


Abstract In this paper, neural networks are used to predict core characteristics, and the predicted results are used to screen poor loading patterns in order to improve optimization efficiency. The radial peaking factor, cycle length, and maximum burnup through the cycle depletion calculations were evaluated by the neural network, and these core characteristics were used for screening. The screened loading patterns were evaluated by the core calculation code as ordinary in-core optimizations. The calculation results of the test problem indicated that the loading pattern screening using the neural network effectively improves the optimization results. Since the computation time for a cycle depletion calculation with the neural network is quite short, the computation load for the screening is negligible. Since the neural network is periodically retrained using the latest evaluation results of the core calculation code, its prediction accuracy is continuously improved during the optimization. The typical prediction accuracies of the radial peaking factor, cycle length, and maximum burnup in the latter part of the optimizations were 3 to 4%, 0.01 to 0.02 GWd/t, and 0.2 GWd/t, respectively, in the test problem. These accuracies are satisfactory for loading pattern screening.


Comparative Law is experiencing something of a renaissance, as legal scholars and practitioners traditionally outside the discipline find it newly relevant in projects such as constitution and code drafting, the harmonization of laws, court decisions, or as a tool for understanding the globalization of legal institutions. On the other hand, comparativists within the discipline find themselves asking questions about the identity of comparative law, what it is that makes comparative law unique as a discipline, what is the way forward. This book, designed with courses in comparative law as well as scholarly projects in mind, brings a new generation of comparativists together to reflect on the character of their discipline. It aims to incite curiosity and debate about contemporary issues within comparative law by bringing the discipline into conversation with debates in anthropology, literary and cultural studies, and critical theory. The book addresses questions such as what is the disciplinary identity of comparative law; how should we understand its relationship to colonialism, modernism, the Cold War, and other wider events that have shaped its history; what is its relationship to other projects of comparison in the arts, social sciences and humanities; and how has comparative law contributed at different times and in different parts of the world to projects of legal reform. Each of the essays frames its intervention around a close reading of the life and work of one formative character in the history of the discipline. Taken as a whole, the book offers a fresh and sophisticated picture of the discipline and its future.


The aim of this work is to explore means to improve the speed of the computational electromagnetics (CEM) processing in use for aircraft design and certification work by a factor of 1000 or so. The investigation addresses particularly the set of problems described as electromagnetic hazards comprising lightning, EMC and the illumination of an aircraft by external radio sources or HIRF (high intensity radiated fields). These are areas which are very much aspects of the engineering of the aircraft where the requirement for accuracy of simulations is of the order of 6dB as build and test repeatability cannot achieve better than this. Computer simulations of these interactions at the outset of this work were often taking 10 days and more on the largest parallel computers then available in the UK (Cray T3D - 40 GFLOPS nominal peak). Such run times made any form of optimisation impossibly lengthy.
While the future offered the certain prospect of more powerful computers, the simulations had to become more comprehensive in their representation of materials and features, geometry of the object, and particularly the representation of wires and cables had to improve radically, and tum around times for analysis had to be improved for design assessment as well as to make design optimisation by trade-off studies feasible. All of these could easily consume all the advantage that the new computers would give.
The investigation has centred around techniques that might be applied via alteration to the most widely used and usable numerical methods in CEM applied to the electromagnetic hazards, and to techniques that might be applied to the manner of their use. In one case, the investigation has explored a particular possibility for minimising the duration of computation and extrapolating the resulting data to the longest time-scales required.
Future improvements in the capabilities of radiating boundary conditions to mimic the effect of an infinite boundary at close range will further improve the benefits already established in this work, but this is not yet realisable. However, it has been established that a combination of techniques with some processes devised through this work can and does deliver the performance improvement sought. It has further been shown that the issues such as object resonance that could have incurred significant error and distrust of computational results can be satisfactorily overcome within the required accuracy.
Four papers have been published arsing from this work. Some of these techniques are now in use in routine analyses contributing to BAE SYSTEMS programmes. Plans are in place to incorporate all of the successful techniques and processes.


Americans have long acknowledged a deep connection between evangelical religion and democracy in the early days of the republic. This is a widely accepted narrative that is maintained as a matter of fact and tradition-and in spite of evangelicalism's more authoritarian and reactionary aspects. In "Conceived in Doubt", Amanda Porterfield challenges this standard interpretation of evangelicalism's relation to democracy and describes the intertwined relationship between religion and partisan politics that emerged in the formative era of the early republic. In the 1790s, religious doubt became common in the young republic as the culture shifted from mere skepticism toward darker expressions of suspicion and fear. But by the end of that decade, Porterfield shows, economic instability, disruption of traditional forms of community, rampant ambition, and greed for land worked to undermine heady optimism about American political and religious independence. Evangelicals managed and manipulated doubt, reaching out to disenfranchised citizens as well as to those seeking political influence, blaming religious skeptics for immorality and social distress, and demanding affirmation of biblical authority as the foundation of the new American national identity. As the fledgling nation took shape, evangelicals organized aggressively, exploiting the fissures of partisan politics by offering a coherent hierarchy in which God was king and governance righteous. By laying out this narrative, Porterfield demolishes the idea that evangelical growth in the early republic was the cheerful product of enthusiasm for democracy, and she creates for us a very different narrative of influence and ideals in the young republic.


We consider a linear regression game in which the covariates are known in advance: at each round, the learner predicts a real-value, the adversary reveals a label, and the learner incurs a squared error loss. The aim is to minimize the regret with respect to linear predictions. For a variety of constraints on the adversary's labels, we show that the minimax optimal strategy is linear, with a parameter choice that is reminiscent of ordinary least squares (and as easy to compute). The predictions depend on all covariates, past and future, with a particular weighting assigned to future covariates corresponding to the role that they play in the minimax regret. We study two families of label sequences: box constraints (under a covariate compatibility condition), and a weighted 2norm constraint that emerges naturally from the analysis. The strategy is adaptive in the sense that it requires no knowledge of the constraint set. We obtain an explicit expression for the minimax regret for these games. For the case of uniform box constraints, we show that, with worst case covariate sequences, the regret isO(dlogT), with no dependence on the scaling of the covariates.


Over one billion cars interact with each other on the road every day. Each driver has his own driving style, which could impact safety, fuel economy and road congestion. Knowledge about the driving style of the driver could be used to encourage "better" driving behaviour through immediate feedback while driving, or by scaling auto insurance rates based on the aggressiveness of the driving style. In this work we report on our study of driving behaviour profiling based on unsupervised data mining methods. The main goal is to detect the different driving behaviours, and thus to cluster drivers with similar behaviour. This paves the way to new business models related to the driving sector, such as Pay-How-You-Drive insurance policies and car rentals. Driver behavioral characteristics are studied by collecting information from GPS sensors on the cars and by applying three different analysis approaches (DP-means, Hidden Markov Models, and Behavioural Topic Extraction) to the contextual scene detection problems on car trips, in order to detect different behaviour along each trip. Subsequently, drivers are clustered in similar profiles based on that and the results are compared with a human-defined groundtruth on drivers classification. The proposed framework is tested on a real dataset containing sampled car signals. While the different approaches show relevant differences in trip segment classification, the coherence of the final driver clustering results is surprisingly high.


Abstract With recent improvements in human magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at ultra-high fields, the amount of data collected per subject in a given MRI experiment has increased considerably. Standard image processing packages are often challenged by the size of these data. Dedicated methods are needed to leverage their extraordinary spatial resolution. Here, we introduce a flexible Python toolbox that implements a set of advanced techniques for high-resolution neuroimaging. With these tools, segmentation and laminar analysis of cortical MRI data can be performed at resolutions up to 500 μm in reasonable times. Comprehensive online documentation makes the toolbox easy to use and install. An extensive developer's guide encourages contributions from other researchers that will help to accelerate progress in the promising field of high-resolution neuroimaging.


In this paper, we present a method for integrating possible prior knowledge (such as phonetic and lexical knowledge), as well as acoustic context (e.g., the whole utterance) in the phone posterior estimation, and we propose to use the obtained posteriors as complementary posterior features in Tandem ASR configuration. These posteriors are estimated based on HMM state posterior probability definition (typically used in standard HMMs training). In this way, by integrating the appropriate prior knowledge and context, we enhance the estimation of phone posteriors. These new posteriors are called 'in-context' or HMM posteriors. We combine these posteriors as complementary evidences with the posteriors estimated from a Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP), and use the combined evidence as features for training and inference in Tandem configuration. This approach has improved the performance, as compared to using only MLP estimated posteriors as features in Tandem, on OGI Numbers , Conversational Telephone speech (CTS), and Wall Street Journal (WSJ) databases.


