ABSTRACT
One of the difficulties facing art historians and curators when approaching recently produced artworks is how to interpret such works within the dominant narrative of art history and its traditional axis of historical time and geographical place. Often such works are interpreted as 'global' and effectively reduced to a western interpreta- tion of the artworks. While this is a helpful approach for many artists and artworks, it can be less helpful to the interpretation of works that seek to address local issues that the 'global' approach might miss. Moreover, the criteria of the 'global' might exclude such works from being perceived as 'contemporary art'. The problem today is acute when dealing with artworks in East Asia, especially China, because so many works have been accepted as 'global' only occasionally mentioning that they are 'Chinese'. Hence the uneasy term 'Contemporary Chinese art' and the debate between its inter- pretation as 'global' and/or 'Chinese'. If the latter perspective is applied, some form of 'Chineseness' will explicitly or implicitly be applied. This article takes the 'local' perspective in order to interpret a group of works by the Hong Kong/Macau artist Lo Yuen-yi in memory of the rural women who practised nushu (women's writ- ing) through chants, embroidery and writing in Hunan province, China. In so doing, Lo can position herself within an alternative narrative of female literate and artistic ancestral narrative from which she is not excluded as a Chinese female artist. The article argues that the work cannot be fully understood from the 'global' perspective and thus requires a perspective that would necessarily adopt a strategic concept of 'Chineseness'.


Noble gases are widely used in studies of the basic properties and dynamics of natural systems including the ocean. This chapter describes some of the more extensive applications of noble gases (mainly helium isotopes) to studies of oceanographic problems. They include the modern oceanic circulation, paleo-oceanography, hydrothermal and cold brine systems in the deep ocean, and ocean/atmosphere gas exchange.

Originally, oceanic noble gas studies were focused on geochemical problems such as the question of the existence of excess helium in seawater derived from radioactive decay of the elements of the uranium and thorium series in ocean sediments (Suess and Wanke 1965; Bieri et al. 1966). After the discovery of mantle (primordial) helium during the 1960s (Clarke et al. 1969; Craig and Weiss 1971; Craig et al. 1975) and 3He derived from decay of tritium in the near-surface waters of the ocean (Jenkins and Clarke 1976), large programs were developed to exploit helium isotopes, frequently in combination with tritium, for studies of water mass formation, circulation and variability (e.g., Jenkins 1987; Schlosser et al. 1991).

More recent studies started to explore the use of helium isotopes to paleoceanographic objectives. These studies build upon the discovery of extraterrestrial helium in deep-sea sediments in the early 1960s (Merrihue 1964). This signal is now being systematically examined for its potential as a tool for investigations of sediment accumulation rates on very long time scales (millions of years) and their correlation with changes in paleoceanography (e.g., Farley 1995; Farley and Patterson 1995; Marcantonio et al. 1995, 1996, 2001).

Soon after the discovery of mantle helium in seawater, noble gases were applied to studies of hydrothermal systems. Originally, these studies were focused on the source of the fluids emanating from hydrothermal vents as well as …


Protein Design
There has been some success in designing stable peptide filaments; however, mimicking the reversible assembly of many natural protein filaments is challenging. Dynamic filaments usually comprise independently folded and asymmetric proteins and using such building blocks requires the design of multiple intermonomer interfaces. Shen et al. report the design of self-assembling helical filaments based on previously designed stable repeat proteins. The filaments are micron scale, and their diameter can be tuned by varying the number of repeats in the monomer. Anchor and capping units, built from monomers that lack an interaction interface, can be used to control assembly and disassembly.

Science , this issue p. [705][1]

 [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aau3775


HIV AND OPIATES-MEDIATED NEUROTOXICITY: GSK3β IS A POTENTIAL THERAPEUTIC TARGET By Ruturaj R. Masvekar A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Neuroscience at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2014 Director: Pamela E. Knapp, PhD. Professor, Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology. HIV-1 enters the CNS soon after initial systemic infection. HIV-1 can induce a wide range of neurological deficits, collectively known as HIV-1-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND). Mature neurons are not infected by HIV-1; instead, infected and/or activated glial cells release various viral and cellular factors that induce direct and/or indirect neuronal toxicity, leading to HAND. Injection drug abuse is a significant risk factor for HIV-infection, and opiate drug abusers show increased HIV-neuropathology, even with anti-retroviral treatments. Our previous work has largely modeled HIV-neuropathology using the individual viral proteins Tat or gp120, with murine striatal neurons as targets. To model disease processes more closely, the current study uses supernatant from HIV-1-infected cells. Supernatant from HIV-1SF162 (R5-tropic)-infected differentiated-U937 cells (HIV + sup) was collected and p24 level was measured by ELISA to assess the infection. We assessed HIV + sup effects on neuronal survival and neurite growth/pruning with or without concurrent exposure to morphine, an opiate that preferentially acts through μ-opioid receptors. Effects of HIV + sup ± morphine were assessed on neuronal populations, and also by time-lapse imaging of individual cells. HIV + sup caused dose-dependent toxicity over a range of p24 levels (10-500 pg/ml). Significant interactions occurred with morphine at lower p24 levels (10 and 25 pg/ml). In the presence of glia, selective neurotoxic measures were significantly enhanced and interactions with morphine were also augmented. Importantly, the arrest of neurite growth that occurred with exposure to HIV + sup was reversible unless neurons were continuously exposed to morphine. Thus, while reducing HIV-infection levels may be protective, ongoing exposure to opiates may limit recovery. During early stage of HIV-infection R5-tropic viruses are predominant, but during later stages of disease X4-tropic viruses are more predominant; co-receptor usage switch from CCR5 to CXCR4 is crucial in disease progression to AIDS. Some previous studies have shown that drugs of abuse interact with virus or viral proteins in strain/tropism-dependent manner. Therefore, we also assessed neurotoxic effects and interactions with opiates by supernatant from HIV-1LAI (X4tropic)-infected H9 cells. Neurotoxic effects and the interactions with opiates of HIV-1LAIsupernatant are quantitatively similar to that of HIV-1SF162. Surprisingly, the cytokine/chemokine release profile of HIV-1LAI-infected H9 cells is similar to that of HIV-1SF162-infected U937 cells. Only in the presence of glia, HIV-1LAI virion induced neurotoxic effects, but no interactions with morphine were seen. Also our studies have shown that HIV-1LAI virions are slightly more neurotoxic than HIV-1SF162. Altogether, largely our results suggest that HIV + sup mediated neurotoxicity and the interactions with opiates are majorly attributed to cytotoxic factors released from infected and activated cells instead of viral strain specific factors. Although there is a correlation between opiate drug abuse and progression of HAND, the mechanisms that underlie interactions between HIV-1 and opiates remain obscure. Previous studies have shown that HIV-1 induces neurotoxic effects through abnormal activation of GSK3β. Interestingly, expression of GSK3β has shown to be elevated in the brains of young opiate abusers suggesting that GSK3β is also linked to neuropathology seen with opiate abusing patients. Thus, we hypothesized that GSK3β activation is a point of convergence for HIVand opiate-mediated interactive neurotoxic effects. Cultures of striatal neurons were treated with HIV + sup (R5-tropic), in the presence or absence of morphine and GSK3β inhibitors. Our results show that multiple GSK3β inhibitors significantly reduce HIV-1-mediated neurotoxic outcomes, and also negate interactions with morphine that result in cell death. This suggests that GSK3βactivation is an important point of convergence and a potential therapeutic target for HIVand opiate-mediated neurocognitive deficits.


