The interest in the biological effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and static magnetic fields (SMFs) on the whole organism, as well on cellular systems, has noticeably increased in recent years in consideration of their increased production (from the generation and transmission of electricity, to domestic appliances and industrial equipment, to telecommunications and broadcasting) and the possible health risk for humans. About one century ago, associated with the wide use of electricity, artificial electric and magnetic fields became a part of our living environment. The use of technology in communication, entertainment, industry and science enhanced our quality of life. On the other hand, the biological effects of the electric and magnetic fields associated with this technology are not well understood. In the work published on page 1432 of this issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, Dini and co-workers have incorporated nanotechnology, material science and the clinical imaging modality MRI, to create a nano-sized probe capable of non-invasively visualizing and quantifying the blood vessel growth in tumors in a preclinical model. The work was carried out by Elisa Panzarini, as part of his postdoctoral research, working together with Luciana Dini and other colleagues, at the University of Salento, Department of Biological and Environmental Science and Technology, Lecce, Italy. Dr Dini stated 'Taking into account that innate immunity is based on macrophage phagocytosis of non-self microrganisms and particles, the exposure to SMF could interfere with a correct immune response. Indeed, phagocytosis of apoptotic cells represents the endpoint of apoptosis, allowing the fast removal of dead cells by neighbours and macrophages. For phagocytosis of apoptotic cells to proceed correctly requires the action of a number of genes greater than those involved in the induction of the apoptosis itself. Impaired phagocytosis of apoptotic cells is the cause of several diseases.' The research team studied the effects of 6 mT SMF on the phagocytosis process of differentiating macrophages by using human Kupffer cells, Raw 264.7 macrophages and 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate [TPA]-differentiated THP-1 monocytes and U937 promonocytes. Indeed, macrophage phagocytosis is the basis of innate immunity and the exposure to SMFs could interfere with a correct immunoresponse. In particular, with this study, the researchers aimed to verify the effect of 6 mT SMF on the phagocytosis mechanism and to compare these effects with those on other internalization processes, like endocytosis. For many years, this research team has focused its interest on the study of the biological effects of SMFs, in particular, moderate intensity (ranging from 1 mT to 1 T) SMF that represents the lowest intensity able to interfere with the apoptotic process in relation to apoptotic cell death. Results obtained indicating that (1) SMF significantly influences the phagocytosis of apoptotic cells and latex beads, and to a lesser extent, fluid phase endocytosis and that (2) the effect of SMF is dependent on the degree of macrophage differentiation, validate that the primary site of action of SMF is at the plasma membrane. Indeed, the plasma membrane has a pivotal role in the recognition of apoptotic cells and for their engulfment through connection with the cytoskeleton. A 6 mT SMF is able to modify cell surface morphology, distribution of plasma membrane proteins, receptors and sugar residues and disarrange the cytoskeleton. Dr Dini said 'On the basis of the results obtained in this study in human primary macrophages, even if it is not yet possible to foresee application in medicine, it follows that it is better to avoid exposure of patients bearing a wound, inflammatory foci or abnormal production of apoptotic cells to machinery (including medical equipment) producing moderate intensity SMF. The reason being that recruitment of monocytes from the blood could be delayed and thus the rescue of the tissue from inflammation postponed, or a chronic condition could be favored.' Several studies have suggested a potential cause–effect relationship between removal of dead cells and the onset of human pathologies. Indeed, diseases such as lupus erythematosus, cystic fibrosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, atherosclerosis, encephalomyelitis autoimmune and multiple sclerosis are correlated to the delayed or inefficient removal of apoptotic cells, which can cause persistency of inflammation and tissue damage leading to the onset of immune response. The results obtained in the current study suggest that the exposure to 6 mT SMF affects fluid-phase endocytosis and phagocytosis in monocyte/macrophages in a differentiation degree-dependent manner. Thus, even if the underlying biological mechanisms are still for the most part unclear, this work could help to explain the effects of exposure in support of a possible causal relationship between SMF and differentiation degree. Steven R Goodman, Editor-in-Chief of Experimental Biology and Medicine, said 'This interesting study by Dini and colleagues suggests the need of thoughtful consideration of the level of SMF exposure that is appropriate for patients bearing a wound and resulting inflammation.'


Book groups are an increasingly popular way for people outside university walls to engage in literary reading. Recordings and observations of these groups can offer us access to naturally-occurring reading 'on the hoof', and the analysis of talk produced in groups' meetings is emerging as an area of study in its own right. In this chapter, book group discourse is analysed, with the view of considering how literary interpretation happens across short extracts of talk. The book group is seen as a learning environment, a community of practice in which the 'private' readings that readers bring to meetings can be transformed through discussing the text with others. The specific readings articulated within the group are analysed in terms of Allan Bell's interpretative arc, as this model provides a way of seeing the incremental nature of literary interpretation; in other words, the way that readings are constructed across time. Extracts from one particular reading group meeting are considered and the transcript data is approached in a qualitative, sociolinguistic fashion. On a micro-level, a discourse analysis is applied to the talk while on a macro-level the reading groups are considered as communities of practice. The analysis focuses on specific acts of learning that occur in the discussions: occasions when groups collaboratively piece together textual interpretation where there is individual difficulty, and other times when readers attempt to understand or account for a fictional character's actions. Analysis of extracts shows that participation in the group changes the interpretations that readers bring to the meetings. The co-reading considered in this chapter demonstrates that interpretation in this context is more than the sum of its parts, so that what is produced in the talk is group reading rather than isolated, individual action.


Renal dysfunction has become a validated prognostic factor indicating increased morbidity and mortality in different cardiovascular diseases, such as acute coronary syndrome1 or chronic heart failure.2 Impaired kidney function may not only reflect chronic renal disease but also deterioration secondary to haemodynamic disturbances, as decreased cardiac output and elevated central venous pressure may contribute to renal insufficiency.3 Kidney dysfunction has previously been observed in patients with acute pulmonary embolism (APE) and was found to be associated with worse short-term outcomes.4 ,5 However, those studies were not able to distinguish between acute kidney injury due to haemodynamic compromise cause by APE or chronic pre-existing renal insufficiency.

Kostrubiec and co-workers6 investigated markers of acute kidney injury such as cystatin C and serum neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (N-GAL) and their association with left and right heart function, disease severity, and prognosis in patients with APE. Cystatin C is a 13 kDa endogenous cysteine proteinase inhibitor and is produced by nucleated cells at a constant rate. It is freely filtered by the glomerulus, reabsorbed and catabolised, but it is not secreted by the tubules. Earlier studies demonstrated the superiority of serum cystatin C compared with creatinine, especially to detect minor changes in glomerular filtration rate …


Short-distance airborne infections are often thought to occur by large droplets or direct contact. Recent studies have investigated the phenomenon of short-range airborne infection. In this study, the effect of relative humidity and short-distance exposure to cough droplet nuclei were evaluated. The evaluation model for infection risk was designed based on experimental data and previous studies and included sampling efficiency and virus survival rate. As observed in the comparison between short-range exposure and long-range exposure, the short-range exposure to the droplet nuclei by one cough was equivalent to a long-range exposure of several seconds to, depending on the number of ventilations, even for a momentary high-concentration exposure. This suggests the possibility of an infection risk corresponding to the receiving condition. Since short-range exposure and long-range exposure have different factors affecting the risk of infection, it is suggested that effective infection control should be selected for each condition. The risk of infection due to long-range exposure is considered to be sufficiently reduced to that of a single cough if the building meets the necessary number of ventilations. It was suggested that the influence of relative humidity on infection risks is smaller than other factors such as ventilation.


Biomass fuels are being increasingly used for domestic heating and power generation to cut down the net CO2 emission to the atmosphere. In most cases, those fuels are thermally-thick under packed-bed combustion conditions. In this paper, a double-mesh numerical scheme is proposed and implemented to simulate the detailed combustion processes for a biomass fuel with sizes ranging from 5 mm to 50 mm. Bench-top experiments were also carried out to validate the theoretical simulation. Under the specific conditions of investigation, it is found that a bed packed with particles over 35 mm can develop a temperature gradient over 400°C inside the particles at the flame front, and significant overlapping of moisture evaporation, devolatilization and char burn-out is observed in the bed-height direction; CH4 emission over the bed top is more focused on the central part of the combustion period for larger particles; CO level in the flue gases increases with decreasing particle sizes and the opposite is true for H2 emission. The overall air to fuel stoichiometric ratio for the whole combustion period increases significantly with increasing particle sizes, from 0.57 (fuel-rich) at 5 mm to 1.2 (fuel-lean) at 35 mm, but for the constant stage during combustion, the range of ratio narrows to 0.32–0.35.


The concept of cooperation where two or more parties work together to pursue a common goal, is applicable in almost every aspect of today's life. For instance, in the upcoming car-to-car communications, the vehicles exchange information regarding their current status and potential threats on the road in order to avoid accidents. With the evolution of the wireless communication systems and the advent of new services and devices with more capabilities, the demand for higher data rates is ever increasing.

In cellular networks, the achievable data rates of the users are limited by the inter-cell interference, which is caused by the simultaneous utilization of the time/frequency resources. Especially, the data rates of the users located at the vicinity of neighboring base stations is affected by the inter-cell interference. Hence, in this dissertation, cooperation in cellular communication downlink networks is investigated, where the base stations coordinate their operation in order to mitigate the impact of co-channel inter-cell interference. Thus, the constantly increasing user demand can be satisfied. Cooperative resource allocation schemes are derived, where practical conditions and side constraints regarding the available channel state information at the base stations are taken into account.

