The objective of this Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) scoping project is to identify options for public-interest research and development (R&D) to improve transmission-planning tools, techniques, and methods. The information presented was gathered through a review of current California utility, California Independent System Operator (ISO), and related western states electricity transmission-planning activities and emerging needs. This report presents the project team s findings organized under six topic areas and identifies 17 distinct R&D activities to improve transmission-planning in California and the West. The findings in this report are intended for use, along with other materials, by PIER staff, to facilitate discussions with stakeholders that will ultimately lead to development of a portfolio of transmission-planning R&D activities for the PIER program.


Thermal energy storage (TES) is becoming a growing concern in modern technology and it has number of applications. Energy storage is essential whenever there is a mismatch between the supply and consumption of energy. Growing energy demands, lack of fossil increase in the level of greenhouse gas emissions are the main driving forces to practice various sources of renewable energy. Due to irregular and unpredictable nature of solar energy; efficient, economical and reliable solar th Among the different possibilities to store energy, systems using Phase Change Materials (PCM) can be preferred for its consistency in latent heat storage. The use of PCM is an effective way of thermal energy and has the advantages of having high storage density and the isothermal nature of the storage process. Due to this, the volume of material is reduces and so the cost of the system. But the PCM storage system has low thermal conducti enhancement techniques should be used. This paper summarise the selection of thermal energy storage systems using phase change material.


The objective of this study was to quantify the environmental and economic impact of withdrawing growth-enhancing technologies (GET) from the U.S. beef production system. A deterministic model based on the metabolism and nutrient requirements of the beef population was used to quantify resource inputs and waste outputs per 454 × 10(6) kg of beef. Two production systems were compared: one using GET (steroid implants, in-feed ionophores, in-feed hormones, and beta-adrenergic agonists) where approved by FDA at current adoption rates and the other without GET use. Both systems were modeled using characteristic management practices, population dynamics, and production data from U.S. beef systems. The economic impact and global trade and carbon implications of GET withdrawal were calculated based on feed savings. Withdrawing GET from U.S. beef production reduced productivity (growth rate and slaughter weight) and increased the population size required to produce 454 × 10(6) kg beef by 385 × 10(3) animals. Feedstuff and land use were increased by 2,830 × 10(3) t and 265 × 10(3) ha, respectively, by GET withdrawal, with 20,139 × 10(6) more liters of water being required to maintain beef production. Manure output increased by 1,799 × 10(3) t as a result of GET withdrawal, with an increase in carbon emissions of 714,515 t/454 × 10(6) kg beef. The projected increased costs of U.S. beef produced without GET resulted in the effective implementation of an 8.2% tax on beef production, leading to reduced global trade and competitiveness. To compensate for the increase in U.S. beef prices and maintain beef supply, it would be necessary to increase beef production in other global regions, with a projected increase in carbon emissions from deforestation, particularly in Brazil. Withdrawing GET from U.S. beef production would reduce both the economic and environmental sustainability of the industry.


The Sunnyside mine, in the Eureka mining district, San Juan County, Colorado, produces 700 tons/day of gold-silver-copper-lead-zinc-cadmium ore and is currently the State's leading gold producer (28,500 ounces in 1974). Production is from veins filling faults and fractures along the northern side of the Eureka graben, which formed during resurgent doming of the San Juan-Uncompahgre calderas about 28 m.y. ago. Mineralization in the Sunnyside system occurred between 13.0 and 16.6 m.y. ago. The Sunnyside mine workings extend through a vertical range of 610 meters, from 3,230 to 3,840 meters elevation, and extend laterally for approximately 2,100 meters.Six periods of mineralization have been recognized. The products of these, and their approximate volumetric abundances, are: (I) pyrite-quartz ores (5%); (II) banded quartz-sulfide ores (30%); (III) massive galena-sphalerite-chalcopyrite-bornite-hematite ores (40%); (IV) gold-telluride-quartz ores (1-2%); (V) manganese ores (20%); and (VI) quartz-fluorite-carbonate-sulfate ores (5%). Heating studies of fluid inclusions in quartz, fluorite, and rhodochrosite indicate that temperatures ranged between 250 degrees and 320 degrees C during mineralization for periods I-V and between 170 degrees and 245 degrees C for period VI. Samples collected at 3,800 meters elevation on the Spur vein show evidence that period VI fluids boiled at approximately 240 degrees C. These data together with the P-V-T data of dilute salt solutions indicate that P (sub H 2 O) was between 110 and 220 bars during periods I-V and about 35 bars for period VI. Freezing temperatures of fluid inclusions indicate a range from approximately 0 to 3.6 equiv. weight percent NaCl for the ore-forming fluids. The ore-forming fluids were largely K-Na-Ca solutions whose concentrations ranged from 0.03 to 0.27 weight percent K; 0.23 to 0.65 weight percent Na; and 0.03 to 0.26 weight percent Ca. Metal concentrations in inclusion fluids range from less than 10 to approximately 1,000 ppm for Cu, Fe, Zn, and Mn; these values agree well with values calculated from thermodynamic data. The dominant species in the fluid was H 2 O, which accounted for more than 0.99 mole fraction of fluids excluding dissolved salts. CO 2 was the only other gas species present in significant proportions. SO 2 2 as well as H 2 S was detected in period IV fluids. Period VI fluids contain numerous odd-mass hydrocarbons. The pH of periods I-V fluids ranges from 4.3 to 5.9 at a (sub K (super +) ) = 0.02 and appears to have been in equilibrium with the assemblage sericite + quartz. Total sulfur concentration is estimated to be 0.05 + or - 0.02 molal; f (sub O 2 ) and f (sub S 2 ) conditions estimated from the stability relationships of minerals together with gas data from inclusion fluids indicate that the dominant sulfur species in the ore-forming fluid were in the oxidized form (HSO 4 (super -) , KSO 4 (super -) , and NaSO 4 (super -) ) rather than in the reduced form. The delta D values of inclusion fluids from quartz, fluorite, sphalerite, and galena range from -96 to -135 per mil during periods I-VI. The delta 18 O values of water calculated from oxygen isotopic composition of quartz and carbonates ranges from -5.7 to -8.0 per mil for periods I-V and from -7.2 to -14.0 per mil for period VI. The delta 18 O values of whole rocks for wall rocks adjacent to a major vein range from +1.9 to -3.9 per mil. These delta D and delta 18 O data suggest that the hydrothermal fluids were predominately meteoric water which underwent moderate isotopic exchange with country rocks during periods I-V, but only slight exchange during period VI. The delta 13 C values of period VI carbonate minerals are -2.8 and -3.8 per mil for calcite and -6.3 to -7.9 per mil for rhodochrosite, indicating a limestone source for carbon in calcite while suggesting either a meteoric or magmatic source for carbon in rhodochrosite. Sulfur isotope values are 6.0 to +2.7 per mil for sulfides and +15.5 to +22.0 per mil for sulfates. These values together with consideration of the physicochemical conditions of the ore-forming fluids suggest that upper Paleozoic marine evaporites with delta 34 S = +12 per mil may have been the source for Sunnyside sulfur. Isotopic studies of lead and rubidium-strontium suggest that metals in the Sunnyside ore fluids were scavenged from both Tertiary volcanic rocks and from the 1.4 to 1.8 b.y. Precambrian basement. Geological and geochemical studies suggest a model for Sunnyside ore deposition in which a probable recharge area for the ore-forming fluids was located west and southwest of the San Juan-Silverton calderas. Fluids were channeled through and out of the caldera along fractures radiating to the northwest and the northeast. In-flowing fluids picked up carbon, salts, and sulfur by solution of Mesozoic and/or Paleozoic sedimentary rocks. As these dilute fluids became heated, metal-carrying capacity increased and metals were leached from wall rocks. At this same time, some SO 4 (super 2-) was reduced to H 2 S by reaction with the volcanic rocks. Fluids carrying both metals and reduced sulfur continued their northerly flow until they encountered the structures of the Eureka graben. Here the primary mechanism of precipitation was decreasing temperature.


Do the mass media condition and educate their audience with clever manipulation? In the current era of expanding digital technologies, our environment is often dominated by the power of images. Human tragedy in modern society is that our scientific-technological automatisms drive us too far from real and pure authenticity of feelings and emotions of the human being. Images and mass media systems determine passivity in the human mind and they do not develop experience, real motivations, spontaneity, creativity: they are not able to form creative and critical minds. In the sociological theory of Jürgen Habermas, the mass media are seen as being controlled by political and economic forces, which have an interest in manipulating the audience. The first rule for understanding «the human condition is that men live in second hand worlds». They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced and their own experience is always indirect. The quality of their lives is determined by meanings they have received from others. As Wright Mills suggested, we do live in a «second hand world», in which many of the things we know, were learned from others rather than experienced first hand. This means, quite simply, that more than ever we are dependent on the meanings given us by the mass media and through mass communication.