Abstract We examine whether advertising increases household debt by studying the initial expansion of television in the 1950's. Exploiting the idiosyncratic spread of television across markets, we use micro data from the Survey of Consumer Finances to test whether households with early access to television saw steeper debt increases than households with delayed access. Results indicate that exposure to television advertising increases the tendency to borrow for household goods and the tendency to carry debt. Television access is associated with higher debt levels for durable goods, but not with the total amount of non-mortgage debt. We provide suggestive evidence that increased labor supply may drive our results. The role of media in household debt may be greater than suggested by existing research.


While exercise has been widely proposed in the management of depression in older people, the subjective experiences of individuals participating in this intervention have been neglected. Similarly, little is known about the manner in which unsupervised physical activity is adopted by older people as they recover from an episode of depression. This qualitative study sought the views of 11 older people who had recently been admitted to hospital with depression and attended regular inpatient exercise groups. It was found that participants valued opportunities to exercise when in hospital and reported a range of benefits. Following discharge unsupervised physical activity played a crucial part in the recovery process and three typologies were defined which categorised participants' motivation to be physically active. It was concluded that opportunities for older people to join exercise groups when hospitalised with depression are likely to be valued and that individual factors should be acknowledged when promoting post discharge physical activity. Keywords, Older people, depression, exercise, physical activity


The Corniche is a public realm located in Doha. Its waterfront palm-fringed boulevard and twin carriageway extends in a horseshoe shape and runs 7 km along the Doha Bay and the city's sea-front. Doha Corniche is indisputably the most attractive part of Doha, studded with exciting green surroundings and remarkable modern architecture. The Corniche was formed during the late 1970s and early 1980s, reshaping Doha's coastline. The public space used to be an empty walkway, however development has expanded in the 21st century with many skyscrapers being built towards the north of the Corniche. Presently, the Doha Corniche is an appealing designation of the economic boom. Today a rapid development of the built environment of Doha including public urban open spaces is witnessed. Open spaces are functional under the circumstance that they are used by the people; however, the open spaces in Doha are vacant due to the unappealing and uncomfortable physical and non-physical factors, namely during summer. This paper proposes an integrated approach for improvement of human comfort conditions in a public outdoor space all year round with emphasis on the summer season. The objective is to assess the existing condition of Doha Corniche and provide solutions that address the outdoor urban comfort issues. The extent to which physical and non- physical characteristics of Doha Corniche can contribute to enhance human comfort was investigated through structured interviews, surveys, site observations and visual material, such as maps, photographs and drawings. Through the findings, specific parameters, which contribute to the outdoor human comfort in Doha's public realm, have been identified. Finally, an integrated approach for implementation of human comfort in the Corniche is discussed.


Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), though powerful, is hard to train. Several recent works (Brock et al., 2016; Miyato et al., 2018) suggest that controlling the spectra of weight matrices in the discriminator can significantly improve the training of GANs. Motivated by their discovery, we propose a new framework for training GANs, which allows more flexible spectrum control (e.g., making the weight matrices of the discriminator have slow singular value decays). Specifically, we propose a new reparameterization approach for the weight matrices of the discriminator in GANs, which allows us to directly manipulate the spectra of the weight matrices through various regularizers and constraints, without intensively computing singular value decompositions. Theoretically, we further show that the spectrum control improves the generalization ability of GANs. Our experiments on CIFAR-10, STL-10, and ImgaeNet datasets confirm that compared to other methods, our proposed method is capable of generating images with competitive quality by utilizing spectral normalization and encouraging the slow singular value decay.


A few days before Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011, he reminded the Egyptian people that 'istiqrār ('stability') was his legacy both domestically and internationally. Their choice was between 'stability' and 'chaos', he threatened. This thesis argues that stability is a mode of governmentality whose power cannot be fully appreciated at the level of political discourse only. Rather, stability as a practice of government is entangled with peoples' values, aspirations, and the intimate politics of everyday life. In Egypt between the Free Officers coup of 1952 and the January 25th revolution of 2011, 'stability' embodied access to both tenured employment and the means to reproduce the conditions of 'a good life' in the context of the family. Adequate understanding of stability and its ubiquity as an ideal must take into account the complex ways in which state projects and imaginative appropriation of those projects intersect. The thesis draws on fieldwork in an industrial neighbourhood of Cairo central to political movements of Egypt to analyse the everyday politics surrounding access to tenured employment in the context of the casualisation of labour and deregulation of capital since the inception of neo-liberal reforms in Egypt in 1991. By analysing the politics of labour at a site of strategic interest to the Egyptian regime from Abdul-Nasser to Mubarak, the thesis highlights how adequate understanding of political economy, practices of governing and neoliberalism must include both the shop floor and the home.
 The material for this study is drawn from twenty-two months of ethnographic research on the shop-floors and in the homes of the company town of Egypt's oldest public-owned fully integrated steel plant, the Egyptian Iron and Steel Company (EISCO) in Helwan. I explore how the politics around tenured employment enabled the state to tighten its grip over what historically used to be a leading site of militant labour activism. I argue that the state capitalised on workers' valuation of relationality and reproduction, represented in their aspiration for 'istiqrār ('stability'), by confining new temporary fixed-term employment to children and relatives of EISCO permanent workers. In the face of the increased precariousness of work and life conditions under neo-liberalism, permanent work contracts, I propose, acted as a potential property right that transformed a group of militant workers into a privileged group and set their interests against the rest of the working class outside the plant. The thesis shows how the constant innovation in property relations and the re-appropriation of the meaning of work in people's lives, by turning 'stability' from a social value into a productivist and calculative one, perpetuated the capitalist labour regime and values in workers' communities.