Cooperation in the form of power control and joint time/frequency scheduling is mainly studied. In the former type of cooperation, the base stations dynamically adjust their own transmit powers to cause less inter-cell interference to the users connected to neighboring base stations. In the case of cooperative scheduling, the available time/frequency resources are jointly allocated by the base stations in order to trade off user throughput and inter-cell interference. The cooperative scheduling schemes apply two special cases of the power control approach, where the base stations either serve their connected users with maximum transmit power, or abstain from transmitting data, i.e., muting, in order to reduce the interference caused to users served by neighboring base stations. One major contribution of this work is the formulation of the cooperative resource allocation problems by considering the availability of channel state information at the transmitter in form of data rate measurement reports, which follows standard compliant procedures of current mobile networks such as LTE and LTE-Advanced.

From a system perspective, two parameters are considered throughout this dissertation in order to derive the proposed cooperative schemes. These parameters are the cooperation architecture and the traffic model characterizing the demand of the connected users. In the case of the cooperation architecture, centralized and decentralized schemes are studied. In the former, a central controller performs the cooperative schemes based on global knowledge of the channel state information, and in the latter, the cooperative decisions are carried out independently per base station based on local information exchanged with adjacent base stations. It is expected that the centralized architecture provides the best performance, however, the gap with respect to the decentralized approaches reduces significantly under practical network assumptions, as demonstrated in this work based on numerical simulations. With respect to the traffic model, the user demand is characterized by full-buffer and non-full-buffer models. The first model is applied in order to assess the performance of the proposed cooperative schemes from a capacity enhancement perspective, where all users constantly demand as much data as possible. On the other hand, the non-full-buffer model represents a more practical network scenario with a dynamic utilization of the network resources. In the non-full-buffer model case, the proposed schemes are derived in order to improve the link adaptation procedures at the base stations serving users with bursty traffic. These link adaptation procedures, establish the transmission parameters used per serving link, e.g., the transmit power, the modulation and the coding schemes.

Specifically, a cooperative power control scheme with closed-form solution is derived, where base stations dynamically control their own transmit powers to satisfy the data rate requirements of the users connected to neighboring base stations. Moreover, centralized and decentralized coordinated scheduling with muting is studied to improve the user throughput. For the centralized case, an integer linear problem formulation is proposed which is solved optimally by using commercial solvers. The optimal solution is used as a benchmark to evaluate heuristic algorithms. In the case of decentralized coordinated scheduling with muting, a heuristic approach is derived which requires a low number of messages exchanged between the base stations in order to coordinate the cooperation. Finally, an integer linear problem is formulated to improve the link adaptation procedures of networks with user demand characterized by bursty traffic. This improvement results in a reduction of the transmission error rates and an increase of the experienced data rates. With respect to non-cooperative approaches and state-of-the-art solutions, significant performance improvement of the achievable user throughput is obtained as the result of applying the proposed cooperative schemes, especially for the users experiencing severe inter-cell interference.


Video recorded at the workshop on The Future of Pastoralism in Africa: International Conference to Debate Research Findings and Policy Options, Addis Ababa, 21-23 March 2011.


In order to develop and implement the laws piloting for an aircraft, flights validation will be necessary. This could in fact be done, in a first step, by using flight simulators. In this work, we choose the predator virtual model flying in Microsoft flight simulator (MSFS) and we propose the procedure of controlling its attitude. We send the adaptive integral high-order sliding mode (AIHOSM) inputs piloting control. This work is a realtime virtual simulation. For the AIHOSM controller, we propose the gain adaptation for reduction of chattering phenomena and possibility to control the aircraft presented by the uncertain nonlinear systems in which the uncertainties have unknown bounds. This technique is more robust and simpler to implement than the quaternion one and only needs the information about the sliding mode surface.


The hydrostatic primitive equations of motion which have been used in large-scale weather prediction and climate modelling over the last few decades are analysed with variational methods in an isentropic Eulerian framework. The use of material isentropic coordinates for the Eulerian hydrostatic equations is known to have distinct conceptual advantages since fluid motion is, under inviscid and statically stable circumstances, confined to take place on quasi-horizontal isentropic surfaces. First, an Eulerian isentropic Hamilton's principle, expressed in terms of fluid parcel variables, is therefore derived by transformation of a Lagrangian Hamilton's principle to an Eulerian one. This Eulerian principle explicitly describes the boundary dynamics of the time-dependent domain in terms of advection of boundary isentropes sB; these are the values the isentropes have at their intersection with the (lower) boundary. A partial Legendre transform for only the interior variables yields an Eulerian 'action' principle. Secondly, Noether's theorem is used to derive energy and potential vorticity conservation from the Eulerian Hamilton's principle. Thirdly, these conservation laws are used to derive a wave-activity invariant which is second-order in terms of small-amplitude disturbances relative to a resting or moving basic state. Linear stability criteria are derived but only for resting basic states. In mid-latitudes a time- scale separation between gravity and vortical modes occurs. Finally, this time-scale separation suggests that conservative geostrophic and ageostrophic approximations can be made to the Eulerian action principle for hydrostatic flows. Approximations to Eulerian variational principles may be more advantageous than approximations to Lagrangian ones because non-dimensionalization and scaling tend to be based on Eulerian estimates of the characteristic scales involved. These approximations to the stratified hydrostatic formulation extend previous approximations to the shallow- water equations. An explicit variational derivation is given of an isentropic version of Hoskins & Bretherton's model for atmospheric fronts.


ABSTRACT This study was designed to investigate the background, psychological characteristics and motivations of independent actors who carried out attacks in Israel. It also examined the antecedent factors that influenced their decision to carry out an attack, and their retrospective attitudes to the act. Forty-five Palestinians who had carried out attacks against Israeli targets on their own initiative were interviewed in prison about their background, motivations, circumstances and process of the attack. Thirty-nine of them were also interviewed by a clinical psychologist and took a battery of psychological tests. Twenty-six of these were diagnosed as suffering from one or more of the following: psychotic background, severe personality disorder, and suicidality. A considerable number of the participants described personal, family or social problems that influenced their decision to carry out the attack. Three dominant motives for carrying out an attack were identified: suicidality, a psychotic state, and an ideological national-religious motivation. The characteristics of the attack were influenced by the dominant type of motivation. The discussion compares the findings of this study with those of a study on suicide bombers and with studies on behavioral characteristics of independent actors in other countries.


Reductions in peri-implant bone height have been acknowledged as a normal consequence of implant therapy. Various restorative factors contribute to this phenomenon. One is repeated abutment retightening, which causes a mechanical disruption at the implant-abutment interface, leading to soft tissue recession. Several investigators proposed placement of the definitive abutment after implant placement as a solution to the problem. The definitive use of an intermediate abutment after implant placement seems to positively affect the soft tissue response. This article aims to present a prosthetic sequence for achieving peri-implant tissue stability in the esthetic zone.


Presented here are the results of performance tests made with a single-cylinder, four stroke cycle, compression-ignition engine. These tests were made on a precombustion chamber type of cylinder head designed to have air velocity and tangential air flow in both the chamber and cylinder. The performance was investigated for variable load and engine speed, type of fuel spray, valve opening pressure, injection period and, for the spherical chamber, position of the injection spray relative to the air flow. The pressure variations between the pear-shaped precombustion chamber and the cylinder for motoring and full load conditions were determined with a Farnboro electric indicator. The combustion chamber designs tested gave good mixing of a single compact fuel spray with the air, but did not control the ensuing combustion sufficiently. Relative to each other, the velocity of air flow was too high, the spray dispersion by injection too great, and the metering effect of the cylinder head passage insufficient. The correct relation of these factors is of the utmost importance for engine performance.


Abstract. The meso-scale chemistry-transport model CHIMERE is used to assess our understanding of major sources and formation processes leading to a fairly large amount of organic aerosols – OA, including primary OA (POA) and secondary OA (SOA) – observed in Mexico City during the MILAGRO field project (March 2006). Chemical analyses of submicron aerosols from aerosol mass spectrometers (AMS) indicate that organic particles found in the Mexico City basin contain a large fraction of oxygenated organic species (OOA) which have strong correspondence with SOA, and that their production actively continues downwind of the city. The SOA formation is modeled here by the one-step oxidation of anthropogenic (i.e. aromatics, alkanes), biogenic (i.e. monoterpenes and isoprene), and biomass-burning SOA precursors and their partitioning into both organic and aqueous phases. Conservative assumptions are made for uncertain parameters to maximize the amount of SOA produced by the model. The near-surface model evaluation shows that predicted OA correlates reasonably well with measurements during the campaign, however it remains a factor of 2 lower than the measured total OA. Fairly good agreement is found between predicted and observed POA within the city suggesting that anthropogenic and biomass burning emissions are reasonably captured. Consistent with previous studies in Mexico City, large discrepancies are encountered for SOA, with a factor of 2–10 model underestimate. When only anthropogenic SOA precursors were considered, the model was able to reproduce within a factor of two the sharp increase in OOA concentrations during the late morning at both urban and near-urban locations but the discrepancy increases rapidly later in the day, consistent with previous results, and is especially obvious when the column-integrated SOA mass is considered instead of the surface concentration. The increase in the missing SOA mass in the afternoon coincides with the sharp drop in POA suggesting a tendency of the model to excessively evaporate the freshly formed SOA. Predicted SOA concentrations in our base case were extremely low when photochemistry was not active, especially overnight, as the SOA formed in the previous day was mostly quickly advected away from the basin. These nighttime discrepancies were not significantly reduced when greatly enhanced partitioning to the aerosol phase was assumed. Model sensitivity results suggest that observed nighttime OOA concentrations are strongly influenced by a regional background SOA (~1.5 μg/m3) of biogenic origin which is transported from the coastal mountain ranges into the Mexico City basin. The presence of biogenic SOA in Mexico City was confirmed by SOA tracer-derived estimates that have reported 1.14 (±0.22) μg/m3 of biogenic SOA at T0, and 1.35 (±0.24) μg/m3 at T1, which are of the same order as the model. Consistent with other recent studies, we find that biogenic SOA does not appear to be underestimated significantly by traditional models, in strong contrast to what is observed for anthropogenic pollution. The relative contribution of biogenic SOA to predicted monthly mean SOA levels (traditional approach) is estimated to be more than 30% within the city and up to 65% at the regional scale which may help explain the significant amount of modern carbon in the aerosols inside the city during low biomass burning periods. The anthropogenic emissions of isoprene and its nighttime oxidation by NO3 were also found to enhance the SOA mean concentrations within the city by an additional 15%. Our results confirm the large underestimation of the SOA production by traditional models in polluted regions (estimated as 10–20 tons within the Mexico City metropolitan area during the daily peak), and emphasize for the first time the role of biogenic precursors in this region, indicating that they cannot be neglected in urban modeling studies.