Nowadays, the overall attention is focused on de-escalating treatments for breast cancer (BC) including surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. The introduction of sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) has led to less invasive surgical approaches for accurately staging the axilla, with axillary lymph node dissection (ALND) progressively confined to a limited group of patients. One of the goal of surgery in de-escalating approaches is to reduce surgical morbidity by restricting or avoiding axillary surgery with no effect on survival. In this context the importance of imaging study for preoperative identification of axillary metastasis, in order to reduce axillary surgery, is gradually improving while the role of intraoperative assessment of sentinel nodes is progressively becoming limited to restricted groups of patients. According to the results of the ACOSOG Z0011 and following the most important guidelines, ALND can be safely omitted in selected patients treated with breast conserving surgery (BCS) with one or two positive SLNB while the adoption of SLNB positive alone in patients undergoing mastectomy is not yet defined. The increased employment of neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) and the use of SLNB in patients after NAC plays an important role in de-escalation of axillary surgery in this group of patients. However current studies on this topic are still controversial, mainly about clinically positive lymph nodes (cN+) pre NAC patients or how to manage positive SLNB in post NAC patients. Some authors have collected predictive factors of positive non sentinel lymph nodes (NSLNs) in nomograms, considered an useful tool to avoid unnecessary further surgery. Elderly women represent specific group of patients where the axillary approach needs to be properly resized. The management of axilla in BC is in continuous evolution and ongoing studies could make even SLNB useless in the next future.


The region exposes an unusually deep section through the continental crust. Gravity and seismic surveys show a ridge-like NE-SW up-warping of the Moho to within 25 km of the surface. The oldest rocks are migmatitic gneisses of generally intermediate composition, probably largely of supracrustal origin; these were intruded by a granodiorite/granite pluton at about 2600 Ma. Pb isotope data indicate that the migmatites formed c. 2700 Ma ago, and the isotopic systems in some rocks have been disturbed by Proterozoic granulite-facies metamorphism. A Proterozoic supracrustal series is composed dominantly of felsic metavolcanic gneisses but includes marble, quartzite, graphite schist and iron formations. An Rb-Sr whole-rock isochron age of 1830 ±35 Ma is interpreted as the age of a metamorphism which reached intermediate-pressure granulite facies in the western part of the area. An early low-P, high-T event was followed by PT conditions near 900°C and 10 kbar at the metamorphic maximum. This thermal peak was essentially post-tectonic and coincided with the intrusion of gabbro, anorthosite and huge volumes of mangeritic to charnockitic magma between c. 1800 and c. 1700 Ma ago. A swarm of alkali-olivine dolerites was intruded shortly after the mangerites. The Lefdingen granitic batholith gives an Rb-Sr isochron age of 1380 ±80 Ma and may represent remobilized basement rocks. Pelitic schists of the Leknes Group were tectonically emplaced against the mangerites and gneisses, and metamorphosed in amphibolite facies 1140 ±135 Ma ago. Rb-Sr and K-Ar mineral ages suggest that the extensive retrograde metamorphism observed in the older rocks occurred at this time. Small granitic pegmatites were also emplaced during this episode. The Caledonian orogeny is recorded by some K-Ar mineral ages, the development of local W-dipping thrust zones, and the local intrusion of large pegmatites. Lofoten-Vesteralen was probably part of the Baltic plate during the Caledonian orogeny, but escaped deformation because it lay at a high tectonic level and consisted largely of massive granulite-facies rocks.


The meat processing conglomerates that currently control the majority of the market share in the meatpacking industry are responsible for its most systemic animal abuses. Increased concentration has enabled these larger processors to dictate animal treatment standards maintained by meat producers, most of whom have caved to economic pressure and moved their animals from small farms into Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. Animal welfare proponents have failed to adequately challenge the concentration of the meat industry and in 2012 have yet to fully explore strategies made available by the Packers & Stockyards Act of 1921 (PSA). This Article proposes that a coalition between animal welfare activists and small meat producers, who have yet to be absorbed or driven out of business by the meatpacking giants, could effectively attack the concentration of the meat industry. First, animal welfare activists should work with small producers to expose to the public the negative human externalities associated with market concentration, such as intensive farming techniques that directly compromise consumer health. Second, the animal welfare movement should harness its legal experience to encourage small meat producers to pursue PSA-based civil suits aimed at challenging the power of the meatpacking conglomerates.


Research on the adoption of rural innovations is reviewed and interpreted through a cross-disciplinary
lens to provide practical guidance for research, extension and policy relating to conservation practices. Adoption of
innovations by landholders is presented as a dynamic learning process. Adoption depends on a range of personal,
social, cultural and economic factors, as well as on characteristics of the innovation itself. Adoption occurs when
the landholder perceives that the innovation in question will enhance the achievement of their personal goals.
A range of goals is identifiable among landholders, including economic, social and environmental goals.
Innovations are more likely to be adopted when they have a high 'relative advantage' (perceived superiority to the
idea or practice that it supersedes), and when they are readily trialable (easy to test and learn about before adoption).
Non-adoption or low adoption of a number of conservation practices is readily explicable in terms of their failure
to provide a relative advantage (particularly in economic terms) or a range of difficulties that landholders may have
in trialing them.


Neural ordinary differential equations describe how values change in time. This is the reason why they gained importance in modeling sequential data, especially when the observations are made at irregular intervals. In this paper we propose an alternative by directly modeling the solution curves - the flow of an ODE - with a neural network. This immediately eliminates the need for expensive numerical solvers while still maintaining the modeling capability of neural ODEs. We propose several flow architectures suitable for different applications by establishing precise conditions on when a function defines a valid flow. Apart from computational efficiency, we also provide empirical evidence of favorable generalization performance via applications in time series modeling, forecasting, and density estimation.


We present VMλ, a formalization and implementation of the functional language VML. VML is a programming language proposed by discovery scientists for the purpose of assisting the process of knowledge discovery. It is a nontrivial extension of ML with hypothetical views. Operationally, a hypothetical view is a value with a representation that indicates how the value was created. The notion of hypothetical views has already been successful in the domain of genome analysis, and known to be useful in the process of knowledge discovery. However, VML as a programming language was only informally defined in English prose, and indeed found problematic both in theory and in practice. Thus, a proper definition and implementation of VML with formal foundations would be of great help to discovery science and hence corresponding domain sciences. This paper gives a solid foundation of VML by extending the standard simply typed call-by-value λ-calculus. Although this extension, VMλ, is simple and clear, its design required much care to find and fix problems of the original VML. We also present a real implementation of VMλ, written in Camlp4 as a conservative translator into OCaml. This implementation makes extensive use of labeled arguments and polymorphic variants – two advanced features of OCaml that originate in OLabl.


A quantitative understanding of photophysical processes is fundamental for designing novel thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) materials. Taking a Cu(pop)(pz2Bph2) crystal as a typical TADF molecular model, we computed the conversion and decay rates of the first excited singlet state (S1) and triplet state (T1) at different temperatures by employing the thermal vibration correlation function (TVCF) approach. For the consideration of the solid-state environment, a methodology, which is based on the combination of a nonempirical, optimally tuned range-separated hybrid functional with the polarizable continuum model, was applied. Our calculated results are in excellent agreement with the experimentally available data. It is found that the reverse intersystem crossing (RISC) from T1 to S1 proceeds at a rate of kRISC = 6.34 × 105 s-1 and can compete with the radiative decay rate (k = 3.29 × 103 s-1) and nonradiative intersystem crossing rate (k = 1.48 × 102 s-1) of T1 at 300 K. This implies that the S1 state can be repopulated from the T1 state, TADF should be observed and the TADF decay time was found to be τ (300 K) = 9.68 μs by fitting calculations. In addition, the calculations indicate that the free rotation of the phenylene ring in the pop ligand can provide an important channel to energy conversion between T1 and S1. But, at a low temperature of T < 100 K, the situation will experience a larger change. The RISC rate becomes very small, kRISC ≪ k or kISC, and it cannot induce an occurrence of delayed fluorescence. As a consequence, Cu(pop)(pz2Bph2) is a highly attractive candidate for applications of TADF.

publisher-specific, author manuscript: http://rsc.li/journals-terms-of-use


With the advancement of technology organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on successful deployment of information systems. To deal with the IS complexity, developers require competence. However, the question "What is competence?" is still a topic of further deliberation in general, and in IS field in particular. Contemporary research critiques the concept of competence as confined to a narrow and instrumental view, for instance just as application of skills and knowledge. The narrow and instrumental view of competence does not give full attention to the information systems developers nor to the situations where the competence is enacted. To enhance the understanding of competence, we critically analyze the prevailing concepts of competence in general and in particular within the IS field. Based on the results of our analysis we propose an expansion of the concept competence to include 'competence-as-skilful-coping' based on a holistic perspective where developers 'being-in-the-world' act appropriately in unique and complex contexts. Such contexts may involve the developers of the systems, the users of IS-es to be developed, related information systems, manual routines, and the technology used. We present and analyze a case searching for the suggested concept of 'competence-as-skilful-coping'.


AIMS
To assess the impact of retail displays of tobacco on tobacco smoking and purchase by smokers and attempting quitters.

DESIGN
Population-based diary style survey.

SETTING
NSW, Australia.

PARTICIPANTS
A total of 998 smokers and 111 attempting quitters.

MEASUREMENTS
Demographic measures and 4-hourly records over 4 days: number of cigarettes smoked and bought; exposure to cigarette smoking by friends/family or other smokers; and exposure to retail displays of tobacco.

FINDINGS
Subjects reported seeing cigarettes for sale in more than 40% of the time-periods when they were outside their home. After allowing for factors which are known to increase smoking, people who saw cigarettes for sale were more likely to smoke, and smoked more cigarettes, even if they did not buy cigarettes in the same time-period. There was marginally significant evidence that people exposed to retail displays of tobacco in one time-period were more likely to buy in the following time-period.

CONCLUSIONS
In an environment which permits point-of-sale displays, smokers were found to see tobacco displays in more than 40% of the 4-hour periods that they were outside the home. Exposure to such tobacco displays was associated with a higher probability of smoking, and with higher levels of smoking, even when subjects did not purchase cigarettes.


