Interference between top tensioned risers (TTRs) is a key design challenge. Due to TTR tensioner stroke limits combined with large vessel offsets, the space out of wellheads is limited. Therefore, riser-to-riser contact is more likely to occur in extreme current conditions.Riser clearance between adjacent risers is evaluated accounting for the effects of wake, vortex-induced vibrations, current directionality (including variation through-depth), vessel offset, riser configuration, and drilling sequence. Accounting for all of these effects simultaneously and in detail when assessing TTR interference can be challenging.The typical TTR array interference approach consists of a combination of riser deflection shape matching and detailed wake assessment. In this paper, a revised TTR interference analysis approach is discussed, with the inclusion of an intermediate step involving screening for critical riser pairs using a simplified wake model assessment. Riser deflection shape matching ensures that the likelihood of clashing is minimized. The riser interference screening process avoids detailed wake modelling of non-critical riser pairs. The screening analysis method emphasizes avoidance of false positives (unrealistic riser clashing pairs) and false negatives (missing riser clashing pairs). It employs a simplified conservative wake model using a stratified downstream current profile to determine which riser pairs are critical and warrant detailed wake modelling. To illustrate the efficiency of the screening approach, results from this approach are compared to results from analysis with detailed wake modelling.An implementation of this approach is presented for riser joints with fairings and strakes. Nominal drag coefficients for these joints are obtained based on experimental testing and/or computational fluid dynamics simulations. Drag amplification of the upstream riser is obtained from vortex induced vibration (VIV) analysis and is also incorporated in the analysis.Copyright © 2015 by ASME


A real-time monitorinsg method of local water content in polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) is required to achieve higher current density operation of a polymer electrolyte fuel cell. Based on the T2 relaxation measurement of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the local water-content sensor consisting of the planar surface coil of 0.8 mm outside diameter and a permanent magnet of 1.0 Tesla was developed. In this research, T2 (CPMG) relaxation time of PEM was measured by Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG) method. The measurement time of CPMG method is 1.1 s. It is found from the result using the solenoidal coil that the T2 (CPMG) relaxation time of the membrane at 75°C increases with increasing a vapor concentration in N2 gas.The accuracy of T2 (CPMG) measurement by two small planar coils of 0.8 mm and 2.0 mm outside diameters was evaluated using CuSO4 sulution with the concentrations of 0.1 and 1.2 mmol/l as standard samples. The average and coefficient of variation of T2 (CPMG) measured by the planar surface coils were evaluated by comparing with the T2 (CPMG) STAND measured by the standard solenoidal coil. In the case of 2.0 mm planar coil, the average of T2 (CPMG) D=2.0 mm was equal to T2 (CPMG) STAND within the accuracy of 6%, and the coefficient of variation was in the range of 0.11 to 0.13. In the case of 0.8 mm planar coil, the average of T2 (CPMG) D=0.8 mm was longer than T2 (CPMG) STAND by the factor of 1.32 to 1.54 due to inhomogeneous perturbing magnetic field exposed from the small planar coil, and the coefficient of variation was in the range of 0.14 to 0.16. Furthermore, T2 (CPMG) measurement of PEM by the planar surface coils was performed. Using the planar surface coil and the obtained relationship between T2 (CPMG) and water content of PEM, the developed monitoring system can measured local water content in the membrane during 1.1 s.


The rise of investment fraud in Indonesia has been driven by several factors, such as a lack of public awareness of the financial sector, especially legal investments, and the plight of those seeking high returns ignoring risk. The victims of fictitious investment are not only from the lower middle class, but also the educated or upper class with higher education. This research aims to find out how the legal arrangements for investment managers to commit fraud in the capital market using a pyramid scheme, and the criminal sanctions they will receive. This research is normative legal research conducted with a case and legislation approach. As a result, in cases of fraud, two sides can be found, namely the side that is deceived (the victim) and the side that deceives (the perpetrator). Capital Market Law stipulates a regulation whereby parties are required to follow the principle of transparency in trading securities and conducting public offerings on the secondary market. The criminal sanction for fictitious investment managers to commit fraud in the capital market using a pyramid scheme is where the perpetrator performs deviant behavior that meets certain requirements to be subject to criminal sanctions.


Creating Traffic Models is a challenging task because some of their interactions and system components are difficult to adequately express in a mathematical form. Traffic Flow Theory: Characteristics, Experimental Methods, and Numerical Techniques provide traffic engineers with the necessary methods and techniques for mathematically representing traffic flow. The book begins with a rigorous but easy to understand exposition of traffic flow characteristics including Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and traffic sensing technologies. * Includes worked out examples and cases to illustrate concepts, models, and theories* Provides modeling and analytical procedures for supporting different aspects of traffic analyses for supporting different flow models* Carefully explains the dynamics of traffic flow over time and space


Objective:To determine whether menstrual cycle phase in women at the time of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) predicts 1-month outcomes. Setting:Six emergency departments; 5 in Upstate New York, and 1 in Pennsylvania. Participants:One hundred forty-four female participants (age, 16–60) who presented to participating emergency departments within 4 hours of mTBI. Design:Nested cohort study with neurologic and quality-of-life outcome assessment, 1 month after enrollment. Female subjects aged 16 to 60 enrolled in the parent cohort study, with 1-month neurological determination data available, were classified into menstrual cycle groups by serum progesterone concentration and self-reported contraceptive use. Main Measures:Rivermead Post Concussion Questionnaire and EuroQoL/EQ5D. Results:Women injured during the luteal phase of their menstrual cycle, when progesterone concentration is high, had significantly lower EuroQoL General Health Ratings and Index Scores than women injured during the follicular phase of their cycle or women taking oral contraceptives. Multivariate analysis confirmed a significant independent effect of menstrual cycle phase on EuroQoL Index Score and the Rivermead Post Concussion Questionnaire Somatic Subscore. Conclusion:Menstrual cycle phase and progesterone concentration at the time of mTBI affect 1-month quality-of-life and neurologic outcomes. This association has important implications for treatment and prognosis after mTBI.


Purpose - This paper aims to investigate the relationship between ownership structure and performance for a comprehensive sample of Chinese listed firms for the years 2000-2004. In particular, the paper seeks to explore the effect of the dominance of state and private blockholders and control on firm performance. It aims to use a more differentiated approach than previous research on the subject, which has mainly focused on the effects of the pervasive state ownership on firm values. Accordingly, the main theme of the paper intends to relate to the analysis of the effects of private blockholders on firm value. Design/methodology/approach - The paper tests the ownership-performance relationship for the state and for sub-samples with predominantly private shareholders. The paper uses both an ordinary least squares and a two-stage least squares analysis, which treats ownership concentration as endogenous. Findings - The paper finds evidence that large private blockholdings are to the benefit of firm value for the full sample. Conversely, for smaller samples of companies without or with very low shareholdings by the various state players, there is some evidence that large private block shareholdings might be to the detriment of firm value. Originality/value - The study contributes to the literature by presenting a more comprehensive treatment of the ownership-performance relationship of listed firms in China. The main theme of the paper relates to ownership concentration and the effects of private blockholders on the performance of firms, in addition to the endogeneity of ownership. It also contributes by utilising the alternative ownership classification system developed by the National University of Singapore.


This is a delightful book about Italy's unexpected history, told through its citrus fruits. The story of citrus runs through the history of Italy like a golden thread, and by combining travel writing with history, recipes, horticulture and art, Helena Attlee takes the reader on a unique and rich journey through Italy's cultural, moral, culinary and political past. "4 stars. Attlee, who knows and loves Italy and the Italians, takes the reader through the country's scented gardens with her sharp descriptions, pertinent stories and quotes and intriguing recipes. I was there with her". (Anna del Conte, Sunday Telegraph). "Fascinating ...A distinguished garden writer, Attlee fell under the spell of citrus over ten years ago and the book, like the eleventh labour of Hercules to steal the golden fruit of the Hesperides, is the result. She writes with great lucidity, charm and gentle humour, and wears her considerable learning lightly ...Helena Attlee's elegant, absorbing prose and sure-footed ability to combine the academic with the anecdotal, make The Land Where Lemons Grow a welcome addition to the library of citrologists and Italophiles alike". (The Times Literary Supplement). "A paradise of citrus is how I always think of Italy too: a place where ice-cold limoncello is sipped from tiny glasses on piazzas, and everything from ricotta cake to osso bucco is enlivened with zest. What a joy, therefore, to read Helena Attlee's The Land Where Lemons Grow, which tells the story of Italy through its citrus fruit". (Bee Wilson, Telegraph). Helena Attlee is the author of four books about Italian gardens, and others on the cultural history of gardens around the world. Helena is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and has worked in Italy for nearly 30 years.


In most published hydrothermal ore deposit models, the main agent of metal transport is an aqueous liquid. However, there is increasing evidence from volcanic vapors, geothermal systems (continental and submarine), vapor-rich fluid inclusions, and experimental studies that the vapor phase may be an important and even dominant ore fluid in some hydrothermal systems. This paper reviews the evidence for the transport of metals by vapor (which we define as an aqueous fluid of any composition with a density lower than its critical density), clarifies some of the thermodynamic controls that may make such transport possible, and suggests a model for the formation of porphyry and epithermal deposits that involves precipitation of the ores from vapor or a vapor-derived fluid.