This review focuses on recent progress in understanding morphogenetic findings on the neogenesis of islet beta cells following Pancreatic Duct Ligation (PDL) in animal models. These results may give hope for modifications in the treatment of diabetes in general and transplantation in particular. On the basis of this review, translational studies should be developed to allow information on beta-cell neogenesis to be integrated into a potential therapy for Diabetes Mellitus (DM) in humans. Further studies on the development of animal models that will produce PDL islets for transplantation are urgently needed (Adv Clin Exp Med 2011, 20, 1, 5–14).


Crystallographic preferred orientations (CPOs) are widely used to infer deformation conditions in the ductile crust and mantle. However, the effects of secondary phases on CPO evolution are not fully understood, despite the compositional diversity of Earth's lithosphere. Here we examine the role of plagioclase on the evolution of quartz CPOs through general shear experiments at 900 °C and 1.1 GPa. Pistons featuring an "asperity" on the shear plane were used, providing a novel way of visualizing CPO evolution under increasing shear strains and with material flow path variations. With the addition of albite, grain boundary pinning inhibits a transition from basal to prism slip, which is observed in single-phase quartz aggregates deformed under the same conditions. Simultaneously, crystallographic axes are modified by rotations around the kinematic vorticity axis, resulting in pronounced weakening of [c]-axis CPOs in the two-phase experiments, where quartz [c]-axes are oriented perpendicular to the vorticity axis. After only modest amounts of deformation (shear strain, γ < 5), CPOs in the single-and two-phase materials become markedly different. These findings highlight complications in using CPOs to infer deformation conditions in well-mixed polymineralic mylonites typical of most lithospheric shear zones.


This thesis examines what it means to be a "Soviet Korean" in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. The majority of Koreans in Alma-Ata are the historical result of two displacements, having first migrated to Russia since the nineteenth century and then being deported to Kazakhstan in 1937 by Stalin. The repression was followed by decades of confinement in collective farms. The unlikely Korean presence in Central Asia was to be unveiled to the outside world after glasnost, and a change in the international political climate around the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games resulted in unprecedented encounters between the Soviet Korean diaspora community and other Korean visitors. My fieldwork began shortly afterwards, capturing the historical moment of this hitherto unknown section of the Korean diaspora. Reflecting the minority's history of persecution and isolation, it is not surprising to find high levels of linguistic and cultural "Russification". However, the Soviet Koreans constantly compare themselves with "others" and keep a distinct boundary. Following Bloch (1998), I argue for the importance of exploring socio-cultural reproduction in implicit domains. Thus sharing and transmitting cultural identity and memory is not so dependent on languages, narratives and formal education alone. Rather, aspects of "being Korean" are constantly found and reinforced within the community in aspects such as management of resources, articulation of cultural symbols, ways of communication, and sensorial preferences. I concentrate on their history, community dynamics, parent and child relationship, dietary practice, way of communicating and implicit and emotional aspects of "being Korean". I elucidate both the experiences and representations of the diaspora covering from pre-migration days in Korea to the present in the new state of Kazakhstan. Korean agricultural and Confucian root is favourably contrasted to the nomadic Kazakh traditions, yet it also bears the stigma of marginality in a Soviet context. Thus "Soviet Koreanness" reflects the traditions of the early migrants which are open to constant repositioning through dialogue with other Korean influences and ethnic groups. Food and culinary practice in its production and consumption is one of such areas where categories of ethnicity and gender get expressed and boundaries are maintained. Strong emotional responses are noted as they are triggered by sensory experiences and associations. In the section on family I single out the significance of parent-child relationships and associated ideology and emotions. Parental sacrifice, filial piety and guilt are specific parts of "being" a Korean. Education as ethnic identifier, and symbolic component for Korean personhood is examined in an intergenerational context. Finally, I explore Korean emphasis on non-verbal and implicit ways of communication and examine their relationship with notions of personhood, morality and ethnic identity.


Today, outsourcing query processing tasks to remote cloud servers becomes a viable option; such outsourcing calls for encrypting data stored at the server so as to render it secure against eavesdropping adversaries and/or an honest-but-curious server itself. At the same time, to be efficiently managed, outsourced data should be indexed, and even adaptively so, as a side-effect of query processing. Computationally heavy encryption schemes render such outsourcing unattractive; an alternative, Order-Preserving Encryption Scheme (OPES), intentionally preserves and reveals the order in the data, hence is unattractive from the security viewpoint. In this paper, we propose and analyze a scheme for lightweight and indexable encryption, based on linear-algebra operations. Our scheme provides higher security than OPES and allows for range and point queries to be efficiently evaluated over encrypted numeric data, with decryption performed at the client side. We implement a prototype that performs incremental, query-triggered adaptive indexing over encrypted numeric data based on this scheme, without leaking order information in advance, and without prohibitive overhead, as our extensive experimental study demonstrates.


Variance in fitness is well known to influence the outcome of evolution but is rarely considered in the theory of marine reproductive strategies. In coastal environments, turbulent mesoscale eddies can collect larvae into packets, resulting in collective dispersal. Larvae in packets return to the coast or are lost offshore in groups, producing variance in fitness. Using a Markov process to calculate fixation probabilities for competing phenotypes, we examine the evolution of offspring size and spawning duration in species with benthic adults and pelagic offspring. The offspring size that provides mothers with the highest mean fitness also generates the greatest variance in fitness, but pairwise invasion plots show that bet-hedging strategies are not evolutionarily stable; maximizing expected fitness correctly predicts the unique evolutionarily stable strategy. Nonetheless, fixation can take a long time. We find that selection to increase spawning duration as a risk avoidance strategy to reduce the negative impacts of stochastic recruitment success can allow multiple offspring sizes to coexist in a population for extended periods. This has two important consequences for offspring size: (1) coexistence occurs over a broader range of sizes and is longer when spawning duration is longer because longer spawning durations reduce variation in fitness and increase the time to fixation, and (2) longer spawning durations can compensate for having a nonoptimal size and even allow less optimal sizes to reach fixation. Collective dispersal and longer spawning durations could effectively maintain offspring size variation even in the absence of good and bad years or locations. Empirical comparisons of offspring size would therefore not always reflect environment-specific differences in the optimal size.


The degree to which a partial evaluator can specialize a source program depends on how accurately the partial evaluator can represent and maintain information about runtime values. Partial evaluators always lose some accuracy due to their use of finite type systems; however, existing partial evaluation techniques lose information about runtime values even when their type systems are capable of representing such information. This paper describes two sources of such loss in existing specializers, solutions for both cases, and the implementation of these solutions in our partial evaluation system, FUSE.


The analysis of high resolution measurement data, from Munich, showed significant and repeated irradiation peaks. For irradiation enhancements (IE), the observed irradiation is above the theoretically-calculated global irradiation of a clear sky day (i.e. for the given time with a clear sky and atmosphere). The increased irradiation power is mainly caused by reflections of cumulus clouds. Along with the elevated global irradiation, low ambient and module temperatures were observed, due to cloud coverage between irradiance enhancements peaks. This analysis investigates the essential meteorological observation from these data records. It also depicts the technological effects on the PV-system. To illustrate this, the irradiation peaks are classified by their specific characteristics such as magnitude, period, distribution or slope. Therefore data sets from several Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) sites, representing various climatic zones are examined to evaluate the magnitude of this effect across Europe and its dependence on general meteorological conditions. It is key to understand the PVsystem's response to the monitored IE-effects. The employment of the simulation environment INSEL (for various PV-cell types and panels) enables simulations of incorporate high resolution measurement data and (commercially available) PV-module simulation data. The output power of the modules investigated could be up to 30 % higher than under STC conditions. The system response was also explored by using a solar generator simulator and by evaluating operating data sets of MW PV-plants.