The extraction of text in an image is a classical problem in the computer vision. With the increasing popularity of practical vision system text recognition in natural scenes becomes a critical task. Text data present in images and video contain useful information for automatic annotation, image indexing. But as natural scene images contain complex background, multiple fonts and orientations, and different alignments make the problem of automatic text extraction extremely challenging. This paper proposes the approach for automatic detection of text from images and explains the methodology to extract and recognize multi-oriented text in natural scene images.


Cytotoxic T-lymphocyte antigen 4 (CTLA-4) is an inhibitory receptor that is upregulated after T-cell activation, and transmits signals that suppress T-cell activation and proliferation. Antibodies targeting CTLA-4 can selectively deplete regulatory T cells by antibody-mediated cellular cytotoxicity mechanisms.  Radiation therapy (RT) on the other hand is a longstanding pillar of cancer treatment, historically utilized to treat a discrete target and provide local tumor control. Recent preclinical studies demonstrated that RT is synergistic with anti-CTLA antibody and induces systemic anti-tumor responses. In order to better understand the effect of the combination therapy on metastatic melanoma, we developed a multi-scale mechanistic model using a system of impulsive differential equations. The objective of this study was to develop a predictive simulation platform to improve cancer management by manipulating dose and fractionation schedule of RT in the combination therapy. The project was supported by NIH Grant P20GM103434 to the West Virginia IDeA Network for Biomedical Research Excellence.


This paper provides an empirical analysis of the factors that determine the profitability of Indonesian banks between the years 2006-2012. In particular, it investigates whether there are any significant differences in terms of profitability between Islamic banks and commercial banks. The results, obtained by applying the system-GMM estimator to the panel of 54 banks, indicate that the high bank profitability during these years were determined mainly by the size of the banks, the market share as measured by the industry concentration index and the interest rate levels. In addition, we find that the financial structure as measured by the customer deposits to the total liabilities ratio and the annual customer deposits growth rate do not affect banks' profitability. On the other hand, the macroeconomic determinants such as GDP and inflation, with the exception of interest rate, have no influence on bank profitability. Finally, our study reveals that there are no significant differences in the profitability of Islamic and commercial banks. These findings apply only when using return on assets (ROA) as the profitability measure.

Key words: Banks' Profitability • Commercial Banks • Indonesia • Islamic Banks


The forecast evaluation literature has traditionally focused on methods for assessing point-forecasts. However, in the context of risk models, interest centers on more than just a single point of the forecast distribution. For example, value-at-risk (VaR) models which are currently in extremely wide use form interval forecasts. Many other important financial calculations also involve estimates not summarized by a point-forecast. Although some techniques are currently available for assessing interval and density forecasts, none are suitable for sample sizes typically available. This paper suggests an new approach to evaluating such forecasts. It requires evaluation of the entire forecast distribution, rather than a value-at-risk quantity. The information content of forecast distributions combined with ex post loss realizations is enough to construct a powerful test even with sample sizes as small as 100.


The pattern of autonomic deficit in the face of cluster headache patients resembles the deficit in patients with a postganglionic sympathetic lesion from some other cause; however the presence of abnormal cardiac rhythms and bilateral pupillary reflex deficit in some patients with cluster headache suggests that the lesion might compromise central sympathetic drive. To investigate this possibility, the vasomotor and sudomotor startle reflex was investigated in the hands of sic cluster headache patients with ocular and thermoregulator signs of postganglionic sympathetic deficit in the face; for comparison, responses were also investigated in 15 patients with a lesion in the cervical sympathetic pathway from some other cause. The startle reflex was intact in the hands of the six cluster headache patients, but was diminished ipsilaterally in patients with a central or preganglionic sympathetic lesion and also, surprisingly, in patients with a postganglionic lesion caused by an aneurysm of the internal carotid artery. Ocular sympathetic deficit was greater in patients with an aneurysm of the internal carotid artery than in cluster headache patients or in patients with a postganglionic sympathetic lesion from some other cause; the aneurysm may have compromised neurons with projections to the face and hand, or could have induced transsynaptic degeneration of preganglionic fibers supplying both regions. The findings indicate that central sympathetic drive is not impaired in cluster headache patients; thus, a peripheral lesion probably induces sympathetic deficit on the symptomatic side of the face.