Amilcar Cabral, who was the Secretary-General of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC), was assassinated by Portuguese agents on January 20, 1973. Under his leadership, the PAIGC liberated three-quarters of the countryside of Guinea in less than ten years of revolutionary struggle. Cabral distinguished himself among modern revolutionaries by the long and careful preparation, both theoretical and practical, which he undertook before launching the revolutionary struggle, and, in the course of the preparation, became one of the world's outstanding theoreticians of anti-imperialist struggle. This volume contains some of the principal speeches Cabral delivered in his last years during visits to the United States. The first is his speech to the fourth Commission of the United Nations General Assembly on October 16, 1972, on "Questions of Territories Under Portuguese Administration." His brilliant speeches on "National Liberation and Culture" (1970) and "Identity and Dignity in the Context of the National Liberation Struggle" (1972) follow.


Scholars and courts have hotly debated whether the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act is constitutional under the Reconstruction Amendments. In answering this question, this Article is the first to consider the effect of section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment on the scope of Congress's enforcement authority. Section 2 allows Congress to reduce the size of a state's delegation in the House of Representatives for abridging the right to vote in state and federal elections for "any reason except for participation in rebellion, or other crime." This Article contends that section 2 influences the scope of congressional authority under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which gives Congress the "power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article." Section 2, with its low threshold for violations (i.e., abridgment on almost any grounds) that trigger a relatively extreme penalty (reduced representation), illustrates the proper means/ends fit for congressional legislation passed pursuant to section 5 to address voting rights violations. Renewed focus on section 2 also sheds light on the textual and historical links between the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, links that provide a broad basis for Congress to regulate state and federal elections. Contrary to the Supreme Court's recent decision in Shelby County v. Holder, this Article concludes that requiring preclearance of all electoral changes instituted by select jurisdictions under the Voting Rights Act is actually a lesser penalty than reduced representation under section 2, and thus is consistent with Congress's broad authority to regulate voting and elections under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.


The first thematic meeting on fractography in geology, held on 13 September at Burlington House, London, was jointly sponsored by the Petroleum Group and the Tectonic Studies Group of the Geological Society. It was attended by 50 participants from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States of America, a gathering which included a wide spectrum of specialists from the oil, environmental, engineering and mining industries and from universities and colleges. Three posters and 14 papers were presented, including two keynote addresses. A one-day field trip led by Ameen, the convenor, preceded the conference during the course of which the fracture characterization of the Upper Chalk in the Thanet monocline, Kent, was discussed. The purpose of the conference was to discuss those aspects and applications of fractography which have evolved into an invaluable discipline within the vast field of fracture characterization of rocks. Fractography can be defined as the science which deals with the diagnosis, description, analysis and interpretation of fracture surface morphology or topography, and links them to the causes and mechanisms of the fractures. The term fractography was first used by the metallurgist Car1 A. Zapffe (Zapffe & Clogg 1944), and introduced to geology by Byron Kulander in the 1970s (Kulander et al. 1979). An introduction by the convenor outlined several factors which prompted the meeting. The discipline of fractography in geology is new, even though Woodworth (1896) was the first to describe joint surface morphology from field observations. It is hardly mentioned


Background Knee injuries are prevalent in cutting, pivoting, and jumping sports. Studies have investigated the effects of exercise-based knee injury prevention programs, however no clinical practice guidelines (CPG) exist. Objective 1) Review the evidence for exercise-based knee injury prevention programs, 2) identify if there are exercise-based knee injury prevention programs that are effective for particular groups of athletes, 3) explore the evidence for dosage and delivery of exercise-based knee injury prevention programs, 4) provide information on how exercise-based knee injury prevention should be implemented. Design Systematic review for CPG development. Setting Multiple. Patients (or Participants) Healthy, active individuals, particularly athletes participating in cutting, pivoting, and jumping sports. Interventions (or Assessment of Risk Factors) A systematic review of literature was performed via PubMed, Scopus, SportDiscus, CINAHL, and the Cochrane databases for relevant articles addressing the effects of an exercise-based knee injury prevention program. The final search was performed in April, 2016 to identify all articles published prior to that point. Main Outcome Measurements The effects and outcomes of exercise-based knee injury prevention programs. Results Thirty-seven studies met the inclusion criteria for this CPG. Exercise-based knee injury prevention programs have a low implementation cost and large relative risk reductions. Clinicians should implement an exercise-based knee injury prevention program for all athletes involved in cutting and pivoting type sports to reduce the number of significant knee injuries. The program should be implemented two to three times per week in the preseason and one to three times per week in the competitive season. It should consist of a combination of plyometric training, strength and power exercises, balance and dynamic stabilization training, core strengthening, technique training, and/or sports-specific drills. Conclusions This CPG will provide evidence based guidance for clinicians in choosing and implementing exercise-based knee injury prevention programs appropriate for the athlete(s) they work with.


As a founding member of the McLaren racing team, Tyler Alexander has seen motor racing up close for more than half a century. McLaren from the Inside collects the best of Alexander's behind-the-scenes photographs from two very different eras. Part I covers the team's formative years in the 1960s, while Part II captures the high-tech, hypercompetitive atmosphere of today's Formula One scene. Along with such great drivers as Bruce McLaren, Denny Hulme, Kimi Raikkonen, and Jenson Button, Alexander's images also show the designers, engineers, and mechanics who have made McLaren such a successful motor racing team for so many years.


Interferon production requires the activity of a prolyl isomerase on a kinase involved in Toll-like receptor signaling. Recognition of viral particles by Toll-like receptors (TLRs) 7 and 9 induces the recruitment of IRAK1 [interleukin 1 (IL-1) receptor–associated kinase 1] to the TLR complex, where it is phosphorylated by IRAK4. Activated IRAK1 then dissociates from the TLR complex and activates the transcription factor IRF7, which translocates to the nucleus and mediates transcription of the gene encoding interferon-α (IFN-α). Tun-Kyi et al. explored the role of Pin1, an enzyme that induces cis-trans isomerization of proline residues after a phosphorylated serine or threonine residue, in the activation of IRAK1. Pin1-deficient plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) produced less IFN in response to stimulation of TLR7 or TLR9 with purified ligand or virus than did wild-type pDCs. IRAK1 was identified as a Pin1 substrate, and the interaction required the WW domain of Pin1 and phosphorylation of IRAK1 at Ser131, Ser144, or Ser173. In Pin1-deficient mouse embryo fibroblasts (MEFs) or pDCs, activation of IRAK1 in response to TLR7 or TLR9 ligation was attenuated. This was due in part to stable association of IRAK1 with the TLR complex, suggesting that Pin1 activity released IRAK1 from the TLR complex. Nuclear translocation of IRF7 in response to TLR7 or TLR9 ligands was impaired in Pin1-deficient pDCs. Furthermore, the activity of an IRF7 reporter gene was reduced in Pin1-deficient MEFs, an effect that was rescued by reconstitution with wild-type Pin1 but not with a catalytically inactive mutant or a mutant that could not bind to IRAK1. MEFs expressing IRAK1 S131A, S144A, or S173A (mutations that abolished phosphorylation of the residues preceding the proline residues targeted by Pin1) in various combinations showed reduced IRF7 transcriptional activity and diminished production of IFN-α, as indicated by the lower antiviral activity of supernatants from these MEFs against vesicular stomatitis virus. Pin1-deficient mice produced less IFN-α than did wild-type mice in response to injection with TLR7 or TLR9 ligands, were more susceptible to infection with mouse cytomegalovirus (a virus that activates TLR9), and showed less expansion of CD8+ T cells in response to antigen. Thus, Pin1 promotes the activation of IRAK1 and the production of IFN in antiviral responses. A. Tun-Kyi, G. Finn, A. Greenwood, M. Nowak, T. H. Lee, J. M. Asara, G. C. Tsokos, K. Fitzgerald, E. Israel, X. Li, M. Exley, L. K. Nicholson, K. P. Lu, Essential role for the prolyl isomerase Pin1 in Toll-like receptor signaling and type I interferon–mediated immunity. Nat. Immunol. 12, 733–741 (2011). [PubMed]


Comprising 18 contributions, this book is a tribute to Robin Cohen's academic scholarship and intellectual impact. Some 50 colleagues and friends from the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, Canada and the USA gathered in Oxford for two days of reflection, celebration and recollection on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The editors have included a selection of interventions from what was called the 'Robinfest', covering Robin Cohen's interests in labour studies, social movements, globalization, creolization, diaspora and migration. There are also a number of more personal accounts that attest to his qualities and influence. Robin Cohen worked and undertook research in many countries and made commanding contributions to international labour issues and the study of diasporas. His two books, 'The New Helots' and 'Global Diasporas' bookended the Oxford event. This collection is a keepsake of the occasion and one that will be of interest to those who have been affected by his work.


This paper presents the implementation and experimental demonstration results of a practically effective and computationally efficient model predictive control (MPC) algorithm used to optimize the energy use of the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system in a multi-zone medium-sized commercial building. Advanced building control technologies are key enablers for intelligent operations of future buildings, however, adopting these technologies are quite difficult in practice mainly due to the cost-sensitive nature of the building industry. This paper presents the results of implementing optimization-based control algorithm and demonstrates the effectiveness of its energy-saving feature and improved thermal comfort along with lessons-learned. The performance of the implemented MPC algorithm was estimated relative to baseline days (heuristic-based control) with similar outdoor air temperature patterns during the cooling and shoulder seasons (September to November, 2013), and it was concluded that MPC reduced the total electrical energy consumption by more than 20% on average while improving thermal comfort in terms of temperature and maintaining similar zone CO2 levels.