The dynamics of a single‐species aerosol composed of droplets in air is described in terms of nucleation, evaporation, condensation, and coagulation processes. We present a comprehensive overview of the Euler–Euler formulation, which gives rise to a model in which fast nucleation that initiates aerosol droplets co‐exists with comparably slow condensation. The latter process is responsible for the subsequent growth of the droplets. To accurately represent the dynamical consequences of the fast nucleation process, while retaining numerical efficiency, a new second‐order time‐integration method for the nucleation, evaporation, and condensation processes is proposed and analyzed. The new time‐integration method takes the form of a 'corrected Euler forward' method. It includes rapid nucleation bursts and their possible cessation within a time step Δt. If the current nucleation burst persists for longer than the next time step, it is included fully, whereas cessation of the nucleation burst within the next Δt implies corrections to the effective rates in the algorithm. The identification of these two situations corresponds to the physical mechanism by which nucleation of a supersaturated vapor is halted because of the progressing condensation onto the already formed droplets. The resulting time‐integration method is shown to be second‐order accurate in time, whereas the computational costs per time step were found to be increased by less than 25% compared with the Euler forward method. The new method is also applied in combination with advective transport of the aerosol forming vapor to investigate a front of rapid nucleation. Adopting robust first‐order upwinding for the spatial discretization, we arrive at a flexible method that shows an overall first‐order convergence in Δt. For the full, spatially dependent system motivated by an aerosol of water droplets in air, the computational benefits of the new time‐integration method over the Euler forward scheme, are a factor of about 10 improvements in accuracy at a given Δt and a similar factor in computing time when keeping the same level of accuracy. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Pay-Per-Click (PPC) e-marketing has recently attracted growing attention. It is particularly critical for the success of Small and Medium size Enterprises (SME) because they usually do not have extensive national, regional or global marketing networks. Given the cost, however, the question is: how advertisers are rewarded for paid online advertising and to what extent. In this paper we presents an empirical study aiming to evaluate whether or not active participation in PPC advertising programs would improve the indexing and ranking of a website in the organic search results of the major search engines. In order to do this we propose a systematic methodology for experiment design, data collection and performance analysis. We build comparable benchmarking websites and submit them to different search engines using both paid and unpaid methods. We monitor and collect the crawling activity of the search engine robots and the ranking placement of each of the sites in the search results of the respective search engines. The captured data are then compared and analysed from which findings are drawn and discussed. Finally we outline conclusions and point out future work.


The anaphylatoxin C5a constitutes a powerful fragment generated by complement system activation. Interestingly, this complement active fragment is also an important mediator of tissue regeneration. Recent findings suggest that C5a could be an initial signal orchestrating pulp nerve sprouting beneath carious injury, a critical step in dentin-pulp regeneration. Indeed, the expression and activation of the C5a active receptor (C5aR/CD88) by injured pulp fibroblasts controls the direction of neurite outgrowth toward carious injuries by modulating the secretion of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) by pulp fibroblasts. A second C5a receptor, C5L2, has also been cloned but has received much less attention because its interaction with the ligand induces no signaling. This work aims to investigate the role of C5L2 in pulp nerve regeneration in the secretion of BDNF by pulp fibroblasts under sites of carious injury. Using fluorescence immunostaining on human tooth sections in vivo and on primary human pulp fibroblasts in vitro, the authors reveal that C5L2 and C5aR are co-expressed by pulp fibroblasts under lipoteichoic acid (LTA) stimulation. Moreover, silencing C5L2 significantly increases BDNF secretion by LTA-stimulated pulp fibroblasts. Finally, an analysis of the subcellular distribution of C5aR and C5L2 indicates that the negative regulation of BDNF secretion by C5L2 correlates with C5aR activation and its subsequent intracellular co-localization with C5L2. Overall, the current study sheds light on the mechanism of pulp nerve regeneration by identifying C5L2 as a negative regulator of BDNF secretion by pulp fibroblasts under carious teeth. This knowledge significantly increases the understanding of the functional mechanism linking C5aR and C5L2 in pulp nerve regeneration, which may be useful in future dentin-pulp engineering strategies that target fibroblast C5L2 to induce pulp innervation.


The concept of co-occupations or collectives occupations is gaining global recognition in occupational science and occupational therapy. However, little is known about the interpretation and understanding of this concept by occupational therapists in South Africa. The study aimed to explore community based occupational therapist's understanding of the concept of collective participation in occupations. Purposive sampling was used to select participants. Data, gathered through semi-structured interviews, were analysed thematically. The study yielded two themes namely; 'The whole is more than the sum of the parts' and 'I joined because of me, I stayed because of them'. Theme 1, describes the nature of the concept of collective participation while theme 2 describes the reasons for people to engage in collective participation. All participants agreed that collective participation is an everyday occurrence within South Africa. The study found that mutuality and connectedness is needed for effective co-creating, which in turn is essential for collective participation in occupations. It is through this connectedness that a collective becomes more than the sum of the parts. The study also found innate needs for human beings to 'belong' and to 'survive' and an enabling and supportive environment are motivators for people to participate collectively in occupations. Keywords : co-occupation, collective occupation, collective participation, collective.


Purpose To analyze the baseline clinical factors and medication treatment strategy used in cases with medication treatment failure of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). Methods From January 2006 to December 2009, 677 BPH patients with at least 3 months of treatment with medication were enrolled. We analyzed clinical factors by medication failure (n=161) versus maintenance (n=516), by prostate size (less than 30 g, n=231; 30 to 50 g, n=244; greater than 50 g, n=202), and by prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels (less than 1.4 ng/mL, n=324; more than 1.4 ng/mL, n=353). Results Age, combination medication rate, PSA, and prostate volume were statistically different between the medication treatment failure and maintenance groups. By prostate size, the PSA and medication failure rates were relatively higher and the medication period was shorter in patients with a prostate size of more than 30 g. The combination medication rate was higher in patients with a prostate size of more than 50 g. The medication failure rate and prostate volume were higher in patients with a PSA level of more than 1.4 ng/mL. However, the combination treatment rate was not significantly different in patients with a PSA level lower than 1.4 ng/mL. Suggestive cutoffs for combination medication are a prostate volume of 34 g and PSA level of 1.9 ng/mL. Conclusions The clinical factors associated with medication failure were age, treatment type, and prostate volume. Combination therapy should be considered more in Korea in patients with a PSA level higher than 1.4 ng/mL and a prostate volume of between 30 and 50 g to prevent medication failure.


In an effort to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries around the globe adopted social distancing measures. Previous studies have relied on the geographical and temporal variation in the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to show that early adoption of NPIs is correlated to lower infection and mortality rates. However, due to the non-random adoption of NPIs, the findings may not be interpreted as causal. We address this limitation using a different source of identification –namely, the regional variation in the placement on the pandemic curve at the time of a nationwide lockdown. Our results reveal how, relative to regions for which the lockdown arrived 10+ days after the pandemic's outbreak, regions where the outbreak had just started were able to lower their daily fatality rate by 2.5 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. We also provide suggestive evidence of contagion deceleration as the main mechanism behind the effectiveness of the early adoption of NPIs in lowering the death rate, rather than increased healthcare capacity.


A persistent and sizeable literature argues that the reported job dissatisfaction of union members is spurious. It reflects either the sorting of workers across union status or the sorting of union recognition across jobs. We cast doubt on this argument presenting the first estimates that use panel data to hold constant both worker and job match fixed effects. The estimates demonstrate that covered union members report greater dissatisfaction even when accounting for sorting in both dimensions. Moreover, covered union members are less likely to quit holding job satisfaction constant and their quit behaviour is far less responsive to job satisfaction. The paradox of the discontented union member remains intact.


Background & Objectives: A large portion of medical wastes is dangerous, which is hazardous to the health of human beings, animals, plants, and environment. Considering the importance of this issue, this study aimed to evaluate the collection and disposal of medical waste in teaching hospitals of Sari, Mazandaran, Iran. Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional, descriptive study, a questionnaire including 122 items was distributed in four teaching hospitals during June-July 2013. The validity of this questionnaire was confirmed by faculty members, and its reliability was calculated to be 0.795. The results were analyzed using SPSS version 17 and Microsoft Excel. Results: The rate of medical waste generation in these hospitals was estimated at 2.19 kg/bed, 57%, 36%, and 3.6% of which were domestic wastes, infectious wastes, and sharp objects, respectively. Since medical waste is disposed out of the cities, municipality was responsible for transportation and disposal of waste out of the hospitals, except for one. Only Zare Hospital had incinerator, and BuAli and Imam Khomeini Hospials used Hydroclave (waste disposal device) and autoclave for disinfecting the infectious waste. Conclusion: The execution of the decree of Ministery of Health in relation to medical waste management is done monthly, and on the whole, proper equipments and facilities were used for waste collection.


We construct a financial literacy index as well as a financial confidence index in order to evaluate the effect of confidence on financial literacy, and more specifically, on the gender gap in financial literacy. Results confirm the existence of a gender gap in financial literacy in Canada, and show that having a higher confidence in one's financial skills and knowledge is indeed a factor that increases one's financial literacy. Financial confidence is found not to track actual financial skills very closely across different ages, especially for women, and at older ages. We also find evidence that financial literacy and decision making are related to the relative education level of spouses. Using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, confidence is also found to explain 14.15% of the gender gap in financial literacy, while being self-employed explains 19% of the gap, and taking part in the financial planning accounts for 16.76% of the gender gap difference. We find that most of the gap remains unexplained by differences in coefficients of men and women.