Due to its association with Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC), a substantial effort has been made to better understand how Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCPyV) proteins drive oncogenesis; however, our understanding of the early steps of MCPyV infection remains poor. The polyomavirus Large Tumor antigen (LT) is a highly multi-functional protein with a wide range of activities, including: stimulation of cellular proliferation through its interaction with retinoblastoma protein and DnaJ heatshock protein family members; arrest of the cell cycle through a poorly understood activity localized to the C-terminal region; and regulation of the initiation of viral DNA replication. LT proteins also play important roles in regulating viral transcription. How these various functions are regulated to ensure an orderly progression of events conducive for the viral life cycle has not been well established. In this study, I show how phosphorylation of MCPyV LT plays an important role in regulating its many functions. I identify threonines 297 and 299 as key phospho-sites which regulate LT's ability to initiate replication. T297 phosphorylation inhibits LT binding to the viral origin of replication and acts as an "off " switch, while phosphorylation of T299 is required to stimulate LT-mediated replication of viral genomes. This study was the first to identify phosphorylation sites of LT and link them to important protein functions. Cross-reactivity to a phospho-specific antibody revealed yet another phosphorylation site on MCPyV LT as S816. We discovered that this phosphorylation event is mediated by ATM kinase, and may play a role in the MCPyV LT C-terminal domain's ability to arrest the cell cycle. This study helps to further elucidate MCPyV's association with the host DNA Damage Response (DDR) and provides some rational for the recruitment of these factors to viral replication centers. Finally, studies of the viral non-coding control region (NCCR) reveal a surprising interaction between LT and sT on the late promoter. MCPyV LT is able to robustly stimulate the late promoter only in the context of an intact Ori and sT co-expression. Using phosphomutant LTs and mutant Ori sequences, I highlight the importance of LT binding to the Ori and stimulation of replication as key factors in LT-mediated activation of the late promoter in the context of sT co-expression. LT alone actually represses the late promoter and requires sT coexpression to efficiently stimulate the late promoter after replication. This study therefore reveals an important dependence on sT expression for the regulation of transcription that has not yet been reported with other polyomaviruses. In sum, this study demonstrates multiple mechanisms of regulation including protein phosphorylation, protein-DNA interactions, and co-expression of key viral proteins as regulators of LT function. These studies may help elucidate critical factors required for establishing a robust cellular infection system which is greatly needed to further our understanding of the basic virology of this important human tumor virus. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1041 Graduate Group Cell & Molecular Biology First Advisor Jianxin You


Focused on the intimate effects of large-scale economic transformations, After Love illuminates the ways that everyday efforts to imagine, resist, and enact market reforms shape sexual desires and subjectivities. Anthropologist Noelle M. Stout arrived in Havana in 2002 to study the widely publicized emergence of gay tolerance in Cuba but discovered that the sex trade was dominating everyday discussions among gays, lesbians, and travestis . Largely eradicated after the Revolution, sex work, including same-sex prostitution, exploded in Havana when the island was opened to foreign tourism in the early 1990s. The booming sex trade led to unprecedented encounters between Cuban gays and lesbians, and straight male sex workers and foreign tourists. As many gay Cuban men in their thirties and forties abandoned relationships with other gay men in favor of intimacies with straight male sex workers, these bonds complicated ideas about "true love" for queer Cubans at large. From openly homophobic hustlers having sex with urban gays for room and board, to lesbians disparaging sex workers but initiating relationships with foreign men for money, to gay tourists espousing communist rhetoric while handing out Calvin Klein bikini briefs, the shifting economic terrain raised fundamental questions about the boundaries between labor and love in late-socialist Cuba.


Background Pulmonary hypertension (PHT) lacks community prevalence and outcome data. Objective To characterise minimum 'indicative' prevalences and mortality data for all forms of PHT in a selected population with an elevated estimated pulmonary artery systolic pressure (ePASP) on echocardiography. Design Observational cohort study. Setting Residents of Armadale and the surrounding region in Western Australia (population 165 450) referred to our unit for transthoracic echocardiography between January 2003 and December 2009. Results Overall, 10 314 individuals (6.2% of the surrounding population) had 15 633 echo studies performed. Of these, 3320 patients (32%) had insufficient TR to ePASP and 936 individuals (9.1%, 95% CI 8.6% to 9.7%) had PHT, defined as, ePASP>40 mm Hg. The minimum 'indicative' prevalence for all forms of PHT is 326 cases/100 000 inhabitants of the local population, with left heart disease-associated PHT being the commonest cause (250 cases/100 000). 15 cases of pulmonary arterial hypertension/100 000 inhabitants were identified and an additional 144 individuals (15%) with no identified cause for their PHT. The mean time to death for those with ePASP >40 mm Hg, calculated from the first recorded ePASP, was 4.1 years (95% CI 3.9 to 4.3). PHT increased mortality whatever the underlying cause, but patients with PHT from left heart disease had the worst prognosis and those with idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension receiving disease-specific treatment the best prognosis. Risk of death increased with PHT severity: severe pulmonary hypertension shortened the lifespan by an average of 1.1 years compared with mild pulmonary hypertension. Conclusions In this cohort, PHT was common and deadly. Left heart disease was the most common cause and had the worst prognosis and treated pulmonary arterial hypertension had the best prognosis.


Book published for the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Special Interest Group for International Information Issues (SIG-III). As part of the celebrations for the 75th ASIS&T anniversary and 30th anniversary of SIG-III), this special commemorative publication was created. In this anniversary publication, current and past SIG-III officers attempt to capture some of the SIG-III activities and highlight the challenges as well as the successes that the ASIS&T community has had in the last 30 years.


The perivascular adipose tissue (PVAT) is now recognized as an active contributor to vascular function. Adipocytes and stromal cells contained within PVAT are a source of an ever-growing list of molecules with varied paracrine effects on the underlying smooth muscle and endothelial cells, including adipokines, cytokines, reactive oxygen species, and gaseous compounds. Their secretion is regulated by systemic or local cues and modulates complex processes, including vascular contraction and relaxation, smooth muscle cell proliferation and migration, and vascular inflammation. Recent evidence demonstrates that metabolic and cardiovascular diseases alter the morphological and secretory characteristics of PVAT, with notable consequences. In obesity and diabetes, the expanded PVAT contributes to vascular insulin resistance. PVAT-derived cytokines may influence key steps of atherogenesis. The physiological anticontractile effect of PVAT is severely diminished in hypertension. Above all, a common denominator of the PVAT dysfunction in all these conditions is the immune cell infiltration, which triggers the subsequent inflammation, oxidative stress, and hypoxic processes to promote vascular dysfunction. In this review, we discuss the currently known mechanisms by which the PVAT influences blood vessel function. The important discoveries in the study of PVAT that have been made in recent years need to be further advanced, to identify the mechanisms of the anticontractile effects of PVAT, to explore the vascular-bed and species differences in PVAT function, to understand the regulation of PVAT secretion of mediators, and finally, to uncover ways to ameliorate cardiovascular disease by targeting therapeutic approaches to PVAT.


