In response to proposals to introduce new Long Term Evolution (LTE) microcell Citizens Broadband Service (CBS) radio systems into 3550–3650 MHz (3.5 GHz) radio spectrum in the United States, the authors have performed measurements and analysis on effects of LTE interference on the performance of a type of radar receiver that might eventually share spectrum with such systems. LTE and Gaussian noise interference were injected into a radar receiver; Gaussian noise was a proxy for aggregated interference sources and one type of LTE. Interference was injected into a radar receiver so as to appear coincident with synthetic radar targets on the radar's display. The targets' baseline (non-interference) probability of detection (Pd) was 90 percent. With interference present, the targets' Pd was measured and recorded as a function of LTE signal (both on-tuned and off-tuned) and Gaussian noise interference levels. Additional data presented in this report include: the radar receiver's antenna radiation pattern, RF front end frequency response, IF-stage frequency response, noise figure, and RF overload response up to an input power of -4.6 dBm. A measured LTE emission spectrum is also provided. Using these data, spectrum management personnel can perform electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) analyses for possible future spectrum sharing between LTE transmitters and this type of radar receiver.


This thesis explores the phenomenon of job security, insecurity and the ability to maintain continuity of employment. Assumptions regarding the nature of work are being altered by globalization, organizational flexibility and increased power for management in relation to labour. Furthermore, the move from welfarism to nee-liberal prescriptions of governance in New Zealand since 1984 has created challenges for individuals who are required to become self-reliant and responsible . The experiences of eight informants in management and supervisory roles are reviewed here, providing an 'insiders' point of view on change in the workplace in the ethnographic tradition . The research is guided by the governmentality theory of Nikolas Rose, and Zygmunt Bauman's analysis of contemporary insecurity. Contextual influences on the employment environment in New Zealand are outlined. Findings are discussed in relation to the following themes. It has been argued that job insecurity is endemic at all levels within organizations and can no longer be expected as part of the employment relationship . Employment continuity requires reflexivity of knowledge, as well as the constant questioning of the assumptions upon which the foundations of work are based. The central argument of the thesis is that employability requires an acknowledgement of the rigours associated with increasingly contingent work and an awareness of norms and strategies that are needed to assist all those currently involved in the hazards of working life, those excluded from it, and those who will join it. The development of a semblance of personal autonomy is required in order for 'freedom' to provide opportunities rather than insecurity, fear and exclusion.


The species of the brachiopod Gigantoproductus are giants within the Palaeozoic sedentary benthos. This presents a dilemma as living brachiopods have low‐energy lifestyles. Although brachiopod metabolic rates were probably higher during the Palaeozoic than today, the massive size reached by species of Gigantoproductus is nevertheless unusual. By examining the diet of Gigantoproductus species from the Visean (Mississippian, Carboniferous) of Derbyshire (UK), we seek to understand the mechanisms that enabled those low‐metabolism brachiopod species to become giants. Were they suspension feeders, similar to all other brachiopods, or did endosymbiosis provide a lifestyle that allowed them to have higher metabolic rates and become giants? We suggest that the answer to this conundrum may be solved by the identification of the biogeochemical signatures of symbionts, through combined analyses of the carbon and nitrogen‐isotopic compositions of the occluded organic matrix within their calcite shells. The shells are formed of substructured columnar units that are remarkably long and a few hundreds of microns wide, deemed to be mostly pristine based on multiple analyses (petrography, cathodoluminescence (CL), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM)); they contain occluded organic fractions detected by TEM, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC‐MS) analyses. We conclude that the gigantic size reached by the species of Gigantoproductus is probably the result of a mixotroph lifestyle, by which they could rely on the energy and nutrients derived both from photosymbiotic microbes and from filtered particulate food.


Nickel ferrite, NixCo1-xFe2O4, NPs (where x = 0.0, 0.6 and 1.0) were successfully synthesized by a rapid and reproducible CTAB-assisted hydrothermal route. The influence of different hydrolyzing agents on the particle size and magnetic behavior of NixCo1-xFe2O4 NPs was investigated. Particles showed very high phase purity and crystallinity in powder XRD analysis. Compositions of Co, Fe, and Ni in fabricated powders were also determined by AAS and results are in very good agreement with the targeted compositions. Samples hydrolyzed using NH3 showed no significant changes in the particle size and morphology. NH3 hydrolyzed samples were much smaller than their NaOH hydrolyzed counterparts, which was attributed to the strength and concentration of the hydrolyzing agents, NH3 being about 6 times more concentrated than NaOH. This in turn influenced the nucleation rate thus the size of each nucleus formed. Strong temperature and Ni concentration dependence of magnetic parameters was observed. These samples are considered as promising materials for high density magnetic recording media.


With the development of mobile networks, customer needs and behaviourshave changed. Mobile communications means so much more than simplevoice communication; there is now mobile Internet with web surfing, videophone,streaming media, and micro blogging. The objective of network optimizationhas gradually shifted from enhancing network performance to improvequality of experience (QoE). Therefore, assessing and optimizing QoEis the trend for optimizing future mobile networks.Today, users want reliable access for their content, wherever they go inthe network. To deliver the best possible experience to mobile broadbandsubscribers, operators need new ways to assess performance that will enablethem to build and manage their networks in the most efficient way. The newparadigmatic eco system (user-interface-network-content) requires novel anddisruptive end-to-end considerations in order to enable and sustain the nextgeneration of services and user experience. Thus, the extraordinary adoptionof mobile connectivity by end users, and the need for optimized bandwidthmanagement network resource, on the one hand, and the growing interest forgood quality content delivery/consumption, is boosting the creation of newnetwork solutions.We consider that by taking advantage of the capacity to support multimedia platforms and applications of mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets,etc.) is possible to incorporate and provide awareness to the wireless infrastructuresin the context of cross-layer systems to manage the resource allocationaccording to expected QoE levels. In this thesis, we address the questionon how to implement QoE-aware mobile networks and evaluate differentschedulers oriented to take advantage of the proposed architecture. We showthat by providing QoE-awareness to the network infrastructure is possible toimprove user's QoE and generate impacts in the utilization of the networkresources. With this study, we provide insights into the broader question ofwhether future mobile infrastructures can be deployed considering QoE besidesthe classical QoS considerations.


The human visual system processes complex scenes to focus attention on relevant items. However, blind people cannot visually skim for an area of interest. Instead, they use a combination of contextual information, knowledge of the spatial layout of their environment, and interactive scanning to find and attend to specific items. In this paper, we define and compare three cursor-based interactions to help blind people attend to items in a complex visual scene: window cursor (move their phone to scan), finger cursor (point their finger to read), and touch cursor (drag their finger on the touchscreen to explore). We conducted a user study with 12 participants to evaluate the three techniques on four tasks, and found that: window cursor worked well for locating objects on large surfaces, finger cursor worked well for accessing control panels, and touch cursor worked well for helping users understand spatial layouts. A combination of multiple techniques will likely be best for supporting a variety of everyday tasks for blind users.


The linguistic fund, that is, the actual lexical inventory of a language, is always considerably larger than the sum total of the contents of dictionaries for that language. It corresponds to all the possibilities of derivation and compounding - with the associated word-formation rules. The exploitation of the latter within machine-readable dictionaries should therefore allow a far more accurate coverage of the linguistic fund, by generating thousands of additional entries, some being more or loss widely attested in their written form, some representing the set of virtual words generated by a productive rule that have not, for one reason or another, been recognized as existing words. Note that the boundary between the two subsets is not clearcut. The conditions which determine whether a generated form will belong to one or the other have not given rise to extensive studies, neither in linguistics nor in lexicology, in spite of their significance for a better understanding of lexical creativity and word-formation processes. The relevance of such phenomena seems to have been greatly underestimated - as is indicated by the fact that no studies have been fulfilled on the topic of words such as medico-legal and franco-quebecois. We will demonstrate and illustrate for the French language the shortcomings of the simple compiling method and how ignoring them has led to unnecessary complications in the field of electronic lexicography.


Background: A cross-sectional study was conducted at the Craniofacial Rehabilitation Center in the General Hospital of the University of Cuiabα, Cuiabα city, Mato Grosso, Brazil. Materials and Methods: Poisson regression model was used to analyze the relationship between antenatal factors and the occurrence of oral clefts in 116 patients. Results: Oral clefts were more common in males (64.66%) and White race (46.02%). The mean age of the children was 21.91 months. The most common type of cleft was cleft lip and palate (CLP, 55.17%). Maternal and paternal smoking in the first trimester of pregnancy and parity were significantly associated with the occurrence of CLP. Parent′s age, educational level, and occupation did not interfere in the occurrence of oral clefts. There was also no significant association between maternal illness, medication use, alcohol consumption, and maternal exposure to chemicals in the first trimester of pregnancy and the occurrence of clefts in this population. Conclusion: The analysis of the environmental factors present during the pregnancy of children with oral clefts revealed a significant association between parity (second onward), maternal smoking, and paternal smoking and the occurrence of CL and/or palate in this population.