Analyses of vapor (generally >90% water) released from volcanic fumaroles at temperatures from 500° to over 900°C and near-atmospheric pressure typically yield concentrations of ore metals in the parts per billion to parts per million range. These vapors also commonly deposit appreciable quantities of ore minerals as sublimates. Much higher metal concentrations (from ppm to wt %) are observed in vapor inclusions trapped at pressures of 200 to 1,000 bars in deeper veins at lower temperatures (400°–650°C). Moreover, concentrations of some metals, notably Cu and Au, are commonly higher in vapor inclusions than they are in inclusions of coexisting hypersaline liquid (brine). Experiments designed to determine the concentration of Cu, Sn, Ag, and Au in HCl-bearing water vapor at variable although relatively low pressures (up to 180 bars) partly explain this difference. These experiments show that metal solubility is orders of magnitude higher than predicted by volatility data for water-free systems, and furthermore that it increases sharply with increasing water fugacity and correlates positively with the fugacity of HCl. Thermodynamic analysis shows that metal solubility is greatly enhanced by reaction of the metal with HCl and by hydration, which results in the formation of species such as MeCl m . n H2O. Nonetheless, the concentrations measured by these experiments are considerably lower than those measured in experiments involving aqueous liquids or determined for vapor fluid inclusions. A possible explanation for this and for the apparent preference of metals such as Cu and Au for the vapor over the coexisting brine in some natural settings is suggested by limited experimental studies of metal partitioning between vapor and brine. These studies show that, whereas Cu, Fe, and Zn all partition strongly into the liquid in chloride-bearing sulfur-free systems, Cu partitions preferentially into the vapor in the presence of significant concentrations of sulfur. We therefore infer that high concentrations of Cu and Au in vapor inclusions reflect the strong preference of sulfur for the vapor phase and the formation of sulfur-bearing metallic gas species.

Phase stability relationships in the system NaCl-H2O indicate how vapor transport of metals may occur in nature, by showing a range of possible vapor evolution paths for the conditions of porphyry-epithermal systems. At the world-class Bingham Canyon porphyry Cu-Au deposit, evidence from fluid inclusions supports a model in which a single-phase fluid of intermediate to vapor-like density ascends from a magma chamber. On cooling and decompression, this fluid condenses a small fraction of brine by intersecting the two-phase surface on the vapor side of the critical curve, without significantly changing the composition of the expanding vapor. Vapor and brine reach Cu-Fe sulfide saturation as both phases cool below 425°C. Vapor, which is the dominant fluid in terms of the total mass of H2O, Cu, and probably even Cl, is interpreted to be the main agent of metal transport. The evolution of fluids leading to high-grade epithermal gold mineralization is initiated by an H2S-, SO2-, Au-, and variably Cu- and As-rich vapor, which separates from an FeCl2-rich brine in a subjacent porphyry environment. In the early stages of the hydrothermal system, vapor expands rapidly and on reaching the epithermal environment, condenses, producing hypogene advanced argillic alteration and residual vuggy quartz and, in some cases, coeval high-sulfidation precious metal mineralization (e.g., Pascua). More commonly, the introduction of precious metals occurs somewhat later, after the site of magmatic fluid exsolution has receded to greater depth. Because of the relatively high pressure, the vapor separating from brine at this stage cools along a pressure-temperature path above the critical curve of the system, causing it to contract to a liquid capable of transporting several parts per million Au to temperatures as low as 150°C.


The monarchs of seventeenth-century Europe put a surprisingly high priority on the abolition of dueling, seeing its eradication as an important step from barbarism toward a rational state monopoly on justice. But it was one thing to ban dueling and another to stop it. Duelists continued to kill each other with swords or pistols in significant numbers deep into the nineteenth century. In 1883 Maupassant called dueling the last of our unreasonable customs. As a dramatic and forbidden ritual from another age, the duel retained a powerful hold on the public mind and, in particular, the literary imagination.Many of the greatest names in Western literature wrote about or even fought in duels, among them Corneille, Moliere, Richardson, Rousseau, Pushkin, Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Twain, Conrad, Chekhov, and Mann. As John Leigh explains, the duel was a gift as a plot device. But writers also sought to discover in duels something more fundamental about human conflict and how we face our fears of humiliation, pain, and death. The duel was, for some, a social cause, a scourge to be mocked or lamented; yet even its critics could be seduced by its risk and glamour. Some conservatives defended dueling by arguing that the man of noble bearing who cared less about living than living with honor was everything that the contemporary bourgeois was not. The literary history of the duel, as "Touche" makes clear, illuminates the tensions that attended the birth of the modern world."


Inspired by BatchNorm, there has been an explosion of normalization layers in deep learning. Recent works have identified a multitude of beneficial properties in BatchNorm to explain its success. However, given the pursuit of alternative normalization layers, these properties need to be generalized so that any given layer's success/failure can be accurately predicted. In this work, we take a first step towards this goal by extending known properties of BatchNorm in randomly initialized deep neural networks (DNNs) to several recently proposed normalization layers. Our primary findings follow: (i) similar to BatchNorm, activations-based normalization layers can prevent exponential growth of activations in ResNets, but parametric techniques require explicit remedies; (ii) use of GroupNorm can ensure an informative forward propagation, with different samples being assigned dissimilar activations, but increasing group size results in increasingly indistinguishable activations for different samples, explaining slow convergence speed in models with LayerNorm; and (iii) small group sizes result in large gradient norm in earlier layers, hence explaining training instability issues in Instance Normalization and illustrating a speed-stability tradeoff in GroupNorm. Overall, our analysis reveals a unified set of mechanisms that underpin the success of normalization methods in deep learning, providing us with a compass to systematically explore the vast design space of DNN normalization layers.


This Article develops a novel analytic framework for the evaluation of regulatory policy in cyberspace, flowing from a reconceptualization of cyberlaw's central premise: software code as complementary to law rather than its substitute. This approach emphasizes the linkage between law and software; for every quantum of legal-regulatory impact, there is a corresponding equilibria of regulation-by-software. The absence of a legal right will stimulate a technological response - and such incentives will moderate with increased rights. Rather than code is law, this is code meets law. The implications of this methodological shift are explored in the context of the emerging (and intensely controversial) cyberproperty right - defined as the right to exclude others from one's network resources. The debate over whether (and how, and why) concepts of property rights can be extended to bits stored on web servers, email systems and the like is both deeply intertwined with technology and fundamentally comparative in nature, bringing the importance of understanding the regulatory costs and benefits of software (as compared to law) into sharp relief. The analysis that emerges suggests that, contrary to much of the relevant scholarly literature (and perhaps counterintuitively), the availability of technological mechanisms to replace legal rights likely strengthens, rather than weakens, the case for legal regulation in the form of property rights. At least in this context, a software-centric regulatory approach is dominated by regimes premised on property-backed contractual relationships. Considering the regulatory environment of cyberspace from this perspective may have profound effects on the way we think about the form and function of law online. The nature of cyberspace as particularly sensitive to emerging concerns about the tyranny of software suggests that the online environment might be more suited for a broad property rights regime than has been recognized to date.


Research data are essential to all scientific endeavours. Openness in the sharing of research results is one of the norms of modern science. The assumption behind this openness is that scientific progress requires results to be shared within the scientific community as early as possible in the discovery process.


Comparative anatomy was first developed by Greek natural philosophers and physicians. It has had a rich interplay with Western culture since that time until the present. Our understanding of how the anatomy of plants and animals varies reflects the view we have of nature and the world. Comparative anatomy can be traced back to the ancient Greeks who made scattered anatomical observations. Aristotle, the student of Plato, made the first systematic dissections. Researchers made more detailed anatomical observations throughout antiquity, while thinkers of the Middle Ages incorporated anatomical ideas within a deeply religious culture. The Renaissance began around 1400 as an interest in early texts, including those on comparative anatomy, increased. The knowledge from ancient texts, fed by the advent of printing, led to the Scientific Revolution. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, much discussion of comparative anatomy has focused on the theory of evolution.

Key Concepts

Animal: A major kind of life form that has been distinguished from plants by virtue of possessing a sensorimotor system that gives it an ability to move around.

Antiquity: In classical western European history, the time period from about 800 bc to ad 450 when the oldest approaches to thought emerged and the oldest texts, mostly in Greek and Latin, were written.

Classification: The procedure of comparing different living things and assigning them to abstract groups such as species and genera according to specific anatomical or behavioural criteria.

Dissection: The procedure of intentionally cutting open a dead plant or animal in order to discern how its parts are interconnected and organized.

Evolution: The process by which one species changes into other species during long periods of time.

History: The process by which the ideas, beliefs, language, cultural practices and institutions of a people change over time, often in response to events, social interactions and technological inventions.

Middle Ages: The historical period from about ad 450 to 1400 which saw the rise and dominance of Christian religion and culture within the boundaries of the classical Roman Empire.

Nature: Those aspects of the world and the cosmos that exist independent of human institutions and technological contrivances, including such things as the developmental processes of plants and animal and the way bodies are.

Renaissance: The historical period in Western civilization that succeeds the Middle Ages and precedes the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, in which there is an intense desire to retrieve ancient Greco-Roman knowledge and learning, which was accelerated by printing, the publication of books and the influx of Greek scholars after Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire in ad

Scientific change: The process by which scientific accounts are modified as investigators consider new texts, ideas, observations and experimental methods.

Keywords:

anatomy;
classification;
dissection;
evolution;
history;
Aristotle


Abstract The open source movement has made vast quantities of source code available online for free, providing an extremely large dataset for empirical study and potential resuse. A major difficulty in exploiting this potential fully is that the data are currently scattered between competing source code repositories, none of which are structured for empirical analysis and cross-project comparison. As a result, software researchers and developers are left to compile their own datasets, resulting in duplicated effort and limited results. To address this challenge, we built SourcererDB, an aggregated repository of statically analyzed and cross-linked open source Java projects. SourcererDB contains local snapshots of 2,852 Java projects taken from Sourceforge, Apache and Java.net. These projects are statically analyzed to extract rich structural information, which is then stored in a relational database. References to entities in the 16,058 external jars are resolved and grouped, allowing for cross-project usage information to be accessed easily. This paper describes: (a) the mechanism for resolving and grouping these cross-project references, (b) the structure of and the metamodel for the SourcererDB repository, and (d) end-user dataset access mechanisms. Our goal in building SourcererDB is to provide a rich dataset of source code to facilitate the sharing of extracted data and to encourage reuse and repeatability of experiments.