Objectives. With advances in the Human Genome Project, the implications of genetic technology in disease prevention should be assessed. Methods. The paradigm suggested in The Future of Public Health-assessment, policy development, and assurance-was used to examine the continuum from genetic technology to public health practice. Results. First, important public health functions are to (1) assess the impact of genes and their interactions with modifiable disease risk factors on the health status of the population and (2) assess the impact and safety of genetic testing on the population. Second, given the many implications of genetic testing, the public health community should participate in policy development related to the timing and use of genetic testing in disease prevention. Third, whenever appropriate, the public health community needs to ensure the development of public health genetics programs (e.g. newborn screening) and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of the use of genetic testing in disease prevention. Conclusions. Although most current genetic tests are not ready for disease prevention, there is an important role for the public health community in translating genetic technology into disease prevention.


Chaperone proteins are implicated not only in aiding the formation of properly folded and functional signaling proteins, but also in subsequent control of the activity of their protein targets. In particular the Hsp90- and Hsp70-type chaperone proteins take part in assembly of nuclear receptor complexes and control of transcription by those receptors (see STKE Perspective by DeFranco and Csermely). Hon et al. now present evidence for similar, yet distinct, roles for chaperone proteins of these types in control of the heme activator protein (Hap1) in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Yeast respond to oxygen with increased production of heme protein, which activates Hap1 transcription factor to promote transcription of genes whose products function in respiration and protection from oxygen damage. In the absence of heme, the transcriptional activity of Hap1 is normally repressed by interactions with cellular proteins, including Hsp90 and now the Hsp70 proteins designated Ssa and Sro9. Decreased expression of the Hsp70 Ssa (and, to a lesser extent, decreased expression of Sro or its partner Ydj1) caused enhanced transcriptional and DNA binding activity of Hap1 in the absence of heme, but did not affect Hap1 activity in the presence of high concentrations of heme. This contrasts with the effect of Hsp90 on Hap1 or on nuclear receptors. Loss of Hsp90 does not lead to activation, but rather reduces transcriptional activity of its partners even in the presence of activators (steroid hormones or heme). The authors note that distinct modes of regulation of Hap1 activity by the Hsp70 and Hsp90 chaperones provide a means for precise regulation of Hap1 that reveals previously unrecognized versatility in the control of transcription in complexes with multiple chaperones. T. Hon, H. C. Lee, A. Hach, J. L. Johnson, E. A. Craig, H. Erdjument-Bromage, P. Tempst, L. Zhang, The Hsp70-Ydj1 molecular chaperone represses the activity of the heme activator protein Hap1 in the absence of heme. Mol. Cell. Biol. 21, 7923-7932 (2001). [Abstract] [Full Text] D. B. DeFranco, P. Csermely, Steroid receptor and molecular chaperone encounters in the nucleus. Science's STKE (2000), http://www.stke.org/cgi/content/full/OC_sigtrans;2000/42/pe1 [Summary] [Full Text]


A study of data from the California Department of Corrections -- the system in California for adult prisoners - shows that there are more Hispanic prisoners than any other group, with African-Americans second in percentage incarcerated. Other data, from the population of 160,846 prisoners, reveals interesting findings. Prisoners seem more likely to come from southern California than from northern California. Drawing on the author's own prison work in California, it is suggested that gang membership may account, in part at least, for the large percentage of prisoners being Hispanic or African-American. Other issues are discussed. Key Words: California, criminal justice system, prisons, drugs, gangs, Hispanics, African-Americans, Crime is a serious social problem in the United States and as in many other countries (Bartol, 1999; Correctional Service of Canada, 1990; Douglas, Burgess, Burgess, & Ressler, 1992; Hodgins, 1993). California is the most highly populated state in the United States. It has been a state where numerous innovative programs have appeared for dealing with crime and with prisoners. It also has a wide array of racial and ethnic groups. So, it is of some value to look at characteristics of prisoners in the state's Department of Corrections, which is the agency that handles adult prisoners. In a previous study, the author reported on the characteristics of prisoners in a California Youth Authority prison treatment program (Eisenman, 1993). Having worked for close to two years in a California Youth Authority intensive treatment program, he was able to draw upon objective data and staff ratings when engaging in this study (Eisenman, 1993). His previous study of official data in California revealed interesting information about crime rates and arrest rates (Eisenman, 1994). Adulthood in California is defined as being 18 years of age or older. Younger prisoners go to a variety of prisons and county-run camps. The worst youth offenders are sent to the California Youth Authority. However, from age 18-25 years of age, a convicted person can be sent either to the California Youth Authority or to the Department of Corrections. Immature, weak offenders, in the 18-25 years age range, are more likely to be sent to the California Youth Authority, while your more normal criminal in this age range is more likely to be sent to an adult prison. Both the California Youth Authority and the California Department of Corrections have mostly prisoners with serious, felony convictions, and often with long histories of committing crimes. Findings The data ppresented here were obtained from the California Department of Corrections. At the time the data were gathered, in the middle of the year 2000, the inmate population comprised 160,846 prisoners, of which the greatest percentage were Hispanics, representing 34.0% of prisoners in the California Department of Corrections. Next come African-Americans, who comprised 31.4% of the prison population, Whites constituted 29.4% of the prison population, while 5.2% were classified as "Other." Why would Hispanics be such a high percentage of the prison population? A partial answer comes from the top five counties in terms of inmates in the Department of Corrections. Los Angeles County, which has a high percentage of Hispanics, leads with 34.3% of the prisoners being from Los Angeles County. Then, the percentages drop off greatly from the 34.3% of Los Angeles County. But, the other four counties are all in southern California, where Hispanics would be more likely to be found, than in the northern California counties. The second most populous county is San Diego County, with 8.2% of the prison population being from there; the third most is San Bernardino County, 6.2%; the fourth most is Orange County (right next to Los Angeles County, but with a much wealthier population) 5.3%; and fifth is Riverside County, 5.4%. Although the United States has had a War on Drugs that has led to large numbers of federal prisoners being incarcerated for drug offenses, this is surprisingly not the top cause of incarceration in California, although it is the second largest category of incarceration. …