"In a model where a monopolistic downstream firm (assembler) negotiates simultaneously with each of its "n" subcontractors the prices of the complementary components which enter its product, we show that backward integration is limited by a strategic negative effect: the prices and profits of independent suppliers increase when a merger reduces their number. Mergers are profitable only if the downstream firm buys at least two thirds of its suppliers. In an endogenous acquisition game "a la" Kamien and Zang (1990) the only merged equilibrium occurs when there is only one subcontractor. In a sequential acquisition game full integration is not an equilibrium when the number of suppliers is at least five." Copyright (c) 2008, The Author(s) Journal Compilation (c) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc..


The issue of interpretation is central to contract law, because a major goal of that body of law is to facilitate the power of self-governing parties to further their shared objectives through contracting. Modem contract law has developed a set of general principles of interpretation that give a place to both objective and subjective elements, and must be applied on an individualized basis. However, a number of narrower black-letter rules give a purely objective and standardized interpretation to certain kinds of expressions, and these standardized interpretations may often differ from the meanings such expressions would be given under the general principles of contract interpretation. These narrower rules, which the author calls expression rules, generally have not been recognized as a special legal category, and partly for that reason have not been critically examined The author argues that the use of expression rules in contract law is in need of justification. Several possible justifications are explored, and the resulting analysis is applied to various expression rules in the law of offer and acceptance. The author concludes that many expression rules are carryovers from classical contract law, cannot be justified under modem principles of interpretation, and should be dropped or modified.


This paper introduces extensions and applications of depth-first forwarding (DFF)-a data forwarding mechanism for use in unreliable networks such as sensor networks and Mobile Ad hoc NETworks with limited computational power and storage, low-capacity channels, device mobility, etc. Routing protocols for these networks try to balance conflicting requirements of being reactive to topology and channel variation while also being frugal in resource requirements-but when the underlying topology changes, routing protocols require time to re converge, during which data delivery failure may occur. DFF was developed to alleviate this situation: it reacts rapidly to local data delivery failures and attempts to successfully deliver data while giving a routing protocol time to recover from such a failure. An extension of DFF, denoted as DFF++, is proposed in this paper, in order to optimize the performance of DFF by way of introducing a more efficient search ordering. This paper also studies the applicability of DFF to three major routing protocols for the Internet of Things (IoT), including the Lightweight On-demand Ad hoc Distance-vector Routing Protocol-Next Generation (LOADng), the optimized link state routing protocol version 2 (OLSRv2), and the IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL), and presents the performance of these protocols, with and without DFF, in lossy and unreliable networks.


Established in 1999, the Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) program is funded by the Australian Government and is the nation's longest-running ongoing survey of police detainees across the country. DUMA comprises two core components: a self-report survey on drug use, criminal justice history and demographic information; and voluntary urinalysis, which provides an objective measure for corroborating reported recent drug use. This report describes drug use, drug market participation and the extent to which detainees' alleged offences were related to drug or alcohol use. Data were collected between January and December 2017 at five sites: Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth, Bankstown and Surry Hills. Since police detainees are more likely than the general population to have been in recent contact with the illicit drug market, understanding their drug use and offending habits is valuable in the formulation of policy and programs.


The apology is an important marketing and management tool. Knowing how to apologize correctly is a skill that must be mastered and should be studied. The purpose of this paper is to provide needed course material for instructors preparing a course module on this relatively new and very topical subject. This paper is targeted to educators and anyone who wants to understand the fundamentals of apologies. Possible relevant disciplines include: marketing, management, medicine, hospital administration, nursing, business law, and philosophy of law, among others. The paper includes examples of apologies, some good and some not, drawn from real life as well as from television and film. A reading list is provided as well.


Three fungicides were tested in the field for efficacy on late blight caused by Phytophthora infestans. The effects of these fungicides on epidemic development, lesion growth rate and sporulation were measured. No fungicide completely arrested epidemic development under the environmental conditions of these experiments. However, the fungicide mixture, propamocarb hydrochloride plus chlorothalonil, had the most suppressive effect of the fungicides tested. The mechanism of effect included suppression of disease progress and lesion expansion. Growth chamber studies demonstrated that 24°C compared to 10 or 16°C limited cymoxanil efficacy.


Atriplex nummularia has been extensively planted in Northern Africa to combat desertification. However, few studies evaluated the effectiveness of these interventions. This study aimed at assessing the dynamic performance of a number of Atriplex plantations located in the Marrakech province in terms of multitemporal dry biomass production. Three SPOT 5 images (2004, 2008 and 2012) and field biomass measurements were integrated to quantify the dry biomass production dynamics of plantations established from 1996 to 2007. Different plant ages covered the whole plant life cycle curve. Vegetation indices were derived from the images and those of 2012 were coupled to the measured biomass of 2012 to formulate biomass models. An analysis of shrub biomass production was conducted in plantations and in adjacent rangelands, covering varying degree of plant development, and an estimate of the economic benefits generated by the plantations in terms of available fodder biomass was performed. The results show that, on average, the plantation sites produced 2·21 to 3·61 Mg ha−1 of dry biomass more than the surrounding rangelands. The best performing plantations yielded even greater differences, up to more than 7 Mg ha−1. It was observed that the most performing plantations, while contributing to mitigating land degradation, have generated economic value and could compensate the economic cost of the intervention even under drought conditions. However, in several cases the plantation performance was far from sustainability, particularly due to poor management (early and/or over grazing), revealing that management is a critical factor for the success of this restoration practice. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


We propose a traffic engineering (TE) scheme that uses virtual preemption and configurable survivability to improve the resilience of the emerging-generation GMPLS networks. Virtual preemption ranks the rerouting requests based on bandwidth granularity and, using this ranking, reroutes these requests to allow the highest-bandwidth-demanding requests to be rerouted first with the expectation of achieving higher restorability. Configurable survivability moves the network operating conditions close to a predefined performance pattern and balances the routing configuration to improve the network survivability. Simulation reveals that the proposed TE scheme can increase the survivability of a network and achieve higher restorability while maintaining the signaling efficiency at an acceptable level.


Abstract This article explores the law governing the maintenance of public order and safety during belligerent occupation. Given the potential for widespread violence associated with international armed conflict, such as occurred in 2003–2004 in Iraq, it is inevitable that military and police forces will be engaged in activities that interface and overlap. Human-rights-based norms governing law enforcement, such as the right to life, are found in humanitarian law, permitting an application of both law enforcement and conduct of hostilities norms under that body of law. This results in the simultaneous application of these norms through both humanitarian and human rights law, which ultimately enhances the protection of inhabitants of the occupied territory.


Oral cancer is the largest group of cancers which fall into the head and neck category. While genetic alterations in oral cancer have long been documented, the effect of epigenetic changes is more recent. The recent explosion in science of how chromatin organization modulates the gene expression has highlighted the epigenetic mechanism of oral cancer pathogenesis. DNA methylation, which is an important epigenetic marker, is perhaps the best characterized chemical modification of mammalian DNA and provides a stable, heritable, and critical component of epigenetic regulation. This review attempts to decipher the epigenetic aspects of oral cancer by evaluating the DNA methylation status through its various stages from normal to potentially malignant to malignant states. In doing so, we emphasize DNA methylation as a novel biomarker in oral cancer research, thus opening newer avenues in oral cancer research.


The implications of urban development for overall economic prosperity are well known. Employment, housing, policing, infrastructure and social policies in cities have been shaped and institutionalized through a complex set of interactions between various urban interests, public officials, and institutions. In advanced industrial countries, for example, the rise of influential coalitions with the urban working class at the center was responsible for the proliferation of social protection in the 19th and 20th centuries. Consequently, a great deal is known about the dynamics of urban political mobilization and behavior in richer countries, and of participation among the urban poor. In the cities of the developing world, however, there is far less information available regarding these issues. I survey some theoretical foundations for understanding the political-economy of urban poverty before examining several pathologies of political life for the urban poor in the developing world. I focus on some aspects of the city-dweller's political agency - or the lack thereof - that limit the ability of the urban poor to engage in collective action, to participate in decision-making, to form effective organizations, and to resist predatory behavior by officialdom. I then examine some areas where further research is needed, including the political-economic bases for mobilization, the prospects for pro-poor urban social policy, conditions determining the effectiveness of delegation, and of membership organizations for the urban poor.


Against the backdrop of continuing adjustment in EU labour markets in response to the Great Recession and the sovereign debt crisis, the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) conducted the third wave of the Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) survey in 2014-15 as a follow-up to the two previous WDN waves carried out in 2007 and 2009. The WDN survey collected information on wage-setting practices at the firm level. This third wave sampled about 25,000 firms in 25 European countries with the aim of assessing how firms adjusted wages and employment in response to the various shocks and labour market reforms that took place in the European Union (EU) during the period 2010-13. This paper summarises the main results of WDN3 by identifying some patterns in firms' adjustments and labour market reforms. It seeks to lay out the main lessons learnt from the survey in terms of both the general response of EU labour markets to the crisis and how these responses varied across the countries that took part in the survey.


Design and simulation of two-dimensional diffractive optical elements are often limited by the amount of data required to represent the element in the computer's memory. We present a technique based on a geometrical description of the element, which requires fewer data than the traditional pixel description. Moreover, the element is being described more accurately and consequently the pixel-related artefacts are suppressed. This technique can be used for both periodic and non-periodic structures of large dimensions under Fraunhofer or Fresnel approximations. We apply the method to analysis of far-field beam-shaping elements and discuss possible extensions and refinements of the technique.