The defects in crystalline materials significantly affect the fracture behaviors. In this paper molecular dynamics (MD) model using a potential of embedded atom method (EAM) has been developed to investigate the effect of the major crystalline defects, stacking fault and edge dislocation, on the crack propagation in Fe crystal. Six cases with different locations of stacking fault and edge dislocation have been studied. The strain distribution in lattice aggregate was heterogeneous. The dislocations were observed slipping along directions [100] and [-100] on the plane (100). Simulation results showed that the location of the stacking fault and edge dislocation significantly influenced the crack propagation speed.


Today a new generation of food safety policy is emerging in OECD countries and international public health forums. The United States has actively contributed to the thinking and scientific research underlying this new generation of policy. A consensus has emerged among nations about the basic components of an effective food safety system based on modern science and management practices. In shorthand, the vision is of a farm-to-fork, risk-based, scientifically supported safety control system. This system is built on several decades of experience with risk management in national governments, particularly in U.S. environmental and occupational and consumer safety policy. This paper describes the elements of a risk-based, farm-to-fork food safety system as it is emerging in OECD countries guided by discussions through Codex Alimentarius and traces its roots in the development of risk management policy in the United States.


The mechanism of the newly reported route for surface-assisted covalent coupling of terminal alkynes on Ag(111) is unraveled by density functional theory based transition state calculations. We illustrate that the reaction path is fundamentally different from the classical coupling schemes in wet chemistry. It is initiated by the covalent coupling between two molecules instead of single-molecule dehydrogenation. The silver substrate is found to play an important role stabilizing the intermediate species by chemical bonds, although it is hardly active electronically in the actual coupling step. The dimer intermediate is concluded to undergo two subsequent dehydrogenation processes expected to be rate-limiting according to the comparatively large barriers, which origin is discussed.


Objective: PHLAME's (Promoting Healthy Lifestyles: Alternative Models' Effects) objective was to assess and compare two means to promote healthy lifestyles. Methods: Prospective trial among 599 firefighters randomized by station to 1) team-centered curriculum, 2) one-on-one motivational interviewing (MI), and 3) controls. Assessment included dietary behavior, physical activity, weight, and general well-being at baseline and 12 months. Program effects were determined using an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) based approach, and models for relationships were evaluated with path analysis. Results: Both interventions were acceptable and delivered with high fidelity. The team and MI programs increased fruit and vegetable consumption (P < 0.01 and 0.05, respectively) and general well-being (P < 0.01). Significantly less weight gain occurred in both (P < 0.05). A cross-sectional model was consistent with mediation differing between interventions. Conclusions: Both a team-centered and individual-oriented intervention promoted healthy behaviors. The scripted team curriculum is innovative, exportable, and may enlist influences not accessed with individual formats.


The consumption of electricity in residential buildings exceeds 20% in Qatar and can go up to 50% in other hot countries like Kuwait. The air-conditioning systems in hot countries like Qatar consumes around 60–80% of the total energy demand in buildings. This triggers researchers and industry experts in the built environment to explore new avenues towards reducing the cooling load on a building and study influential factors to enhance energy efficiency in buildings in such extreme climatic conditions. The carbon foot print of buildings can be reduced by reducing the cooling load through passive building design, using high efficiency equipment and incorporating renewable energy technologies such as solar systems, air source heat pumps, wind generators and ground source heat pumps are few to name that are widely used among many other available renewable technologies. The focus of this research work is on the Passivehouse building design incorporating solar hybrid Photovoltaic Thermal collectors (PV/T) as a source of renewable electricity and solar hot water for domestic use. Two different designs of a residential building for Modern Agro-Industrial Communities in Qatar were considered i.e. Pyramidal Shaped Building and Square Shaped Building. 3D energy models were created for both type of buildings using the IES software (Integrated Environmental Solutions) in virtual environment and thermal analysis was carried out. For the same building type, orientation and structure, two different criteria were applied to the model i.e. Passivehouse design vs. Conventional design. Pyramid shaped buildings are more stable but tend to cost more to construct when compared to traditional buildings. The sloping external walls tend to gain more solar energy and daylight through windows installed on the external walls. This provides an opportunity for solar panels installation on the external walls. The solar gain through external windows can be reduced to a minimum by effective solar shading and the daylight harvesting system can further reduce the artificial lighting gain inside the building. The results show that the passive house design of a building can save more than 70% of the cooling plant load, the as installed plant size and associated infrastructure. This will also considerably reduce the annual operational and maintenance cost of the building with just an extra 15% in construction cost. The cost analysis of passive house in comparison with a conventional house was carried out by QGBC (Qatar Green Building Council). In a nutshell this research work demonstrates how buildings' cooling load and carbon foot print can be reduced by effective solar shading, lower infiltration rates (air tight building design), highly insulated building fabric, natural ventilation, daylight harvesting system (that can help reduce artificial lighting gain inside the building) and heat recovery system.


Purpose: Ocular injuries in children are a major under-recognized cause of ocular morbidity and can be prevented by identifying the etiology and implementing measures to prevent these injuries. This study intends to assess the visual outcome and ocular survival in paediatric ocular trauma.
Design: A descriptive study set in a tertiary care teaching hospital in Southern India.
Methods: A total of 56 children less than 18 years of age with ocular trauma during the period August 2010 to August 2012were studied. Injuries were classified as per modified Ocular Trauma Classification System (OTCS). Final visual outcome was assessed at the end of 1, 3, & 6 months.
Results: Of the 56 children assessed 87.5% were that of boys. About 12% were under-fives and almost 66% were in the age range of 5-14 years.  And majority   (47.45 %) had sustained trauma in  the streets. Closed globe injury predominated (69.49%). At presentation, grade I  injury  noted  in 28 eyes (47.45%), grade II  in 1 (1.69%), grade III in 3 (5.08%) , grade IV in  8  (13.55%) , PL negative in 3 (5.08 %)  and un-cooperative in 16 cases  (27.11 %). At six months, good vision noted in 44 eyes (74.6%), moderate in 5 (8.47%), poor vision in 1 (1.69 %), PL negative in 4 (6.77%), un-cooperative 4 cases (6.77%). 4 eyes had phthisis (6.77%) and 1 eye (1.69%) was eviscerated.
Conclusions: Ocular trauma in childhood was more common in the male child, mostly due to road traffic accidents.  Ocular trauma being a significant cause of visual loss in childhood, awareness campaigns are necessary.


The T'ang (618-907) and Sung (960-1279) dynasties were times of great change in China. The economy flourished, the population doubled, printing led to a great increase in the availability of books, Buddhism became a fully sinicized religion penetrating deeply into ordinary life. This volume represents a collaborative effort of nine scholars of Chinese religion, history, and thought to begin addressing the question of how changes in the religions of the Chinese people were implicated in the momentous social and cultural changes of this period.


To clarify how the fire performance of ultra-low density fiberboard (ULDF) can be improved by complex fire-retardants, the limiting oxygen index (LOI) and microstructure of ULDFs with different additive amounts of complex fire-retardants was analyzed. The char yield, chemical bonding, and thermostability of ULDFs treated by different temperatures were also tested. Results showed that the LOI values and compactness of ULDFs were increased with increased amounts of fire-retardants. Three steps of char yield curves in control fiberboard (CF) and mixed fiberboard (MF) were apparent. The preliminary degradation in lignin and cellulose of CF occurred at 300 °C. The cellulose had completely decomposed at 400 °C, but in the case of MF, the lignin and cellulose were not completely decomposed at 400 °C. It was shown that there are different ways to improve the fire resistance of ULDF using boron, nitrogen-phosphorus, silica, and halogen-based fire-retardants. The fiberboard with silicium compounds had the lowest mass loss in three stages and total mass loss. Compared with CF, MF had a lower mass loss. Furthermore, the exothermic peak for MF at around 400.0 °C was decreased, indicating that the fire resistance of ULDF was improved by the complex fire-retardants.


At the 2000 Euralex conference we presented a paper on the development of a new learner's dictionary for Modern Standard Arabic, based on a corpus linguistic approach. In 2001 this dictionary was published in two volumes: a Dutch-Arabic volume and an Arabic-Dutch one. After the publication of the two dictionaries, we started new projects to work on both the existing corpus on which the dictionary was based (at that time 3,000,000 words) and the internal extension of the lexicographical database. We did not limit ourselves to additional lexical information and expressions, but included very detailed grammatical information. In recent years, the evolution of language technology has led to increased possibilities for lexicographical exploration of databases, especially in Arabic. In this paper we present the elements that we added to the contents of the lexicographical database: new words and expressions, 646 detailed POS tags, the technological changes it underwent (for example, the transformation from 4 th Dimension (4D) to Mysql). This resulted this year in the development of the first full online consultable Arabic-Dutch/Dutch-Arabic dictionary. This Arabic dictionary is the first of its kind, not limiting itself to mere lexical information, but allowing a much greater variety of searches for all kinds of grammatical information. In this paper we offer an overview of some of the possible searches. One of the next challenges is the production of an online dictionary with a clear layout in order not to be forced to skip much of its detail and accuracy.