Objective: To investigate the significance of complement activation in patients with primary antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). Methods: Thirty-six patients with primary APS, 42 control patients with non-systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) connective tissue diseases, and 36 healthy volunteers were analysed retrospectively. Serum complement levels (C3, C4, CH50) and anaphylatoxins (C3a, C4a, C5a) were examined in all subjects, and serum complement regulatory factors (factor H and factor I) were measured in patients with primary APS. Plasma anticoagulant activity was determined in a mixing test using the activated partial thromboplastin time. Results: Serum complement levels were significantly lower in patients with primary APS than in patients with non-SLE connective tissue diseases (mean (SD) C3: 81.07 (17.86) vs 109.80 (22.76) mg/dl, p<0.001; C4: 13.04 (8.49) vs 21.70 (6.96) mg/dl, p<0.001; CH50: 31.32 (8.76) vs 41.40 (7.70) U/ml, p<0.001) or healthy volunteers. Only two healthy subjects with low serum C4 levels showed hypocomplementaemia, whereas most patients with primary APS showed raised serum C3a and C4a. No subjects showed raised C5a. Patients with primary APS with low serum C3 or C4 had significantly higher levels of C3a or C4a than healthy controls. No patients had low serum complement regulatory factors. Among patients with primary APS, hypocomplementaemia was significantly more common in those with high anticoagulant activity than in those with low or normal activity. Conclusion: Hypocomplementaemia is common in patients with primary APS, reflecting complement activation and consumption, and was correlated with anticoagulant activity, suggesting that antiphospholipid antibodies may activate monocytes and macrophages via anaphylatoxins produced in complement activation.


In order to investigate the effect of decomposing leaf litter of Eucalyptus grandis ( E. grandis ) on the growth trait and resistance physiology of Eremochloa ophiuroides ( E. ophiuroides ), three treatments with different amounts of leaf litter were designed in this study, including A1 (30 g/pot), A2 (60 g/pot), A3 (90 g/pot), and a group without treatment (0 g/pot, CK), The blank experiment group with distilled fallen leaves were set as mentioned above. The results showed that growth traits (root length, plant height, fresh weight and dry weight) were significantly inhibited along with the increasing amounts of E. grandis leaf litter. The activity of CAT and SOD increased at low content of leaf litter and less processing time, but significantly dropped over time. The activity of POD was inhibited at all tested time, and all treatments were significantly lower than that in CK. The MDA content of CK was similar to that in A1 and A2, but significantly lower than that in A3 at the 30 th day after sowing, and three treatments were significantly higher than that in CK after sowing for 60 days and 90 days. The soluble sugar content went up with the increase of leaf litter content at all time points, while the change of soluble protein contents was opposite. This study demonstrated that the decomposing leaf litter of E. grandis had obviously allelopathic effect on the growth and resistance physiology characteristics of E. ophiuroides , which should be controlled rationally in the E. grandis plantation.


Tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α blockers have emerged as valuable tools in the treatment of active rheumatoid arthritis. The increased incidence of reactivated latent mycobacterial infection following institution of infliximab therapy has been reported. However, less is known about the risk of malignancy with use of anti-TNF antibodies. We present a case of disseminated tuberculosis, possible infection with Mycobacterium fortuitum, and lung cancer in association with infliximab therapy in a 55-year-old man with active rheumatoid arthritis who had received previously isoniazid chemoprophylaxis. We review the existing literature on anti-TNF agents and risk of tuberculosis and malignancy.


Although ideological polarization can create problems for governability and democratic stability, this article argues that it also has beneficial effects in new democracies. By clarifying the political alternatives, polarization creates strong links between parties and voters, and thereby instills accountability mechanisms that force parties to remain responsive to evolving voter preferences. A comparative historical analysis of six South American cases demonstrates that the vast differences in the quality of representation in the 1980s, immediately after many countries in the region returned to democracy, were rooted in an early bifurcation of party systems in the first half of the twentieth century: while prolonged periods of ideological conflict occurred in some countries during this period, polarization was aborted by various means in others. By showing that ideological moderation may help formal democracies survive, but that aborting conflict in the long run severely hampers key aspects of the quality of democracy, this study suggests a revision of conventional views regarding ideological polarization.


Ten years after the tragic terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the tension between civil liberties and national security-based law enforcement endures. The due process rights of terror suspects are at the pinnacle of this ongoing debate. Two cases in particular pushed the boundaries of constitutional compliance. On December 25, 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate an explosive device while on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. The "Christmas Day Bomber" was then taken into custody and questioned by FBI agents before being read his Miranda rights. In May 2010, Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square and was later questioned by FBI agents for three hours prior to his rights advisement. In light of these cases, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he would work with Congress to seek new legislation formalizing Miranda's public safety exception. When these efforts stalled, the FBI issued a memorandum in October 2010 establishing the current policy; terror suspects will not be read Miranda warnings during the first critical hours of custodial interrogation. This article critically examines the policy to forego providing rights warnings to terror suspects due to public safety concerns. Taking into consideration the tension between the forward looking nature of intelligence gathering, and the post-hoc deterrence and incapacitation goals of criminal punishment, this article concludes that these goals are not irreconcilable. After discussing the merits of both the policy and legal consideration of the current approach to formalizing the public safety exception, this article analyzes proposals aimed at allowing the full use of a terror suspect's statements to prevent future attacks, and suggest limits to the introduction of those same statements at trial.


Using near-field scanning optical microscopy and ultrafast laser spectroscopy, we study the linear optical properties of subwavelength nanoslit and nanohole arrays in metal films, which are prototype structures for novel plasmonic crystals. Near-field microscopy provides direct evidence for surface plasmon polariton (SPP) excitation and allows for spatial imaging of the corresponding SPP modes. By employing spectral interferometry with ultrashort 11-fs light pulses, we directly reconstruct the temporal structure of the electric field of these pulses as they are transmitted through the metallic nanostructures. The analysis of these data allows for a quantitative extraction of the plasmonic band structure and the radiative damping of the corresponding SPP modes. Clear evidence for plasmonic band gap formation is given. Our results reveal that the coherent coupling between different SPP modes can result in a pronounced suppression of radiative SPP damping, increasing the SPP lifetime from 30 fs to more than 200 fs. These findings are relevant for optimizing and manipulating the optical properties of novel nano-plasmonic devices.