Promoters of evidence-based policy making assume that such practices contribute to an improvement in public policies and therefore to social betterment and state legitimacy. However, scholars in democracy research rarely include practices of evidence-based policy making in their analyses of the legitimacy of the state. This article outlines the linkages between evidence-based policy making and the output-oriented legitimacy of the state, and assesses the potential of these linkages. The analysis shows that only a selection of these linkages have the potential to contribute to state legitimacy whereas others are very restricted in this respect.


OBJECTIVE--To investigate factors influencing a general practitioner's decision to do a rectal examination in patients with anorectal or urinary symptoms. DESIGN--Postal questionnaire survey. SETTING--General practices in inner London and Devon. SUBJECTS--859 General practitioners, 609 (71%) of whom returned the questionnaire. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES--Number of rectal examinations done each month; the indication score, derived from answers to a question asking whether the respondent would do a rectal examination for various symptoms; and the confidence score, which indicated the respondent's confidence in the diagnosis made on rectal examination. RESULTS--279 General practitioners did five or fewer rectal examinations each month and 96 did more than 10 each month. Factors significantly associated with doing fewer rectal examinations were a small partnership and being a female general practitioner, and the expectation that the examination would be repeated. Lack of time in the surgery, and a waiting time of less than two weeks for an urgent outpatient appointment were also important. General practitioners were deterred from doing rectal examinations by reluctance of the patient (278), the expectation that the examination would be repeated (141), and lack of time (123) or a chaperone (39). Confidence in diagnosis was significantly associated with doing more rectal examinations, the perception of having been well taught to do a rectal examination at medical school, and being a male general practitioner. CONCLUSIONS--Factors other than clinical judgment influence the frequency of rectal examination in general practice. Rectal examination may become commoner with the trend towards larger group practices and if diagnostic confidence is increased and greater emphasis put on rectal examination in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching.


Recent years globalization processes, growing competition and pressure in the market rise new challenges for managers and enterprises. New strategies, valued decisions, new ways of thinking are implied in business. But there are some traditional viewpoints to business which creates added value. One of them is entrepreneurship. The phenomenon is known from the times than business was not so much researched as now is. The value and meaning of this phenomenon is important and even growing. Entrepreneurship can be described by the features of its expression. These features in the article are crystallized from theoretical research works on entrepreneurship and the whole of them reflects the modern concept of entrepreneurship in an enterprise nowadays. Development of features of entrepreneurship's expression strongly depends on the economic and society transformations. The features encounter economic, managerial, social cohesion and technological activities in the enterprise. As the theoretical analysis allowed to identify and to ground the features of entrepreneurship's expression in an enterprise, an empirical analysis of the development of features is important and useful in practice. Entrepreneurship is tightly connected with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Expression of entrepreneurship is more intensive in SMEs. Important support for SMEs is structural funding from the European Union (EU). Financial support goes under appropriate priorities, there is often declared that innovative entrepreneurial SMEs have to be supported in the documents.  So, possible expression of entrepreneurship and its features is researched in this article in this kind of projects supported by the European Commission (EC) as to clarify how the concept of entrepreneurship is understood by the experts valuating projects and giving funding for the SMEs. The other part of empirical research is based on the Lithuanian enterprises, treated as innovative. Such environment as a science park could give the appropriate conditions to the enterprises for implying and developing entrepreneurship. So, interviewing enterprises of Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) Regional Science Park might disclose the view of business practitioners to the expression of entrepreneurship. They could value the features of entrepreneurship's expression from innovative SMEs attitude. Empirical research methods:  content analysis of SMEs supporting projects; interview of experts (managerial staff) of enterprises of KTU Regional Science Park. The research results conclude that development of the features of entrepreneurship's expression depends on economic transformations, also is related with new innovation, technologies, and knowledge used. The pressure of competitors makes impact on activity directly. The society pressure raises conditions for social features' development. The consolidated features of entrepreneurship's expression are meaningful and important as well as newly developed features. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ee.23.5.3133


This paper builds upon previous research that investigated the critical factors and essential elements for professionally accredited real estate degree programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the UK (Poon, Hoxley and Fuchs). The aim of this paper is to compare and contrast the perspective of human resource (HR) professionals with other stakeholders and to identify preferred knowledge, skills and attributes. The previous research targeted real estate professionals (employers) and recent real estate graduates (new entrants) by way of questionnaire survey. The survey enabled a detailed analysis of the knowledge, skills and attributes that employers required and a comparison with those that recent real graduates considered they had gained from their programme of study. The survey results were complemented by detailed interviews undertaken with a small number of course directors of Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) accredited programmes delivered by UK universities. One of the interesting comparisons illustrated by the survey data was the relevant weighting given to the importance of technical knowledge compared with esofteri skills and attributes such as communication, time management, negotiation skills, interpersonal skills, and adaptability and flexibility. This aspect has been investigated further by undertaking a series of detailed interviews with HR professionals working for leading real estate consultancies in London. Initial results, perhaps not surprisingly, suggest that HR professionals attach greater weight to esofteri skills and attributes than either employers or recent graduates. The perspectives of HR professionals are of significance for new entrants to the real estate profession. They are important gatekeepers in designing and implementing selection processes and in providing graduate surveyors with appropriate in-house support and training to successfully proceed to full professional membership. The interviews also provide further illumination to the on-going debate about whether undergraduates who have completed a dedicated professional degree or non-cognate postgraduates are most suitability equipped to secure employment in the current extremely competitive market for new entrants to the profession.


Electronic health (e-Health) is an emerging research field that focuses on healthcare based in emerging information and communication technologies. Researchers on e-Health have been working on database management systems to store and retrieve electronically the health records, conducting e-referral of the patients, e-transferring of the patient information and helping several other sectors of a hospital management system (e.g. finance, pharmacy etc). This paper examines the problem of e-Health system development for mental illnesses that may lead to suicides. We propose a Decision Support System (DSS) that is able to mine complex real-world data of suicidal patients based on evolving knowledge engineering techniques. Evidence-based suicidal scenarios are analyzed using statistical modeling to mine knowledge. Finally the performance of the DSS is tested on some test data.


The textile industry has been one of the most resilient in the current economic recession with positive overall results in the sector although there was a contraction of the online sales last year in Spain. Precisely e-commerce is expected to be an important source of growth in the sector in the upcoming years so it seems necessary to determine the influence of the recession on consumers' shopping behaviour. To address this objective a quantitative approach has been taken through the application of a questionnaire to 1522 people in Spain to determine first, how consumers' shopping experiences relate to their income level and secondly, what motivates consumers to use different channels and their intentions to use them based on their working situation. The results establish the need of creating a superior shopping experience in bricks-and-mortar stores and online channel and to promote the use of e-commerce by fashion retailers. The theoretical framework of hedonic and utilitarian shopping values is applied to measure consumers' shopping experiences and shopping motivations in a multichannel retail environment, in the textile sector, in Spain.


The steady growth of enrollments in online higher education courses has prompted many institutions to explore ways of putting their content online. A common method has been to record face-to-face (f2f) lectures and make those videos and corresponding materials available to distance students through a Learning Management System. Few additional measures are taken to increase the levels of engagement and interaction for online students. This model still designs instruction with f2f students as the primary audience. Online students to be observers rather than full participants in the course. This paper looks at reversing that model by creating courses where the online student experience is the starting point for course design. The authors researched best practices in online education to reinvent lectures, assessments, and interactions and used a Backwards Design approach to reinvent a graduate level materials science course. The process developed became known as the Design for Online (DFO) model. Lectures were pre-taped in a studio and broken into smaller digestible chunks. Each of the videos was based upon clearly identified outcomes that focused on higher order thinking as defined by Bloom's Taxonomy. In order to facilitate those outcomes, embedded questions were added within the videos to point out vital information as well provide data to the instructor about the students' thinking. Multiple means of assessment were used to help respect diverse talents and ways of learning as well as to provide actionable timely feedback to students. Interaction became a key component in this new course. These interactions focused beyond student-to-content interaction by making sure to layer in meaningful student-to-instructor and student-to-student collaborations. End of semester survey data showed an increase in student satisfaction for the online version of the course. As a result, another materials science course was tested using the DFO process the following semester with similar results. Through this paper, the authors share best practices and lessons learned as well as a blueprint for any institution looking to go through a similar process. Suggestions are made as to how instructors might leverage the digital assets created through this process to benefit their on-ground students.