This thesis documents research into the role of young children's spatial structuring ability in the development of number sense, particularly in terms of insight into numerical relations. We take Battista and Clements' (1996, p. 503) definition to define the act of spatial structuring as "the mental operation of constructing an organization or form for an object or set of objects". Insight into numerical relations involves the structuring (e.g., (de)composing) of quantities (e.g., understanding six to be three and three but also five and one or four and two), which is essential for the development of higher-order mathematical abilities. Through exploring and comparing, for example, symmetrical double-structures (as represented by egg cartons) to dot configurations (as represented by dice configurations), children can come to recognize an underlying structure such as two rows of three. Such insights can help to establish children's awareness of spatial structures, to support children's ability to recognize and manipulate such structures in various contexts and settings, and to use spatial structuring to abbreviate numerical procedures. The research questions are defined as follows: 1. What strategies for solving spatial and numerical problems characterize young children's spatial structuring abilities? 2a. How can young children be supported in learning to recognize and make use of spatial structures for abbreviating numerical procedures? 2b. What characterizes a learning ecology that can facilitate the development of children's spatial structuring ability? The research followed the guidelines of Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) and socio-constructivism. It was conducted at a local elementary school with an intervention group that was a combined grade 1 and grade 2 with four- to six-year old children (N = 21). A comparable non-intervention group (N = 17) did not participate in the instruction experiment, but was included to provide additional data for developing and analyzing the interviews and the instruction experiment. To answer the first research question, a set of tasks was designed for gauging children's spatial structuring and numerical ability in a one-to-one clinical (pre- and post-) interview setting. These interviews contributed to creating a strategy inventory for classifying children's strategies into one of four phases in a developmental trajectory, which describes children's spatial structuring ability regarding this particular interview setting. Cumulative cyclic, classroom-based, design research was used to answer the second research question. This involved designing, testing and refining a hypothetical learning trajectory (HLT) with five corresponding instruction activities for an instruction experiment. The retrospective analysis of the data followed the principles of constant comparison. Qualitative analyses of the instruction experiment and comparisons between the phase classifications for the pre- and post-interview, reflected the benefit of an instructional setting that supports awareness of spatial structuring for fostering young children's insight into numerical relations. This also highlighted the role of the learning ecology in a kindergarten setting regarding an overarching context, shared vocabulary, children's own productions and constructions, interactive learning, and the socio-mathematical norm of spatial structuring. The teachers who participated had gained an increased awareness of the role of spatial structuring ability in young children's mathematical development. As such, the local instruction theory contributes to the need for educational practice that stimulates spatial structuring.


Abstract. The TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) level-2 aerosol layer height (ALH) product has now been released to the general public. This product is retrieved using TROPOMI's measurements of the oxygen A-band, radiative transfer model (RTM) calculations augmented by neural networks and an iterative optimal estimation technique. The TROPOMI ALH product will deliver ALH estimates over cloud-free scenes over the ocean and land that contain aerosols above a certain threshold of the measured UV aerosol index (UVAI) in the ultraviolet region. This paper provides background for the ALH product and explores its quality by comparing ALH estimates to similar quantities derived from spaceborne lidars observing the same scene. The spaceborne lidar chosen for this study is the Cloud-Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) on the
Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) mission, which flies in formation with NASA's A-train constellation since 2006 and is a proven source of data for studying ALHs. The influence of the surface and clouds is discussed, and the aspects of the TROPOMI ALH algorithm that will require future development efforts are highlighted. A case-by-case analysis of the data from the four selected cases (mostly around the Saharan region with approximately 800 co-located TROPOMI pixels and CALIOP profiles in June and December 2018) shows that ALHs retrieved from TROPOMI using the operational Sentinel-5 Precursor Level-2 ALH algorithm is lower than CALIOP aerosol extinction heights by approximately 0.5 km. Looking at data beyond these cases, it is clear that there is a significant difference when it comes to retrievals over land, where these differences can easily go over 1 km on average.


This study examined the interplay of spatial and environmental effects shaping the range margin of the red‐backed shrike (Lanius collurio) in northern Portugal. The occurrence of shrikes in 10 × 10 km UTM squares was related to three sets of explanatory variables, reflecting environmental effects (climate and habitat), large‐scale spatial trends, and neighbourhood influences (considering an autologistic term); spatial variables were used as surrogates for historical and demographic factors. Multiple logistic regression models were built for each set, and then variation partitioning based on partial regressions isolated the unique and shared components of explained variation. The environmental model revealed a dominant influence of climate effects, with the occurrence of shrikes increasing with frost and thermal amplitude, declining with insolation, and responding unimodally to rainfall. There was a weaker influence of habitat conditions, though shrikes were more likely with increasing cover by annual crops and pastures, and decreasing forest cover. Only a relatively small proportion of explained variation was due to a 'pure' environmental component (10.4%), as most variation explained by environmental factors appeared spatially structured (51.9%). The unique contributions of spatial variables to the overall model were also small, though the neighbourhood effects appeared relatively stronger than large‐scale trends. Taken together, results suggested that the south‐western range margin of the red‐backed shrike was largely determined by spatially structured environmental factors. Nevertheless, there were also 'pure' environmental factors determining some isolate occurrences irrespective of any spatial structure, and 'pure' spatial factors that appeared to favour the occupation of squares surrounding the core distribution areas irrespective of environmental conditions. These results add to the growing evidence that both environmental and spatial factors need to be considered in predictive modelling of species range margins.


Machine translation is one of the oldest and hardest problems in artificial intelligence. It is studied as a subfield of natural language processing or computational linguistics. Although machine translation has a long history, full automatic translation with high quality seems hard to achieve at least in the near future. Nowadays due to the increase in computing power and the accessibility of huge date in the Internet, the field has taken a new direction and started to grow rabidly. Translation is a process of transferring the meaning of words or text to another language which involves decoding the meaning of the source language and then re-encoding that into the target language. Many systems have been proposed in order to tackle this problem such as rule-based, example-based, statistics-based and other systems. Evaluating these systems is another difficult issue since there is no one correct translation of a sentence and it is subjective to humans' judgement. Machine translation evaluation is currently very active research and has many debatable topics.


The avian plumage color gamut is the complete range of plumage colors, as seen by birds themselves. We used a tetrahedral avian color stimulus space to estimate the avian plumage color gamut from a taxonomically diverse sample of 965 plumage patches from 111 avian species. Our sample represented all known types of plumage coloration mechanisms. The diversity of avian plumage colors occupies only a portion (26--30%, using violet-sensitive and ultraviolet-sensitive models, respectively) of the total available avian color space, which represents all colors birds can theoretically see and discriminate. For comparison, we also analyzed 2350 plant colors, including an expansive set of flowers. Bird plumages have evolved away from brown bark and green leaf backgrounds and have achieved some striking colors unattainable by flowers. Feather colors form discrete hue "continents," leaving vast regions of avian color space unoccupied. We explore several possibilities for these unoccupied hue regions. Some plumage colors may be difficult or impossible to make (constrained by physiological and physical mechanisms), whereas others may be disadvantageous or unattractive (constrained by natural and sexual selection). The plumage gamut of early lineages of living birds was probably small and dominated by melanin-based colors. Over evolutionary time, novel coloration mechanisms allowed plumages to colonize unexplored regions of color space. Pigmentary innovations evolved to broaden the gamut of possible communication signals. Furthermore, the independent origins of structural coloration in many lineages enabled evolutionary expansions into places unreachable by pigmentary mechanisms alone. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.


© 2009 Gill Green. All rights reserved. This innovative book investigates the roots of contemporary experiences of stigma, throwing new light on the phenomenon by examining a variety of long-term conditions. Behaviour, lifestyle and identity are no longer the results of mass-production by social class and nation, but increasingly the quirky and unique eccentricities of the individual as consumer, reflexive citizen and free agent. But if the hallmark of the post-modern world is endless variety and unlimited sub-cultural freedom, should we not be witnessing "The End of Stigma"? The book takes Fukuyama's notion of "The End of History" and examines contemporary challenges to the stigma associated with chronic illness. Award-winning author Gill Green examines cases of HIV, mental illness and substance misuse, to provide new insights into stigma in health. She demonstrates that people with long-term conditions refuse to be defined by their condition and highlights their increasingly powerful voice. The End of Stigma? will be of interest to a wide range of students and health professionals in medical sociology, health studies and social care.


Constitutional rights can impact large groups, yet most plaintiffs in civil rights cases bring individual claims. Critics of the Supreme Court's decisions regarding class actions, such as the decision last Term in Dukes v. Wal-Mart, have argued that the Court is generally limiting the ability of plaintiffs to bring class actions through procedural limitations, such as the Wal-Mart Court's heightening of the commonality requirement. I trace the problem deeper into the substance of constitutional doctrine. The Court has defined certain constitutional rights to require highly individualized inquiries. For example, Fourth Amendment excessive force claims, the bread and butter of constitutional tort litigation, often require an individual analysis of the reasonableness of the search. As a result, courts may deny class certification citing to a lack of common issues. Other constitutional rights - ranging from due process rights, criminal procedure rights, equal protection claims, and takings claims - similarly resist aggregate treatment. The Wal-Mart ruling - although procedural - will have a disproportionate impact on particular substantive areas of the law, even within civil rights litigation. I suggest that this confluence of procedural rulings and change in constitutional doctrine was not anticipated and nor is it desirable. I explore changes to sub-constitutional remedial doctrine and statutes that could rekindle aggregate constitutional litigation. Aggregation would benefit more than just the plaintiffs who bring these cases. If constitutional litigation becomes a purely solitary affair, sporadic cases may have an outsized impact, but in an ad hoc way that provides poor notice to government officials. Aggregation can improve clarity, legitimacy, participation, and representation. Bigger lawsuits may sometimes be better - particularly when developing constitutional values.