Bacillus anthracis is the causative agent of the infectious disease anthrax. The disease is caused after taking up the spores by either inhalation, ingestion or through skin lesion. They then germinate inside the body and start secreting the tripartite anthrax toxin. This toxin can hijack the two anthrax toxin receptors, CMG2 (ANTXR2) or TEM8 (ANTXR1) to enter host cells. Once inside the host cell, the toxin will start to interfere with essential cellular pathways, ultimately leading to severe damage and death. The two anthrax toxin receptors have been well described in the context of anthrax toxin pathogenesis. Their normal, physiological function however has been studied far less. Mutations in either one of the two proteins leads to a severe genetic disease, underlining the importance CMG2 and TEM8 normally have. My thesis therefore aimed at better understanding the physiological function of the two receptors. In a first part, we chose to study the impact of N-glycosylation on the folding, trafficking and, finally, the function of CMG2 and TEM8. N-glycosylation is a very common posttranslational modification and has been shown to play an important role in various cellular processes such as protein folding, stability, cell adhesion, endocytosis, cell-cell recognition and trafficking. We show that both receptors are glycosylated on the predicted sites, with varying impacts on different functions of the proteins. TEM8 crucially relies on the presence of the sugar sidechains, as a non-glycosylated mutant will fail to fold, will be retained in the ER and is non-functional. CMG2 is less sensitive to defects in glycosylation, even a non-glycosylated mutant will be able to reach its target destination and function correctly. However, in the simultaneous presence of mutations seen in Hyaline Fibromatis Syndrome, N-glycosylation seems to function as a buffer, stabilizing the mutated protein. N-glycosylation helps to increase the folding capacity of both receptors and therefore impacts on their physiological function. In a second part our objective was to find new interaction partners of CMG2 and study their effect on toxin endocytosis as a suitable functional output. We identified 4 new proteins that regulate anthrax toxin entry via CMG2: RNF41 and Cbl, both ubiquitin E3 ligases, MARK2, a serine-threonine kinase and USP8, a deubiquitinating enzyme. In the absence of any of these four proteins, toxin entry into cells was strongly delayed or blocked. Of these four new regulators, Cbl and MARK2 are conserved for toxin entry via TEM8. We found that both RNF41 and Cbl can ubiquitinate CMG2, but regulate different steps of toxin entry. We also established a flow cytometry-based endocytosis assay for CMG2 and TEM8, enabling us to look at endocytosis and internalization kinetics in the absence of the pathogenic ligand anthrax toxin. Both receptors continuously internalize from the plasma membrane in an endocytic process, which is regulated by ligand-binding and the multimerization of the receptors. Interestingly, CMG2 and TEM8 show a striking difference in their endocytosis rate, suggesting an important functional role of this behavior as well.


Scene perception is a fundamental aspect of vision. Humans are capable of analyzing behaviorally-relevant scene properties such as spatial layouts or scene categories very quickly, even from low resolution versions of scenes. Although humans perform these tasks effortlessly, they are very challenging for machines. Developing methods that well capture the properties of the representation used by the visual system will be useful for building computational models that are more consistent with perception. While it is common to use hand-engineered features that extract information from predefined dimensions, they require careful tuning of parameters and do not generalize well to other tasks or larger datasets. This thesis is driven by the hypothesis that the perceptual representations are adapted to the statistical properties of natural visual scenes. For developing statistical features for global-scale structures (low spatial frequency information that encompasses entire scenes), I propose to train hierarchical probabilistic models on whole scene images. I first investigate statistical clusters of scene images by training a mixture model under the assumption that each image can be decoded by sparse and independent coefficients. Each cluster discovered by the unsupervised classifier is consistent with the high-level semantic categories (such as indoor, outdoor-natural and outdoor-manmade) as well as perceptual layout properties (mean depth, openness and perspective). To address the limitation of mixture models in their assumptions of a discrete number of underlying clusters, I further investigate a continuous representation for the distributions of whole scenes. The model parameters optimized for natural visual scenes reveal a compact representation that encodes their global-scale structures. I develop a probabilistic similarity measure based on the model and demonstrate its consistency with the perceptual similarities. Lastly, to learn the representations that better encode the manifold structures in general high-dimensional image space, I develop the image normalization process to find a set of canonical images that anchors the probabilistic distributions around the real data manifolds. The canonical images are employed as the centers of the conditional multivariate Gaussian distributions. This approach allows to learn more detailed structures of the local manifolds resulting in improved representation of the high level properties of scene images.


By investigating the effect of habits and surroundings on the blood pressure (of hypertensives) in Okayama Prefecture, the following results were obtained: 1. There was a close relation between drinking of alcoholic beverage and blood pressure but this concerned with men who acquired the habit of drinking by the force of surroundings. Strong tea and coffee, too, had something to do with blood pressure but in this case the surroundings were out of question. 2. Blood pressure was apt to rise with men who took meals hastily but it bad nothing to do with women. 3. Those who were fond of excessively salty or fatty food often suffered from hypertension. 4. Those who were particular about their food were found in the greatest number among the group of extreme hypertension. 5. Hypertension was rarely found among those with constant poor appetite. 6. Hypertension seldom attacked those who had the following complaints: To fall ill occasionally, to be always out of order, to have severe mental fatigue, to feel fatigue every morning, etc. But hereditary weak constitution had nothing to do with hypertension. 7. The blood pressure rose when the time for sleeting was less than 4 hours. It also rose with those who were easily awakened from their sleep or could not enjoy a sound sleep. But it was difficult to find any immediate relations between the failure to sleep readily or to have regular hours for sleep and the blood pressure. 8. Many heavy smokers were found among hypertensives which shows that smoking is the cause of high blood pressure. 9. The blood pressure rose of women whose household operates less than 50 area of farms while in the household with over one hectares, men's pressure rose. This is because in the former case, the stress of labor falls on women while in the latter, men bear the burden. 10. The rate of grey hair and baldness was high with the group of hypertension irrespective of sex. The same was the case with the declining of memory.