Agricultural wastes are non-product outputs of production and processing of agricultural products that may contain material that can benefit man but whose economic values are less than the cost of collection, transportation, and processing for beneficial use. Estimates of agricultural waste arising are rare, but they are generally thought of as contributing a significant proportion of the total waste matter in the developed world. Agricultural development is usually accompanied by wastes from the irrational application of intensive farming methods and the abuse of chemicals used in cultivation, remarkably affecting rural environments in particular and the global environment in general. Generally, agricultural wastes are generated from a number of sources notably from cultivation, livestock and aquaculture. These wastes are currently used for a number of applications through the '3R' strategy of waste management. Agricultural waste management system (AWMS) was discussed and a typical waste management options for a poultry farm was also described using the six agricultural waste management functions. Agricultural waste has a toxicity potential to plant, animals and human through many direct and indirect channels. The effects of these toxic agricultural wastes on the environment were discussed as well as their management. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/njt.v35i4.34


New regulations requiring increases in vehicle fuel economy are challenging automotive manufacturers to identify fuel-efficient engines for future vehicles. Lean gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines offer significant increases in fuel efficiency over the more common stoichiometric GDI engines already in the marketplace. However, particulate matter (PM) emissions from lean GDI engines, particularly during stratified combustion modes, are problematic for lean GDI technology to meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Tier 3 and other future emission regulations. As such, the control of lean GDI PM with wall-flow filters, referred to as gasoline particulate filter (GPF) technology, is of interest. Since lean GDI PM chemistry and morphology differ from diesel PM (where more filtration experience exists), the functionality of GPFs needs to be studied to determine the operating conditions suitable for efficient PM removal. In addition, lean GDI engine exhaust temperatures are generally higher than diesel engines which results in more continuous regeneration of the GPF and less presence of the soot cake layer common to diesel particulate filters. Since the soot layer improves filtration efficiency, this distinction is important to consider. Research on the emission control of PM from a lean GDI engine with a GPF was conducted on an engine dynamometer.more » PM, after dilution, was characterized with membrane filters, organic vs. elemental carbon characterization, and size distribution techniques at various steady state engine speed and load points. The engine was operated in three primary combustion modes: stoichiometric, lean homogeneous, and lean stratified. In addition, rich combustion was utilized to simulate PM from engine operation during active regeneration of lean NOx control technologies. High (>95%) PM filtration efficiencies were observed over a wide range of conditions; however, some PM was observed to slip through the GPF at high speed and load conditions. The PM characterization at various engine speeds and loads will help enable optimized GPF design and control to achieve more fuel efficient lean GDI vehicles with low PM emissions.« less


In this book, CIFOR explores the trends, opportunities, problems and challenges of forest decentralization in Guatemala, identifying its consequences particularly for its rural indigenous population and small-scale foresters, and proposing a research and action agenda that would promote increased equity of benefits from such processes. This publication is one of the outputs of a larger CIFOR study also carried in Bolivia, Brazil, Nicaragua and Honduras, which investigates forestry decentralization processes and, in particular, their effects on forest-dependent groups. The Guatemalan case study demonstrates that, more than in other countries, many municipal governments play an important role in forest resources management, creating the opportunity to promote forest-related issues within local administrations and to increase their capacity to manage natural resources. Nevertheless, the tensions between the state and other professional foresters' vision of forests and forestry and that of an important sector of the indigenous population have not been addressed with the necessary respect for the latter, contributing to the ongoing marginalization of these groups. To support this analysis, this publication presents data on Guatemala's forestry sector, the national context of financial, administrative and political decentralization, the implementation of forest and decentralization policies, focusing on local governance, and the implications of decentralization for marginalized groups.


Detailed studies and comparisons were carried out on those flower characters of sour cherry cultivars that may affect bee pollination of flowers. Flower characters of sour cherry are fairly similar to other temperate zone fruit tree species. Their relatively small flowers distinguish the Ciganymeggy-types of cultivars from the flowers of tart cherries cultivars that are conspicuously larger, almost as large as the sweet cherry flowers. The relative position of flower organs was much more variable according to the season than according to the cultivars. So the differences were rather the consequences of seasonal effects than of variety features of sour cherry cultivars. As far as individual cultivars are concerned differences in the nectar production and the sugar concentration are revealed rather between groups of cultivars than between individual cultivars. The pollen production of flowers was extremely changeable in consecutive years. Most honeybees collected nectar at sour cherry flowers; pure pollen gatherers and mixed behaviour bees were half as frequent but differences among the behaviour of honeybees according to cultivars cannot be stated. The fidelity of honeybees to sour cherry is less expressed than to some other fruit tree species. Accordingly, it is very strongly suggested to take the competitive effect other plant species (weeds) flowering in and around the orchard carefully into account when organizing additional bee pollination in sour cherry plantations. Several sour cherry cultivars possess more or less self-fertilization capacity but this is greatly changeable according to the season. It has been proved that self-sterile sour cherry cultivars are sensitive even on the partial restriction of the effective time of bee pollination and it is to be stressed too that even in the case of partly self-fruitful cultivars bee pollination is also vital in yield formation because medium or strong restriction of the effective bee pollination period is of a definite negative effect on their fruit set and yield. In years with unfavourable weather the yield can dramatically be reduced sometimes down to nil. However, very high fruit set is also unfavourable because a negative correlation was detected between the final set and the mean mass of fruits.


Many rural parts of the United States are now "pornified." There is growing quantitative evidence revealing that rural women are at higher risk of being victimized by intimate violence than their urban and suburban counterparts. In-depth interviews with 55 rural southeast Ohio women who wanted to leave, were trying to leave, or were in the process of leaving, or who have left their male marital/cohabiting partners reveal that pornography is a major component of the problem of rural woman abuse. The main objective of this article is twofold: (a) to present the results of our qualitative study, and (b) to suggest future directions in theoretical and empirical work.


Abstract. Daily historical snowfall data were analysed with the objective of determining the stability of their variability at short temporal scales. The data are weakly multifractal over periods shorter than one month, which controls their scaling properties and which can be used to statistically downscale monthly data to shorter-duration values. Although the daily snowfall values appear to be stationary, their multifractality displays much temporal variability, with most sites showing statistically-significant trends. Through use of a physically-based hydrological model, it is demonstrated that the variability of the multiscaling of snowfall can affect the timing and quantity of snow accumulation in catchments where the snowpacks are subject to wind redistribution. Therefore trends in scaling, based on multifractal characteristics, should be taken into account when downscaling climate model scenario outputs.


The steadily decreasing prices of display technologies and computer graphics hardware contribute to the increasing popularity of multiple-display environments, like large, high-resolution displays. It is therefore necessary that educational organizations give the new generation of computer scientists an opportunity to become familiar with this kind of technology. However, there is a lack of tools that allow for getting started easily. Existing frameworks and libraries that provide support for multi-display rendering are often complex in understanding, configuration and extension. This is critical especially in educational context where the time that students have for their projects is limited and quite short. These tools are also rather known and used in research communities only, thus providing less benefit for future non-scientists. In this work we present an extension for the Unity game engine. The extension allows – with a small overhead – for implementation of applications that are apt to run on both single-display and multi-display systems. It takes care of the most common issues in the context of distributed and multi-display rendering like frame, camera and animation synchronization, thus reducing and simplifying the first steps into the topic. In conjunction with Unity, which significantly simplifies the creation of different kinds of virtual environments, the extension affords students to build mock-up virtual reality applications for large, high-resolution displays, and to implement and evaluate new interaction techniques and metaphors and visualization concepts. Unity itself, in our experience, is very popular among computer graphics students and therefore familiar to most of them. It is also often employed in projects of both research institutions and commercial organizations; so learning it will provide students with qualification in high demand. © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of organizing committee of the 2015 International Conference on Virtual and Augmented Reality in Education (VARE 2015).


ABSTRACT:
 The Colorado Plateau supports one of the highest levels of endemism in the United States, with more than 10% of the plant species estimated to be endemic. Many endemic plants are considered rare and may be susceptible to climate change. To determine the potential impacts of climate change on the range extent on plants endemic to the Colorado Plateau, we used two future climate scenarios and the Maxent algorithm to predict present and future potential suitable habitat for 239 endemic plants. Climate scenario, biogeographic distribution, and dispersal model all influenced predicted suitable habitat extents. Both climate change scenarios predicted 104 species to have range contractions of potential suitable habitat for all future time periods and dispersal models. Plants predicted to be widespread today are predicted to continue to gain habitat when dispersal is allowed, 31 species always gain habitat with all future scenarios. Matching species with actual dispersal ability influenced results; 194 species are predicted to lose potential habitat for both climate scenarios, while only 24 are predicted to gain habitat. Many Colorado Plateau endemic plants are predicted to experience significant range reductions by the end of the century as a result of two conditions; (1) current occupied habitats will become climatically unsuitable, and (2) most Colorado Plateau endemics lack the ability to disperse to future suitable habitats. Thus, the risk of range collapse is generally high, but may be mitigated by management efforts, including managed relocation to future suitable habitats outside the dispersal abilities of these endemic plants.