The evolution of new combinations of bacterial properties contributes to biodiversity and the emergence of new diseases. We investigated the capacity for bacterial divergence with a chemostat culture of Escherichia coli. A clonal population radiated into more than five phenotypic clusters within 26 days, with multiple variations in global regulation, metabolic strategies, surface properties, and nutrient permeability pathways. Most isolates belonged to a single ecotype, and neither periodic selection events nor ecological competition for a single niche prevented an adaptive radiation with a single resource. The multidirectional exploration of fitness space is an underestimated ingredient to bacterial success even in unstructured environments.


The financial crisis of 2007-09 and its aftermath turned monetary economics and policymaking on its head and called into question many of the conventional views held before the crisis. One of the most popular and enduring views in all of monetary economics since the 1970s, and indeed since the 1940s, has been that a nominal interest rate peg is poor monetary policy and that attempts to pursue such a policy would lead to ruin. Yet, post-crisis U.S. monetary policy could be interpreted as exactly that—an interest rate peg—and an extreme one at that, since the policy rate has remained near zero for nearly seven years. The author summarizes some recent academic work on the idea of a stable interest rate peg and what its implications may be for current monetary policy choices. He argues that a stable interest rate peg is a realistic theoretical possibility; that it has some mild empirical support based on a cursory look at the data; and that, should we find ourselves in a persistent state of low nominal interest rates and low inflation, some of our fundamental assumptions about how U.S. monetary policy works may have to be altered.


A R Amorim

Correspondence to: Dr A R Amorim, Copenhagen University Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark; email@example.com

Are diet and/or exercise effective for weight reduction in postpartum women?

### Data sources:

Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group's Trial Register (including searches of Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Medline, 30 journals, and proceedings of major conferences) (September 2006), LILACS (2006), reference lists, and experts.

### Study selection and assessment:

randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-randomised trials that evaluated interventions involving diet (advice, counselling, or prescription of a calorie-restricted diet) and/or exercise (counselling or structured programmes) in postpartum women (⩽12 mo after birth of a healthy singleton term infant) ⩾18 years of age who were overweight, obese, or had gained excessive weight during pregnancy. Excluded were studies involving women who were underweight before pregnancy, exercise interventions for pelvic or back pain or urinary incontinence, or interventions combined with medication. 6 RCTs (n = 245) met the selection criteria; duration of the intervention ranged from 11 days to 11 …


Global Climate Change (GCC) is arguably one of the most significant challenges ever faced by humankind. The complex science of GCC leaves the general public and teachers at both secondary school and tertiary levels perplexed.. There is a profound need for high quality teaching materials addressing this challenging topic. In response to this need, The King's Centre or Visualization in Science (Edmonton, Canada) has developed a broad range of digital learning objects addressing many aspects of Global Climate Change. The DLOs range from simulations of the basic science behind greenhouse gas heating, the understanding of evidence for climate change and how it is produced to models of global CO2 concentration and climate change. We also present outcomes from a joint project with The International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry, The American Chemical Society, The Royal Society of Chemistry and UNESCO to weave these materials into teaching modules adaptable to many international curricula at different levels.


Stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) delivers large doses of radiation with great accuracy, but is known to have deleterious effects on the vascular compartment of irradiated tissues. Combining SBRT with targeted anti-angiogenesis agents, while able to increase therapeutic efficacy, may unexpectedly precipitate vascular-based toxicities. In this report, we describe a patient with colon cancer who developed transverse myelopathy from regorafenib 2 years after receiving SBRT for three metastatic liver lesions. Regorafenib (Stivarga), formerly BAY 73-4506, (Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, Montville, NJ) is a multiple receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor with anti-angiogenic effects used in metastatic colon cancer. Its most common side effects are fatigue, diarrhea and hypertension. However, severe neurologic toxicity has not been previously recognized. Here, we illustrate a case in which the patient developed hyperalgesia and radicular pain 2 weeks after starting regorafenib. Several studies report an increased neurological toxicity when angiogenesis inhibitors are given after radiation therapy, and we postulate that the angioinhibitory effects of regorafenib accelerated subclinical microvascular injury from SBRT. This unexpected toxicity may be clinically relevant when giving targeted angiogenesis inhibitors after SBRT.


Selection for malting quality traits is a major breeding objective for barley breeding programs. With molecular markers linked to loci affecting these traits, this selection can be undertaken at an earlier stage of the breeding program than is possible using conventional tests. Quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with malting quality traits were mapped in 2 populations derived from parents with elite malting quality. Progeny from an Arapiles/Franklin population grown in 4 environments and an Alexis/Sloop population grown in 5 environments were tested for grain protein percentage, α-amylase activity, diastatic power, hot water extract, wort viscosity, wort β-glucan, β-glucanase, and free α-amino acids. QTL analysis was performed using a one-stage approach, which allowed for modelling of spatial variation in the field, and in each phase of the malting quality analysis in the laboratory. QTLs for malting quality traits were detected on all chromosomes and for both populations. Few of these QTLs were significant in all of the environments, indicating that QTL × environment interactions were important. There were many coincident QTLs for traits that are expected to be related such as diastatic power and α-amylase activity, wort β-glucan and wort viscosity and for some traits that are not expected to be related such as hot water extract and malt viscosity.


Antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as capitalists have hindered research into the economic dimension of the Jewish past. The figure of the Jew as trader and financier dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the economy has been central to Jewish life and the Jewish image in the world; Jews not only made money but spent money. This book is the first to investigate the intersection between consumption, identity, and Jewish history in Europe. It aims to examine the role and place of consumption within Jewish society and the ways consumerism generated and reinforced Jewish notions of belonging from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the new millennium. It shows how the advances of modernization and secularization in the modern period increased the importance of consumption in Jewish life, making it a significant factor in the process of redefining Jewish identity.


The article aims at identifying the social structure and the inequality in monetary income of the population in Russia. identification of the social groups with different levels of material well-being in a society with a high inequality in the distribution of living standard is a relevant topic. The integration of normative and statistical methods allows to consider the limitations of the existing model of the distribution of cash income and adjust the boundaries of social groups with different levels of material well-being. At the same time, we stay within the criteria for the social standards of the differentiation of living standards. The authors have corrected the specific weight of the Russian social groups with different levels of material well-being. To define these social groups, we have applied the system of normative consumer budgets for different level of material well-being. This paper discovers the intervals for the levels of income and consumption, which are not in contradiction with the normative approach and existing conditions of the Russian economic development. These intervals are advisable for the identification of the social groups with different levels of life. The proposed tools allow to integrate the measurements into the international system and define the place of Russia in terms of economic inequalities among other countries. The authors have assessed the weights of the different social groups, their share in the total volume of monetary income and their polarization in terms of living standards. The main conclusions of the article can be used as a theoretical, methodological and practical basis for identifying social structures in terms of living standards, determining their numbers and economic inequality. The research results can be introduced into the statistical monitoring of the living standards of the population.


Paula Radcliffe has managed to be both very successful in her field and incredibly popular with the Great British Public. She was the underdog for so long -- narrowly missing out on medals in the 1999 World Championships and the 2000 Sydney Olympics -- that fans longed to see her win. Paula's rosy manner hides a tough resolve to succeed and in 2002 her luck began to turn. She won gold medals at both the Commonwealth and European championships and started to grab the headlines, bringing Britain's focus back to athletics. Paula's bravery is not limited to the track, however. She has become a passionate spokesperson against drug cheats and, inspired by her own battle with the condition, she is widely admired for her patronage of asthma charities. And even though Athens in 2004 proved to be more Greek tragedy than triumph, her popularity remains undimmed. Her remarkable life story of highs and lows is fully chronicled in this fascinating and inspiring autobiography.


This article describes two practices that can be considered signature pedagogies of doctoral education, one in neuroscience (the journal club) and one in English studies (the list). The practices are routinely found in these and neighboring disciplines but are not found in other fields. The journal club and the list share the goal of acquainting students with the literature of a field, but apart from that, they are very different. In addition to teaching students to work with the literature, they serve other pedagogical goals, including socializing students into disciplinary norms and identities. Thus they serve as windows into the underlying culture of their home disciplines. This article considers the value of adapting these practices into education doctoral programs and offers suggestions for how to modify the practices to suit education.


Recent research suggests that the college application process itself prevents access. This paper reports results from a large school-based experiment in which application assistance is incorporated into the high school curriculum for all graduating seniors at low-transition schools. Over three workshops, students were guided to pick programs of interest that they were eligible for, apply for real, and complete the financial aid application. The goal was to create a college option for exiting students to make the transition easier and more salient. On average, the program increased application rates from 64 to 78 per cent. College enrolment increased the following school year by 5.2 percentage points with virtually all of this increase in two-year community college programs. The greatest impact was for students who were not taking any university-track courses in high school: the application rate for these students increased by 24 percentage points with a nine per cent increase in two-year college enrolment. A second experiment was conducted two years later to explore several variations of the program. Offering personal assistance without waiving application fees had a negligible or even negative impact on applications and enrollment. Using laptops in homeroom classrooms instead of sending students to computer labs while combining the initial 2 workshops into one full-morning session increased application rates. However, subsequent enrollment effects were negligible. We provide some evidence consistent with the possibility that decreased guidance in choosing eligible programs was responsible for the second-experiment's decline in enrollment impacts.