"Lust for Liberty" challenges long-standing views of popular medieval revolts. Comparing rebellions in northern and southern Europe over two centuries, Samuel Cohn analyses their causes and forms, their leadership, the role of women, and the suppression or success of these revolts. Popular revolts were remarkably common - not the last resort of desperate people. Leaders were largely workers, artisans, and peasants. Over 90 percent of the uprisings pitted ordinary people against the state and were fought over political rights - regarding citizenship, governmental offices, the barriers of ancient hierarchies - rather than rents, food prices, or working conditions. After the Black Death, the connection of the word 'liberty' with revolts increased fivefold, and its meaning became more closely tied with notions of equality instead of privilege. The book offers a new interpretation of the Black Death and the increase of and change in popular revolt from the mid-1350s to the early 15th Century. Instead of structural explanations based on economic, demographic and political models, this book turns to the actors themselves - peasants, artisans, and bourgeois - finding that the plagues wrought a new urgency for social and political change and a new self- and class-confidence in the efficacy of collective action.


Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) obtained from human melanomas can specifically lyse autologous tumor in vitro and mediate tumor regression in vivo. To develop more effective therapeutic reagents and to further understand the T-cell response to tumors, the diversity of T-cell receptors (TCRs) involved in melanoma antigen recognition has been studied. The TCR variable (V) genes, joining (J) segments, and N diversity regions used by five clonal lines and one highly oligoclonal, melanoma-specific, CD8+ TIL line were examined utilizing PCR amplification with V gene subfamily-specific primers and anchor PCR. The TIL lysed multiple allogeneic melanomas expressing matched surface major histocompatibility complex class I molecules. TCR analysis confirmed the clonal nature of the TIL lines; however, the TCR repertoire was diverse. Even among the three HLA-A2 restricted TIL (TIL 1200, TIL F2-2, and TIL-5), no common V gene usage was found. Comparison of the third complementarity-determining regions of the TCRs from the HLA-A2 restricted TIL revealed no homology. Results presented here identify T-cell clonotypes that recognize epitopes on highly prevalent, shared melanoma tumor-associated antigens presented in the context of HLA-B55, HLA-A1, and HLA-A2. These T cells and the antigens they recognize represent important components for the design of new immunotherapies for patients with advanced melanoma.


A search for the Zγ decay of the Higgs boson, with Z boson decays into pairs of electrons or muons is presented. The analysis uses proton–proton collision data at √s=13 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb−1 recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The observed data are consistent with the expected background with a p-value of 1.3%. An upper limit at 95% confidence level on the production cross-section times the branching ratio for pp→H→Zγ is set at 3.6 times the Standard Model prediction while 2.6 times is expected in the presence of the Standard Model Higgs boson. The best-fit value for the signal yield normalised to the Standard Model prediction is 2.0−0.9+1.0 where the statistical component of the uncertainty is dominant.


Though we commonly make them the butt of our jokes, weather forecasters are in fact exceptionally good at managing uncertainty. They consistently do a better job calibrating their performance than stockbrokers, physicians, or other decision-making experts precisely because they receive feedback on their decisions in near real time. Following forecasters in their quest for truth and accuracy, therefore, holds the key to the analytically elusive process of decision making as it actually happens. In Masters of Uncertainty, Phaedra Daipha develops a new conceptual framework for the process of decision making, after spending years immersed in the life of a northeastern office of the National Weather Service. Arguing that predicting the weather will always be more craft than science, Daipha shows how forecasters have made a virtue of the unpredictability of the weather. Impressive data infrastructures and powerful computer models are still only a substitute for the real thing outside, and so forecasters also enlist improvisational collage techniques and an omnivorous appetite for information to create a locally meaningful forecast on their computer screens. Intent on capturing decision making in action, Daipha takes the reader through engrossing firsthand accounts of several forecasting episodes (hits and misses) and offers a rare fly-on-the-wall insight into the process and challenges of producing meteorological predictions come rain or come shine. Combining rich detail with lucid argument, Masters of Uncertainty advances a theory of decision making that foregrounds the pragmatic and situated nature of expert cognition and casts into new light how we make decisions in the digital age.


The credibility of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports is contingent on social and legal institutions. Based on a comprehensive sample of CSR reports in Taiwan, where legal environment and reputational concerns are weaker than in the U.S., we find that CSR reports do not in general help prevent future CSR-related high-profile misconduct or mitigate investors' negative reaction to misconduct events, but external assurance provides incremental certification that enhances the credibility of CSR reports. In other words, CSR reports are superfluous unless accompanied by third-party assurance. We also find that the signaling role of assurance only exists for firms with prior misconduct. These findings contrast with existing evidence based on U.S. data and underscore the importance of understanding CSR activities in the context of litigation risk and reputational capital.


For the vast majority of proteins no experimental information about the three-dimensional structure is known, but only its sequence. Therefore, the easiest way to obtain some understanding of the structure and function of these proteins is by relating them to well studied proteins. This can be done by searching for homologous proteins. It is easy to identify a homologous sequence if the sequence identity is above 30%. However, if the sequence identity drops below 30% then more sophisticated methods have to be used. These methods often use evolutionary information about the sequences, which makes it possible to identify homologous sequences with a low sequence identity.In order to build a three--dimensional model from the sequence based on a protein structure the two sequences have to be aligned. Here the aligned residues serve as a first approximation of the structure.This thesis focuses on the development of fold recognition and alignment methods based on evolutionary information. The use of evolutionary information for both query and target proteins was shown to improve both recognition and alignments. In a benchmark of profile--profile methods it was shown that the probabilistic methods were best, although the difference between several of the methods was quite small once optimal gap-penalties were used. An artificial neural network based alignment method ProfNet was shown to be at least as good as the best profile--profile method, and by adding information from a self-organising map and predicted secondary structure we were able to further improve ProfNet.


Paragangliomas and pheochromocytomas are rare tumors of the autonomic nervous system that represent a diagnostic and therapeutic challenge. While the classic sites of origin are the adrenal medulla and the autonomic branches of the lower cranial nerves, they may arise from any site in connection with the autonomic neural branches in the thoracic, abdominal, and head and neck regions. The uncontrolled release of catecholamines by these tumors can be life-threatening. Paragangliomas and pheochromocytomas are the tumor types in which the impact of genetic predisposition factors is the highest. The treatment of paraganglioma and pheochromocytoma requires specialized knowledge and solid experience, which, given the rarity of these diseases, is available only in highly specialized centers. This book includes specific chapters written by experts from several countries that deal with relevant aspects of paraganglioma and pheochromocytoma diagnosis and therapy. Chapter 1 addresses the genetic findings that are most relevant to diagnosis and management, chapter 2 deals with the biochemical diagnosis, chapter 3 with imaging, chapter 4 with the surgical and pharmacological management, mainly of trunk paraganglioma and pheochromocytoma, chapters 5 and 6 with the histopathological, genetic, and clinical characteristics of carotid body, and vagal and tympano-jugular paragangliomas.


SQL injection attacks are a serious security threa t to Web applications. They allow attackers to obta in unrestricted access to the databases underlying the applications and to the potentially sensitive information these databa se contain. Various researchers and practitioners have proposed various methods to address the SQL injection problem. To address this problem, we present an extensive review of the various types of SQL inject ion attacks known to date. For each type of attack, we provide descriptions and examples of how attacks of that type could be perfo rmed. We also present a methodology to prevent SQL injection attacks. It concentrates on the SQL queries and SQL stored proc edure where input parameters are injected by the at tacker. After a rigorous input validation with our proposed SQL security mod el will ensure input validation.


The study involves the investigation of the chemical composition of some marine organisms. This entails collecting the organism, extracting compounds from it and separation, characterization and identification of these compounds. Marine chemistry has been ignored by many scientists in the past and it is for this reason that these organisms have been investigated, with the aim of discovering their chemistry and also finding new compounds which might be of value in our society. Such value may be the medicinal benefit and/or the understanding of some toxicological effect of some species. This study was conducted on Codium extricatum, Palythoa natalensis, Zoanthus sansibaricus and Zoanthus durbanensis all of which were collected from reefs situated at the southern part of Durban in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). Carpobrotus edulis was another organism that was used in this work. The plant normally occurs on sand dunes. This, however, was collected from the terrestrial environment within the premises of University of Natal (Durban). Sterols, i.e., compound l, 2 and compound 4 were obtained from both the Codium and Zoanthus genera. Zoanthus also gave compounds which are derivatives of genetic material and these include inosine nucleoside, adenine nucleoside and guanine nucleoside. Zoanthus further gave a compound which is aromatic in nature i.e., compound 5 and this belongs to a class of compounds known as the tyrarnines. Cinnamic acid was found from Carpobrotus edulis. The structures of all compounds were elucidated by conducting a number of experiments using spectroscopic methods. These included nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (n.m.r), mass and infrared spectroscopy.


Anthropogenic CO 2 emissions are considered the major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. The mitigation of this kind of CO 2 emissions relies on a portfolio of alternatives where CO 2 absorption appears as the nearest approach to be applied at industrial scale. Researchers have been focused on developing new formulations of solvents to make more competitive CO 2 absorption as a carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. In this sense, this chapter summarizes both the conventional solvents and the most recent investigations on this field. Chemical absorption is more suitable for a lot of industrial process due to the flue gas conditions: ambient pressure, low CO 2 concentration and large volume. Therefore numerous novel solvents came up in recent years and they are further discussed in this chapter. The most recent solvents, their mechanisms and kinetics and the advantages and disadvantages are also included. Finally, physical solvents are adequate in high CO 2 partial pressure applications and they are reported in the last section. Although physical absorption field is constrained to high-pressure flue gas, physical solvents provided higher performance in CO 2 separation process and their characteristics are also summarized.