Revelations published by the whistleblower platform WikiLeaks, including the releases of U.S. diplomatic cables in what became referred to as 'Cablegate', put WikiLeaks into the international spotlight and sparked intense about the role and impact of leaks in a digital era. Beyond WikiLeaks opens a space to reflect on the broader implications across political and media fields, and on the transformations that result from new forms of leak journalism and transparency activism. A select group of renowned scholars, international experts, and WikiLeaks 'insiders' discuss the consequences of the WikiLeaks saga for traditional media, international journalism, freedom of expression, policymaking, civil society, social change, and international politics. From short insider reports to elaborate and theoretically informed academic texts, the different chapters provide critical assessments of the current historical juncture of our mediatized society and offer outlooks of the future. Authors include, amongst others, Harvard University's Yochai Benkler, Graham Murdoch of Loughborough University, net activism scholar, Gabriella Coleman, the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jillian York, and Guardian editor, Chris Elliott. The book also includes a conversation between philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and its prologue is written by Birgitta Jonsdottir, Icelandic MP and editor of the WikiLeaks video, `Collateral Murder`.


The Shape Boltzmann Machine (SBM) [1] has recently been introduced as a state-of-the-art model of foreground/background object shape. We extend the SBM to account for the foreground object's parts. Our new model, the Multinomial SBM (MSBM), can capture both local and global statistics of part shapes accurately. We combine the MSBM with an appearance model to form a fully generative model of images of objects. Parts-based object segmentations are obtained simply by performing probabilistic inference in the model. We apply the model to two challenging datasets which exhibit significant shape and appearance variability, and find that it obtains results that are comparable to the state-of-the-art.


The recent revolution in nanoscience and global energy demand have motivated research in liquid fuel cells (LFCs) due to their enhanced efficiency, moving flexibility, and reduced contamination. In line with this advancement, a glassy carbon (GC) electrode was modified with platinum (PtNPs) and gold (AuNPs) nanoparticles to fabricate a nanosized anode for formic acid, methanol, and ethylene glycol electrooxidation (abbreviated, respectively, to FAO, MO, and EGO), of the key anodic reactions of LFCs. The deposition sequence of the catalyst's layers was important where the Au/Pt/GC electrode (in which PtNPs were directly deposited onto the GC surface followed by AuNPs—surface coverage ≈ 32%) exhibited the best catalytic performance. The catalytic performance of the Au/Pt/GC anode excelled (at least threefold) its value obtained at the Pt/GC anode with regard to FAO and EGO, if the oxidation peak currents were compared. This enhancement got reduced to 1.4 times in the case of MO, but the large decrease (− 220 mV) in the onset potential of MO provided compensation. The role of AuNPs in the Au/Pt/GC catalyst was principal in boosting its catalytic performance as it immunized the underlying PtNPs against CO poisoning which is associated with the release of CO as an intermediate during the oxidation. Interestingly, AuNPs succeeded in interrupting the contiguity of the Pt surface sites required for CO adsorption during FAO, MO, and EGO and, thus, presage preventing the deterioration of the catalytic performance of their corresponding LFCs.


Abstract Introduction: Despite the advancements in the field, there is a lack of data when it comes to co-infections in poultry. Therefore, this study was designed to address this issue. Material and Methods: Broiler birds were experimentally infected with E. coli (O78) and low pathogenic avian influenza (LPAI) strain, alone or in combination. The experimental groups were negative control. Results: The infected birds showed most severe clinical signs in E. coli+LPAI group along with a significant decrease in weight and enhanced macroscopic and microscopic pathological lesions. The survival rate was 60%, 84%, and 100% in birds inoculated with E. coli+LPAI, E. coli, and LPAI virus alone, respectively. The results showed that experimental co-infection with E. coli and H9N2 strain of LPAI virus increased the severity of clinical signs, mortality rate, and gross lesions. The HI titre against LPAI virus infection in the co-infected group was significantly higher than the HI titre of LPAI group, which may indicate that E. coli may promote propagation of H9N2 LPAI virus by alteration of immune response. Conclusion: The present study revealed that co-infection with E. coli and H9N2 LPAI virus caused more serious synergistic pathogenic effects and indicates the role of both pathogens as complicating factors in poultry infections.


TAPESTREA is a sound design and composition framework that facilitates the creation of new sound from existing digital audio recordings, through interactive analysis, transformation and re-synthesis. During analysis, sinusoidal modeling and transient detection techniques are used to parametrically extract desired sound templates of different types: sinusoidal events, transient events, and stochastic background. Each extracted template is transformed and synthesized independently using an appropriate technique, such as sinusoidal re-synthesis or wavelet tree learning. This allows specialized transformations on each template based on its type; sinusoidal templates undergo real-time, large-scale time and frequency transformations, while background is generated parametrically from extracted samples. The user interacts with TAPESTREA via a set of graphical interfaces. Synthesis is further controlled through ChucK scripts, which allow simultaneous, precise manipulation of many parameters. They also allow control via external input devices and user-defined GUI elements.
These combined techniques form a workbench for completely transforming a sound scene, dynamically generating soundscapes, or creating musical tapestries by weaving together transformed elements from different recordings. Thus, TAPESTREA introduces a new paradigm for composition, sound design, and other sonic sculpting tasks. Work on further improving the system includes user studies to compare alternative algorithms for generating stochastic background noise.


Due to the increasing demand and focus for sustainable chemicals and fuels that are independent from fossil resources, itaconic acid gained interest and recognized for market position as a potential bio-based platform chemical. Itaconic acid can be produced via a chemical pathway or a biotechnological pathway, the more effective production way is the latter one, which is currently conducted in industrial scale production. In order to replace fossil-based chemicals, the efficiency of the current production that is mainly operated by using Aspergillus terreus has to be improved to achieve the economically feasible process. The recent progress in understanding the biosynthesis pathway, finding new raw materials and microbes as well as applying a more effective downstream process, facilitated the optimization of existing processes and resulted in reduction of production cost. However, there is still need for further optimization to achieve higher final concentrations and to use a broader range of low cost sustainable raw materials. Nowadays, the largest industrial producers of itaconic acid are located in China and the USA. If the production costs can be reduced and the downstream value chain for itaconic acid can be expanded, the market could be grow in the future.


This paper explores how parents respond to their memories of their stillborn child over the years following their loss. When people die after living for several years or more, their family and friends have the residual traces of a life lived as a basis for an identity that may be remembered over a sustained period of time. For the parent of a stillborn child there is no such basis and the claim for a continuing social identity for their son or daughter is precarious. Drawing on interviews with the parents of 22 stillborn children, this paper explores the identity work performed by parents concerned to create a lasting and meaningful identity for their child and to include him or her in their families after death. The paper draws on Finch's (2007) concept of family display and Walter's (1999) thesis that links continue to exist between the living and the dead over a continued period. The paper argues that evidence from the experience of stillbirth suggests that there is scope for development for both theoretical frameworks.


Medical and Engineering research studies have shown the potential risks of long haul flight travel and methods of preventing it occurring. The risk of serious health problems or even death is known to arise from lack of venous movement and increased coagulation (clotting) of the blood. These factors contribute to the development of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and this is more likely to occur in situations where people are seated for long periods during travel on land or in air. Currently long haul airlines have yet to be seen to introduce physical preventative measures against this syndrome. A prototype design of an in-flight exercise machine to prevent flight related deep vein thrombosis (FRDVT) has been developed. The prototype is an exercise device consisting of a foot pedal attached to a base by a hinge mechanism and is made from aircraft grade aluminium alloy material. Mechanical testing and medical experiments were conducted on a number of volunteers at the Faculty of Engineering, Dublin Institute of Technology and at Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, respectively to confirm the design characteristics of the device. Test results have indicated that the use of such a device can increase blood circulation in critical areas of the lower body limbs and prevent the occurrence of DVT and this paper discusses the threat that DVT holds to both travellers and people prone to periods of immobility.


During 2002-2008, there was no increase in global temperature, though green house gas concentrations had increased. Sun is the ultimate source of energy. It has been, therefore, examined if there was any anomaly in the solar characteristics during this period. The sunspot number data has been used for this purpose. This parameter has an 11-year solar activity cycle and the same is found in the global temperature. But the trend in sun's output, after removing solar activity effect, does not match with the long term trend of global temperature. Peculiarities in the duration and in the peak value of solar cycle 23 were identified which might have portended the increase of global temperature during 2002-2008. The possibility of the pause of increase in temperature could also be that the heat generated due to the increase in the greenhouse gas concentration was absorbed in deep ocean layer.


This article addresses the debate on fuzzy cases concerning the so called 'mild' and sporadic instances of physical violence against children by caregivers. The end of violence toward children is a current goal in the international scenario. However, myths on the use of violence and the scope of parental rights still survive. Thus, I examine the main theoretical, ethical and political challenges regarding conceptual clear-cut boundaries and the burden of proof when justifying violence. Finally, I defend the role of a preventive approach on children's wellbeing and family intervention as a fruitful way to surpass polarized debates on permissibility and criminalization.