This thesis provides a critical and practice based exploration of a recent 'theatrical turn' in the visual arts from the point of view of a theatre maker engaged in interdisciplinary practice, and asks what implications these developments may have for theatre making. As a context, I explore ideas of anti-theatricality which rely on a Platonic definition of truth that find expression within certain discourses and practices within the discipline of visual art. Through referencing the ancient Greek cultural practice of theoria that was appropriated by Plato, as well as Heidegger's alternative concept of truth as aletheia (unconcealment) and his theorising of the festival, I examine the possibility of a re-instigation of a theoric festive mode which reconnects the idea of theory to its practice based antecedents and acknowledges the potential of theatricality to stage an aletheic form of truth. My first piece of practice, the film The Making of Us, explores the use of framing and theatricality in an interdisciplinary artwork, drawing on Derrida's ideas of the parergon and Heidegger's concept of technology and Gestell (enframing), to propose an interdisciplinary practice that might 'rest on the frame' (Derrida, 1987). Finally, my play How To Act is an attempt to create a contemporary Greek tragedy in order to investigate the expression of aletheic truth within a 'mono-disciplinary' theatrical frame and provide a theoric return to my own practice as a theatre maker.


The intravehicular wireless sensor network (IVWSN) is a promising new research area that can provide part cost, assembly, maintenance savings, and fuel efficiency through the elimination of the wires and enables new sensor technologies to be integrated into vehicles, which would otherwise be impossible using wired means such as Intelligent Tire. The close interaction of communication with control systems, strict reliability, energy efficiency, and delay requirements in such a harsh environment that contains a large number of reflectors that operate at extreme temperatures are distinguishing properties of this network. In this paper, we investigate optimal power control, rate adaptation, and scheduling for an ultrawideband-based IVWSN for one-electronic-control-unit (ECU) and multiple-ECU cases. For the one-ECU case, we show that the optimal rate and power allocation is independent of the optimal scheduling algorithm. We prove the NP-hardness of the scheduling problem and formulate the optimal solution as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem. We then propose a 2-approximation algorithm, which is the smallest period into the shortest subframe first (SSF) algorithm. For the multiple-ECU case, where the concurrent transmission of links is possible, we formulate the optimal power control as a geometric-programming problem and optimal scheduling problem as an MILP problem where the number of variables is exponential in the number of links. We then propose a heuristic algorithm - the maximum-utility-based concurrency allowance algorithm - based on the idea of significantly improving the performance of the SSF algorithm in the existence of multiple ECUs by determining the sets of maximum utility.


This paper addresses a long-standing debate concerning the derivation of de se construals. One camp holds that there is a dedicated mechanism of 'de se binding', which results in a de se pronoun being interpreted as a variable ranging over the doxastic alternatives of the attitude holder (e.g. Chierchia 1990). Another treats de se as a special case of de re under the acquaintance relation of identity (e.g. Lewis 1979, Reinhart 1990). This debate is premised on the assumption that the two different routes to de se result in identical truth conditions. I argue that this assumption is incorrect for a class of cases that can be delineated in a principled fashion — counterfactual attitude reports involving counter-identity, such as Ivanka imagined that she was Melania and she was giving an interview . The argument builds on Ninan 2008, who noticed that de re construal works differently with counterfactual attitudes, and that this has consequences for de se interpretation in this type of sentence. I spell out these consequences more precisely, drawing on a novel, crosslinguistically robust generalization about unambiguously de se expressions such as PRO (the 'De Se Generalization'). I argue that a treatment of such expressions that appeals to de se-as-de re cannot account for the De Se Generalization in a principled way, and hence that a dedicated mechanism of de se binding must be included among the expressive resources of the grammar.

EARLY ACCESS


In this paper we propose a novel theoretical model for the dielectric response of variably saturated porous media. A model is constructed for fully saturated porous media as a combination of the well established Hashin and Shtrikman [1962] bounds and Archie's [1942] law, the latter usually adopted for electrical conductivity of multiphase porous media. One of the key advantages of the new constitutive model is that it explains both electrical conductivity and permittivity using the same parameterization, so that the measurements made on one such physical quantity can be used to predict the other. The model for partially saturated media is derived as an extension of the fully saturated model, where the permittivity of the pore space is in turn obtained as a combination of the permittivity of the aqueous and non aqueous phases. Both fully saturated and unsaturated models are successfully tested against both synthetic data from pore-scale digital modeling and laboratory data from the literature, proving effective for a wide range of different porous media. As opposite to most of existing constitutive laws for the water saturation – dielectric constant relationship, model parameters are related to the micro-geometrical and chemical-physical properties of the porous medium.


Much of the recent philosophical literature about distributive justice and equality in the domestic context has been dominated by a family of theories now often called 'luck egalitarianism', according to which it is unfair if some people are worse off than others through no choice or fault of their own. This principle has also found its way into the literature about global justice. This paper explores some difficulties that this principle faces: it is largely insensitive to the causes of global inequality, and it is so demanding that it can only give rise to weak moral claims. I go on to argue that a) understanding justice claims as merely weak claims rests on an implausible and impractical concept of justice, and b) using the global luck egalitarian argument in practical discourse is likely to lead to misunderstanding, and to be counterproductive if the aim is to tackle global inequality. While these considerations do not suffice to make a conclusive case against the luck egalitarian principle, they should be acknowledged by global luck egalitarians – as some similar problems have indeed been by domestic luck egalitarians – and need to be addressed.


Phenological observations were used in conjunction with destructive sampling and measurements of plant cover to determine the aboveground seasonal dynamics, annual aboveground net primary production (ANPP), and responses to fertilizer applications of the rhizomatous, perennial, understory species, saw palmetto (Serenoa repens (Bartr.) Small), in a north-central Florida pine ecosystem. Phenology was not significantly affected by the fertilization. Flowering, fruiting, frond initiation, and frond mortality were all highly seasonal, but while flowering was consistent, fruiting occurred in only one of the three seasons studied. Turnover rates of plant biomass averaged 22% per year over the 2 years and treatments, resulting in ANPP values of 11-37 g·m-2 per year, with higher values on fertilized plots, which amounted to 1-3% of overstory ANPP.


N-acetylcysteine (NAC) is the acetylated metabolite of cysteine and is approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating acetaminophen toxicity. By boosting glutathione, NAC acts as an antioxidant and through replenishing glutathione, it can also prevent paracetamol toxicity. From the other hand, NAC has mucolytic and antiinflammatory effects and also is a glutamate precursor and therefore can be used in a variety of diseases. Regarding the various pharmacological effects of NAC and its low rate of adverse events, NAC has attracted increasing interest for a range of indications during the recent years. Here, the possible applications of this drug in dermatology are reviewed.


Heme-regulated eIF2α kinase (HRI) controls protein synthesis by phosphorylating the α-subunit of eukaryotic translational initiation factor 2 (eIF2α). In heme deficiency, HRI is essential for translational regulation of α- and β-globins and for the survival of erythroid progenitors. HRI is also activated by a number of cytoplasmic stresses other than heme deficiency, including oxidative stress and heat shock. However, to date, HRI has not been implicated in the pathogenesis of any known human disease or mouse phenotype. Here we report the essential role of HRI in 2 mouse models of human rbc disorders, namely erythropoietic protoporphyria (EPP) and β-thalassemia. In both cases, lack of HRI adversely modifies the phenotype: HRI deficiency exacerbates EPP and renders β-thalassemia embryonically lethal. This study establishes the protective function of HRI in inherited rbc diseases in mice and suggests that HRI may be a significant modifier of many rbc disorders in humans. Our findings also demonstrate that translational regulation could play a critical role in the clinical manifestation of rbc diseases.


EDITORIAL COMMENT: In this paper the authors have made an important point. Counselling concerning simple treatment options should be the first step in the management of infertility as for most other medical problems. Conversely it could be said, as stated by an Anglican priest to the editor about 10 years ago, that counselling the infertile couple, who were candidates for only the most complicated regimens of reproductive technology, should include acceptance of their infertility. Many years ago the editor, when doing a locum, met a couple whose longstanding infertility was the result of misunderstanding of the physiology of conception, with avoidance of coitus at the fertile time of the cycle ‐ conception occurred 2 months after a simple explanation of the physiology of the menstrual cycle as advocated in this paper.


The synthetic versatility and the potential application of metalloporphyrins (MP) in different fields have aroused researchers' interest in studying these complexes, in an attempt to mimic biological systems such as cytochrome P-450. Over the last 40 years, synthetic MPs have been mainly used as catalysts for homogeneous or heterogeneous chemical reactions. To employ them in heterogeneous catalysis, chemists have prepared new MP-based solids by immobilizing MP onto rigid inorganic supports, a strategy that affords hybrid inorganic-organic materials. More recently, materials obtained by supramolecular assembly processes and containing MPs as building blocks have been applied in a variety of areas, like gas storage, photonic devices, separation, molecular sensing, magnets, and heterogeneous catalysis, among others. These coordination polymers, known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), contain organic ligands or complexes connected by metal ions or clusters, which give rise to a 1-, 2- or 3-D network. These kinds of materials presents large surface areas, Brønsted or redox sites, and high porosity, all of which are desirable features in catalysts with potential use in heterogeneous phases. Building MOFs based on MP is a good way to obtain solid catalysts that offer the advantages of bioinspired systems and zeolitic materials. In this mini review, we will adopt a historical approach to present the most relevant MP-based MOFs applicable to catalytic reactions such as oxidation, reduction, insertion of functional groups, and exchange of organic functions.


Cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels have potential market in North America for building mid-rise structures due to their good structural and seismic performance, lightweight, and prefabricated nature. However, to ensure long-term durability, the hygrothermal performance of CLT wall assemblies needs to be evaluated in terms of drying and wetting potential before their widespread adoption in North America. A test wall was constructed with initially wetted CLT panels, and monitored over a year. The drying behaviour of the panels was analysed, and results were compared to hygrothermal simulations. It was found from the field data that no tested wall assemblies in the given climate prevented the panels from drying in enough time to prevent decay initiation. The hygrothermal simulation program is capable of predicting general trends, and can predict if a wall be safe, but tends to be overly conservative. Further refinement of the model for wood is needed.