In comparison to the food industry, anaerobic treatment had a later and a slower start in the pulp & paper industry. The first plants were installed in the beginning of the eighties and at the moment the number of projects that has been counted is approximately 140. Many of these plants have been installed as a pre-treatment stage before an activated sludge plant and reduce at least 80% of the energy consumption and the waste activated sludge yield. In return the produced biogas gives a positive energy balance of approximately 347 MJ/ton of packaging paper produced, which is, in the example of this publication, 4.6% of the total energy required to produce the paper. It is shown in graphs that anaerobic treatment is quite popular within the recycled paper and board sector. Furthermore there is a growing interest from the pulp mill sector, especially sulphite mills, TMP/CTMP mills and kraft mills. The majority of all projects are in Europe, with the peak in Germany, where 25 % of all realized projects can be found. The developments in North America are very slow. It is expected that the Far East will be developing more quickly in the coming years. Closed circuit operation and recovery of effluent is getting more and more popular among the users of anaerobic treatment. This positive development can be the spin-off of a better and more constant treated effluent quality, as well as the achievement of lower salt levels.


In this paper we compare the cryptogam vegetation in the Spergulo-Corynephoretum and Genisto-Callunetum in an inland drift-sand area in three periods (1968, 1993 and 2004). In the early period the lichen diversity in these plant communities appeared to be very high. The aspect was formed by Corynephorus canescens and Polytrichum piliferum. The highest numbers of lichen species are found in the S.-C. cladonietosum, irrespective of the period. In all years, variants of this subassociation are found, with many lichen species. In time pH decreases and organic matter, % total N and % total P increase by humus production. Cover sands having relatively high content of cations form a suitable substrate for lichens. Since the 1970s the neophytic moss Campylopus introflexus, a species adapted to acidic, nutrient-poor sand, has invaded the sand dunes. These changes have been attributed to the high aerial deposition of N in this central part of the Netherlands. In the more recent periods the actual lichen diversity did not really diminish, but the cover of lichen-rich plant communities was clearly reduced when encroaching mosses outgrew the lichens in all succession stages. However, when C. introflexus is less vital because of ageing, desiccation or burial under wind-blown sand, common humicole, aero-hygrophytic and even pioneer lichen species may locally establish on or between the moss cushions. The former succession series starting with P. piliferum and ending with lichen-rich Calluna heath (1968) has been partly replaced by one including C. introflexus (1993 and 2004). Process management is necessary to keep the sand blowing and hereby reduce the colonization by C. introflexus. Habitat restoration by small-scale management consisting of cutting down self-sown trees and removing the top soil has positively influenced lichen diversity and needs to be continued.


Plant breeding relies heavily on genetic resources with high genetic diversity presence in nature. Lack of genomic resources can slow down molecular characterization of any plant species. Transferability of SSR markers is when SSRs developed in one species can cross amplify in other species. Cucumber is an economically important fruit crop in the family Cucurbitaceae with many already developed Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR). We evaluated 515 cucumber-derived SSR markers in seven less studied cucurbit crops consisting of fifty one accessions. The transferability rate was 6.94% in pumpkin, 17.09% in wax gourd, 19.81% in bottle gourd, 13.27% in luffa, 45.05% in melon, 18.55% in watermelon and 8.76% in bitter gourd. Genetic diversity analysis classified tested plant species into five clades corresponding to four tribes. The result indicated that cucumber derived genetic tools are applicable to decipher genetic information in other cucurbit species.


Interpersonal Deception Theory (IDT) posits that socially skilled individuals are better able to project truthful demeanors and evade detection than are unskilled individuals. IDT also predicts that social skills benefit receivers, making them better able to detect deception. Past research by Riggio, Thcker, Throckmorton, and Widaman in 1987 (in two separate studies) has shown that socially skilled individuals emit nonverbal behaviors that enhance believability. The present study extends Riggio's findings by investigating how social skills and nonverbal communication work in concert to predict three forms of deception/detection success: believability, accuracy, and bias. Acquainted and unacquainted dyads participated in interviews in which interviewees (senders) answered two questions truthfully and then used falsification, equivocation, or concealment to deceive on the remaining 13 questions. Results confirmed that as sender social skills increased, believability increased and receiver detection accuracy decreased, especially during equivocation. Skilled senders were more fluent and less hesitant. Senders were more believable, and truth biases were higher, if senders displayed greater involvement, positive affect, fluency, and composure and used a concealment strategy. Hesitancy was also implicated in a complex way. Only one dimension of receiver skill improved accuracy. Receivers were also more accurate if senders were less fluent.


The United Kingdom has one of the most restrictive systems of planning control in the world, and one which has become more restrictive over the sixty years it has been in existence. The most obvious effect of this long lasting constraint on the availability of land for urban use is that the price of land with planning permission for urban development may be a thousand times higher than the price of an adjacent piece of agricultural land for which permission for urban development would be unobtainable. This paper explores the economic consequences of the constraint and of the high price of urban land. The most obvious is its effect on the housing market where too few homes are built, housing is expensive, and the homes which are built are by some way the smallest in Western Europe. Moreover they are getting smaller and the majority of homes now being built are flats, a type of property which very few actually want to live in but which is forced on them because they cannot afford anything else. The constraint also affects commerce and industry. So London is the most expensive city in the world, but though wages are also high, those not owning their homes are poor relative to other countries because of the high cost of living. Other UK cities are also expensive, as evidenced by the fact that the cost of office space or of industrial floor space in these cities is amongst the most expensive in the world. The high cost of space discourages uses which use a lot of space. As a result manufacturing is discouraged and the UK economy is far more service oriented than other comparable economies. Moreover industrial production is falling in the UK while in the rest of the European Union it is increasing. This trend is exacerbated by recent planning policies which encourage the demolition of factories and offices and their replacement by houses and flats. The paper looks at the reasons for the continuing popularity of this policy of constraint. One reason is that the majority of the population are owner occupiers and therefore regard rising prices as a good thing, something which they would not do if they rented. Another is that most of the population believes that the UK is far more urbanised than it is, indeed four or five times more urbanised, and that the remaining rural area is half what it actually is. A third is that for almost the whole of the last sixty years planners and population have not seen economics having any relevance to land use n eit is up to the planners to plan and the market to followi. Only in the past two or three years has the position changed and the Treasury started to take an interest n but whether policies will change is another matter.


Yesterday's news indicating the potential overplaying of the risk of alcohol in pregnancy highlights the professional and ethical tensions that scientists and evidence-based practitioners face on a daily basis. On the one side is the often incredible power of medical and scientific knowledge, on the other the daily encroachment of medicine and science into every aspect of our lives, what is termed 'medicalisation'.

Many academics and even practitioners have presented coherent and powerful arguments against medicalisation, often identifying the worrying role of commercial, political and similar interested agencies in its apparently insidious spread.

But there are occasions in which these arguments, no matter how well made, no matter how reasonable, and no matter how well intentioned, can be counter-productive. Yesterday's media around alcohol and pregnancy may be just such an example.

As scientists with a keen interest in exercise and pregnancy, we have to daily consider the tensions between common sense and an un-medicalised approach, and one based on scientific evidence, even if that evidence is not complete. The bottom line, however, is that we also have to veer on the side of caution.

Exercise was once considered a risk to pregnant mothers, we now know the benefits. The risks were overplayed in early research, and subsequent evidence indicated the positive effects of exercise on health during pregnancy. Likewise, evidence for the harmful effects of alcohol may have been overplayed, but where is the evidence for benefit? It is a maxim of knowledge that lack of evidence for something is not the same as evidence for the lack of something. Unlike many areas of science, it is problematic to research the real effects of alcohol during pregnancy, it is an emotive issue riddled with ethical and pragmatic challenges.

But there is a further risk. Any practitioner in public health will be happy to tell you that many people will hear what they want to hear, they will ignore the 99% of messages that indicate, for example, that smoking is harmful, and hear the 1% that indicates a lack of harm.

Scientists and academics should challenge scientific data, it is how science and knowledge progress. But in doing so we must exercise caution because the difference between the message sent – the evidence is not as strong as we like to think – and the messages that people hear – that it's not as dangerous as we thought to drink alcohol during pregnancy – is stark.


A survey of juvenile Astacopsis gouldi was conducted in streams in northern Tasmania. Differences in catch per unit distance (CPUD) and catch per unit area (CPUA) of juvenile A. gouldi between stream classes (as defined in the Tasmanian Forest Practices Code) were examined, as well as relationships between CPUD, CPUA and habitat variables. Use of Class 4 streams (catchment area 100 ha) in the stream systems studied, with A. gouldi occurring in only very low densities in Class 4 streams. Streams of 50–200 ha catchment area (stream Classes 2 to 3) and potentially those with significant and sustained groundwater input were found to be important for A. gouldi. Streams with less than 2% area of substrate as silt, high proportions of moss cover, moderate to high proportions (10–30%) of substrate as boulders, and channel slopes of less than 15% were associated with higher densities of juvenile A. gouldi. Meso-habitat features favoured by juvenile A. gouldi included large rocks or logs that overlie coarser substrates and/or which had a distinct cavity underneath. These characteristics of optimal habitat can be used to identify sections of stream drainage that may require local or upstream protection measures for juvenile A. gouldi.