Purpose: the purpose of this study was to examine and obtain empirical evidence of the
effects of external and internal environmental factors on the strategy and performance of
manufacturing companies.
Design/methodology/approach: This study used primary data obtained by distributing
questionnaires to 150 respondents of manufacturing companies in Indonesia spreading over six
major cities in Java such as Jakarta, Banten, Bandung, Yogyakarta, Semarang and Surabaya.
Samples were taken by using the systematic random sampling technique. The technique was
used since those major cities had different numbers of manufacturing companies. Subsequently,
the feasibility of the model was tested. Several indices of model feasibility would be used to test
the model developed in this structural equation model. In case of a sub-optimal model, a model
modification was to be performed by adding or removing paths so that the chi-square values
would decrease by the values of the index.
Findings: Results showed that internal and external environmental factors, through the
operating environments and the remote environments of manufacturing industries, jointly
affected the companies' understanding of the condition of the industrial environments to
establish strategic goals in order to achieve optimal performance of manufacturing industry Practical implications: The internal and external environmental factors through the operating
and remote environments had effects on the strategy of manufacturing companies in Indonesia.
However, both internal and external environments did not affect the performance of
manufacturing companies in Indonesia. There was a tendency that manufacturing companies
were to observe the occurring macro-economic conditions. Manufacturing industries were
faced with the pressures from competition, customers and suppliers that affected companies'
revenue. Performance of manufacturing industries was more influenced by macro-economic
conditions that have not recovered from the global crisis.
Originality/value: This study was conducted to determine the effects of environmental
factors on the corporate strategy and performance. The effects of the industrial environments
are crucial since the more complicated changes in the industrial environments the greater the
impacts it has on the resources, structures and processes in the company. Environmental
factors of the industry present both organizational strengths and weaknesses, which would
affect the strategy and performance of the industry.


I n July, hope was expressed on this page about new developments in the accessibility of clinical trial data. Several leading medical journals had pressed for a requirement that all clinical trials be placed in a public registry, a proposal endorsed by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Association of American Medical Colleges. The AMA had urged the institutional review boards (IRBs) that review trial protocols to require such registration before approval of a drug. The World Health Organization further supports an international registry.

That good news has proved transitory, as subsequent events have damaged the public's faith in a process that is, after all, vital to its health. The alleged failure of Merck and Co. to release damaging data about cardiac risks associated with its blockbuster pain drug Vioxx (a COX-2 inhibitor) has prompted congressional hearings, with charges that the company knew of the risks earlier but didn't say so. That scandal followed another: a year-long delay by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to warn about the suicide risks of certain antidepressants given to children.

![Figure][1]

CREDIT: [IMAGES.COM/CORBIS][2]

What's needed to restore confidence in the system that brings us new medicines? It is natural to focus blame on the drug companies. After all, they're rich, and people are mad about their prices. Although clinical trials can be well run, the companies that sponsor and organize them want the "right" result, and opportunities for influence abound. An important trial may involve many centers, each with an IRB of tired and overstretched members. One resistant IRB can be pressed for approval because "all the others have approved." Many trials are outsourced for management by clinical research organizations (CROs), which are motivated to please the employer (after all, doesn't the wedding coordinator want to please the bride's mother?).

But the FDA's end of the process is a natural target, too. The agency has had good external advisory committees in the past. But the recent history of administrative removals, particularly that of COX-2 critic Curt Furberg from a panel considering those drugs, has invited public suspicion. This and other questions about other already-marketed drugs have raised concern about the FDA's susceptibility to drug company influence. These have now led to several actions: a request by the agency for a comprehensive review by the Institute of Medicine; a system of internal appeals, in which an employee concerned about a drug safety issue can be heard by a panel with participation from outside the agency; and a renewed search for a director of the Office of Drug Safety.

Some critics have urged that the situation is so bad that we need a new government agency charged with the conduct of all clinical trials, using funds supplied by the manufacturers. That might be a solution, but political enthusiasm for it will be low for a while. Meanwhile, there are possible short-term fixes. Regional or national IRBs might do a better job, but institutions are reluctant to use them because of the added liability they could take on. Better, perhaps, to provide resources to beef up existing IRBs. Second, require that all late-stage clinical trials, including those testing for unapproved uses of already-marketed drugs, be entered into a registry that would make all results, including the negative ones, available publicly, which is a step beyond the proposals contained in legislation now under Senate consideration.

The most important task is to provide one essential tool. Through no fault of the FDA, the United States has lacked a system than can detect things that go wrong with an already-marketed drug. Physicians are asked to make voluntary reports and manufacturers are required to tell the FDA when they spot a problem, but there's little incentive for either. Moreover, there is no centralized way of knowing how much of a given drug is being used, so there is no denominator and no adverse reaction rate can be calculated. That's not to say that it can't be done right. Kaiser Permanente, the health plan giant, maintains electronic patient records and its doctors do report problems, allowing them to conduct adverse reaction epidemiology (a Kaiser study spotted the Vioxx problem early). The absence of an effective national adverse event reporting and analysis capacity is an embarrassment. Instead of complaining about the FDA, Congress should fund it to support an effective Office of Drug Safety, with the authority needed to encourage physician reporting and a way to audit prescriptions.

 [1]: pending:yes
 [2]: http://images.com/corbis


Two 21-day field operations were conducted in 1997 and 1998 in the estuaries and on the inner continental shelf off the northern Oregon and southern Washington coast. These cruises aboard the R/V Corliss were run in order to generate reconnaissance maps of the seafloor geology and the shallow subsurface stratigraphy using sidescan sonar and seismic-reflection mapping techniques. The 1998 cruise also collected sediment grab samples, bottom photographs, and video images to verify the sidescan-sonar imagery and to document the seafloor geology. The combination of these data with previously collected sediment sample data (Robert, 1974; Nittrouer, 1978; and Smith et. al., 1980) has been used to define the extent and lithology of shelf sediments associated with the Columbia River littoral cell. This work is one component of a larger project studying the erosion of the Washington and Oregon coast and is being coordinated by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Washington State Department of Ecology. The reason for collecting these data is to provide a regional synthesis of the offshore geology to support a wide variety of management decisions and to provide a basis for further process-oriented investigations.


I study how choice behavior given unawareness of an event differs from choice behavior given subjective belief of zero probability on that event. Depending on different types of unawareness the decision-maker suffers, behavior under unawareness is either incomparable with that under zero probability (in the case of pure unawareness), or drastically different (in the case of partial unawareness). The key differences are (1) partial unawareness permits dynamically inconsistent choice, while zero probability beliefs do not; and (2) there are unforeseen options in an unawareness environment that are necessarily modeled as dominated options in zero probability models.


This paper derives some exact finite sample distributions and characterizes the tail behavior of maximum likelihood estimators of the cointegrating coefficients in error correction models. It is shown that the reduced rank regression estimator has a distribution with Cauchy-like tails and no finite moments of integer order. The maximum likelihood estimator of the coefficients in a particular triangular system representation is studied and shown to have matrix t-distribution tails with finite integer moments to order T - n + r where T is the sample size, n is the total number of variables in the system and r is the dimension of the cointegration space. These results help to explain some recent simulation studies where extreme outliers are found to occur more frequently for the reduced rank regression estimator than for alternative asymptotically efficient procedures that are based on the triangular representation. In a simple triangular system, the Wald statistic for testing linear hypotheses about the columns of the cointegrating matrix is shown to have an F distribution, analogous to Hotelling's T^{2} distribution in multivariate linear regression.


Importance
Although anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) treatment offers better outcomes than the natural history of neovascular age-related macular degeneration (ARMD), a less burdensome, less expensive, and more durable treatment is needed.

Objective
To assess the efficacy and safety of epimacular brachytherapy (EMB) for chronic, active, neovascular ARMD.

Design, Setting, and Participants
The Macular Epiretinal Brachytherapy vs Ranibizumab (Lucentis) Only Treatment (MERLOT) pivotal device trial was conducted at 24 National Health Service hospitals across the UK. Patients who had neovascular ARMD and received intravitreal ranibizumab were enrolled between November 10, 2009, and January 30, 2012. Eligible patients were randomized 2:1 and were stratified by lens status and angiographic lesion type to receive either EMB plus as-needed ranibizumab or as-needed ranibizumab monotherapy. Participants were followed up monthly for 24 months and then assessed at a final visit at month 36. Masking of participants and clinicians was not possible, but best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) and imaging were analyzed by masked assessors. Analysis followed the intent-to-treat approach.

Interventions
Pars plana vitrectomy with 24 Gy EMB plus as-needed ranibizumab vs as-needed ranibizumab monotherapy.

Main Outcomes and Measures
Coprimary outcomes were the number of as-needed ranibizumab injections and the mean change in Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) BCVA with a noninferiority margin of -5 ETDRS letters. Secondary outcomes were the percentage of participants losing fewer than 15 ETDRS letters and gaining 0 or more or 15 or more ETDRS letters and the mean change in angiographic total lesion size, choroidal neovascularization size, and foveal thickness on optical coherence tomography.