The use of electrical signals to restore the function of paralyzed muscles is called functional electrical stimulation (FES). FES is a promising method to restore mobility to individuals paralyzed due to spinal cord injury (SCI). This thesis is concerned with the development of an accurate paraplegic knee joint model and control of electrically stimulated muscle. The modelling of musculoskeletal of paraplegic�s lower limb is significantly challenging due to the complexity of the system. The first aim of this study is to develop a knee joint model capable of relating electrical parameters to dynamic joint torque as well as knee angle for FES application. The knee joint is divided into 3 parts; active muscle properties, passive knee joint properties and lower limb dynamics Hence the model structure comprising optimised equations of motion and fuzzy models to represent the passive viscoelasticity and active muscle properties is formulated. The model thus formulated is optimised using genetic optimization, and validated against experimental data. The results show that the model developed gives an accurate dynamic characterisation of the knee joint. The second aim of this study is to develop FES-induced swinging motion control. A crucial issue of FES is the control of motor function by artificial activation of paralyzed muscles. Major problems that limit the success of current FES control systems are nonlinearity of the musculoskeletal system and rapid change of muscle properties due to fatigue.�Fuzzy logic control (FLC) with its ability to handle a complex nonlinear system without mathematical model is used. Two FLC strategies; trajectory based control and cycle-to-cycle control are developed. In the trajectory based control, the controller with less energy consumption is developed to reduce muscle fatigue. The ability of this controller to minimize the fatigue is proved in the experimental work. The discrete-time cycle-to-cycle control strategy is developed without predefined trajectory. This strategy is applicable for controlling FES-induced movement with the ability to reach full knee extension angle and to maintain a steady swinging of the lower limb as desired in the presence of muscle fatigue and spasticity. The performances of the controllers are assessed through simulation study and validated through experimental work.


Coordinate-based meta-analysis can provide important insights into mind-brain relationships. A popular meta-analytic approach is activation likelihood estimation (ALE), which identifies brain regions consistently activated across a selected set of experiments, such as within a functional domain or mental disorder. ALE can also be utilized in meta-analytic co-activation modeling (MACM) to identify brain regions consistently co-activated with a seed region. Therefore ALE aims to find consensus across experiments, treating heterogeneity across experiments as noise. However, heterogeneity within an ALE analysis of a functional domain might indicate the presence of functional sub-domains. Similarly, heterogeneity within a MACM analysis might indicate the involvement of a seed region in multiple co-activation patterns that are dependent on task contexts. Here we demonstrate the use of the author-topic model to automatically determine if heterogeneities within ALE-type meta-analyses can be robustly explained by a small number of latent patterns. In the first application, the author-topic modeling of experiments involving self-generated thought (N = 179) revealed two cognitive components fractionating the default network. In the second application, the author-topic model revealed that the inferior frontal junction (IFJ) participated in three co-activation patterns (N = 323), which are differentially expressed depending on cognitive demands of different tasks. Overall the results suggest that the author-topic model is a flexible tool for exploring heterogeneity in ALE-type meta-analyses that might arise from functional subdomains, mental disorder subtypes or task-dependent co-activation patterns. Code and data for this study are publicly available at GITHUB_LINK_TO_BE_ADDED.


Field studies and laboratory experiments on noise-induced sleep disturbance show conflicting results and do not provide sufficient knowledge for valid exposure-effect relationships. It is also well known that habituation exists for awakenings whereas other effects such as heart rate reactions and minor EEG-reactions do not habituate. In this paper comparisons are made between findings from a series of laboratory and field studies on effects of road traffic noise on sleep performed by this athor. Possible reasons for the discrepancies found in various studies in laboratory and field are commented on and methods and research needs are discussed. Comparison of results obtained in research on perceived sleep quality parameters at this Department that used the same methods in laboratory and field studies showed fairly good agreement for difficulties in falling asleep and perceived sleep quality whereas awakening reactions were much less frequently reported in the field studies.


Whilst most teams understand that delivering value is the key goal of a project or business, many do not have structured ways to make explicit and measure aspects of value that go beyond functionality and cost. The aim of this paper is to present Value in Design (VALiD), a new approach to help project teams identify and maintain a value delivery culture. A value framework is outlined that could help stakeholders articulate, in a structured way, their values and judgements of value by consistently stimulating their discussions during project activities to express and agree stakeholder priorities and expectations. Ultimately it is hoped that project teams will critically appraise their own approaches to determine whether they are successfully integrating stakeholder values and value in their design delivery processes. VALiD (see www.valueindesign.com), has been developed by Loughborough University and adopted by Constructing Excellence in the UK as an approach to move away from a short term cost focus to a broader stakeholder view. It equips construction teams with a cultural toolkit, that can be customised and integrated with other methods that address more objective time, cost and quality criteria, to enable them to better understand stakeholders' value judgements as they are framed by values and beliefs.


Abstract Objectives: To assess whether the amount of fruits and vegetables consumed depends on the serving size or on how often fruits and vegetables are eaten. Design: Estimation of the weight of serving sizes and the number of fruits and vegetables eaten daily, using a validated food diary method. Setting: Free-living men and women participating in the Norfolk arm of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC). Subjects: Two hundred and sixty-nine men and women sampled from EPIC–Norfolk to participate in a study of simple methods of assessing fruit and vegetable intakes. Results: The average portion of all fruits and vegetables measured was 87 g, close to the standard portion size of 80 g used as the basis of '5-a-day' recommendations. There was a wide variation; the average portion size for baked beans was 147 g while for lettuce it was 26 g. The 20th and 80th percentiles also showed a large range, e.g. 39–72 g for carrots and 60–150 g for strawberries. Women ate more fruit than did men but fewer vegetables, so the total amount of fruit and vegetables eaten by men and women was the same. High consumers of fruits and vegetables (≥400 g day-1) ate them ~5 times a day whilst low consumers (<400 g day-1) ate them less often (~3 servings per day, P<0.01). Portion size differed little between high and low consumers. Conclusions: Frequency of intake is more important than portion size when distinguishing between high and low consumption of fruits and vegetables. Therefore, to increase intakes, low consumers should eat fruits and vegetables more often. This endorses the '5-a-day' healthy eating message.


Adequate planning of construction sites guarantees better efficiency, productivity, quality on the development of all work activities, optimization of the physical available space, workers' safety and motivation in performing their duties. The objective of this paper is to verify the influence of Lean Construction and LEED Certification on the quality of construction sites. The aspects analyzed were Temporary Facilities, Safety, Material Handling and Storage at construction sites by using a checklist developed by Saurin and Formoso (2006). Forty construction sites in the Metropolitan Region of Fortaleza (MRF), Brazil, were analyzed. The results pointed to a direct relationship between the implementation of Lean Construction and LEED Certification and the overall quality of work at construction sites. The concepts of Lean Construction are linked to a better quality of material handling and storage, temporary facilities and safety at construction sites. Also, the LEED Certification influences to a better quality of material handling and storage. Those two aspects combined make the construction site safer and more efficient, reduce material waste and cost, as well as increase the quality of the services executed.


The study was undertaken to evaluate the effects of fruit development and conditions on the quality and acceptability of fresh and vacuum-fried jackfruit pulp from EVIARC Sweet variety.
Four maturity periods, namely, 85, 88, 91 and 94 days after bagging of fruits were considered in the study. Effect of fruit location on tree and pulp location in fruit, as well as size and thickness of pulp were the conditions evaluated. Physicochemical properties like pH, TTA, TSS, thickness and pectin of fresh ripe pulp were evaluated while sensory attributes of vacuum-fried jackfruit pulp were determined. The attributes evaluated by semi-trained panelists were color, aroma, taste, texture, oiliness and general acceptability of vacuum-fried jackfruit pulp. Consumer acceptability was determined by subjecting the product to consumer evaluation employing students, faculty, staff, housewives and guests of the Visayas State University. It was found that fruit maturity significantly affected the quality of vacuum-fried jackfruit pulp. The ideal maturity of jackfruit for vacuum fried pulp production is 88 days after bagging. Fruit location on tree has significant influence on pH, TSS and TA while the pulp location in fruit has significant influence on pH, TSS and thickness. The pulp thickness did not influence the sensory acceptability ratings of all the sensory attributes. The pulp size only influenced the taste acceptability rating of the product. The taste attribute of vacuum-fried jackfruit pulp was significantly affected by the fruit location on tree, location of pulp in fruit, and pulp size. Worth noting is that mean acceptability rating still fell under the moderately acceptable level of the scale and the products were acceptable among consumers.


Marine ecosystems are under anthropogenic pressures degrading both biodiversity and functional diversity. Functional diversity studies identify species functions through trait analysis, and are a robust alternative to the classical taxonomic approach. Although trophic traits are considered predominantly when analyzing functional diversity on marine ecosystem studies, there are other functional traits related to the species functions in the ecosystem. To critically understand the use of existing functional diversity indexes, we analyze them and their trait selection processes. The functional diversity approach improves our understanding of ecosystems and can help us slow and reduce the global-scale biodiversity loss by developing effective frameworks for monitoring and protection. We present some study questions and suggestions about how research should be oriented through functional analysis.