Title of dissertation: ANALYZING STRUCTURED SCENARIOS BY TRACKING PEOPLE AND THEIR LIMBS Vlad I. Morariu, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Larry S. Davis Department of Computer Science The analysis of human activities is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Though complex, interactions between people and their environment often exhibit a spatio-temporal structure that can be exploited during analysis. This structure can be leveraged to mitigate the effects of missing or noisy visual observations caused, for example, by sensor noise, inaccurate models, or occlusion. Trajectories of people and their hands and feet, often sufficient for recognition of human activities, lead to a natural qualitative spatio-temporal description of these interactions. This work introduces the following contributions to the task of human activity understanding: 1) a framework that efficiently detects and tracks multiple interacting people and their limbs, 2) an event recognition approach that integrates both logical and probabilistic reasoning in analyzing the spatio-temporal structure of multi-agent scenarios, and 3) an effective computational model of the visibility constraints imposed on humans as they navigate through their environment. The tracking framework mixes probabilistic models with deterministic constraints and uses AND/OR search and lazy evaluation to efficiently obtain the globally optimal solution in each frame. Our high-level reasoning framework efficiently and robustly interprets noisy visual observations to deduce the events comprising structured scenarios. This is accomplished by combining First-Order Logic, Allen's Interval Logic, and Markov Logic Networks with an event hypothesis generation process that reduces the size of the ground Markov network. When applied to outdoor one-on-one basketball videos, our framework tracks the players and, guided by the game rules, analyzes their interactions with each other and the ball, annotating the videos with the relevant basketball events that occurred. Finally, motivated by studies of spatial behavior, we use a set of features from visibility analysis to represent spatial context in the interpretation of human spatial activities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our representation on trajectories generated by humans in a virtual environment. ANALYZING STRUCTURED SCENARIOS BY TRACKING PEOPLE AND THEIR LIMBS


Ecuador's current political economy is largely a product of the boom that took place in the country's oil sector in the early 1970s. The pressure of heightened revenue flows created an oil-exporting factional democracy, and a dichotomy between policies focused on minimizing the pitfalls of natural resource rents (widespread corruption, Dutch disease, etc.) and individual actors driven to maximize their profits. Today, these pressures continue to mount for the country and in the face of significant positive growth indicators.


Between the pleats Issey Miyake's iconic line of innovative garments. Issey Miyake's Pleats Please collections were first launched in 1993. Made from single pieces of high quality 100 per cent polyester fabric, Pleats Please clothing is innovative in its process: the clothes are first cut and sewn together nearly three times larger than the finished garments, then individual pieces are hand fed into a heat press sandwiched between two sheets of paper. From tube dresses to cardigans, skirts, roll-necks, or elastic-waisted pants: the garment emerge with permanent pleats. This industrial process allows both texture and form to be created at the same time. Vertical pleating is used to create varying effects and architectural shapes. Pleats Please clothes are very functional and practical; the garments store easily, travel well, require no ironing, can be machine-washed, and dry within an hour. Shapes are simple, colors diverse (a set of standard colors is available each season, plus seasonal colors and prints). The clothes' simple beauty, comfort, lightness, and ease of care have changed the way many women all over the world dress. For the first time, the story of this revolutionary clothing is told in a book. A wide array of texts and images explore the fundamental concept of Pleats Please Issey Miyake, tracing its journey from inception, through material development, to public reception, including the making of the original yarn - revealing the pleating process for the first time!


Researcher Kamal Meattle shows how an arrangement of three common houseplants, used in specific spots in a home or office building, can result in measurably cleaner indoor air. With its air-filtering plants and sustainable architecture, Kamal Meattle's office park in New Delhi is a model of green business. Meattle himself is a longtime activist for cleaning up India's air.


Mobile technology makes it possible to be reachable for people or technical systems when out of the office or the control room. Regarding design, appliances i.e. one function or a narrow set of functionality devices, opens up for exciting possibilities to combine new artefacts with the phone as a communication core. We have conducted an ethnographic study of everyday mobility in a municipality. In this paper we will focus on a design issue that is based on our overall understanding of building-maintenance workers  ̓work practices. Based on the understanding of how SMS alarms are used today we will discuss design issues regarding what we have chosen to call richer reachability. We use the metaphor of "interviewing the field" when addressing issues about making opaque information transparent. We find that an SMS alarm contains valuable information in the work of the building-maintenance worker, when at the field. The possibility to interview the field would offer a choice to access additional information that would be useful in determining the priority and do a second evaluation on the priority of the alarm when out of the control room.


We present a new approach to retrieve Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) over the turbid coastal water. This approach supplements the operational Dark Target (DT) aerosol retrieval algorithm that currently does not conduct AOD retrieval in shallow waters that have visible sediments or sea-floor (i.e., Class 2 waters). Over the global coastal water regions in cloud-free conditions, coastal screening leads to ~20% unavailability of AOD retrievals. Here, we refine the MODIS DT algorithm by considering that water-leaving radiance at 2.1 µm to be negligible regardless of water turbidity, and therefore the 2.1 µm reflectance at the top of the atmosphere is sensitive to both change of fine-mode and coarse-mode AODs. By assuming that the aerosol single scattering properties over coastal turbid water are similar to those over the adjacent open-ocean pixels, the new algorithm can derive AOD over these shallow waters. The test algorithm yields ~18% more MODIS-AERONET collocated pairs for six AERONET stations in the coastal water regions. Furthermore, comparison of the new retrieval with these AERONET observations show that the new AOD retrievals have equivalent or better accuracy than those retrieved by the MODIS operational algorithm's over coastal land and non-turbid coastal water product. Combining the new retrievals with the existing MODIS operational retrievals yields an overall improvement of AOD over those coastal water regions. Most importantly, this refinement extends the spatial and temporal coverage of MODIS AOD retrievals over the coastal regions where 60% of human population resides. This expanded coverage is crucial for better understanding of impact of aerosol particles on coastal air quality and climate.


High-mode-volume, high-energy (70-mJ), high-brightness (1.6*10/sup 14/ W cm/sup -2/ Sr/sup -1/) laser beams have been extracted from a high-gain short-pulse XeCl laser with a super-Gaussian unstable resonator. These results are obtained by increasing the cavity magnification factor to 6.6 and the output mirror peak reflectivity to 78%. The output beam divergence is seen to decrease from an initial value of approximately 0.2 mrad down to nearly diffraction limited after 6 ns for the short gain build-up time of the active medium. >


Abstract Many male coffee farmers in the highlands of Papua New Guinea believe they have a right to sex with their spouse without regard to her wishes. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, I argue that such sexual violence is best framed within local understandings of what marriage involves – an implicit contract which conveys rights and responsibilities to each partner in a marriage. Changes brought by modernity are transforming traditional understandings of conjugality, causing some discrepancies in partners' understanding of what they have agreed to. Too many women continue to endure marital rape, but some signs of improvement are discernible.


The first attempt to investigate the marine litter pollution level of the Lithuanian coastal zone was carried out based on different marine litter monitoring methods and according to the lists of identifiable items. The results have proven that plastic is the dominant type of marine litter. It seems that tourism and fishery related marine litter occurrence do not significantly depend on seasonal variations. The outcome of the study will serve as basic information for future inventory of the character of marine pollution, provide the scientifically grounded limit value for Good Environmental Status (GES) assessment in the Lithuanian coastal zone, and will contribute for the enhancement of the ecological status of the south–eastern coasts of the Baltic Sea.


From logs and information left in online spaces to data points self-generated by connected devices, digital traces have become more and more diffused over the past years. Along with some big-data approaches, Digital Methods of research treating the actual content of users' manifestation online (i.e. tweets, Instagram pictures, comments) offer the opportunity to better understand people and behaviours through their online activities. This paper investigates how Digital Methods can be repurposed as a full-fledged approach for the Service Design practice, by offering a method to outline service design frameworks from a corpus of web data. These quantitative methods, in combination with the traditional qualitative ethnographic approaches, leverage the continuous exchange of information that is happening in the digital space and suggest the possibility to automate parts of the data collection and analysis processes in support of service design activities. Grafting on several case studies we will explain how Digital Methods could be used to identify and describe a set of personas by extracting and interpreting data from their online activities, and we will inquire into the application of the same methodological approach to map other frameworks such as experience journeys or system maps that are critical to Service Design.


Limited evidence exists about non-specific low back pain (NSLBP) interventions among tactical personnel (police officers, firefighters, or army forces). The aim was to identify and systematically review the findings of randomized control trials (RCTs) investigating conservative interventions for the treatment NSLBP in tactical personnel. A search of seven databases for randomized controlled trials RCTs were conducted. Two independent reviewers extracted data and assessed the risk of bias (PEDro scale). Five RCTs (n = 387 military subjects; median PEDro score = 7/10) were included. The trials were highly heterogeneous, differing in pain and disability outcome measures, duration of NSLBP symptoms (acute, nonacute, nonchronic, and chronic), types of intervention (exercise, manual therapy, and physical therapy), types of control groups, and intervention durations (4–12 weeks). Two studies reported that strengthening exercise interventions were not effective for reducing pain or disability in military personnel with chronic or nonacute NSLBP. Manual therapy treatment was more effective than usual activities in current pain and pain typical symptoms in soldiers with acute NSLBP after four weeks. A multidimensional intervention reduced disability in military personnel with non-chronic NSLBP after four weeks. Strong evidence does not exist for the efficacy of any conservative interventions in the reduction of pain and disability in tactical populations with NSLBP.