PURPOSE
To the best of our knowledge no data has been published on the use cones at 10×FFF and very little for 6×FFF. We report our experience commissioning and validating beam models for 4, 6, 7.5, 10, 12.5, and 15 mm cones on a Varian TrueBeam STx (Varian Medical Systems, Palo Alto, CA)).

METHODS
Scatter factors, radial profiles, and percent depth dose curves were measured per Brainlab protocol using a Sun Nuclear Edge Detector diode (Sun Nuclear Corp., Melboune, FL). The resulting Brainlab iPlan (Brainlab AG, Germany) beam models were validated with measurements of absolute dose and profiles at depths of 5, 10, and 15 cm in a polystyrene phantom using EBT3 radiochromic film (Ashland Inc., Covington, KY). Absolute doses were evaluated by comparing the average of pixels in the planned dose that had values > 80% of the maximum dose to the average of the corresponding pixels in the film.

RESULTS
The 6×FFF commissioning data was reviewed by Brainlab and found to be in good agreement with other user submitted data. Brainlab did not have a 10×FFF reference set at this time. The measured absolute dose agreed with planned dose to within 4.7% for all 6×FFF measurements (average difference of 2.1%) and within 4.9% for all 10×FFF measurements (average difference of 3.6%). Vertical and horizontal profiles through film planes gave full-width-at-half-maximum values that agreed with planned values to 0.4 mm for 6×FFF and to 0.2 mm for 10×FFF.

CONCLUSION
The calculated dose distributions showed acceptable geometric agreement with measured values. The measured absolute dose for both energies was consistently lower than planned dose, with the difference more noticeable for the 10×FFF energy. This effect may be explained by reported over responses of diodes at small fields and under responses of EBT film at small fields.


In the following work we investigate the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates(BECs) under the influence of time-dependent potentials. The response of such a sensitive system to external perturbations is a matter of increasing interest. This is because of the enormous growth in understanding the physics and emerging applications of BECs in many areas of physics such as sensing, microscopy and quantum information.


Introduction
This study investigates the experiences of individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) as they experienced transition into employment in the UK. The high prevalence of ASC has led to increased social and economic pressures (Gerhardt & Lainer, 2010), with the estimated yearly cost to the UK for each individual at £90,000 (Knapp, Romeo & Beecham, 2007). Employment may help to reduce economic pressures, benefit individuals and society (Howlin, Alcock & Burkin, 2005). Individual gains in cognitive functioning (Garcia-Villamisar & Hughes, 2007), quality of life and self-esteem (Eggleton et al., 1999) may be experienced. However, individuals with ASC tend to find transitioning to employment difficult, due to implicit characteristics associated with the condition (Berney, 2004). Transitions represent challenges to individuals' social identity and self-concept, require behaviour change and may contribute to distress (Liddle, Carlson & McKenna, 2004). These factors may be exacerbated in individuals with ASC due to their difficulties with social and behaviour change processes (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2010).
Transition and employment support strategies have been shown to facilitate successful employment for individuals with ASC (Howlin et al., 2005). The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence ([NICE], 2012) propose how best to support people with ASC, based on the synthesis of available evidence. However, the evidence lacks in consideration of individuals' experiences and psychological theories of support and transition. Considering these perspectives may facilitate service users to influence effective service provision, through disseminating their views and experiences of transition to work by means of a rigorous qualitative study.
Method
This study investigates the experiences of 10 participants with ASC during their transition to employment settings in the UK and aims to provide them with a platform to express their experiences and views of this process. An inductive thematic analysis methodology (Braun & Clarke, 2006) is used to explore semantic information obtained from retrospective interviews relating to the experiences of transition to work and identify frequent and salient themes within the data (Buetow, 2010).
Results
Analysis identified three main themes that were particularly salient and frequent for the interviewed participants:
Diagnosis; comprised of subthemes 'Access to support', 'Identifying with ASC', 'Other-understanding' and 'Delay in diagnosis'.
Barriers to transition; comprised of 'Socio-economics', 'Physical accessibility' and 'ASC characteristics'.
Transition support; comprised of 'Emotional needs', 'Clear guidance and honest feedback', 'Practical support' and 'Social integration'.
Discussion
Thematic analysis facilitated investigation into the experiences of 10 participants with ASC as they transitioned to work. Participants' difficulties and needs were reflected in the existing evidence base and aims of current legislation and guidance, but short-comings in the delivery of these were also highlighted. In addition, a unique insight into both the positive and negative emotional impact of transition to work for individuals with ASC was obtained. Psychological models of support and transition are considered in relation to the experiences of transition and associated challenges to self-concept. Potential support measures for more effective and less distressing transition to work are discussed.


Lymphangioma of the esophagus is a benign vascular tumor that rarely occurs in the upper gastrointestinal tract. We report a rare case of lymphangioma of the esophagus and our experience with endoscopic resection of this lesion. Lymphangiomas are benign lesions that arise from the cystic dilatation of hamartomas in deep lymphatic tissue and are rarely found in the GI tract (1%). The esophagus is the most unusual location for this lesion. The diagnosis of lymphagioma is usually made on histopathology. The masses are composed of
enlarged channels lined by lymphatic endothelial cells surrounded by a loose myxoid stroma. Standard biopsies are often normal as the lesions are submucosal. The treatment of esophageal lymphangioma is conservative in
asymptomatic patients. For symptomatic pateints, response to surgical or endoscopic removal of these tumors is excellent. However, a large tumor with symptoms or a lesion suspicious for malignancy requires surgical
resection. Conclusion: Lymphangioma of the esophagus is a rare submucosal tumor, generally small and benign in nature. Endoscopic ultrasound is an excellent tool for diagnosis of these lesions. Our experience reaffirms that
endoscopic excision of such lesions is safe and appears to be without major complications.


GaN HEMTs are being touted as the next generation microwave power transistor. Many research groups have reported outstanding DC and RF results on small periphery devices. However, the data on larger devices is somewhat limited. This paper will present results on large periphery devices (18 mm total gate width). Results from DC, RF and Linearity measurements will be presented. In addition a detailed thermal analysis based on simulation and measurement will be discussed. To our knowledge this is the first time the thermal characteristics of large periphery GaN -on-Si devices has been presented. Finally, the thermal model is used to study the thermal performance of these devices on different substrates. The results illustrate that GaN-on-Si is a viable approach for handling the large thermal dissipation requirements of microwave power transistors.


We discuss a tax-transfer scheme that aims at addressing the under-provision problem associated with the private supply of international public goods and at bringing about Pareto optimal allocations internationally. In particular, we consider the example of the global public good 'climate stabilisation', both in an analytical and a numerical simulation model. The proposed scheme levies Pigouvian taxes globally, while international sidepayments are employed in order to provide incentives to individual countries for not taking a free-ride from the international Pigouvian tax scheme. The side-payments, in turn, are financed via the environmental taxes. As a distinctive feature we take into account ancillary benefits that may be associated with local public characteristics of climate policy. We determine the positive impact that ancillary effects may exert on the scope for financing side-payments via environmental taxation. A particular attractive feature of ancillary benefits is that they arise shortly after the implementation of climate policies and therefore yield an almost immediate payback of investments in abatement efforts. Especially in times of high public debt levels, long periods of amortisation would tend to reduce political support for investments in climate policy.


This work-in-progress paper describes attempted improvements on Pachet's Description-Based Design (DBD), a system that uses machine learning to generate melodies. We discuss in depth both Description-Based Design and our extensions to Pachet's original approach. We also present a user study in which users had some success in transforming melodies and describe the implications of these results for future work.


The measurement of organically bound tritium in environmental samples is essential for assessing the impact of tritium releases in terms of doses to the general public and a growing number of laboratories are now required to make them. Interlaboratory comparisons provide one way for laboratories to practice and check their analytical methods and procedures. At AECL's Chalk River Laboratories, two organic matrices with tritium concentrations less than 1.5 kBq/g were developed and distributed to seven laboratories in Canada, Europe and Russia for measurement. Some participants experienced difficulties in analysing the samples, especially with the lower concentrations, where results varied by more than an order of magnitude. Laboratories incorporating procedures such as rinsing to remove tritium from exchangeable sites, using standardized combustion methods and purifying the combustion water obtained more reliable, consistent results. The preparation of the standard reference material must be carefully executed in order to produce a homogeneous sample of uniform size. The tritium measurement community would benefit if standard reference materials in the environmental concentration range were available.


Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) automates numerous manual tasks, from attendance to testing, evaluations to scheduling. Virtually all OMR readers ship with software that takes the information culled using the scanner and saves it into the universal ASCII file format. In this raw form, data can be imported into an unlimited number of applications and subsequently manipulated. Standard database or spreadsheet programs help organize data. Statistical programs help researchers dissect and analyze data to a much greater extent. And administrational packages accept ASCII data to compute grades, take attendance and organize class schedules. We will focus on grading and scoring software here, one genre that works well with OMR data. * On the Hardware Side Two companies have new developments in their OMR hardware lines. Scantron Corp.'s latest addition to their 8000 family of OMR scanners, the Model 8600, accepts standard or custom-designed forms; a built-in Forms Translator converts scanned data into ASCII text records. Features include the ability to specify which output hoppers processed forms are sent to and an LED display. The machine can calculate and print either a score or message on a form based on information read from it. Also just in, Scanning Systems' (formerly HEI) newly enhanced SR-360X and SR-380X models include a second communications port, have an optional ink and pencil readhead, and are plug-compatible replacements for NCS' 3000 scanner--software modifications are unnecessary. The company now offers high-volume scanners, the SR|7100 and SR-7700, which process up to 7,200 forms per hour, boast a select stacker and printer, and offer both ink readhead and barcode reader options. * OMR & Testing Suites Many full-featured testing and scoring packages not only develop tests, but also score them and generate reports that break down the effectiveness of specific questions and/or the performance of a class or individual. An integrated suite of programs is offered from Economics Research, Inc. Their ParSYSTEM software includes ParTEST, an item banking and test generation program; ParSCORE, a test scoring and analysis program that also includes grade book and reporting features; and ParGRADE, which provides ParSCORE's grade book and reporting functions. All are designed for the DOS platform. Teachers start by developing exams in ParTEST, which boasts a built-in spell checker. ParTEST creates up to four different versions of a test, each with up to 250 items, by scrambling answers and/or questions. A Scantron optical reader is used to input student data and test responses. Student scores are automatically posted to the gradebook module, which performs numerous computing options such as dropping lowest scores or weighing rosters by percentage. Classes of up to 2,000 students with up to 90 test scores per student are supported. ParSCORE 4.00 sports many enhancements, including new facilities for subtesting and subtest report generation, enhanced item analysis and barcode support. The latter prints and reads student data in barcode form. Teachers using any of the eight lecture halls at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Calif., use ParTEST and ParSCORE to generate multiple versions of tests as well as score and record them. Detailed item analysis and the ability to rescore any test are highlights. During a typical semester, 85 to 90 instructors teach over 100 classes in the large lecture halls-over 15,000 students are enrolled in such classes each semester. Many other instructors also use the system for their classes. Another package, the MicroCAT Testing System from Assessment Systems Corp., develops tests, analyzes answers, and creates and maintains item banks from which tests are generated. Of special note is the assessment subsystem, comprising six data-analysis programs. …


Background: The need for empirical investigations in software engineering is growing. Many researchers nowadays, conduct and validate their solutions using empirical research. The Survey is an empirical method which enables researchers to collect data from a large population. The main aim of the survey is to generalize the findings. Aims: In this study, we aim to identify the problems researchers face during survey design and mitigation strategies. Method: A literature review, as well as semi-structured interviews with nine software engineering researchers, were conducted to elicit their views on problems and mitigation strategies. The researchers are all focused on empirical software engineering. Results: We identified 24 problems and 65 strategies, structured according to the survey research process. The most commonly discussed problem was sampling, in particular, the ability to obtain a sufficiently large sample. To improve survey instrument design, evaluation and execution recommendations for question formulation and survey pre-testing were given. The importance of involving multiple researchers in the analysis of survey results was stressed. Conclusions: The elicited problems and strategies may serve researchers during the design of their studies. However, it was observed that some strategies were conflicting. This shows that it is important to conduct a trade-off analysis between strategies.


July 31, 2014 You've worked hard over the years to accumulate wealth, and you probably find it comforting to know that after your death the assets you leave behind will continue to be a source of support for your family, friends, and the causes that are important to you. But to ensure that your legacy reaches your heirs as you intend, you must make the proper arrangements now. There are four basic ways to leave a legacy: (1) by will, (2) by trust, (3) by beneficiary designation, and (4) by joint ownership arrangements.


A specimen of the Oceanic Puffer Fish, Lagocephalus
lagocephalus (Linnaeus) , found on a
beach on King Island, Bass Strait is described.
This appears to be the first Australian record of
this species.


How do governments address complex, cross-sectoral problems, like the COVID-19 pandemic? Why were some Latin American countries more successful at containing the pandemic's most devastating health outcomes? We argue that national governments that were more collaborative in their response to COVID-19 were more successful in reducing death rates. Our original dataset offers a novel attempt to operationalise collaborative governance (CG). We undertake simple statistical tests to measure the relationship between CG and COVID-19-related mortality rates in Latin America. We then choose three case studies to assess whether collaboration was meaningful in practice. Initial evidence suggests governments that pursued CG were more effective at containing mortality rates early on in the pandemic. The collaboration helped to foster cooperation over resources; buy time to prepare for a potential case surge; and produce a unified message regarding what citizens should do to prevent viral spread.


We employ a toolset -- dubbed Dr. Frankenstein -- to analyse the similarity of representations in deep neural networks. With this toolset, we aim to match the activations on given layers of two trained neural networks by joining them with a stitching layer. We demonstrate that the inner representations emerging in deep convolutional neural networks with the same architecture but different initializations can be matched with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy even with a single, affine stitching layer. We choose the stitching layer from several possible classes of linear transformations and investigate their performance and properties. The task of matching representations is closely related to notions of similarity. Using this toolset, we also provide a novel viewpoint on the current line of research regarding similarity indices of neural network representations: the perspective of the performance on a task.


The inelastic densification produced by shear straining saturated sands is opposed by the elasticity of the pore water and leads to a pore pressure increase, which causes a decrease in the intergranular frictional forces and consequent liquefaction of the sand mass. This inelastic densification is accompanied by an inelastic strain of the fluid phase, and the magnitude of the developed pore water pressure is the product of the inelastic densification and the densification compliance, the latter being approximately equal to the drained compressibility of the sand. The tangent elastic moduli are expressed in terms of the drained and undrained compressibilities of the two-phase medium and the compressibilities of water and the solid matter forming the grains. It is demonstrated that the volume change of the grains due to intergranular stresses has a negligible effect on the material parameters, even though it roughly equals the volume change of the grains due to the pore water pressure, which has an appreciable effect. Typical values are calculated for the material parameters.


Fatigue is a significant contributing factor that reduces human ability and leads to accidents and threatens the safety of aircraft and human lives. Approximately 70% of fatal accidents that occur in commercial aviation operations are due to human factors. More specifically, crew fatigue contributes to nearly 15 to 20% of the accidents (Akerstedt, 2000). These accidents and incidents are associated with pilot fatigue because of the long duty periods, disruption of circadian rhythms, and inadequate sleep that are common among both commercial and military pilots. Though fatigue is seen in all the disciplines associated with the aviation industry, this paper will discuss only pilot fatigue. Based on the literature examined, this paper first defines fatigue, examines the significance of the problem, discusses what is fatigue, its types and causes, discusses fatigue-related accidents and incidents, examines fatigue in different flight operations and its impact on the wellbeing of pilots, investigates the in-flight and pre-/post-flight countermeasures (both pharmacological and non-pharmacological methods) practiced at present, and discusses the fatigue risk management system (FRMS)—in this it defines FRMS, briefly discusses its history, describes the organizational structure of FRMS, its process, and its operation in the aviation industry, merits and demerits of FRMS, and its future applications. The paper finally concludes with some recommendations for future research/study in this discipline.


Content related information, metadata, and semantics can be extracted from soundtracks of multimedia files. Speech recognition, music information retrieval and environmental sound detection techniques have been developed into a fairly mature technology enabling a final text mining process to obtain semantics for the audio scene. An efficient speech, music and environmental sound classification system, which correctly identify these three types of audio signals and feed them into dedicated recognisers, is a critical pre-processing stage for such a content analysis system. The performance and computational efficiency of such a system is predominately dependent on the selected features. This thesis presents a detailed study to identify the suitable classification features and associate a suitable machine learning technique for the intended classification task. In particular, a systematic feature selection procedure is developed to employ the random forests classifier to rank the features according to their importance and reduces the dimensionality of the feature space accordingly. This new technique avoids the trial-and-error approach used by many authors researchers. The implemented feature selection produces results related to individual classification tasks instead of the commonly used statistical distance criteria based approaches that does not consider the intended classification task, which makes it more suitable for supervised learning with specific purposes. A final collective decision-making stage is employed to combine multiple class detectors patterns into one to produce a single classification result for each input frames. The performance of the proposed feature selection technique has been compared with the techniques proposed by MPEG-7 standard to extract the reduced feature space. The results show a significant improvement in the resulted classification accuracy, at the same time, the feature space is simplified and computational overhead reduced. The proposed feature selection and machine learning technique enable the use of only 30 out of the 47 features without degrading the classification accuracy while the classification accuracy lowered by 1.7% only while just 10 features were utilised. The validation shows good performance also and the last stage of collective decision making was able to improve the classification result even after selecting only a small number of classification features. The work represents a successful attempt to determine audio feature importance and classify the audio contents into speech, music and environmental sound using a selected feature subset. The result shows a high degree of accuracy by utilising the random forests for both feature importance ranking and audio content classification.


This document provides guidance for the environmental risk assessment (ERA) of living genetically modified (GM) animals, namely fish, insects and mammals and birds, to be placed on the European Union (EU) market in accordance with Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 or Directive 2001/18/EC. It provides guidance for assessing potential effects of GM animals on animal and human health and the environment and the rationales for data requirements for a comprehensive ERA. The ERA should be carried out on a case-by-case basis, following a step-by-step assessment approach. This document describes the six sequential steps for the ERA of GM animals, as indicated in Directive 2001/18/EC: (1) problem formulation including hazard and exposure identification; (2) hazard characterisation; (3) exposure characterisation; (4) risk characterisation; (5) risk management strategies; and (6) an overall risk evaluation. The Scientific Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms of the European Food Safety Authority follows Annex II of Directive 2001/18/EC, considering specific areas of risk to be addressed by applicants and risk assessors during the ERA of GM fish, GM insects and GM mammals and birds. Each specific area of risk is considered in a structured and systematic way following the aforementioned six steps. In addition, this Guidance Document describes several generic cross-cutting considerations (e.g. choice of comparators, use of non-GM surrogates, experimental design and statistics, long-term effects, uncertainty analysis) that need to be accounted for throughout the whole ERA.