Background. To assess the efficacy of midazolam and dexmedetomidine as induction agents and adjuncts to anaesthesia during OPCAB surgery.
 Patients and Methods. 107 patients scheduled for elective OPCAB surgery between 1st of January 2005 to 31 st of December 2007 were enrolled. Patients were randomly allocated into two groups Midazolam group (Group M, n=57) and Dexmedetomidine group (Group D, n=50). Patients in Group D (Dexmedetomidine group) received dexmedetomidine as initial i.v loading dose of 1 µg kg -1 over 1 minute (min) before induction of anaesthesia and 60 µg hr -1 continuous infusion thereafter until the end of surgery. Patients in group M (Midazolam group) received midazolam 0.1 mg kg -1 over 1 min before induction of anaesthesia and 2.5mg hr 1 continuous infusion thereafter until the end of surgery. Anaesthesia was maintained with continuous i.v infusion of sufentanil 0.2 µg kg -1 h -1 , study drug infusion at a rate of 10 ml h -1 , and rocuronium 0.5 mg kg-1 h -1 supplemented with sevoflurane as required. Induction doses as well as anaesthetic maintenance supplementation doses were guided by the BIS reading near 50. Data collection included haemodynamic parameters (HR, MAP, CI & SVR), BIS readings (T0-T7) and sevoflurane concentrations (T3-T7) were recorded at the following data points, T0= baseline pre-induction, T1= immediately post-induction T2= during laryngoscopy & intubation, T3= skin incision, T4= sternotomy, T5= during revascularization of the left anterior descending (LAD) artery, T6= during revascularization of the obtuse marginal (OM) artery, T7= with chest closure at conclusion of surgery.
 Results. 5 patients in Group M and 3 patients in group D were excluded due to diversion to on pump technique. All baseline parameters were comparable among both groups. In group M (52 patients) SVR and BP had significantly decreased following induction (T1) compared to baseline (T0, p<0.0001), while HR and CI had significantly increased during T1 compared to baseline (T0, p<0.0001). Also parameters recorded thereafter were comparable to baseline values. In Group D (47 patients) all parameters recorded were comparable to baseline values with exception of HR that decreased significantly from T1-T7 compared to T0. BIS values recorded were comparable among both groups, however sevoflurane concentrations was significantly higher in Group M compared to group D (P<0.0001). Conclusion. Midazolam can alter hemodynamic response following induction of anaesthesia; however such changes are reversible and returned to baseline. Dexmedetomidine is more haemodynamic stable and more potent anaesthetic adjuvant compared to midazolam in patients undergoing OPCAB surgery.


As personal data markets expand, regulation is an increasingly important issue for business, governments and consumers. Information privacy protection varies between different jurisdictions at all levels. As trade between jurisdictions increases, pressure to standardize regulation also increases. This trend is already apparent with the possibility of a de facto international standard. This paper looks at the future of information privacy protection and how a number of organizations are adapting to the new regulatory climate.


Since the first reports in the late 1970s on transition metal complexes containing pincer-type ligands - named after the particular coordination mode of these ligands - these systems have attracted increasing interest owing to the unusual properties of the metal centers imparted by the pincer ligand. Typically, such a ligand comprises an anionic aryl ring which is ortho,ortho-disubstituted with heteroatom substituents, for example, CH2NR2, CH2PR2 or CH2SR, which generally coordinate to the metal center, and therefore support the M-C bond. This commonly results in a terdentate and meridional coordination mode consisting of two metallacycles which share the M-C bond. Detailed studies of the formation and the properties of a large variety of pincers containing platinum group metal complexes have provided direct access to both a fundamental understanding of a variety of reactions in organometallic chemistry and to a range of new applications of these complexes. The discovery of alkane dehydrogenation catalysts, the mechanistic elucidation of fundamental transformations (for example, C-C bond activation), the construction of the first metallodendrimers for sustainable homogeneous catalysis, and the engineering of crystalline switches for materials processing represent only a few of the many highlights which have emanated from these numerous investigations. This review discusses the synthetic methodologies that are currently available for the preparation of platinum group metal complexes containing pincer ligands and especially emphasizes different applications that have been realized in materials science such as the development and engineering of sensors, switches, and catalysts.


Query processing over uncertain data has gained growing attention, because it is necessary to deal with uncertain data in many real-life applications. In this paper, we investigate skyline queries over uncertain data in distributed environments (DSUD query) whose research is only in an early stage. The state-of-the-art algorithm, called e-DSUD algorithm, is designed for processing this query. It has the desirable characteristics of progressiveness and minimum bandwidth consumption. However, it still needs to be perfected in three aspects. (1) Progressiveness. Each time it only returns one query result at most. (2) Efficiency. There are a significant amount of redundant I/O cost and numerous iterations which causes a long total query time. (3) Universality. It is restricted to the case where local skyline tuples are incomparability. To address these concerns, we first present a detailed analysis of the e-DSUD algorithm and then develop an improved framework for the DSUD query, namely IDSUD. Based on the new framework, we propose an adaptive algorithm, called ADSUD, for the DSUD query. In the algorithm, we redefine the approximate global skyline probability and choose local representative tuples due to minimum probabilistic bounding rectangle adaptively. Furthermore, we design a progressive pruning method and apply the reuse mechanism to improve its efficiency. The results of extensive experiments verify the better overall performance of our algorithm than the e-DSUD algorithm.


Ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is a promising cryptographic technique for fine-grained access control of outsourced data in the cloud. However, some drawbacks of key management hinder the popularity of its application. One drawback in urgent need of solution is the key escrow problem. We indicate that front-end devices of clients like smart phones generally have limited privacy protection, so if private keys are entirely held by them, clients risk key exposure that is hardly noticed but inherently existed in previous research. Furthermore, enormous client decryption overhead limits the practical use of ABE. In this paper, we propose a collaborative key management protocol in CP-ABE. Our construction realizes distributed generation, issue and storage of private keys without adding any extra infrastructure. A fine-grained and immediate attribute revocation is provided for key update. The proposed collaborative mechanism effectively solves not only key escrow problem but also key exposure. Meanwhile, it helps markedly reduce client decryption overhead. A comparison with other representative CP-ABE schemes demonstrates that our scheme has somewhat better performance in terms of cloud-based outsourced data sharing on mobile devices. Finally, we provide proof of security for the proposed protocol.


If every doctor is a teacher, then every doctor should be an examiner too. Assessment has a huge impact on learning; more so than most realise. Whilst there have been seemingly endless changes to current assessment strategies, there are some fundamental tenets to fair assessment that have changed little in recent decades. Similarly, whilst the hurdles to good quality assessment seem innumerable, there are lessons to be learnt from the literature that can lessen the impact of assessment on busy doctors.


A mb(Lg) 4.6 mainshock on January 16, 1994, in the Cacoosing valley, 10 km west of Reading, southeastern Pennsylvania caused modified Mercalli VI-VII intensities and the highest earthquake damage (∼$2 million) in the eastern United States since 1944. Aftershock hypocenters from a temporary local seismic network are confined to the upper 2.5 km of the crust. They are clustered around the periphery of a tabular 3 × 3 km zone that is interpreted to outline the mainshock rupture. This zone matches the nodal plane with reverse and left-lateral slip (strike 135°, dip 54° southwest, and rake 55°) of a focal mechanism obtained from aftershock first motions and from mainshock waveforms. This rupture does not correlate with any of the faults mapped in the epicentral area, but it is parallel to the most prominent fracture set, including joints and small faults. Maximum possible strike-slip accumulated on the causative fault is no more than several tenths of meters. A large carbonate rock quarry is centered above the rupture. We calculate a small, but significant (0.13 MPa) Coulomb stress increase caused by the quarry on the shallow portion of the rupture. Most of this increase was caused by pore pressure rise after the quarry was abandoned in December 1992 and flooded. Seismicity started may 1993. We conclude that the 1993–1997 Cacoosing Valley sequence is probably triggered by the quarry. About 200 km northeast of Cacoosing, another quarry in early Paleozoic carbonate rocks triggered the 1974 mb(Lg) 3.0 Wappingers Falls earthquake.


Introduction Tehran is the capital city of IR Iran with about 12 000 000 inhabitants. Consisting of 22 districts. Injuries happen with different rate and type in different zones. Methods 10% of population of Tehran considered for the households survey based on Urban HEART (urban Health Equity Assessment and Response Tool) interviewer were trained uniformly. The result will be used as a baseline for the future assessment. Results Females are mostly involved in fall, burn and poisoning while men are mostly involved in traffic accidents, interpersonal violence and electric shocks. Most accidents were among families with 3–5 members. Aged 15–40 years old from the low income groups were affected more. In traffic accident the young males are the most affected victims more are living in districts 14, 15, 18, 9, 19 & 4 respectively. In district 11, 12, 14 most of the victims were motorcyclists. In districts 2, 3 & 5 victims were pedestrians predominantly. Children and old ages are the victims of Fall, there is no gender differences in most of the districts area except in district 19 where males are falling twice than females and in districts 1, 2, 3 & 12 this ratio is vice versa (p≤0.05). Burns were more recorded in districts 13, 16, 17, 12 respectively and the least from districts 3, 2, & 5. At the level of p≤0.05 with 95% CI differences between districts were significant. Conclusion Tehran is mega city. By knowing the districts characteristics and sex and age differences, the urban managements will be improved through better policy making.