Large-scale, recurrent fires in Indonesia in recent decades have caused widespread deforestation and transformation of peatlands, and have contributed to substantial smoke haze and greenhouse-gas pollution. In some areas, local community use of fire for livelihood needs could be a major factor behind the widespread fires. We assessed fire patterns and their causes from the 1980s to the present in the Middle Mahakam peatlands of East Kalimantan. This was achieved through satellite image and GIS analysis, biological and social field surveys, and rapid rural appraisals in the villages. People living in or using the swamps employ fire annually along the waterways and adjacent open floodplains and forests, in conjunction with fishing, agriculture, and other livelihood activities. Local communities perceive that uncontrolled burning does not affect the fish, which is their economic mainstay. Dry and windy conditions, failure of regular livelihoods, new markets for turtles and tree bark, and easing of government quotas for these resources led to more widespread fires in the El Nino periods of 1982-1983 and 1997-1998. Repeated burning ultimately transforms larger and larger areas of peat forest into open floodplains and shallow lakes. Local communities promote the transformation, believing it enhances fishing conditions. Even if the interior forests were kept fire free for a lengthy period, they would likely not fully recover, but these areas were rendered highly fire prone during the last El Nino event in 1997-1998. Another long drought in the near future, coupled with widespread community burning, could cause more severe, long-lasting damage to the peat forests and contribute substantially to regional smoke haze and greenhouse-gas pollution. This paper discusses the scope for resolving the trade-offs between the communities' perceived benefits of fire use, and national and global environmental concerns arising from peatland burning.


Turkey's relationship with the European Union (EU) is dominated by issues of democratization and human rights and is best approached from a perspective which understands the nature of the cosmopolitan regimes which work to regulate the democratic practices of nation-states and animate citizens and minority groups striving to assert their rights. Cosmopolitan or transnational processes of democratization are frequently perceived by Turkey's Kemalist political elites as being contrary to the interests of domestic harmony and a threat to national integrity. It is argued that the apparent reluctance of the Kemalist elites to embrace greater pluralism and align with the EU's Copenhagen criteria is in fact an attempt to `remake' themselves through political choices framed by global opportunities. In this sense, the mobilization of nationalist resistance to outside `interference' is calculated to secure legitimacy in an increasingly uncertain political environment. In addition, Turkey is increasingly dependent upon the very global processes that are perceived as a threat to national sovereignty, and EU standards and norms offer the means by which Turkey can safeguard national integrity.


With the transition to multicore processors almost complete, the parallel processing community is seeking efficient ways to port legacy message passing applications on shared memory and multicore processors. MPJ Express is our reference implementation of Message Passing Interface (MPI)-like bindings for the Java language. Starting with the current release, the MPJ Express software can be configured in two modes: the multicore and the cluster mode. In the multicore mode, parallel Java applications execute on shared memory or multicore processors. In the cluster mode, Java applications parallelized using MPJ Express can be executed on distributed memory platforms like compute clusters and clouds. The multicore device has been implemented using Java threads in order to satisfy two main design goals of portability and performance. We also discuss the challenges of integrating the multicore device in the MPJ Express software. This turned out to be a challenging task because the parallel application executes in a single JVM in the multicore mode. On the contrary in the cluster mode, the parallel user application executes in multiple JVMs. Due to these inherent architectural differences between the two modes, the MPJ Express runtime is modified to ensure correct semantics of the parallel program. Towards the end, we compare performance of MPJ Express (multicore mode) with other C and Java message passing libraries---including mpiJava, MPJ/Ibis, MPICH2, MPJ Express (cluster mode)---on shared memory and multicore processors. We found out that MPJ Express performs signicantly better in the multicore mode than in the cluster mode. Not only this but the MPJ Express software also performs better in comparison to other Java messaging libraries including mpiJava and MPJ/Ibis when used in the multicore mode on shared memory or multicore processors. We also demonstrate effectiveness of the MPJ Express multicore device in Gadget-2, which is a massively parallel astrophysics N-body siimulation code.


Just as decentralization communication systems lead to the creation of the Internet, today a new technology — the blockchain — has the potential to decentralize the way we store data and manage information, potentially leading to a reduced role for one of the most important regulatory actors in our society: the middleman. Blockchain technology enables the creation of decentralized currencies, self-executing digital contracts (smart contracts) and intelligent assets that can be controlled over the Internet (smart property). The blockchain also enables the development of new governance systems with more democratic or participatory decision-making, and decentralized (autonomous) organizations that can operate over a network of computers without any human intervention. These applications have lead many to compare the blockchain to the Internet, with accompanying predictions that this technology will shift the balance of power away from centralized authorities in the field of communications, business, and even politics or law.In this Article, we explore the benefits and drawbacks of this emerging decentralized technology and argue that its widespread deployment will lead to expansion of a new subset of law, which we term Lex Cryptographia: rules administered through self-executing smart contracts and decentralized (autonomous) organizations. As blockchain technology becomes widely adopted, centralized authorities, such as governmental agencies and large multinational corporations, could lose the ability to control and shape the activities of disparate people through existing means. As a result, there will be an increasing need to focus on how to regulate blockchain technology and how to shape the creation and deployment of these emerging decentralized organizations in ways that have yet to be explored under current legal theory.


Colon cancer is a major cause of cancer deaths in Western countries and is associated with diets high in red meat. Heme, the iron-porphyrin pigment of red meat, induces cytotoxicity of gut contents which injures surface cells leading to compensatory hyperproliferation of crypt cells. This hyperproliferation results in epithelial hyperplasia which increases the risk of colon cancer. In humans, a high red-meat diet increases Bacteroides spp in feces. Therefore, we simultaneously investigated the effects of dietary heme on colonic microbiota and on the host mucosa of mice. Whole genome microarrays showed that heme injured the colonic surface epithelium and induced hyperproliferation by changing the surface to crypt signaling. Using 16S rRNA phylogenetic microarrays, we investigated whether bacteria play a role in this changed signaling. Heme increased Bacteroidetes and decreased Firmicutes in colonic contents. This shift was most likely caused by a selective susceptibility of Gram-positive bacteria to heme cytotoxic fecal water, which is not observed for Gram-negative bacteria, allowing expansion of the Gram-negative community. The increased amount of Gram-negative bacteria most probably increased LPS exposure to colonocytes, however, there is no appreciable immune response detected in the heme-fed mice. There was no functional change in the sensing of the bacteria by the mucosa, as changes in inflammation pathways and Toll- like receptor signaling were not detected. This unaltered host-microbe cross-talk indicates that the changes in microbiota did not play a causal role in the observed hyperproliferation and hyperplasia.


The reflection of a beam of light at a plane interface is treated using the angular spectrum representation. The Goos-Hanchen shift is found to be proportional to the first derivative of the phase of the reflectance. The second derivative of the phase gives rise to a shift of the reflected beam along its direction of propagation. This new shift, called a focal shift, is different from the extra propagation distance of the beam predicted on the basis of a ray model for total internal reflection. Expressions are presented for the Goos-Hanchen and focal shifts for both s and p polarization.


Theoretical work dealing with the electron-phonon interaction (EPI) and its effects on the physical properties of metals is reviewed. The many-body approach and that using Landau's Fermi-liquid theory are briefly described and their adequacy is demonstrated for low values of the adiabaticity parameter (ωD/εF)(1/2), where ωD is the characteristic photon frequency, and εF is the Fermi energy. Density functional theory is applied to EPI calculations are outlined, and for a number of simple and transition metals, the results of calculations for EPI spectral densities and EPI-dependent physical properties are presented. The potentialities and the range of validity for EPI applications of the density functional method are discussed.


Breast carcinoma is the most common cancer with high mortality caused by metastatic disease. New molecular biomarkers predicting the tumour's metastatic potential would therefore improve metastasis prevention and personalised care. The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between DNA methylation levels in invasivity and metastasising associated genes with aberrant protein expression and also to evaluate whether a similar DNA methylation level is present in the tumour and circulating cell-free DNA for utilising plasma DNA methylation as prognostic biomarker. By using pyrosequencing, we analysed DNA methylation levels of 11 genes, namely APC, ADAM23, CXCL12, ESR1, PGR B, CDH1, RASSF1A, SYK, TIMP3, BRMS1 and SOCS1 in tumour, plasma and peripheral blood cells from 34 patients with primary breast cancer, as well as plasma and peripheral blood cells from 50 healthy controls. Simultaneously, the expression of related proteins in paraffin-embedded tumour samples was evaluated by immunohistochemistry. Statistical analysis was performed by SPSS statistics 15.0 software. Tumour DNA hypermethylation was found in most commonly methylated RASSF1A (71.9%), APC (55.9%), ADAM23 (38%) and CXCL12 (34.4%) genes with methylation levels up to 86, 86, 53 and 64 %, respectively. In tumours, significantly higher methylation levels were found in nine genes, compared with the patients´ peripheral blood cell DNA. Furthermore, in patients methylation levels in peripheral blood cell DNA were significantly higher than in controls in CXCL12, ESR1 and TIMP3 genes, but the values did not exceed 15%. On the other hand, no correlations were observed in patients between DNA methylation in tumours and cell-free plasma DNA. Moreover, in patients and controls nearly identical values of cumulative DNA methylation (43.6 % ± 20.1 vs. 43.7 % ± 15.0) were observed in plasma samples. A variable spectrum from high to none expressions presented in tumour tissues in all of the proteins evaluated, however in APC and CXCL12 genes a visible decreasing trend of mean DNA methylation level with increasing expression of the corresponding protein was observed. The DNA methylation profiles manifested in our group of breast carcinomas are cancer specific, but they are not the only cause that affects the silencing of evaluated genes and the decrease of relevant protein products. The clinical utility of DNA methylation testing in peripheral blood cell DNA for cancer diagnosis and therapy need to be further investigated.