The dramatic consequences of the severe winters and droughts between 1999 and 2002 drew world-wide attention to Mongolia's important livestock sector and its extensive - and growing - nomadic pastoralists. Much of the focus in this regard was put on the impacts of the change from communist rule to a free market regime. In a recent section of the journal 'Development and Change' 35(1), co-ordinated by Robin Mearns, these consequences are discussed extensively. However, concepts like 'nature', 'market', and 'degradation' are used as container concepts, without much empirical specificity. A recent research project run by Mongolian and Dutch researchers applied models of carrying capacity dynamics, and caloric terms of trade, to better understand the relationships between the dynamics of nature and the dynamics of the market in this volatile environment. The project applied these models to Mongolia as a whole, and to two case study areas: Ugtaal in the north, and Gurvansaikhan in the south. The analysis shows the importance of policy attention for livestock commercialisation. A large majority of herders simply do not have enough animals to sustain themselves in the traditional way. They are either forced to combine subsistence livestock-keeping with a variety of other jobs, or they can choose to become more market-oriented herders. If they do this wisely, they can increase their incomes, improve their health, and maintain the pastures. However, this depends on renewed forms of land and water management institutions preventing the few rich (and partly absentee) herders from over-utilising the pastures to the detriment of their poorer, and more market-oriented, fellow pastoralists.


This book is an attempt by an art historian to expand the horizons of her discipline in a self-proclaimed effort to "join..in the new field of comparative arts" (p. 1). Her project is ostensibly premised on the notion that art history cannot ignore film studies because "the cinema has forever changed the meaning of the word `art' and the meaning of the word `history"' (p. 2). But just as film studies specialists have in recent years moved towards a broader definition of their mandate so as to include video, television and even computer-generated art within their (academic) purview, so it would seem that art historians need to abandon their exclusionary perspective on the fine arts if they are to survive (or at least compete) in this `post-postmodern' world. Angela Dalle Vacche, an Associate Professor of Art History at Yale University, takes as her focus the query restated from the subtitle: How (is) art used in film? Given that this could be a very large topic, she formulates a narrower set of questions intended to focus the resultant discussion more specifically on the art of painting, which is, for her, "the most problematic but also the most alluring (sic) of art forms". In doing this, she thereby revises the original question to `How is painting used in film?' Dalle Vacche first asks: "(W)hat happens to the paintings used or alluded to in these texts?", and then," (H)ow do these films define painting as the realm of high art, creativity and femininity(sic), setting it against popular culture or industrial technology? "(p. 2) While the first question seeks merely to place `painting' concretely within the filmic text, as an object to be identified, duly noted, and cross-referenced (as in `old art history'), the second question takes us into the more value-laden realm of oppositional critiques which pay homage to contemporary critical theory (as in `new film theory'). Her method of inquiry has led her to choose examples from different cultural contexts and historical circumstances, `each directed by strong, creative personalities (sic)'. The result is that the films she selects offer up different answers to the questions, and each, therefore, constitutes a separate chapter with a separate focus alluded to in its title, an approach she terms "thematic". Thus, in addition to the introductory chapter, there are eight others each dealing with a specific director, specific film, and specific theme. They are, in order: Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris: Painting as Psychic Upheaval; Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert: Painting as Ventriloquism and Color as Movement; Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O: Painting Thoughts, Listening to Images; Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou: Cinema as Collage against Painting; Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev: Cinema as the Restoration of Icon Painting; F. W. Muranau's Nosferatu: Romantic Painting as Horror and Desire in Expressionist Cinema; Kenji Mizoguchi's Five Women Around Utamaro: Film between Woodblock Printing and Tattooing; and Alain Cavalier's Therese. Still Life and the Close-Up as Feminine Space. A major difficulty for this reader arises as a direct result of the overwhelmingly episodic nature of the text. While the chapters are similar in their individual concerns with a single film, the fact is that the method of investigation as well as the findings differ so radically that there is no connection between them, no overall argument that can be traced through them, and hence no coherence to the project as a whole. Ironically, the `intertextuality' that Dalle Vacche establishes as a key element in her textual analyses of individual films is precisely what is missing in her own text. One of the fundamental problems with Cinema and Painting, I believe, is that neither of the key terms, `art' and `painting', is ever clearly defined; the author's assumption being, I suppose, that their meaning is self-evident. However, all sorts of difficulties evolve from this omission. …


This thesis investigates biological control methods against the causal organism of potato common scab disease. This disease is found wherever potatoes are grown and can result in substantial financial losses to growers. The disease is caused by invasion of lenticels by a number of pathogenic streptomycetes which historically have been referred to as Streptomyces scabies. A multi-control strategy was adopted and targeted to two key areas of infestation: the transport of infested seed tubers to grower's properties and uninfected fields; and control after outplanting in infected fields. The pathogen used in this study was isolated from a commercial potato field in northern Tasmania. Using cultural and morphological characteristics, the organism was identified as Streptomyces scabies and coded T19.

A novel approach was taken in an attempt to achieve biological control at the seed tuber stage. This required the isolation and propagation of a phage effective against Streptomyces scabies. A mini airlift bioreactor was designed and built to rapidly propagate the phage and to produce sufficient volume (6 litres) for experimental purposes. When mini tubers with a surface dried infestation of Streptomyces scabies were immersed in a phage solution and outplanted in a glasshouse trial, common scab lesions were restricted to less than one percent of the surface area of tubers compared to tubers without phage that had an average of 25 % lesion coverage. This phage were ineffective when applied as a soil drench.

Since biological control in the field is likely to be achieved through the manipulation of populations of antagonistic soil borne bacteria, a number of streptomycetes and nonstreptomycete actinomycetes were isolated from a pathogen suppressive soil from northern Tasmania. In addition, other isolates were obtained from a private laboratory. Eleven of the 264 isolates tested that were antagonistic to Streptomyces scabies in an in vitro test were evaluated in the glasshouse trial. Lesions were reduced to 4% of tuber surface area when a mix of the 11 antagonistics and Streptomyces scabies were applied to the soil. When Streptomyces scabies was applied without antagonists, lesion surface area was 26%.

This study demonstrates that potential exists for the biological control of potato common scab but recognises that more extensive trialing with a wider range of organisms should be undertaken.


Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is diagnosed increasingly in adults, but the prevalence remains unknown. This study was designed with an aim to determine the prevalence of NAFLD in a population based sample in KhartoumSudan by an epidemiological survey. A prospective, cross-sectional study was carried out among 500 Sudanese adults (200; 40% males and 300; 60% females) aged 15 to 80 years, in between March 2011 to March 2013. Participants underwent physical examination, laboratory tests and ultrasonography examination of the liver. Diagnosis of NAFLD in this study was based on sonographic evidence of a NAFLD and testing negative for serum hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) and anti-hepatitis C virus antibody (anti-HCV) antibody. Of the 500 participants negative for HBsAg or anti-HCV antibody, the overall prevalence of NAFLD 15%, 4.4% in males and 6.6% in females. NAFLD prevalence differs by race and ethnicity; location in Sudan (Center: 36.36%; North: 7.27%; South: 21.82%; East: 16.36% and West: 18.18%). The most significant factors associated with the presence of NAFLD were weight category, elevated alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and increase Non high density lipoprotein (Non-HDL) cholesterol level. Obesity is a major risk factor and is associated with high rates of NAFLD. It is recommended that ultrasonography of the liver to be included in the routine health examinations of obese adults. Clinicians must be aware of the limitations in the available methods to diagnose NAFLD. [Elkhader BA, Mahmoud MZ. Prevalence of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver among Adults in KhartoumSudan: Epidemiological Survey. J Am Sci 2013;9(6):62-66]. (ISSN: 1545-1003). http://www.jofamericanscience.org. 8