The risk of premature and progressive occlusive vascular disease is high in chronic uremic patients, and it accounts for more than 40% of the mortality in dialysis patients. End stage renal failure (ESRF) patients exhibit elevated plasma homocystein levels, about four fold as much as those in the controls, and it is now considered as a causative factor for increased risk of cardiovascular death among these patients. The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship of total plasma homocysteine level and echocardiographic abnormalities as a surrogate of cardiac disease outcome in hemodialysis patients. 123 adult patients on maintenance hemodialysis and having echocardiography done during January till November 2006 were enrolled in this cross-sectional study. Plasma homocysteine level was directly related to the presence of aortic regurgitation r= 0.27 P= 0.009. There were negative correlations between ejection fraction (EF), left ventricular systolic dimension (LV.S) (r= - 0.71, P= 0.0001), left ventricular diastolic dimension (LV.D) (r= -0.23 p= 0.01) and age (r= - 0.021 P= 0.02). In conclusion we did not find the paradoxical reverse epidemiology in our patients and plasma total homocysteine level was in direct correlation with cardiac risk factors such as left ventricular mass index and aortic regurgitation.


Abstract This work is a theoretical proposal to apply the strongest points from the Montessori methodology to improve information literacy through lifelong learning. Since lifelong learning includes cognition and skills, information literacy permits the solving of problems as well as effectively communicating and interacting with the environment. This means having abilities and skills that through adequate training permit the acquisition of new knowledge or improving knowledge on any topic, within a formal or informal environment. It also could permit seeking, managing, and comparing information. However, there are some questions that arise with older individuals. Since lifelong learning usually takes place in informal environments, getting resources to learn may be a difficult task. Learning difficulties also involve information abstraction, text comprehension, and technological barriers. Consequently, lifelong learning and information literacy are likely to be affected. The question comes up as to which pedagogical methodology may fit better for lifelong learning and the acquisition of better information literacy skills. Task breakdown, guided repetition, and ordering activities from simple to complex are essential keys in the Montessori methodology, which help not only older people but also children to enhance information literacy as well as assist with lifelong learning.


Climate- and management-induced changes in tree species distributions are raising questions regarding tree species-specific effects on soil organic carbon (SOC) storage and stability. Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) is the most widespread tree species in North America, but fire exclusion often promotes the succession to conifer dominated forests. Aspen in the Western US have been found to store more SOC in the mineral soil than nearby conifers, but we do not yet fully understand the source of this differential SOC accumulation. We measured total SOC storage (0–50 cm), characterized stable and labile SOC pools, and quantified above- and belowground litter inputs and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) fluxes during snowmelt in plots located in N and S Utah, to elucidate the role of foliage vs. root detritus in SOC storage and stabilization in both ecosystems. While leaf litterfall was twice as high under aspen as under conifers, input of litter-derived DOC with snowmelt water was consistently higher under conifers. Fine root (<2 mm) biomass, estimated root detritus input, and root-derived DOC fluxes were also higher under conifers. A strong positive relationship between root and light fraction C content suggests that root detritus mostly fueled the labile fraction of SOC. Overall, neither differences in above- and belowground detritus C inputs nor in detritus-derived DOC fluxes could explain the higher and more stable SOC pools under aspen. We hypothesize that root–microbe–soil interactions in the rhizosphere are more likely to drive these SOC pool differences.


This work considers a portfolio of units for electrical power production and the problem of utilizing it to maintain power balance in the electrical grid. We treat the portfolio as a graph in which the nodes are distributed generators and the links are communication paths. We present a distributed optimization scheme for power balancing, where communication is allowed only between units that are linked in the graph. We include consumers with controllable consumption as an active part of the portfolio. We show that a suboptimal, but arbitrarily good power balancing, can be obtained in an uncoordinated, distributed optimization framework, and we argue that the scheme will work even if the computation time is limited. We further show that our approach can tolerate changes in the portfolio, in the sense that increasing or reducing the number of units in the portfolio requires only local updates. This ensures that units experiencing faults or need for maintenance can be removed from the graph without affecting the overall performance or convergence of the optimization. The results are illustrated by numerical case studies. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Rising temperatures, melting ice, swollen seas, and increasingly erratic climatic events will cause water and food shortages that will not only bring a global health catastrophe but "trigger conflict within and between countries," leading scientific, medical, and military experts warned at a conference in London on 17 October.

"Climate change poses an immediate, growing, and grave threat to the health and security of people in both developed and developing countries around the globe," says a statement signed at the meeting by, among others, Michael Jay (chairman of the medical aid charity Merlin), Ian Gilmore (former president of the Royal College of Physicians), Anthony Costello (director of the Institute for Global Health at University College London), Fiona Godlee (editor in chief of the BMJ ), Richard Horton (editor in chief of the Lancet ), and Hege Gjessing (president of the Norwegian Medical Association).

It adds, "Mass migration will also increase, triggered by both environmental stress and conflict, thus leading to serious further security issues."

The …


In this paper we present a large-scale visual object detection and tracking benchmark, named VisDrone2018, aiming at advancing visual understanding tasks on the drone platform. The images and video sequences in the benchmark were captured over various urban/suburban areas of 14 different cities across China from north to south. Specifically, VisDrone2018 consists of 263 video clips and 10,209 images (no overlap with video clips) with rich annotations, including object bounding boxes, object categories, occlusion, truncation ratios, etc. With intensive amount of effort, our benchmark has more than 2.5 million annotated instances in 179,264 images/video frames. Being the largest such dataset ever published, the benchmark enables extensive evaluation and investigation of visual analysis algorithms on the drone platform. In particular, we design four popular tasks with the benchmark, including object detection in images, object detection in videos, single object tracking, and multi-object tracking. All these tasks are extremely challenging in the proposed dataset due to factors such as occlusion, large scale and pose variation, and fast motion. We hope the benchmark largely boost the research and development in visual analysis on drone platforms.


The temporal evolution of the sawtooth crash in ASDEX Upgrade Ohmic and ECRH heated discharges is analysed using a heuristic reconnection model to simulate measured ECE signals. The method turns out to be well suited to detect islands of width above 0.1-0.2 times the mixing radius; for smaller island widths, we cannot distinguish between the resistive and the ideal mode. Thus, the nature of the precursor oscillation cannot be fully resolved. In contrast, we find that during the crash phase, reconnection is incomplete and a large island persists that fully reconnects on a slower time-scale after the crash. The observations are consistent with a recent sawtooth model.


Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide is a compact and straightforward guide to the skills needed to study philosophy, aimed at anyone coming to the subject for the first time or just looking to improve their performance. Nigel Warburton clarifies what is expected of students and offers strategies and guidance to help them make effective use of their study time and improve their marks. The four main skills covered by the book are: * reading philosophy - both skimming and in-depth analysis of historical and contemporary work, understanding the examples and terminology used * listening to philosophy - formal lectures and informal classroom teaching, preparation, picking up on arguments used, note taking * discussing philosophy - arguing and exploring, asking questions, communicating in concise and understandable ways * writing philosophy - planning and researching essays and other written tasks, thinking up original examples, avoiding plagiarism.


Weight tying is now a common setting in many language generation tasks such as language modeling and machine translation. However, a recent study reveals that there is a potential flaw in weight tying. They find that the learned word embeddings are likely to degenerate and lie in a narrow cone when training a language model. They call it the representation degeneration problem and propose a cosine regularization to solve it. Nevertheless, we prove that the cosine regularization is insufficient to solve the problem, as the degeneration is still likely to happen under certain conditions. In this paper, we revisit the representation degeneration problem and theoretically analyze the limitations of the previously proposed solution. Afterward, we propose an alternative regularization method called Laplacian regularization to tackle the problem. Experiments on language modeling demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Laplacian regularization.


The economic recession, the environmental impact as well as the continuous fossil fuel consumption encourage actions that focus on saving energy. In the vessels sector, one of the main objectives has always been to reach a hydro-dynamically optimum hull which gave the desired speed with minimum power. Hydrodynamic drag is basically divided into two parts: a) the friction between the water and the hull, and b) the wave generation due to the free-surface air-water. Presented in this paper, is the research which evaluates the possibility of friction-drag reduction by means of the coat of special paints on the hull. The study has been applied to a fishing cooperation vessel on which hydrodynamic aspects had already been analyzed by the ETSI Navales Model Basin. Two plates with different paints have been tested with a wet surface equivalent to the model used in the previous hydrodynamic test. Numerical simulations with a viscous code, which includes a roughness module, have also been carried out. The complete three dimensional system, including the free surface effect, has been considered. With these simulations it is expected to validate the roughness module of the commercial code.


The study was executed at Kalurghat industrial area to determine the efficiency of effluent treatment plants by testing different physicochemical parameters. Results revealed that only 3 out of 9 industries treated their effluents efficiently and discharged following the standards of Department of Environment. The remaining industries viz. Alfa Textile treated their effluent but the values of pH (10.2), dissolve oxygen (DO) (3.6 mg/L), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) (89 mg/L), chemical oxygen demand (COD) (282 mg/L), total suspended solid (TSS) (221 mg/L), and electric conductivity (EC) (4,003 μS/cm) exceeded the standards, and released untreated effluents directly into the environment. Smart Jeans didn9t maintain the standard of EC (1,927 μS/cm), DO (3.2 mg/L), BOD (96 mg/L) and COD (216 mg/L). Asian Apparels EC (1,973 μS/cm), DO (4 mg/L), BOD (79 mg/L), and COD (221 mg/L) weren9t up to the standards. Similarly, Mans Fashion EC (1,243 μS/cm), DO (3.7 mg/L), TSS (180 mg/L), BOD (78 mg/L), and COD (255 mg/L) also exceeded the standards. In addition, Well Group TSS (160 mg/L), EC (3,201 μS/cm), DO (4.2 mg/L), and COD (235 mg/L) while Golden Height only EC (1,762 μS/cm) crossed the prescribed limits. Inversely, all the sampled industries volleyed effluents containing metals within the standards level except Alfa Textile (Cu, Zn, & Cr), Well Group (Cr) and Asian Apparels (Ni).