We are taking the next big step towards the goal of a purely relational XQuery implementation. The Pathfinder XQuery compiler has been enhanced by a code generator that emits SQL. This code generator targets off-the-shelf relational database systems (e.g., DB2®) and turns them into efficient and scalable XQuery processors. Our approach neither depends on modifications of the database kernel, nor do we rely on built-in XML-specific functionality (SQL/XML, for instance). For that reason we are able to rest this work on query optimization techniques that have proven their effectiveness for pure SQL workloads.
 Here, we will describe (1) how distribution statistics and statistical views can accompany the relational encoding of an XML document to provide information about its node hierarchy, (2) the use of generated columns and materialized query tables to precompute aspects of XPath step evaluation, (3) how the system's index design wizard can automatically advise on the creation of indexes that, for example, enable index-only XPath location path processing, and (4) optimization profiles, a final fallback that enables fine-grained control over DB2's query execution plans. Performance experiments indicate the potential of the XQuery processor that results from this synthesis of Pathfinder and DB2.


This book compares the conduct of civil cases in countries of the South Pacific. It explains the practical application of civil procedures in the context of the courts in which they operate. The text focuses on the rules that apply in the superior courts of Fiji, Kiribati, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. An introductory chapter explains the origin of the rules and the factors that link and differentiate them. The preliminary considerations that should be weighed before proceedings are instituted are highlighted. In a separate chapter, the constitution and civil jurisdiction of the courts are explained. Legislative and case law developments are also discussed. The book also has a chapter on alternative ways of resolving civil disputes. The text describes recent changes to the rules and suggests further reforms that might be considered by South Pacific rule making bodies.The book is designed for use by legal practitioners and scholars interested in civil procedure in the South Pacific region. It is also of use to teachers and students of South Pacific civil procedure, both at degree level and in professional legal training programmes.


Reliability, defined as the guarantee that a program satisfies its specifications, is an important aspect of many applications for which rule-based programs are suited. Executing rule-based programs on a series of test cases does not guarantee correct behavior in all possible test cases. To show a program is reliable, it is desirable to construct formal specifications for the program and to prove that it obeys those specifications. This paper presents an assertional approach to the verification of a class of rule-based programs characterized by the absence of conflict resolution. The proof logic needed for verification is already in use by researchers in concurrent programming. The approach involves expressing the program in a language called Swarm, and its specifications as assertions over the Swarm program. Among models that employ rule-based notation, Swarm is the first to have an axiomatic proof logic. A brief review of Swarm and its proof logic is given, along with an illustration of the formal verification method used on a simple rule-based program.


Abstract The management of pastures is very important to reduce soil erosion. A special attention is generally needed for the wood pastures which combine livestock grazing with trees and shrubs. In this paper, we investigated the differencess between the wood pastures and tree-less pastures and their role to prevent or mitigate the soil erosion. The soil erosion assessment has been performed by using of RUSLE and GIS. The model has been applied in two study-polygons with wood pasture and tree-less pasture located in the northern part of Hartibaciului Tableland (Romania). Our outcomes showed and highlighted by comparison that wood pastures have a lower predicted annual soil loss than pastures with accidental presence of trees. This fact suggests that wood pastures are more resilient to soil erosion than tree-less pasture. The metholology tried to calibrate a preliminary model of soil erosion assessment for wood pastures into the southern part of Transylvania.


Policy- and decision-makers require assessments of status and trends for marine species, habitats, and ecosystems to understand if human activities in the marine environment are sustainable, particularly in the face of global change. Central to many assessments are statistical and dynamical models of populations, communities, ecosystems, and their socioeconomic systems and management frameworks. The establishment of a national system that could facilitate the development of such model-based assessments has been identified as a priority for addressing management challenges for Australia's marine environment. Given that most assessments require cross-scale information, individual models cannot capture all of the spatial, temporal, biological, and socioeconomic scales that are typically needed. Coupling or integrating models across scales and domains can expand the scope for developing comprehensive and internally consistent, system-level assessments, including higher-level feedbacks in social–ecological systems. In this article, we summarize: (i) integrated modelling for marine systems currently being undertaken in Australia, (ii) methods used for integration and comparison of models, and (iii) improvements to facilitate further integration, particularly with respect to standards and specifications. We consider future needs for integrated modelling of marine social–ecological systems in Australia and provide a set of recommendations for priority focus areas in the development of a national approach to integrated modelling. These recommendations draw on—and have broader relevance for—international efforts around integrated modelling to inform decision-making for marine systems.


Weather permitted continuous coverage of the eta Aquariids for the first time in many years. This fortunate occurrence allowed the author to observe the maximum activity, which peaked at around ZHR=135 ± 16 at about solar longitude (λ⊙) = 45.6°, on the morning of 2013 May 6, and at about double the zenithal hourly rate observed in recent years. A total of 256 eta Aquariids were observed in 15.68 hours observation by the author. A summary of the observations and derived shower data is provided.


Abstract A review of existing analysis codes for nuclear fuel cycle systems was performed to determine if any existing codes meet technical and functional requirements defined for a U.S. national program supporting the global and domestic assessment, development, and deployment of nuclear energy systems. The program would be implemented using an interconnected architecture of different codes ranging from the fuel cycle analysis code, which is the subject of the review, to fundamental physical and mechanistic codes. Four main functions are defined for the code. Function 1 is the ability to characterize and deploy individual fuel cycle facilities and reactors in a simulation while discretely tracking material movements. Function 2 is the capability to perform an uncertainty analysis for each element of the fuel cycle and an aggregate uncertainty analysis. Function 3 is the inclusion of an optimization engine able to optimize simultaneously across multiple objective functions. Function 4 is open and accessible code software and documentation to aid in collaboration between multiple entities and to facilitate software updates. Existing codes, categorized as annualized or discrete fuel tracking codes, were assessed according to the four functions and associated requirements. These codes were developed by various government, education, and industrial entities to fulfill particular needs. In some cases, decisions were made during code development to limit the level of detail included in a code to ease its use or to focus on certain aspects of a fuel cycle to address specific questions. The review revealed that while no two of the codes are identical, they all perform many of the same basic functions. No code was able to perform defined function 2 or several requirements of functions 1 and 3. Based on this review, it was concluded that the functions and requirements will be met only with development of a new code, referred to as GENIUS.


A 14-bit dual current-steering digital-to-analog converter implemented in a 0.25 µm CMOS process is presented in this work. Both implementation issues and measurement results are presented. The measured spurious-free dynamic range is higher than 73 dB for signal frequencies up to 3 MHz, and a measured multi-tone power ratio of approximately 71 dB is reported for an ADSL-like input.


A knowledge of physical and morphological properties of custard apple fruit and seeds as well as rheological properties of pulp-flakes are important for determining the unit operations during processing of custard apple pulp and for design of pulp-flakes extractor. In the present investigation, physical and morphological properties of custard apple fruit such as peel, carpellary pulp, gritty pulp and weight of seeds per fruit were found to be 46.77, 35.36, 11.63 and 6.24 %, respectively. Size, sphericity, and angle of repose were found to be increased with increase in moisture content while bulk density, true density and porosity decreased with increase in moisture content of custard apple seeds. It is of vital importance to study the separation of flakes of custard apple from seeds and to find out the force required for the separation. Rheological properties of custard apple pulp-flakes such as stickiness (184.34 g), hardness (596.67 g), cohesiveness (0.31) and viscosity (50.9 cP) were observed along with the shear force (1.84 N) required to separate the pulp-flakes from seeds.


Abstract. High-velocity lower crust (HVLC) and seaward-dipping reflector (SDR) sequences are typical features of volcanic rifted margins. However, the nature and origin of HVLC is under discussion. Here we provide a comprehensive analysis of deep crustal structures in the southern segment of the South Atlantic and an assessment of HVLC along the margins. Two new seismic refraction lines off South America fill a gap in the data coverage and together with five existing velocity models allow for a detailed investigation of the lower crustal properties on both margins. An important finding is the major asymmetry in volumes of HVLC on the conjugate margins. The seismic refraction lines across the South African margin reveal cross-sectional areas of HVLC 4 times larger than at the South American margin, a finding that is opposite to the asymmetric distribution of the flood basalts in the Parana–Etendeka Large Igneous Province. Also, the position of the HVLC with respect to the SDR sequences varies consistently along both margins. Close to the Falkland–Agulhas Fracture Zone in the south, a small body of HVLC is not accompanied by SDRs. In the central portion of both margins, the HVLC is below the inner SDR wedges while in the northern area, closer to the Rio Grande Rise-Walvis Ridge, large volumes of HVLC extend far seaward of the inner SDRs. This challenges the concept of a simple extrusive/intrusive relationship between SDR sequences and HVLC, and it provides evidence for formation of the HVLC at different times during the rifting and breakup process. We suggest that the drastically different HVLC volumes are caused by asymmetric rifting in a simple-shear-dominated extension.


In 2010, over 20.3 million vehicles were recalled. Software issues related to automotive controls such as cruise control, anti-lock braking system, traction control and stability control, account for an increasingly large percentage of the overall vehicles recalled. There is a need for new and scalable methods to evaluate automotive controls in a realistic and open setting. We have developed AutoPlug, an automotive Electronic Controller Unit (ECU) architecture between the vehicle and a Remote Diagnostics Center to diagnose, test, update and verify controls software. Within the vehicle, we evaluate observerbased runtime diagnostic schemes and introduce a framework for remote management of vehicle recalls. The diagnostics scheme deals with both real-time and non-real time faults, and we introduce a decision function to detect and isolate faults in a system with modeling uncertainties. We also evaluate the applicability of "Opportunistic Diagnostics", where the observerbased diagnostics are scheduled in the ECU's RTOS only when there is slack available in the system. This aperiodic diagnostics scheme performs similar to the standard, periodic diagnostics scheme under reasonable assumptions. This approach works on existing ECUs and does not interfere with current task sets. The overall framework integrates invehicle and remote diagnostics and serves to make vehicle recalls management a less reactive and costintensive procedure.