The seeds in the soil play an important role in promoting the plant regeneration and acts on the local biodiversity conservation, but despite their importance, they are subject to biotic and abiotic factors that may inhibit their germination, including allelopathic effects triggered by the plants that are present in the soil environment. In this study we tested the hypothesis that the germination of seeds of seedbeds from Semidecidual Seasonal Forest (SSF) is inhibited under the canopy of exotic trees. Fifty (50) single samples of soil were collected (0.25 x 0.25 x 0.05 m) in a fragment of SSF; the samples were homogenized and from that new samples were taken and submitted to four (4) treatments: 10 samples were deposited in the greenhouse (SMN-CV); other 10 were returned to the forest fragment understory (SMN-MN); 10 were deposited on the soil under homogeneous canopy of Pinus elliottii (SMN-P) and the last 10 samples were allocated under homogeneous plantation of Eucalyptus sp (SMN-E).We also collected samples of soil under the canopies of P. elliottii (SP-CV) and Eucalyptus sp.(SE-CV) that were transferred to a greenhouse. The number of seedlings was counted at intervals of 15 days in each seedbed sample and the plants obtained were identified when possible. We obtained 515 plants from 15 botanical families, 21 genera and 13 morphospecies. The analysis of variance and comparison of means by Tukey-Kramer 0.01% showed no statistical differences between the treatements. Outcomes indicate that the low density and diversity of plants in P. elliottii and Eucalyptus sp understory are not directly corelated to suppressive effects promoted by the presence of these species, supporting recent data from literature that stands out the forest plantations of exotic species as possible areas for biodiversity conservation, in opposition to the designation of "green deserts" that are assigned to them.


I. INTRODUCTION Underlying many of the shrill arguments made in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential vote in Florida were questions regarding judicial independence. The concept of judicial independence is often expressed in absolutist terms, but the reality is more complex. Courts, regardless of their rhetoric, are political institutions, born of politics and subject to political whims. Florida state courts are no exception. This Article connects the historic events of the 2000 presidential election to the larger question of how to balance what are often seen as incompatible variables: judicial independence and political accountability. (1) The political and legal wrangling surrounding the 2000 presidential elections crystallized long-brewing public animosity towards the judiciary, particularly the Florida Supreme Court, perceived to be out-of-step politically with the rest of the state government. In this Article, we will discuss the concept of judicial independence, the political nature of courts, and efforts to insulate courts from the ordinary politics engulfing the popularly elected branches. We first review Florida's political history and changing political landscape. We then trace the development of the state's judicial selection processes and tie those processes to current legislation that the Florida legislature has considered and, in some cases, enacted in the wake of the 2000 Presidential election. Finally, we consider the likely consequences of efforts to diminish the insulation that the Florida courts enjoy from the politics of the day. II. JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE A. Politics Defined and Judicial Politics Explored The key to understanding questions of judicial independence is to appreciate the political nature of courts. When we use the word "politics," we do not employ its pejorative variant. Rather, the definition we attach to politics is derived from the understanding that courts influence the policy-making process. In particular, we adopt the conventional definition of politics in our field: the process by which authoritative decisions are made about the allocation of goods in society. (2) Under this definition, judges have discretion, grounded in their respective jurisdiction, as to what judgments to render and whose interests to protect. They can support certain policies and outcomes while opposing others. Courts throughout the United States do so on a daily basis without arousing much public interest or controversy. (3) While courts are certainly political institutions, they are also legal institutions that differ from the other political branches. Courts operate within a field of bounded discretion due to pre-existing rules that govern their decision-making. These include procedural and evidentiary rules that limit how and when courts can act and constrain a court's options when issuing a decision. Those rules inure to the legal system's benefit in that litigants and the public can generally anticipate how a court will react. This consistency gives the judiciary a greater legitimacy than that of the relatively unpredictable executive and legislative branches. Periodically, courts and their decisions captivate the public's attention. When their decisions are viewed to contradict the interests of the public, their behavior is often discussed at length. (4) In those highlighted situations, the policy-making power of the judiciary becomes apparent to even casual observers who may vigorously oppose the policy interests annunciated in the court's decision. This dynamic certainly was apparent during and following the presidential election in 2000. After that election, serious questions of judicial independence still linger. B. Judicial Independence Defined Judicial independence in America often resembles the proverbial elephant being examined by four blind men. Each reports a description of the beast based on touching the elephant in only one area. …


Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attack despite their tremendous success in many artificial intelligence fields. Adversarial attack is a method that causes the intended misclassfication by adding imperceptible perturbations to legitimate inputs. To date, researchers have developed numerous types of adversarial attack methods. However, from the perspective of practical deployment, these methods suffer from several drawbacks such as long attack generating time, high memory cost, insufficient robustness and low transferability. To address the drawbacks, we propose a Content-aware Adversarial Attack Generator (CAG) to achieve real-time, low-cost, enhanced-robustness and high-transferability adversarial attack. First, as a type of generative model-based attack, CAG shows significant speedup (at least 500 times) in generating adversarial examples compared to the state-of-the-art attacks such as PGD and C&W. Furthermore, CAG only needs a single generative model to perform targeted attack to any targeted class. Because CAG encodes the label information into a trainable embedding layer, it differs from prior generative model-based adversarial attacks that use n different copies of generative models for n different targeted classes. As a result, CAG significantly reduces the required memory cost for generating adversarial examples. Moreover, CAG can generate adversarial perturbations that focus on the critical areas of input by integrating the class activation maps information in the training process, and hence improve the robustness of CAG attack against the state-of-art adversarial defenses. In addition, CAG exhibits high transferability across different DNN classifier models in black-box attack scenario by introducing random dropout in the process of generating perturbations. Extensive experiments on different datasets and DNN models have verified the real-time, low-cost, enhanced-robustness, and high-transferability benefits of CAG.


In the presence of increasing specialization of workers it becomes more and more difficult for firms to find the most suitable workers. In such an environment a multinational corporation has an advantage because it can exchange workers between plants in different countries. In this way it can draw on a larger labor market pool, reducing the mismatch of its workforce. This paper analyzes the consequences of this advantage for production, employment and, most prominently, wages. We are able to disentangle the effects of worker heterogeneity and firm heterogeneity on wages and show that the latter is important to explain why multinationals typically pay higher wages.


We present a case of a 64-year-old man with a bilateral nasal obstruction. An endoscopic biopsy taken from the mass revealed a vascular clear cell tumor underneath an intact Schneiderian membrane compatible with a renal cell carcinoma. Following inquiry, it was revealed that the patient had gone through right radical nephrectomy for renal cell carcinomas 17 years prior to admission, a fact that was not known when the biopsy was taken. A following workup showed areas suspicious for metastases in lungs and maxillary sinuses. The patient started treatment with Sunitinib. On five months follow- up, the lung lesions had regressed.


Abstract
 This study characterizes the seed bank prior to and immediately following dormant-season prescribed fire in mature, mixed-Quercus spp. (oak) forests in the southern Appalachian Mountains. Thirty samples from the litter/duff (LD) and the top 5 cm of the mineral soil (MS) were collected from five 5-ha burn units (6 plots per experimental unit) before and immediately after low-intensity prescribed fires, where maximum fire temperatures varied from <79 to 316 °C. A split-plot ANOVA and multi-response permutation procedures (MRBP) were utilized to assess the effects of burn treatment (pre- or post-fire) and seed bank layer (LD and MS) on the diversity and density of the buried seed bank. An average of 471 emergents/m2 was observed in the buried seed bank comprising 133 identifiable taxa. No differences in total seed-bank density, Shannon-Weiner's diversity index (H′) or overall species composition between pre- and post-fire sampling or between the LD and MS layers were observed. Species richness (S) of the seed bank, however, was slightly greater pre-fire than post-fire, regardless of layer. Similarity, as defined by Sørenson's index, of species common to the seed bank and aboveground forest understory was low, with a slight increase in Sørenson's index observed during post-fire sampling of the seed bank and aboveground vegetation. Although we observed only negligible effects of a once-applied, low-intensity prescribed fire on the buried seed bank, the effects of a low-intensity prescribed fire management regime—one that involves repeated low intensity burns—on the buried seed bank are unknown and should be a focus of future studies across mixed-oak forests in the eastern US.


This 10th South Africa Economic Update offers a review of the country's recent economic and social developments and outlook in the context of global economic prospects. It focuses on the role of innovation in fostering economic growth, job creation and poverty reduction in an environment in which more South Africans are getting poorer. Main conclusions emerging from this analysis suggest that policies to spur innovation can go a long way in addressing unemployment, poverty and inequality in South Africa. It is our hope that South Africa will continue, and possibly expand, using the World Bank vast body of knowledge, global experience and its convening power as a platform for exchange and peer-to-peer learning in the identification of pragmatic solutions to reach the country's National Development Plan's goals.