Results
Of 363 participants, 329 (90.6%) completed 24 months of follow-up (222 participants in the EMB group and 107 in the ranibizumab group). The mean (SD) age of the combined groups was 76.5 (7.4) years. The mean (SD) number of ranibizumab injections was 9.3 (6.7) in the EMB group and 8.3 (4.5) in the ranibizumab group, with a difference of 1.0 injection (95% CI, -0.3 to 2.3; P = .13). The mean (SD) BCVA change was -11.2 (15.7) ETDRS letters in the EMB group and -1.4 (10.9) ETDRS letters in the ranibizumab group, with a difference of 9.8 ETDRS letters (95% CI, -6.7 to -12.9). In the EMB group, 65.6% of participants (160 of 244) lost fewer than 15 ETDRS letters vs 86.6% (103 of 119) in the ranibizumab group, with a difference of 21% (95% CI, 12.4%-29.5%; P < .001). Microvascular abnormalities occurred in 20 of 207 eyes (9.7%) in the EMB group and 1 of 97 eyes (1.0%) in the ranibizumab group. These abnormalities occurred outside the foveal center, and there were no unexpected safety concerns.

Conclusions and Relevance
The MERLOT trial found that despite the acceptable safety of EMB, it did not reduce the number of ranibizumab injections and was associated with worse visual acuity than anti-VEGF treatment alone; these results do not support EMB use as an adjunct treatment for chronic, active neovascular ARMD.

Trial Registration
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01006538.


Emergency room(ER) visit prediction, especially whether visit ER or not and ER visit count, is crucial for hospitals to reasonably adapt resource allocation and` for patients to know future health state. Some existing studies have explored to use machine learning methods especially kinds of general linear model to settle down the task. But, in the clinical problems, there exist complex correlation between targets and features. Generally, liner model is difficult to model complex correlation to make better prediction. Hence, in this paper, we propose to use two non-linear models to settle the problem, which are XGBoost and Recurrent Neural Network. Experimental results show both methods have better performance.


Blogging, the act of posting a regular journal on the Internet, has quickly become one of the most prevalent methods for obtaining and disseminating decentralized information. In part because the barriers to creating a blog are virtually nonexistent, a person can write about anything, from the weather in Tonga to how Company X's president typically handles a controversial client. Given the lack of limitations in the content of a blog and the increasing number of people who use them, corporations are finally realizing the marketing potential behind this latest technology. Simultaneous to trying to harness the marketing power of blogging, corporations have begun to develop methods to control their constituents' (including employees) use of them. When a company has been cybersmeared, e-defamed, or virtually abused by someone through a blog, decisions have to be made to determine the most effective way of countering the attack. Where the attack comes from an anonymous source, the company must first tackle the problem of determining who smeared them. This note explains the standards a court may apply when a cybersmeared company seeks to discover the identity of a John Doe. This note also suggests that the summary judgment standard, recently imposed by the Delaware Supreme Court in such cases, clearly, adequately, and most fairly balances the corporation's interest in obtaining relief against John Doe's First Amendment rights.


Heterocyclic base adducts of copper (II) complexes have been synthesized by the reaction of copper (II) chloride with 5-chloro-2-hydroxy acetophenone N(4) methyl thiosemicarbazone in presence of heterocyclic base like pyridine (py), 2,2'-bipyridine (bipy), 1,10-phenanthroline (Phen), α/β-picoline. Thiosemcarbazone has been characterized by 13C, 1H NMR as well as IR, electronic spectra. The magnetic and spectroscopic data indicate a square planner geometry for the four coordinate and a distorted square pyramidal for five coordinate complexes. The thiosemicarbazone and its copper (II) complexes show growth inhibitory activity against Pseudomonas Putida, Escherichia Coli, Aspergillus Niger and Candida Albicans. Thiosemicarbazone and its copper (II) complexes have been found antioxidant.


Flexible and straightforward syntheses of a series of D3h- or C3h-symmetrical star-shaped compounds with pyridine end groups are reported. In all cases, the acid-mediated cyclocondensations of the corresponding aryl methyl ketone provided the central benzene ring. For the preceding preparation of the functionalized compound arms, Suzuki couplings were applied. The crucial introduction of the pyridine C-2 and C-6 substituents occurred by Fe(acac)3-catalyzed alkylations (acac = acetylacetonate). The preparation of the C3-symmetrical compound involved an alternating sequence of halogenations and coupling reactions. The self-assembly behavior of the four resulting star-shaped compounds at the interface between 1-phenyloctane and the basal plane of highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) was studied by scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM). We found self-assembled monolayers with structures strongly dependent on the substitution patterns of the investigated compounds. The reduction of the symmetry from a D3h- to a C3h-symmetrical compound led to an entirely different self-assembly behavior with the change from a hexagonal to a lamellar arrangement.


Background Breathlessness is distressing for patients and is a common reason for emergency department attendance. Chronic refractory breathlessness is associated with anxiety, embarrassment and fear, and effective management is essential to improve quality of life and reduce hospital admissions.1 Interventions such as breathing control, activity pacing and anxiety management are beneficial.2 This study examined the effect of attending a dedicated respiratory physiotherapist led breathlessness service on patient reported outcomes. Method Patients attending the breathlessness clinic between April 2015 and April 2016 completed Numerical Rating Scales (NRS) out of 10 to grade their breathlessness. Data were collected before and 1–2 weeks after clinic attendance. Lower NRS scores represented a lower symptom burden. A change of 1 or more on the NRS was considered clinically significant. Responses were compared using t-tests and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. Data are presented as mean ± SD. Results Fifty-two patients attended the breathless clinic during the study period (mean age 73, range 49–92 years). Patients had a range of diagnoses causing their breathlessness with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (44.2%), lung cancer (19.2%), and non-specified interstitial lung disease (11.5%) being most common. Significant improvements were observed across all domains. Average breathlessness experienced in the past 24 hours reduced from 3.9 ± 1.7 to 3.6 ± 1.6 (p = 0.001). The worst breathlessness experienced in the past 24 hours reduced by 1 point to 6.3 ± 1.9 (p < 0.001). The distress experienced from breathlessness reduced from 5.8 ± 6.4 to 4.8 ± 4.8 (p < 0.001). Patients' perceived ability to cope with their breathlessness improved by 1 point (p < 0.001). Conclusions A specialist breathlessness clinic provided a valuable service for patients with chronic refractory breathlessness. Significant, clinically meaningful benefits were observed in terms of the severity of breathlessness that patients experienced. Furthermore, patients perceived a reduction in distress and increased ability to cope. References Ekström M, Abernethy A, Currow D. The management of chronic breathlessness in patients with advanced and terminal illness. BMJ 2015;349:g7617. Higginson IJ, Bausewein C, Reilly C, et al. An integrated palliative and respiratory care service for patients with advanced disease and refractory breathlessness: a randomised controlled trial. Lancet Respiratory Medicine2014;2:979–87.


In this work, a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) lateral diffused MOSFET (LDMOS) incorporated with sidewall field plate (SEP) is presented and investigated using three-dimensional numeric simulation. A new additional electric field peak is formed, due to the compound field plate established along the n-drift region. The lateral surface electric field can be modulated, which enhances the breakdown voltage. Meanwhile, the doping concentration of n-drift region is increased, which decreases the specific on-resistance. Compared with the superjunction LDMOS, a 23.7% increase in the breakdown voltage and a 21.7% decrease in the specific on-resistance are obtained in the SFP-LDMOS device.


Recent work showed that short-term memory (STM) is selectively reduced in GluR1 knockout mice. This raises the possibility that a form of synaptic modification dependent on GluR1 might underlie STM. Studies of synaptic plasticity have shown that stimuli too weak to induce long-term potentiation induce short-term potentiation (STP), a phenomenon that has received little attention. Here we examined several properties of STP and tested the dependence of STP on GluR1. The minimal requirement for inducing STP was examined using a test pathway and a conditioning pathway. Several closely spaced stimuli in the test pathway, forming a single brief burst, were sufficient to induce STP. Thus, STP is likely to be induced by the similar bursts that occur in vivo. STP induction is associative in nature and dependent on the NMDAR. STP decays with two components, a fast component (1.6 ± 0.26 min) and a slower one (19 ± 6.6 min). To test the role of GluR1 in STP, experiments were conducted on GluR1 knockout mice. We found that STP was greatly reduced. These results, taken together with the behavioral work of D. Sanderson et al. [Sanderson, D., Good, M. A., Skelton, K., Sprengel, R., Seeburg, P. H., Nicholas, J., et al. Enhanced long-term and impaired short-term spatial memory in GluA1 AMPA receptor subunit knockout mice: Evidence for a dual-process memory model. Learning and Memory, 2009], provide genetic evidence that STP is a likely mechanism of STM.