Abstract First and last occurrences of several Maastrichtian calcareous nannofossil species are shown to be diachronous across paleodepth and paleoenvironment using the graphic correlation method. Calcareous nannofossil assemblages examined from eleven cores from a deep- to shallow-water transect along the eastern United States Atlantic margin document that the first occurrence of Micula murus (Martini 1961) Bukry 1973 is diachronous, appearing 2.0 million years earlier in open ocean sites than in shallow marine sites. The first occurrence (FO) of Lithraphidites kennethii Perch-Nielsen 1984 is also nonsynchronous, appearing in the deep ocean before its FO in neritic waters. The last occurrence (LO) of L. praequadratus Roth 1978 is diachronous across paleodepth, going locally extinct first in deeper water. The LO of Watznaueria bybelliae Self-Trail 1999 is also diachronous, going locally extinct first in shallow-water settings. Ceratolithoides amplector Burnett 1997, C. pricei Burnett 1997, C. self-trailiae Burnett 1997, C. ultimus Burnett 1997, Cribrocorona gallica (Stradner 1963) Perch-Nielsen 1973, Micula praemurus (Bukry 1973) Stradner and Steinmetz 1984, Pseudomicula quadratus Perch-Nielsen et al. 1978, and Semihololithus spp. are present consistently in common to frequent abundances in ODP holes 1050C and 1052E on the Blake Nose, but they are rare or absent from neritic sections in Coastal Plain cores. It is apparent that these species flourished in an open ocean setting, suggesting that differences in assemblage abundance and diversity between deep ocean and nearshore areas were controlled by paleoceanographic factors. These species are not used for biostratigraphy, but may be useful indicators of open ocean conditions. The line of correlation (LOC) for nine Coastal Plain cores clearly defines the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) boundary unconformity at the top of the Maastrichtian section (Peedee Formation) and the Campanian-Maastrichtian (C/M) unconformity at the base of the Maastrichtian section (Peedee/Donoho Creek formational contact). The K/T boundary unconformity is undulatory in nature; updip Maastrichtian sections have been stripped to a greater depth than the downdip sections. The uppermost Campanian, all of the lowermost Maastrichtian, and the basal upper Maastrichtian sediments are missing from the study area.


Abstract The synaptic vesicle (SV) cycle, a trafficking pathway by which SV fuses with the plasma membrane to release neurotransmitters at the neuronal synapse, resides at the heart of neurotransmission. SV fusion consumes vesicle membrane and proteins, whose availability is limited, and these components must be recycled quickly to prevent synaptic fatigue. Biochemical, genetic and physiological approaches over the past five decades have led to a discovery of a large directory of proteins and lipids central to the SV cycle and several models on how these constituents account for the synapse function. The complexity of the SV cycle is starting to be comprehended, which opens new perspectives for our understanding of neuronal physiology and provides mechanistic explanations for several neurological and neurodegenerative diseases. Here, selected classic and recent insights into the mechanisms of two key SV trafficking steps (exocytosis and endocytosis) are reviewed, as well as their links to selected brain pathologies.


An analysis of the scope for exploration and the extent to which impressions of presence are created in domestic videogames. This paper argues that exploration is an important dimension of play in many games, whether employed in relation to other objectives or as a source of pleasure in its own right. The first part of the paper examines the relationship between freedom to explore and spatial constraint, arguing that many games offer a balance between the two, the precise nature of which varies from one type of game to another. The second part of the paper considers the extent to which different types of game offer illusions of presence in the game-world, from the distanced perspective of management and strategy games to the greater impression of sensory immersion created in games rendered in the first


Before the rise of private homes as we now understand them, the realm of personal, private, and local relations in England was the parish, which was also the sphere of poverty management. Between the 1740s and the 1790s, legislators, political economists, reformers, and novelists transferred the parish system's functions to another institution that promised self-sufficient prosperity: the labourer's cottage. Expanding its scope beyond the parameters of literary history and previous studies of domesticity, Be It Ever So Humble posits that the modern middle-class home was conceived during the eighteenth century in England, and that its first inhabitants were the poor. Over the course of the eighteenth century, many participants in discussions about poverty management came to believe that private family dwellings could turn England's indigent, unemployed, and discontent into a self-sufficient, productive, and patriotic labour force. Writers and thinkers involved in these debates produced copious descriptions of what a private home was and how it related to the collective national home. In this body of texts, Scott MacKenzie pursues the origins of the modern middle-class home through an extensive set of discourses--including philosophy, law, religion, economics, and aesthetics--all of which brush up against and often spill over into literary representations. Through close readings, the author substantiates his claim that the private home was first invented for the poor and that only later did the middle class appropriate it to themselves. Thus, the late eighteenth century proves to be a watershed moment in home's conceptual life, one that produced a remarkably rich and complex set of cultural ideas and images.


Introduction The use of a fabric as a separating layer between a soft subgrade and granular fill, for access roads, working platforms, vehicle standing areas, etc., was one of the first uses of geotextiles in ground engineering and is probably still commercially the most important. Al-though there have been many studies of such a form of construction (e.g. see Ruddock 1977 and several papers to the International Conference on Soil Reinforcement, Paris, 1979) design methods are still largely empirical and it is often difficult to calculate the balance of costs and benefits of using fabrics in this way. A research programme has been started at Oxford University to investigate the problem by means of model tests and computer analyses. The study is mainly concerned with the reinforcing effect of the material, rather than its performance as a filter, particularly in view of the recent introduction of high-strength, high-modulus mesh or grid structures for soil reinforcement. As a preliminary stage a series of simple two-dimensional tests have been performed at approximately 1/l0th scale. Granular fill, with or without reinforcement, was spread over a soft subgrade, represented by foam rubber, and deflections due to a surface strip loading determined. Several different reinforcing materials were used, including smooth sheet material as well as various mesh or grid structures, and the effects of varying fill particle size, fill thickness, reinforcement stiffness and subgrade stiffness investigated. It is appreciated that foam rubber is not an accurate substitute for soft clay, and the tests deliberately


Transport is a critical input for agricultural production and marketing. The past three decades have been challenging for the development of efficient transport systems in developing countries. Huge funds and efforts have been devoted to the conventional transport sector but this has clearly had limited impact on accessibility or mobility. Most farmers continue to depend on walking and headloading to move their produce between farms and markets. This hinders the development of agriculture and efficient marketing systems. Intermediate Means of Transports (IMTs) are now seen by many development agencies as a viable option that could induce greater mobility and improve accessibility and help improve agriculture, marketing and other livelihood means in developing areas. The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of IMTs on agricultural production and marketing in mral areas, focussing on Gomoa District in the Central Region of Ghana. The study examines the impact of a small action research project which involved introduction of selected IMTs in off-road villages. It examines the influence of IMTs over a twenty month period on farm size, location, distribution, productivity patterns, labour and gender issues, utilising a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. The study observed some IMT influence on labour productivity, labour availability and mobility, farm location and distribution, cropping pattern, marketed output and access to markets, though a relatively longer period of time is required in order to fully assess their impact than was available to this study. The impact of IMT on farming was influenced by social relationships, physical characteristics of the villages, including physical access conditions, and the economic and financial conditions of farmers. The influence of IMTs on crop marketing was larger in areas where routes to markets are poor, distance to markets are short, conventional transport service are poor and load volumes are large.


This thesis investigates problems in a number of different areas of graph theory. These problems are related in the sense that they mostly concern the colouring or structure of the underlying graph. The first problem we consider is in Ramsey Theory, a branch of graph theory stemming from the eponymous theorem which, in its simplest form, states that any sufficiently large graph will contain a clique or anti-clique of a specified size. The problem of finding the minimum size of underlying graph which will guarantee such a clique or anti-clique is an interesting problem in its own right, which has received much interest over the last eighty years but which is notoriously intractable. We consider a generalisation of this problem. Rather than edges being present or not present in the underlying graph, each is assigned one of three possible colours and, rather than considering cliques, we consider cycles. Combining regularity and stability methods, we prove an exact result for a triple of long cycles. We then move on to consider removal lemmas. The classic Removal Lemma states that, for n sufficiently large, any graph on n vertices containing o(n^3) triangles can be made triangle-free by the removal of o(n^2) edges. Utilising a coloured hypergraph generalisation of this result, we prove removal lemmas for two classes of multinomials. Next, we consider a problem in fractional colouring. Since finding the chromatic number of a given graph can be viewed as an integer programming problem, it is natural to consider the solution to the corresponding linear programming problem. The solution to this LP-relaxation is called the fractional chromatic number. By a probabilistic method, we improve on the best previously known bound for the fractional chromatic number of a triangle-free graph with maximum degree at most three. Finally, we prove a weak version of Vizing's Theorem for hypergraphs. We prove that, if H is an intersecting 3-uniform hypergraph with maximum degree D and maximum multiplicity m, then H has at most 2D+m edges. Furthermore, we prove that the unique structure achieving this maximum is m copies of the Fano Plane.