The Indian overseas communities are the result of different waves of migration. Acknowledging that country's migration history and current conditions of migrants influence these perceptions, this paper begins by describing Indian migration from the early colonial period to the present day and presents the current geography of diaspora with exposing the main concentration areas. We then go on to lay out current policies and institutions that shape Indian diaspora engagement. Special attention is devoted to the set up of the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA), which serves as a single stop agency for any kind of matters relating to overseas Indians and is meant as a focal point for overseas Indians, immigrant organizations, as well as for trade, industry and any other organization with stakes in overseas Indian affairs. By setting up the MOIA in 2004 and dedicating suffient time and resources for support of institutions, the Government of India declared its long-term commitment to reach out to their migrants. Moreover, the Indian government has signed a number of agreements for bilateral cooperation with the main countries of destinations and takes an active part in regional and global initiatives for migration management. India has, in this way, already emerged as a leader in this field with one of the most comprehensive state level diaspora engagement policies, which makes India's institutional practices particularly interesting to observe. The chapter summarizes with the discussion on the current debates, pointing to the continuing renegotiation of diaspora's involvement in the development of India.


It is well known that standard learning classifier systems, when applied to many different domains, exhibit a number of problems: payoff oscillation, difficulty in regulating interplay between the reward system and the background genetic algorithm (GA), rule chains' instability, default hierarchies' instability, among others. ALECSYS is a parallel version of a standard learning classifier system (CS) and, as such, suffers from these same problems. In this paper we propose some innovative solutions to some of these problems. We introduce the following original features. Mutespec is a new genetic operator used to specialize potentially useful classifiers. Energy is a quantity introduced to measure global convergence to apply the genetic algorithm only when the system is close to a steady state. Dynamic adjustment of the classifiers set cardinality speeds up the performance phase of the algorithm. We present simulation results of experiments run in a simulated two-dimensional world in which a simple agent learns to follow a light source.


This paper attempts to provide an evaluation of high performance local area network type 2 (HIPERLAN/2), equipped with space-frequency coded double-antenna transmit diversity. The HIPERLAN/2 physical layer entities are simulated for frequency-selective fading channels for the standard's digital modulation schemes of BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM. Protocol data unit (PDU) error rate comparisons of HIPERLAN/2 with and without space-frequency coding reveal the potential gains and caveats. The analytical bit error probability calculations confirm that the simulation results are consistent with the theory.


The objective of this paper is to bring to the foreground some metaphysical commitments present in the debate about the relation between photography and the past. I will try to answer the question: what does a presentist see when she looks at photographs of dead relatives? According to presentism, if a particular object does not exist in the present, it does not exist simpliciter. For this reason, in Priorian presentism, there can be no de re (singular) propositions about past particulars. Part of the requirement for singularity would be played by reality, which suffers metaphysical restrictions from the passage of time. After outlining the metaphysical and semantical debate about presentism, I will briefly explore some theories of photography and separate them in two groups: de re theories that accept that through photography we indirectly perceive the past object itself and de dicto theories that deny it. Then, I will connect those theories to the problem faced by presentism, showing that a presentist must limit herself, in the case of objects that no longer presently exist, to a de dicto approach of photography. In other words, a presentist cannot accept that through photography she can indirectly see the past object itself. There would be nothing in the past for her to be remotely acquainted with or to demonstratively single out. I attempt to develop a presentist theory that could account for the descriptive and causal referential elements of photography using John Zeimbekis' theory coupled with Craig Bourne's presentist causal theory of reference (that jettison the Millian element of the causal theory). I will show how this theory is different from Kendall Walton's counterfactual theory (also accepted by Dominic Lopes) and explore a criticism that could be formulated from his perspective.


Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) for fuel system integrity set limits for fuel spillage during and after crashes to reduce the occurrence of deaths and injuries from fire. FMVSS 301 and 303 respectively specify post-crash limits for liquid fuels and compressed natural gas (CNG) [1, 2]. These limits have been used as a benchmark for setting leakage limits for hydrogen, based on energy equivalence, in industry standards and proposed or enacted international regulations [3, 4]. However the properties of hydrogen with regard to leak behavior and combustion are very different from those of liquid fuels or CNG. Gasoline will pool and dissipate slowly. CNG and hydrogen will rise and dissipate more rapidly. Hydrogen has a much wider range of flammability in air than most fuels, including CNG: 4% to 75% for hydrogen versus 5% to 15% for CNG. Therefore, a research program was developed and executed to assess the safety of the proposed allowable leak rate for hydrogen, through leak and ignition experiments in and around vehicles and vehicle compartment simulators.


aaa One of the strengths of the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance (IJSPP) is the section of Practical Applications in each published article. This section is intended to address our mission to "promote the publication of research in sport physiology and related disciplines that has direct practical application to enhancing sport performance, preventing decrements in performance, or enhancing recovery of athletes."With the Practical Applications section, we try to narrow the often-mentioned gap between sport science and sport practice.1–3 By clear identification of authentic practical advice for athletes and practitioners,2 we are attempting to "sow the fields for later harvest." However, just sowing the fields is not enough. A next step in narrowing the gap between science and practice is to actively deliver our message to the end users—the coaches—at the field, court, pool, or track. One obvious vehicle for this strategy is social media. It is clear that almost everybody is nowadays "connected" and that the amount of information spread on a variety of social media platforms is enormous. This challenges us to think of how IJSPP's message can stand out from the masses. That is not a complicated process. Just be the same as we always have been and, as is the case for the Practical Applications, deliver authentic practical advice to our readership. To accomplish this, IJSPP has appointed a Social Media Editor, Teun van Erp, who will lead us, together with Associate Editors Rob Lamberts and Stephen Cheung and Editorial Assistant Dionne Noordhof, in this task. Teun has experience as a sport scientist and has also been involved, for more than 10 years, as a leading scientist with one of the major Union Cycliste Internationale WorldTour cycling teams. As such, he has a very keen eye on the application of science in the field and is very well equipped to lead this task. For many scientists and also scientific journals, Twitter is the most popular platform to create social awareness about recently published papers and issues. Just like word of mouth is the best form of advertising, oftentimes the best notice for a paper comes from fellow scientists talking about the work. Posting can take many forms beyond a simple summary and link crammed into 280 characters. For some authors, it is also a creative pursuit, ranging from including key figures to infographics or image files summarizing the paper. Posting about papers is more than self-promotion. Instead, it is a venue for scientific communication to the end users. As part of this activity, it is important for journals to have a high number of Twitter followers, as this increases the social impact of a journal's tweets. In return, the tweets are an easy way for scientists, coaches, and other people interested in sport science research to keep track of recently accepted or published papers. The number of Twitter followers of the top-15 scientific journals ranges from 837 to 76,300. Interestingly, there is a strong correlation (r = .81) between a journal's number of Twitter followers and its impact factor (Figure 1). This highlights the fact that a scientific article in a journal not only needs to be of high quality but also needs social awareness in order to optimally share the body of knowledge with the end users. As you may have noticed, IJSPP has since the beginning of October 2020 started to increase the social awareness of each published issue and newly posted ahead-of-print papers through Twitter (@IJSPPJournal). This initiative over October and November 2020 led to a monthly increase of overall tweet impressions (>3000%) and new monthly Twitter followers (+310%) compared with the first 9 months of 2020. Our plan is to create more awareness about articles that are published in IJSPP and those that have become available as aheadof-print articles. The first medium through which we have started doing this is Twitter. As part of this, IJSPP soon will start by asking submitting authors to also indicate their Twitter handle (user name) as part of the submission process. This step will enable us to link IJSPP tweets to the author(s) of the paper. In addition, we are working on creating a "practical application" tweet for each paper, which will highlight how the outcomes of a paper can be used or are beneficial in a practical applied way. It is our hope that IJSPP will not only become more visible scientifically but also become more impactful in the application of sport science in sport practice. #FollowUsToday @IJSPPJournal!


The Polycomb group of (Pc-G) genes and trithorax group of genes are known to play a crucial role in the maintenance of the transcriptional repression state of Hox genes, probably through modification of the chromatin configuration. The rae28/mph1 gene is a mammalian homologue of the Drosophila polyhomeotic gene, which belongs to the Pc-G genes. As reported previously, we established mice deficient in the rae28/mph1 gene and showed that these homozygous animals displayed the developmental defects compatible with a human congenital disorder, CATCH22 syndrome. In this study we analyzed the structural organization of the human counterpart of the rae28/mph1 gene (RAE28/HPH1) and its processed pseudogene (psiPH), which are located on, respectively, human chromosome 12p13 and 12q13. The HPH1 gene consists of 15 exons spanning approximately 26 kb and its structural organization is well conserved between mouse and human. These genetic information of the RAE28/HPH1 gene may provide an important clue for further examination of its involvement in human congenital disorders related to CATCH22 syndrome.


As underground gas storage becomes one of the important and effective methods for supplying natural gas, modeling such system would help any individuals who own storage facilities plan their project and optimize their resource. Using tool like excel spreadsheet will handle all complicated mathematical calculation with minimal errors occur if it was done properly. We present simple but specific way to ultimately obtain net present value base on various logical assumptions such as periodic gas consumption or facilities design. The model itself is the combination of reservoir and flow model for dry gas reservoir which in this thesis uses Carthage Gas Area in Oklahoma as reservoir description. All relevant costs have been included. The model predicts large positive net present value in the cases where price profile is seasonal or gradually increases. Optimizing adjustable facility input such as number of well or choke position would increase final NPV with considerable amount even if the method of optimizing is mainly trial and error with concepts. Project opportunity to continue further has also been discussed in term of cumulative gas in place that increased. Lastly, constructed model is verified by various measurements to ensure the correctness of the model.