INDICATION, For the treatment of signs of androgenisation in women such as severe acne refractory to prolonged oral antibiotic therapy and idiopathic hirsutism of mild to moderate degree. Diane-35 ED will also provide effective oral contraception. If the hirsutism has only recently appeared or has lately intensified co a considerable extent the cause (androgenproducing tumour or an adrenal enzyme defect) must beclarified by differential diagnosis.


For the past 20 years management of the Bot/Kleinmond estuarine system in the south-western Cape has been based on the premise that, barring intervention, the estuary was naturally evolving into a freshwater coastal lake. This paper presents evidence, based on a 20-year series of water-level data, updated runoff estimates from the catchment and dimensional data, that, in the absence of anthropogenic influences, the system is not progressing naturally, but artificially, towards becoming a freshwater system. It is concluded that the increasingly closed state of the Bot Estuary in recent years is most likely due to reduction in runoff from its tributaries and premature artificial breaching of the Kleinmond arm of the system. These findings, coupled with the high conservation importance of the Bot River Estuary, suggest that the current management plan needs urgent revaluation and that the two estuaries cannot be managed separately.


Our ever increasing knowledge of genetics is radically changing disciplines in science and medicine. Significantly, the study of gene expression and protein synthesis within both healthy and abnormal cells has advanced understanding of the mechanism of disease at the molecular level. The future treatment of certain diseases may benefit from new classes of nucleic acid based drugs which are currently undergoing development and trialling. Concurrently, assays are being formulated to predict, diagnose and monitor medical conditions. This more detailed patient analysis brings the option of moving away from traditional, textbook treatments and tailoring therapies to the individual, the field of personalised medicine. Current polynucleotide analysis platforms allow testing for genomic mutations and quantification of gene expression on a massively multiplexed scale with some arrays able to identify more than a million unique target sequences in a single assay. However much development is required to take this analysis technology from laboratory based applications to the bedside. Reductions in assay costs and analysis time are particular concerns. The 4G research group, based at the University of Southampton has developed novel encoded microparticle technology, allowing individual particles to be identified in a mixture. The work herein documents the adaption of this technology for the multiplexed analysis of DNA samples in the form of a suspension/hybridisation assay, a design which may offer advantages over current analysis technologies including reduced assay time and increased array flexibility.


During our optical monitoring of UV Ceti, iconic late-type flaring star, with high temporal resolution using the Russian 6-m telescope in 2008 we detected a giant flare with the amplitude of about 3 magnitudes in U -band. Near flare maximum more than a dozen of spike bursts have been discovered with triangular shapes and durations from 0.6 to 1.2 s and maximal luminosities in the range (1.5− 8)× 10 erg s. For the half of these events the linear polarization exceeds 35% with significance better than 5σ. We argue that these events are synchrotron emission of electron streams with the energies of several hundred MeV moving in the magnetic field of about 1.4 kG. Emission from such ultrarelativistic (with energies far exceeding 10 MeV) particles is being routinely observed in solar flares, but has never been detected from UV Ceti type stars. This is the first ever detection of linearly polarized optical light from the UV Ceti-type stars which indicates that at least some fraction of the flaring events on these stars are powered by a non-thermal synchrotron emission mechanism.


Abstract Hypertrophic osteoarthropathy (HOA) is a rare paraneoplastic syndrome characterized by digital clubbing, periosteal reaction, polyarthralgia, arthritis, and synovitis. Herein, we report a case series of patients with secondary HOA caused by non-pleural or pulmonary tumors. The radiologic databases of 2 tertiary university hospitals were retrospectively screened for secondary HOA patients. In addition, a systemic review of the published case reports. Only HOA cases with non-pleural or pulmonary malignancies were involved into the study. HOA in primary pleural or pulmonary malignant or benign disorders, as well in inflammatory diseases were excluded. In all cases, plain radiography was performed and clinical signs were documented. In our databases, 6 patients with secondary HOA were identified. In addition, the systemic review yielded 24 eligible patients. The most prevalent primary tumors were nasopharyngeal carcinoma and esophageal cancer in 6 patients (20%), respectively. In 17 patients, (56.7%) HOA was associated with lung metastases, and in 10 patients (33.3%), no lung metastases were detected. In 14 patients (46.7%), HOA was symptomatically before a tumor diagnosis was made. Plain radiography displayed typically features with periostal enlargement in every case. This study is the first report about secondary HOA caused by non-pleural or pulmonary tumors. Various primary tumors were identified, including several rare tumors such as sarcomas. HOA is a rare disorder with typically radiologically findings, which is not only associated with lung cancer or pleural mesothelioma and can even occur in tumor patients without lung metastasis.


Anyone familiar with corporate law knows well how much of that law has been shaped by just one state: Delaware. Less obvious, however, is that so much of Delaware corporate law has been defined by the nonbinding dictum of that state's judges. To illustrate this point, this Article considers the central role of dictum in the evolving doctrine first articulated by the Delaware Supreme Court in Revlon, Inc. v. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, Inc. And in doing so, this Article refutes the thesis, recently advanced by Professor Stephen Bainbridge, that a judicial concern for director conflicts of interests, alone, is what animates the Revlon doctrine. Employing a conflict-of-interests understanding of Revlon, Bainbridge decries a string of Delaware Chancery Court opinions that have applied Revlon to transactions in which a target corporation is sold for cash or a mix of cash and stock in a publicly traded, diffusely held acquirer. In constructing his critique, however, Bainbridge overstates the chancery court precedent with which he takes issue as well as the supreme court precedent upon which he bases his conflict-of-interests thesis. In reality, the boundaries of Revlon-land are murky. Left uncertain by Delaware Supreme Court precedent, the scope of the Revlon doctrine has been purposefully, but cautiously, defined by the Delaware Chancery Court through the use of dictum.