Mouse germ cells begin meiosis for sperm or egg production only when they both are stimulated by the hormone retinoic acid and express a particular RNA-binding protein. Diploid organisms, including humans, have two sets of chromosomes in every somatic cell. Sexual organisms must necessarily make haploid gametes—sperm and eggs with only one set of chromosomes—so that the diploid state is maintained when gametes fuse to form an embryo. The specialized cell division process that generates gametes is known as meiosis and is initiated by the extrinsic factor retinoic acid. Lin et al. show that the mouse RNA-binding protein DAZL (Deleted in azoospermia-like) acts as a complementary intrinsic factor in the initiation of meiosis in a newly posited germ cell-cell state, the meiosis-competent gonocyte. Thus, meiotic initiation in mammals is governed by the cell-intrinsic competence factor DAZL and the extrinsic inducing signal, retinoic acid. Y. Lin, M. E. Gill, J. Koubova, D. C. Page, Germ cell–intrinsic and –extrinsic factors govern meiotic initiation in mouse embryos. Science 322, 1685–1687 (2008). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Papaya is an important fruit crop in Oman covering some 130 ha with an annual production of 20 tonnes. In 2011, during surveys of farms in the Quriyat region of Oman, papaya plants were found severely affected by leaf curl disease. Leaves with severe curling, vein darkening, and vein thickening were collected for study. Disease incidence ranged from 30 to 50%, particularly in fields with young papaya. A begomovirus (family Geminiviridae) was suspected as the causal agent based on symptoms (1) and the presence of whiteflies in the field. Samples (four to five) were collected from three farms. Total nucleic acids extracted from symptomatic leaves using the CTAB method were used as templates to amplify circular DNAs using Φ29 DNA polymerase and products were digested with restriction enzymes to identify fragments of 2.6 to 2.8 kb typical of geminiviruses. PstI yielded a fragment of ~1.8 kb when the digested product was analyzed by electrophoresis on a 1% agarose gel. The fragment was cloned and sequenced using primer walking strategy in both directions. The sequencing confirmed the exact size (1,764 bp) and the sequence was deposited in GenBank (HE800524). The viral sequence from Oman (isolate Pap-2) showed four open reading frames (ORFs) in the complementary sense (replication associated protein [Rep] gene, the C2 gene, the replication enhancer protein [REn] gene, and the C4 gene) and the virion-sense ORFs (V1 and V2) were missing in the sequence. An initial comparison to NCBI database sequences using BLAST showed the clone from Oman had the highest level of sequence identity to Cotton leaf curl Gezira virus (CLCuGeV) (FJ868828) cloned from okra in Sudan. Subsequent pair wise sequence comparison was done using ClustalV algorithm. Full length sequences of CLCuGeV from database were trimmed according to the size and genomic coordinates of Pap-2 isolate. The Pap-2 isolate sequence was found to have 83.3 to 95.1% sequence identity to CLCuGeV sequences with maximum value to the Sudan isolate. Amino acid sequence comparison showed that the four predicted proteins (Rep, C2, REn, and C4) encoded by the Pap-2 isolate shared 95.3%, 97.8%, 97.7%, and 87.6% sequence identity, respectively, with the homologous proteins of CLCuGeV-SD (FJ868828). The absence of virion-sense protein sequences indicated it to be a subgenomic molecule of CLCuGeV. According to the recommendations of International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, these results indicate that the virus identified in association with papaya leaf curl disease in Oman is a variant of CLCuGeV. CLCuGeV is a begomovirus of African origin which is distinct from the begomoviruses of the Middle East and Asia. To our knowledge, this is the first report of CLCuGeV, or any other cotton infecting begomovirus, from papaya in Oman. The presence of a recombinant fragment of CLCuGeV in a Tomato yellow leaf curl virus isolate from Iran (2), and the association of CLCuGeV with cotton in Pakistan (3) and hollyhock in Jordan (GU945265) suggests this virus has moved into the Middle East and Asia from Africa. The identification of CLCuGeV in Oman shows the widespread occurrence of this virus species. This discovery is important since Oman, and other countries in the area, are a hub of international trade and travel, particularly by air and sea, meaning that the virus could spread further. References: (1) R. W. Briddon and P. G. Markham. Virus Res. 71:151, 2000. (2) P. Lefeuvre et al. PLoS Pathog. 6:e1001164, 2010. (3) M. N. Tahir et al. PLoS ONE 6:e20366, 2011.


This paper proposes a theoretical framework for the establishment of digital library for scientific research data in the context of new scholarly information infrastructure in emerging. It also presents a research in which the process of text encoding using TEI is used for creating research data under the proposed theoretical framework. The theoretical framework for a digital library for scientific research data is based on identifying the specific needs of scientists in scientific research, resolving the mentioned specific needs through standardized methods and tools, and transformation of resolved specific needs of scientists in a form of scientific research data. The research part of the paper, based on the specific needs of seven participants (scientists who are engaged in studying Croatian old books), examined the usefulness and effectiveness of text encoding process of Croatian old books using TEI as provider of scientific research data in the humanities. Research on the usefulness and effectiveness of the text encoding using the TEI on Croatian old books has shown that TEI, on the one hand, is extremely useful, but on the other is not as much cost-effective. The study, among other things, pointed the need for an expert in text encoding as an assistant for text encoding procedure within a scientific research.


ABSTRACT Land cover–land use (LCLU) classification tasks can take advantage of the fusion of radar and optical remote sensing data, leading generally to increase mapping accuracy. Here we propose a methodological approach to fuse information from the new European Space Agency Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery for accurate land cover mapping of a portion of the Lower Magdalena region, Colombia. Data pre-processing was carried out using the European Space Agency's Sentinel Application Platform and the SEN2COR toolboxes. LCLU classification was performed following an object-based and spectral classification approach, exploiting also vegetation indices. A comparison of classification performance using three commonly used classification algorithms was performed. The radar and visible-near infrared integrated dataset classified with a Support Vector Machine algorithm produce the most accurate LCLU map, showing an overall classification accuracy of 88.75%, and a Kappa coefficient of 0.86. The proposed mapping approach has the main advantages of combining the all-weather capability of the radar sensor, spectrally rich information in the visible-near infrared spectrum, with the short revisit period of both satellites. The mapping results represent an important step toward future tasks of aboveground biomass and carbon estimation in the region.


This article explores the opening and the free usage of stored public sector data, supplied by state. In the age of Open Government and Open Data it's not enough just to put data online. It should be rather weighed out whether, how and which supplied public sector data can be published. Open Data are defined as stored data which could be made accessible in a public interest without any restrictions for usage and distribution. These Open Data can possibly be statistics, geo data, maps, plans, environmental data and weather data in addition to materials of the parliaments, ministries and authorities. The preparation and the free access to existing data permit varied approaches to the reuse of data, discussed in the article. In addition, impulses can be given for Open Government – the opening of state and administration, to more transparency, participation and collaboration as well as to innovation and business development. The Open Data movement tries to get to the bottom of current publication processes in the public sector which could be formed even more friendly to citizens and enterprises.


Empirical evidences indicate that if institutions of higher education are to survive and achieve long-run viability, they must be effective. Organizational culture and organizational innovativeness are viewed as important factors for improving the organizational effectiveness in these organizations. The aim of this study was to examine the correlations among organizational culture, organizational innovativeness and organizational effectiveness. Moreover,the mediating role of organizational innovativeness between organizational culture and organizational effectiveness was studied. The method used in the study was survey research. Based on the cluster sampling method, all full time faculty members from five branches of Islamic Azad University (lAU), located in Region one, Pars Province, Iran, were included in the sample of the study. The number of respondents was 369 participants. For measuring organizational culture, the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) prepared by Cameron and Quinn (2006) was employed. Two new questionnaires were also developed for measuring organizational innovativeness and organizational effectiveness. The findings indicated that the mean scores for the three organizational culture types of clan, market and adhocracy were all moderate. However, the mean score for hierarchy culture was low. The mean scores for organizational innovativenessand organizational effectiveness were also moderate. Furthermore, the adhocracy culture, market culture and clan culture were found to have significant positive correlations with organizational innovativeness and organizational effectiveness. However, hierarchy culture showed no significant relationship with either organizational innovativeness or organizational effectiveness. Additionally, organizational innovativeness was found to have a significant positive relationship with organizational effectiveness. The results indicated that organizational innovativeness partially mediated the relationships among clan, adhocracy and market cultures with organizational effectiveness. Adhocracy culture contributed to predicting organizational effectiveness positively significantly. Clan, adhocracy and market cultures were positive and significant predictors for organizational innovativeness. Both technical and administrative innovations predicted organizational effectiveness positively significantly. The findings of this study demonstrated that adhocracy culture type is the positive predictor for organizational innovativeness and organizational effectiveness. Therefore,adhocracy culture needs to be strengthened within IAU in Iran in order to enhance the innovativeness and effectiveness of universities.


This article analyses the disjointed, incomplete and often malfunctioning techno-natural networks that make up the Sicilian hydraulic system and the social power relations associated with them, which shape access to and distribution of water in Sicily. We focus on how the perceived, and occasionally real, water scarcity on the island may be understood as a socio-environmental or techno-natural problem deriving from a combination of ecological, political and socio-economic factors. First, we show how a particular set of socio-environmental relations and entanglements has characterized this region since the unification of Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. These relations have proven to be extremely resilient over time because of their ability to adapt to changing political and economic contexts. We examine those relations and entanglements through considering the techno-natural water infrastructures on the island and how they express particular political and social power configurations. Our main empirical focus is on the Sicilian water crisis of summer 2002, which was a particularly revelatory moment as far as the socio-natural power relations involved in access to water were concerned. The prolonged interruptions of water supply between May and September 2002 created considerable urban social unrest and brought the water issue to the centre of an extremely polarized and intense public debate. We show that the imbalance of power between the different actors in the public debate was skewed towards the 'traditional', centre-right political elites and power brokers who had key institutional roles at the time of the crisis - and who were thus responsible for its management. More importantly, this ruling group also proved extremely skilful in presenting their age-old solutions to the crisis, mainly based on the construction of additional hydraulic infrastructure, in the context of a national structural reform of the water sector which, at least nominally, should have challenged the status quo. We conclude that the 2002 crisis produced little change in the articulation of social relations around water and, furthermore, that it provided yet another example of how Sicily's hegemonic powers base their survival on their continuing ability to adapt their discourse and practice to the changing contexts in which they operate. Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2008 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


In the work an analytical model of transmission holographic grating formation by light beams with non-uniform phase-amplitude profiles is presented. The model takes into consideration influence of light absorption of a photopolymer with dye-sensitizer and nonlinearity of photo-polymerization on the spatial profiles and diffraction properties of the chirped grating. The model of diffraction efficiency and selective properties of chirped gratings is also presented. The results of fitting experimental data and numerical ones are shown and discussed.