Industrial technology contributes significantly to the growth of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Japan. Driven by an intense competitive environment, businesses in Japan must continuously innovate to benefit from industrial technologies. As technological complexity increases, Japanese firms have to develop flexible knowledge acquisition and technology development methods. Collaborations and linkages with external organisations for industrial technology development and acquisition are important especially in the early growth stages of the firm. This paper analyses the results of a survey conducted in 407 companies and 20 in-depth case studies to assess the technology development needs of SMEs in Japan. The results show that capital and human resources are the major impediments to SMEs' efforts in new industrial technology development and the firms are increasingly relying on external knowledge sources to build up their technological competencies. The study describes the environment that influences the formation of such tie-ups for new products and technology development in SMEs. The results show that research links with external collaborators and knowledge networks are critical for the next phase of industry technology development in Japanese firms.


There is a strong connection between those associated with the law and cycling. It is possible to find cycling enthusiasts in all three arms of government: former Prime Minister Tony Abbott's love of cycling is well documented; members of the Commonwealth Parliament who also share this passion for the sport have formed their own cycling group – Riders on the Hill; and cyclists can be found within the judiciary. A love of lycra exists more broadly within the legal profession. Presumably it is the love of the physical activity rather than the laws regulating it that attracts those associated with the law to cycling. This article examines the latter.


Purpose
While migrant women entrepreneurs (MWE) have been studied extensively through the lenses of gender and ethnicity, social class, as an axis of difference, received scant attention in entrepreneurship and migrant enterprise literature. The purpose of this paper is to make an intersectional analysis on migrant women's cultural capital development processes on the basis of not only gender and ethnicity, but also class relations.

Design/methodology/approach
The study draws on empirical insights generated through listening to the life story narratives of 17 women entrepreneurs from Turkey. This is a small, yet diverse group consisting of women who followed their male kin who have migrated to Sweden in the late 1960s as a labour force, and of highly educated political refugee women who have migrated to Sweden following the military coup in Turkey in the 1980s.

Findings
By linking pre-migration and post-migration lives through Bourdieusian class analysis, the analysis yielded three distinct types of habitus of the women-intersectional identity constructed through interweaving of certain historical and cultural practices and conditions, labelled as women (immigrant) entrepreneurs, migrant (women) entrepreneurs and hybrid entrepreneurs. Life stories demonstrated the ways the MWE relationally defined, and in turn, contested being the right kind of entrepreneur drawing on their type of habitus and forms of cultural capital within the rules of the game in the specific context of entrepreneurship.

Originality/value
This study shows how MWE generate diverse, yet at times similar, but historically and culturally conditioned responses in actively shaping the relationship between entrepreneurial resources and context-specific structural powers and aspects. This way, the study calls for enriching the extant debate on migrant women entrepreneurship in two ways. First, it suggests that the strategic fit between resources and opportunities does not entail an automatic and arbitrary process. Rather, it takes an effort and contestation carried out by the entrepreneurial actors, among whom the individual entrepreneur is the primary actor. In particular, it draws attention to the conditions of possibilities for agency as a result of struggle and intersectional power relations: social class, ethnicity and gender, which provide a differential degree of powers to the individual entrepreneur.


The heat of adsorption is one of the most important parameters characterizing energetic heterogeneity of the adsorbent surface. Heats of adsorption are either determined directly by calorimetry or calculated from adsorption isotherms measured at different temperatures using the thermodynamic Clausius-Clapeyron equation. Here, we present a method for calculating the isosteric heat of adsorption that requires as input only a single adsorption isotherm measured at one temperature. The proposed method is implemented with either nonlocal (NLDFT) or quenched solid (QSDFT) density functional theory models of adsorption that are currently widely used for calculating pore size distributions in various micro- and mesoporous solids. The pore size distribution determined from the same experimental isotherm is used for predicting the isosteric heat. The QSDFT method has advantages of taking into account two factors contributing to the structural heterogeneity of adsorbents: the molecular level roughness of the surface and the pore size distribution. The method is illustrated with examples of low temperature nitrogen and argon adsorption on selected samples of carbons of different degree of graphitization and MCM-41 mesoporous silicas of different pore size. The isosteric heat predictions from the NLDFT and QSDFT methods are compared against relevant experiments and the results of Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, with good agreement found in the cases where the surface model adequately reflects the pore surface roughness. Analyses with the QSDFT method show that the isosteric heat of adsorption significantly depends of the molecular level roughness of the adsorbent surface, which is ignored in NLDFT and MC models. The proposed QSDFT method with further verification can be used for calculating the isosteric heat as an additional parameter characterizing the adsorbent surface in parallel with routine calculations of the pore size distribution from a single adsorption isotherm.


In addition to prompting the development of the Coase Theorem, Ronald Coase's landmark 1959 article on The Federal Communications Commission touched off a revolution in spectrum policy. Although one of Coase's proposed reforms (that spectrum should be allocated through markets) has now become the conventional wisdom, his other principal recommendation (that governments stop dedicating portions of the spectrum to particular uses) has yet to be fully embraced. Drawing on spectrum as well as Internet traffic and electric power as examples, this Article argues that emerging technologies often reflect qualities that make defining property rights particularly difficult. These include the cumulative nature of interference, the presence of significant interdependencies, and the presence of significant geographic discontinuities in interference patterns, exacerbated by the localized nature of information. These technological considerations define the natural boundaries of property by creating transaction-free zones that must be encompassed within a single parcel. They also complicate defining property rights by making it difficult to identify and attribute harm to particular sources of interference. These challenges can make governance a more attractive solution than exclusion.Other commentators have suggested that the failure of creating well-defined property rights in spectrum support wider use of open access regimes, citing the work of Elinor Ostrom and Michael Heller, or arguing that spectrum is not scarce. Ostrom's work points out that governance of common property requires features that are quite inconsistent with open access, including a finely tailored and unequal allocation mechanism, strict internal monitoring, strong property protection to prevent outside interference, stability, and homogeneity. Heller's theory of the anticommons is sometimes misinterpreted as being hostile towards property. Instead, it is better understood as condemning giving exclusionary rights in the same piece of property to multiple owners, all of whom must agree on any major decision. The primary solution to the anticommons is not open access, but rather unitization of the interests in a single owner. Moreover, bargaining over an anticommons is also properly modeled through the chicken (or snowdrift) game, which has more of a zero-sum, all-or-nothing quality, rather than opportunities for cooperation frustrated by a lack of trust that characterize the prisoner's dilemma and traditional holdout behavior. The final argument, that spectrum is not scarce, simply cannot be squared with Shannon's Law.Instead the solution may lie in reconfiguring rights to increase owners' ability to bargain towards workable solutions. A market maker controlling sufficient property and able to integrate local information could design a mechanism that can solve some of these problems. Property could also be reconfigured to provide more of the primitives needed to write effective contracts. Finally, these challenges, as well as the need to reduce information costs on third parties, provide an explanation for the persistence of use restrictions. In addition, continuing the fiction of government ownership of the spectrum may make it easier to reconfigure rights when necessary.


We have recently shown that the heart of late pregnant (LP) rodent is more prone to ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury compared to non-pregnant. Here we explored the therapeutic potential of Intralipid (ITLD) in the protection of LP hearts against I/R injury, and investigate the involvement of the signal transducer and activator of transcription-3 (STAT3) and phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) signaling pathways in ITLD-induced cardioprotetion. Isolated LP mouse hearts were subjected to 20 min ischemia followed by 40 min reperfusion with 1) Krebs Henseleit buffer (CTRL group), 2) 1% intralipid (ITLD group) or 3) ITLD+STAT3 inhibitor Stattic (20 μM, Stattic group), and 4) ITLD+PI3K inhibitor LY294002 (45 μM). The heart function and the infarct size were measured. The Intralipid-induced cardioprotection was fully abolished by Stattic, as RPP was significantly lower in the presence of Stattic (RPP=8881±1331 mmHg*beats/min vs. 1186±563 mmHg*beats/min in ITLD+Stattic, p<0.01) at the end of reperfusion. In fact, all of the hemodynamic indexes in ITLD+Stattic were not significantly different from CTRL. The infarct size was also significantly larger in ITLD+Stattic group when compared to Intralipid alone (47.9±2.5% in ITLD+Stattic vs. 21.7±2.6 % in ITLD, p<0.01). The Intralipid-induced cardioprotection was only partially abolished by LY294002, as at the end of 40 min reperfusion the RPP was significantly lower compared to the group treated with Intralipid alone, but still significantly higher than ITLD+Stattic ((RPP=8881±1331 mmHg*beats/min in ITLD vs. 5212±1955 mmHg*beats/min in ITLD+LY, p<0.05; RPP=5212±1955 mmHg*beats/min in ITLD+LY vs.1186±563 mmHg*beats/min in ITLD+Stattic, p<0.05). The infarct size was also larger when compared to Intralipid alone (32.8±3.1% in ITLD+LY vs. 21.7±2.6% in ITLD, p<0.05), but lower than ITLD+Stattic group (32.8±3.1% in ITLD+LY vs 47.9±2.5%, p<0.05). In conclusion, Intralipid protects the late pregnant heart against I/R injury via the STAT3 rather than the PI3K signaling pathway.