This thesis has as its objective an analysis of the domestic and
foreign policy of the Hittites during the Old Kingdom. It is not possible
of course to make an arbitrary distinction between domestic and foreign
policy since each inevitably modifies the other.
By domestic policy I mean the practices of internal government and
politics as they pertained to the Hittite homeland proper and, more
specifically, to the Hittite capital. An understanding of their domestic
policy in this sense entails the study of political institutions and
public affairs of an internal nature. Law, society, religion, economics,
art and literature are considered relevant if it is thought that they
in any way explain the domestic political practices of the Hittites. The term foreign policy has as its scope an exposition of the
expansionist tendencies of the Hittites. This will involve a study of
why and how these people extended their domain of rule. It will also
treat the way the Hittites governed their conquered territories. This
essentially means the history of the Hittites in relationship to the
other states of the ancient near east with which they came in contact during
the period of the Old Kingdom. It is also necessary to give a definition
of feudalism because of the feudal structure of the Old Kingdom. By
feudalism I basically mean the granting of land by the king to the members
of the nobility. In return the nobility was expected to render stipulated
services, such as supplying military contingents, to the king. The nobility
retained people on this land and it was they, who in return for a livelihood,
owed services to the nobility who in turn owed them to the king.
The problem of the order of the presentation of the material is not
the least with which this thesis has had to contend. O.R.Gurney in his
book "The Hittites" has as his first chapter an outline of Hittite history.
His second chapter consists of a study of the Hittite state and society.
This chapter is divided into five sections which deal with the king, the
queen, social classes, the government and foreign policy. Chapters III and IV treat Hittite life and economy, and law and institutions respectively.
Chapter V deals with warfare and thus the scheme of presentation continues.
Such mechanics of presentation have much to recommend them. For
example, one can easily find the specific topic one is looking for.
The chief criticism I have to make of such an ordering of the material
is that it does not make manifest to the fullest extent the fact that
the Hittites were essentially a developing, progressive people. This
method of presentation does not allow the sequential plotting of the
development of this remarkable people. At least it certainly does not
allow one to do so with facility.
The Hittite state and society has a marked bearing on Hittite
history just as Hittite history explains much of the Hittite state and
society. The two are not separable. Therefore if one is to gain a
clear picture of the development of Hittite domestic and foreign policy
such topics as the kingship, social classes and foreign policy must be St;an
in their historical framework. That is, the monarch must be seen as
it was in the earliest period of Hittite history and then as it was in
the various phases of the Old Kingdom.
Gurney does indeed attempt to show the development of Hittite government
and foreign policy. But the fact that his first chapter is devoted to
an outline of Hittite history makes repetition necessary in those sections
dealing with government and foreign policy. And being aware of repetition,
even though the mechanics of presentation demand it, an author tends to
guard against it. Hence the line of progress is hard to realise to its
fullest extent.
I do not mean to recommend facility to the exclusion of more important
considerations. But if facility in tracing the growth of the political
and imperial life of the Hittites can be gained by employing a different
method of presentation of material which does not exclude other factors,
such as accuracy, then I see no good reason for not attempting to realise
a clearer picture of Hittite development.
Thus I have decided to use as a skeleton framework for this thesis the
chronological order of Hittite kings. That is, those events and activities
which are to be assigned to Labarnas will be treated in a chapter devoted
to that king. Similarly with Hattusilis I and Mursilis I. The Hittites
possessed a very acute sense of historical process, of the past affecting the present and the present dictating the course of the future. One
of the most characteristic traits of reigning Hittite-Icings is to
hark back to the activities of their predecessors. It is perhaps
not altogether fruitless to speculate that the Hittites would be
happiest having their story presented in the manner I propose.
Probably the greatest pitfall to be avoided in any work to do
with an incompletely documented period of history is to claim irrefutable
_truths and patterns from the material available. Even when all the
surviving material has been brought to light a resignation to incompleteness
and uncertainty must still prevail. This is quite obviously the case
with the Hittites and always shall be. Where the inevitable lacunae
occur one may reasonably Infer, on the basis of what is known, what
was most likely to have happened. But I believe that it is possible
to do even better than that. More richly documented periods of history,
modern and ancient, often offer likely analogies. These can be of
inestimable value in the attempt to fill lacunae. At the end of the thesis I have appended a note on the chronology
of the Old Kingdom. The problems associated with Hittite chronology
are of an especially difficult nature because of the dearth of evidence
directly related to chronology. A great deal of reliance has to be
placed on outside evidences of a synchronistic nature.
I feel that it is necessary to offer an explanatory note in respect
to the first two chapters of this thesis. Much of what is contained
in these chapters is the result of employing what we might well call
the principle of retrospective probability. That is, many of the statements,
especially those concerning the origins of the Hittites, are inferred
from a study of the Hittites in Anatolia. It is really a question
of many of the statements in the first two chapters resulting from an
analysis of the evidence of the Hittites when they became an historical
people. Asa result, these statements concerning Hittite origins and
geography being based in the way they are may be justifiably employed to
help explain the nature of Hittite political forms and imperial practices.
The statements must not be seen as being mere assumptions which explain
various characteristics of Hittite domestic and foreign policy. They
are ideas arising from the knowledge of the Hittites as a reasonably well documented people in historical times. I believe that it is scholastically
reasonable to work on the basis that historical knowledge suggests the
geographic origins of the Hittites and that the likelihood of these
origins permits one to try and determine what possible bearing they
may have had on the Hittite achievement. But because this thesis is
arranged chronologically in so far as it has been possible it has been
thought best to place these two chapters at the beginning of the thesis.
Finally, it is hoped that in the future this thesis will be
extended to include the New Empire. The Old Kingdom is to be seen
as an historical unit or entity in itself but much of what occurred in
the Old Kingdom undoubtedly made possible, in many respects, the Hittite
political and imperial achievement under such kings of the New Empire
as Suppiluliumas, Mursilis II, Muwatallis and Hattusilis III.


I exploit unsupervised machine learning and natural language processing techniques to elicit the risk factors that firms themselves identify in their annual reports. I quantify the firms' exposure to each identified risk and construct factor mimicking portfolios that proxy for each undiversifiable source of risk. The portfolios are priced in the cross-section and contain information above and beyond the commonly used multi-factor representations. A model that uses only firm identified risk factors (FIRFs) performs at least as well as traditional factor models, despite not using any information from past prices or returns.


The Hauraki goldfield in the Coromandel volcanic zone contains approximately 50 adularia-sericite epithermal Au-Ag deposits in a 200-km-long by 40-km-wide north-south-trending belt. These deposits have produced approximately 320,000 kg Au and 1.5 Mkg Ag and formed from Miocene to Pliocene subaerial hydrothermal systems. The goldfield has been divided into three provinces (northern, eastern, and southern), based on the host rocks and geologic setting of the deposits (Christie et al., 2007).

In the northern province of the goldfield, adularia from Paritu yields a single 40Ar/39Ar plateau date of 16.32 ± 0.13 Ma, and adularia from Opitonui yields a preferred 40Ar/39Ar age of 13.15 ± 0.03 Ma. Two Re-Os dates of molybdenite from porphyry-style mineralization at Ohio Creek overlap within error and yield dates of 11.87 ± 0.06 and 11.97± 0.08 Ma; geologic relationships suggest that this is the likely age of mineralization in the nearby Thames epithermal deposits.

In the eastern province, adularia from the Ohui deposit gives a preferred 40Ar/39Ar age of 8.29 ± 0.25 Ma, adularia from the Broken Hills deposit gives a preferred 40Ar/39Ar age of 7.12 ± 0.02 Ma, and adularia from the Wharekirauponga prospect yields a preferred 40Ar/39Ar age of 6.32 ± 0.12 Ma.

In the southern province, adularia from quartz veins at the Maratoto deposit provide a preferred 40Ar/39Ar age of 6.41 ± 0.04 Ma, and adularia from a quartz vein at the Sovereign deposit yields a preferred 40Ar/39Ar age of 6.70 ± 0.16 Ma. Two dates from vein adularia at the world-class Martha deposit overlap within error, and we interpret a preferred age for the deposit of 6.16 ± 0.06 Ma. Two samples of molybdenite from veins in the Martha deposit yield discrete Re-Os dates of 6.37 ± 0.03 and 6.51 ± 0.03 Ma. Adularia from one quartz vein from the Favona deposit yields a 40Ar/39Ar date of 6.05 ± 0.04 Ma. Host rock and vein adularia from the Karangahake deposit yield 40Ar/39Ar plateau dates that range from 6.90 ± 0.20 to 5.71 ± 0.13 Ma, which may reflect more than one stage of mineralization or protracted fluid flow. Adularia from veins at the Waiorongomai deposit yields a preferred 40Ar/39Ar age of 5.71 ± 0.03 Ma, and adularia from a vein at the Eliza deposit yields a preferred age of 4.47 ± 0.06 Ma. The southernmost deposit in the Hauraki goldfield, Muirs Reef, has adularia in quartz veins that yield 40Ar/39Ar plateaus dates of 2.12 ± 0.11 to 1.78 ± 0.16 Ma.

Combined with previous work, these results indicate that mineralization in the Hauraki goldfield ranges from 16.3 Ma in the north to 2 Ma in the south, and clusters into two distinct groups that correlate with location, volcanic stratigraphy, and mineralization style. The first group, from ~16.3 to ~10.8 Ma contains epithermal veins, including bonanza-style veins, and porphyry-style mineralization that formed in the northern province in an arc that was dominated by andesitic volcanism. The second period of mineralization occurs primarily from 6.9 to 6.0 Ma in the eastern and southern provinces, when precious metals were deposited into thicker colloform-crustiform banded veins that formed in extensional settings in an arc that was erupting bimodal andesite-rhyolite compositions. Therefore, even though volcanism in the Coromandel volcanic zone was active from 18 to 2 Ma, Au-Ag mineralization was focused into two discrete periods of this arc formation, and the style of mineralization changed through time, coinciding with a change in style of volcanism. In addition, while Hauraki goldfield mineralization discontinuously lasted more than 11 m.y., greater than 80 percent of the known gold endowment was deposited in a relatively brief 0.9 Ma window between 6.0 and 6.9 Ma. These changes through time likely reflect, at least in part, reorganization of the Miocene Northland and Colville volcanic arcs in the New Zealand region of the southwest Pacific.


The design and implementation of critical controllers benefit from development in a formal method such as B. However, B does not support execution specification directly, which is a requirement in controller design. The aim here is to develop a set of annotations so that they can be used by a B design engineer to capture execution requirements, while creating the B model. The annotations, once shown to be machine-annotation consistent with the B machine, can be used independently from the machine to assess the correctness of CSP controllers developed to detail the control behaviour. CSP-B is a formal method integration that can be used to develop critical controller with both state and event behaviour. The advantages of using annotations is that the execution requirements can be captured and shown to be machine-annotation consistent during state operation development, and that a control loop invariant does not have to be independently developed. Handel-C is used on route to hardware synthesis as it supports the implementation of concurrency and the manipulation of state. Annotations are utilised again to guide the translation of the B and control annotations into Handel-C. This PhD. work has three main aims. Firstly, to introduce a set of annotations to describe control directives to permit controller development in B. The annotations capture execution requirements. They give rise to proof obligations that when discharged prove that the annotations are machine-annotation consistent with the machine they are written in, and therefore will not cause the machine to diverge. Secondly, we have proven that CSP controllers that are consistent with the annotations will preserve the non-divergence property established between the machine and the annotations. Thirdly, we show how annotation refinement is possible, and show a range of mappings from the annotated B and the consistent controller to Handel-C. The development of mappings demonstrates the feasibility of automatic translation of annotated B to Handel-C.


Background Many individuals with Parkinson's disease are not diagnosed and treated. Attitudes about aging and related help-seeking may affect the timely diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. Our objectives were to develop measures of older adults' expectations regarding movement with aging, specifically related to parkinsonism, and their beliefs about seeking healthcare for the diagnosis and treatment of parkinsonism. Methods We established content and face validity from interviews with experts, review of the literature, and pre-testing with key informants. Two 9-item instruments resulted: Expectations Regarding Movement (ERM) and Healthcare Seeking Beliefs for parkinsonism (HSB). These instruments were administered to 210 older adults at senior centers to investigate internal consistency and construct validity. Results 192 (91%) of the older adults completed more than 90% of the survey. The mean age was 76; 17 (9%) reported parkinsonism. Both scales demonstrated good internal consistency (α = 0.90). Factor analysis supported construct validity of the ERM and HSB scores. Older age, lower education, worse self-reported health and African American race each were associated with lower ERM scores, but not HSB scores. Conclusion The ERM, a brief measure of expectations regarding movement with aging, shows reliability and validity. This scale may be useful in identifying older adults at increased risk for under-identification of Parkinson's disease. Further work is needed to measure healthcare seeking for parkinsonism.


Although courts and scholars have long recognized the weaknesses of eyewitness testimony, the legal system has yet to find a satisfactory mechanism for educating jurors—who are generally unaware of the complex psychological processes that affect eyewitness accuracy—about the inherent fallibility of such testimony. Many scholars argue that the best option is to allow an expert witness to testify to the factors that can affect an eyewitness's ability to perceive and remember. Yet eyewitness expert testimony presents several practical and equitable concerns, and even in jurisdictions that allow eyewitness experts, trial courts have been far from consistent in their admission of such testimony. Cautionary jury instructions avoid many of the same pitfalls and, in fact, carry several inherent advantages. Many of the eyewitness instructions now given by judges, however, are ineffective: they contain ambiguous and confusing language, they are given at the end of trial as part of a long list of other legal instructions, and in many cases, they reinforce jurors' erroneous assumptions about eyewitnesses. This Note argues that eyewitness instructions should be provided before the eyewitness testifies, thus alerting jurors in advance to the factors they should consider in evaluating the testimony. The Note also proposes a model instruction, which attempts to convey the relevant scientific and legal principles in a way that will be meaningful and understandable to lay jurors.


Minimizing the discrepancy of a set system is a fundamental problem in combinatorics. One of the cornerstones in this area is the celebrated six standard deviations result of Spencer (AMS 1985): In any system of n sets in a universe of size n, there always exists a coloring which achieves discrepancy 6√n. The original proof of Spencer was existential in nature, and did not give an efficient algorithm to find such a coloring. Recently, a breakthrough work of Bansal (FOCS 2010) gave an efficient algorithm which finds such a coloring. His algorithm was based on an SDP relaxation of the discrepancy problem and a clever rounding procedure. In this work we give a new randomized algorithm to find a coloring as in Spencer's result based on a restricted random walk we call Edge-Walk. Our algorithm and its analysis use only basic linear algebra and is "truly" constructive in that it does not appeal to the existential arguments, giving a new proof of Spencer's theorem and the partial coloring lemma.


The need for improvement in the petroleum industry has been met through changes in work practices, called Integrated Operations (IO). Changes in the organizations also mean changes in communication practices, for example seen through extended use of cross-professional teams and collaborative technologies. Changes in where we interact, who we interact with, and not least, what purpose the interaction has, create the need for changes in how we interact. With an increasing number of multidisciplinary and distributed teams, there is an increasing need for interactional management in order for the new teams to reach their full potential. This Master's thesis examines interactional management of group processes, a practice often referred to as facilitation. Facilitation is seen as the activities a facilitator performs before, during, and after a meeting to help a team achieve its outcomes. The empirical data on which the study is based, is collected from an international oil and gas operator. The primary data consists of video recordings of daily meetings, the secondary data of an interview with the facilitator, ethnographic data, observations and field notes. Most of the literature on facilitation distinguishes between process facilitation and content facilitation. This study shows that the facilitator role must be seen as more complex and as constituted in a combination of interactional, technical/professional and organizational expertise. The different modes of expertise are visible at the interactional level. Existing literature on facilitation focuses primarily on the "external", third party facilitator, whereas this study provides insights into "internal" facilitation of teams, executed by an in-house member of the organization with a given mandate. The interactional analysis of the study focuses on discursive devices employed by the facilitator, more specifically, how the facilitator utilizes questions and hedges in facilitating the cross-professional and virtual team. Questions are used to clarify and to elicit information, which is important in a decision making process, but, questions are also useful devices in ensuring meeting progression. The use of hedging is functional for the facilitator role because it gives room for the other participants to express their expertise and to give input to the discussion. One can say that the facilitator keeps the discussion open and thus facilitates joint decision-making. Both hedges and questions are important discourse devices for the facilitator in this setting for marking the boundaries of her technical/professional expertise, and for ensuring that the expertise of the entire team is put to use. In addition, hedges and questions are important discourse devices in the demarcation of the facilitator's, as well as the team's, decision-making authority. The boundaries are marked on an interactional level, but require organizational expertise.


Recent research proposes syntax-based approaches to address the problem of generating programs from natural language specifications. These approaches typically train a sequence-to-sequence learning model using a syntax-based objective: maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Such syntax-based approaches do not effectively address the goal of generating semantically correct programs, because these approaches fail to handle Program Aliasing, i.e., semantically equivalent programs may have many syntactically different forms. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a semantics-based approach named SemRegex. SemRegex provides solutions for a subtask of the program-synthesis problem: generating regular expressions from natural language. Different from the existing syntax-based approaches, SemRegex trains the model by maximizing the expected semantic correctness of the generated regular expressions. The semantic correctness is measured using the DFA-equivalence oracle, random test cases, and distinguishing test cases. The experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the superiority of SemRegex over the existing state-of-the-art approaches.


Ocean Engineering III, the third in a series of Specialty Conferences by the Technical Council on Ocean Engineering, occurred during a time when many engineering activities in the ocean were linked closely with national and world concerns for environmental protection and energy resources. The focus of the Conference program was on new and developing technical areas in ocean engineering, many of which were related to those concerns. The program format was designed to enhance participation and to promote information exchange among those attending. The program contained sessions on Macro-Engineering Problems and sessions on Advanced Technical Topics. The six Macro-Engineering Problem sessions dealt with the broad aspects of large-scale ocean engineering operations and facilities including the legal aspects of such problems. In addition to the paper presentations on these topics, three Macro-Engineering Problem sessions were followed by workshop sessions involving the authors of papers for the topics and other interested participants. In the workshops attention was focused on the identification of critical problem areas and potential solution approaches. The results of the workshop sessions are summarized in this book following the papers. The fifteen Advanced Technical Topic sessions consisted of paper presentations and discussions on specific technical areas. The chairman for each session was encouraged to present a brief state-of-the-art summary for the particular session topic. Most chairmen did so, and when available a written version of the state-of-the-art summary is included following the papers presented at that session. In addition to the technical papers, included in the Proceedings are the texts of addresses given during the Conference by distinguished invited speakers.


As an emerging electrochemical energy storage device, potassium‐ion batteries (PIBs) have drawn growing interest due to the resource‐abundance and low cost of potassium. Graphite‐based materials, as the most common anodes for commercial Li‐ion batteries, have a very low capacity when used an anode for Na‐ion batteries, but they show reasonable capacities as anodes for PIBs. The practical application of graphitic materials in PIBs suffers from poor cyclability, however, due to the large interlayer expansion/shrinkage caused by the intercalation/deintercalation of potassium ions. Here, a highly graphitic carbon nanocage (CNC) is reported as a PIBs anode, which exhibits excellent cyclability and superior depotassiation capacity of 175 mAh g−1 at 35 C. The potassium storage mechanism in CNC is revealed by cyclic voltammetry as due to redox reactions (intercalation/deintercalation) and double‐layer capacitance (surface adsorption/desorption). The present results give new insights into structural design for graphitic anode materials in PIBs and understanding the double‐layer capacitance effect in alkali metal ion batteries.


During nursing education students obtain knowledge and skills to develop their professional competence. Teachers may elect to provide pedagogical tools preparing students for current and future healthcare needs. The purpose of this theoretical article was to highlight Work-Integrated Learning combined with the Portfolio Method as a pedagogical strategy and tool for nursing students to develop professional competence for lifelong learning. This strategy contains six phases: pre-reflection, reflection-in-action, reflection-on-action, self-evaluation, meta-reflection and knowledge-in-action, which can help nursing students, during their clinical education, develop deeper understanding of their future profession, while also providing a teaching planning tool.