ABSTRACT Introduction: To prepare for global elimination of trachoma by 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends mapping of trachoma at district-level to enable planning of elimination activities in affected populations. The aim of our study was to provide data on trachoma for each local government area (LGA) of Kaduna State, Nigeria, as such data were previously unavailable. Method: As part of the Global Trachoma Mapping Project (GTMP), a population-based cross-sectional trachoma survey was conducted in each of the 23 LGAs of Kaduna State, between May and June 2013. The protocols of the GTMP were used. Results: The prevalence of trachomatous inflammation – follicular (TF) in children aged 1–9 years was between 0.03% and 8% across the LGAs, with only one LGA (Igabi) having a TF prevalence ≥5%. The LGA-level prevalences of trichiasis in persons aged 15 years and older were between 0.00% and 0.78%. Eleven LGAs had trichiasis prevalences of 0.2% and over in adults; a threshold equivalent to 1 case per 1000 total population. The LGA-level proportion of households with access to improved water sources ranged from 9% to 96%, while household access to latrines ranged from 5% to 99%. Conclusion: Kaduna State has generally hypoendemic trachoma, but a few trichiasis surgeries are still required to attain the WHO elimination targets. Better access to improved water and sanitation is needed.


Purpose: Because of poor prognosis and development of resistance against chemotherapeutic drugs, the existing treatment modalities for gastric cancer are ineffective. Hence, novel agents that are safe and effective are urgently needed. Whether γ-tocotrienol can sensitize gastric cancer to capecitabine in vitro and in a xenograft mouse model was investigated. Experimental Design: The effect of γ-tocotrienol on proliferation of gastric cancer cell lines was examined by mitochondrial dye uptake assay, apoptosis by esterase staining, NF-κB activation by DNA-binding assay, and gene expression by Western blotting. The effect of γ-tocotrienol on the growth and chemosensitization was also examined in subcutaneously implanted tumors in nude mice. Results: γ-Tocotrienol inhibited the proliferation of various gastric cancer cell lines, potentiated the apoptotic effects of capecitabine, inhibited the constitutive activation of NF-κB, and suppressed the NF-κB–regulated expression of COX-2, cyclin D1, Bcl-2, CXCR4, VEGF, and matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9). In a xenograft model of human gastric cancer in nude mice, we found that administration of γ-tocotrienol alone (1 mg/kg body weight, intraperitoneally 3 times/wk) significantly suppressed the growth of the tumor and this effect was further enhanced by capecitabine. Both the markers of proliferation index Ki-67 and for microvessel density CD31 were downregulated in tumor tissue by the combination of capecitabine and γ-tocotrienol. As compared with vehicle control, γ-tocotrienol also suppressed the NF-κB activation and the expression of cyclin D1, COX-2, intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), MMP-9, survivin, Bcl-xL, and XIAP. Conclusions: Overall our results show that γ-tocotrienol can potentiate the effects of capecitabine through suppression of NF-κB–regulated markers of proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastasis. Clin Cancer Res; 18(8); 2220–9. ©2012 AACR.


We analytically predict the existence of both spatial bright and dark counterpropagating solitons in a reflection grating in the presence of the Kerr nonlinearity. The basic trapping mechanism consists of a twofold balance where diffraction is compensated by self-focusing and reflection is altered by the nonlinear-induced interferometric grating. We find that, whenever the spectral soliton profile lies within the grating stop band, bright and dark solitons exist only if the mutual phase of the counterpropagating solitons is pi or 0, respectively.


NaNbO3 samples were synthesized via a microwave-assisted hydrothermal method for different processing times (ranging from 30 to 90 minutes) at 180 °C using NaOH as a mineralizer. XRD and Rietveld refinement data confirmed the successful preparation of NaNbO3 with an orthorhombic (Pbma) crystallographic structure devoid of secondary phases. Raman scattering spectra reveal that the symmetry of the NaNbO3 space group has vibrational modes associated with the librations and internal vibrational modes of NbO6 the octahedron. The NaNbO3 particles grow in plate-like shape besides presenting high agglomeration degree. However, the particles assume parallelepiped-like shape as increasing synthesis time and the agglomeration degree becomes smaller. With an increase in the processing time, the optical band gap (3.24 eV (30 min), 3.32 eV (60 min), and 3.34 eV (90 min)) presents a slight difference in the density of intermediary energy levels within the band gap, which affects the electronic transitions. The broad band PL emission (350–800 nm) obtained at room temperature with a dominant PL sub-band at ∼455 nm (blue component) indicates that the changes in the electronic density are related to the defects of oxygen vacancies (in the bulk and surface) due to the structural disorder degree in the medium-range, i.e., local distortions of the NbO6 octahedron as result of changes in the Nb–O bond lengths and O–Nb–O bond angles, increasing the degree of structural disorder in the medium-range, and thereby a decline in the PL intensity with an increase in synthesis time. This medium-range structural disorder is able to transform the NaNbO3 ordered structure, which is constituted of clusters, into an ordered-disordered NaNbO3 structure formed by , and complex clusters.


Background: Microalbuminuria (MA), a common phenomenon in children with sickle cell anemia (SCA), is defined as an increased urinary albumin–creatinine ratio of 30–300 mg/g of creatinine in an early morning or random urine specimen. Whereas some studies have shown that MA reflects early kidney damage, other studies have documented that it is a manifestation of advanced nephropathy. The reports about the relationship between glomerular filtration rate (GFR) and MA in children with SCA are conflicting. Materials and Methods: This was a longitudinal study. Serum creatinine, GFR, and albumin–creatinine ratio were determined at baseline. The individuals were followed up over 3 months during which albumin–creatinine ratio and GFR were assayed monthly, and the relationship between them was determined. Results: One hundred and seventy children aged 1–18 years with SCA and MA were studied. The mean albumin–creatinine ratio was 120.9 ± 66.8 mg/g, 138.32 ± 101.79 mg/g, 117.12 ± 78.09 mg/g, and 106.73 ± 38.82 mg/g at baseline, 1, 2, and 3 months, respectively, whereas the mean GFR was 121.7 ± 33.0 ml/min/1.73 m2, 117.69 ± 29.70 ml/min/1.73 m2, 117.56 ± 35.77 ml/min/1.732 m2, and 116.22 ± 30.28 ml/min/1.73 m2 at baseline, 1, 2, and 3 months, respectively. There was no significant relationship between MA and GFR in the participants throughout the study period (Pearson's correlation coefficients: 0.050, 0.250, 0.268, and 0.143 and corresponding P: 0.95, 0.88, 0.15, and 0.36). Conclusions: GFR is normal in SCA children with MA. There is no significant relationship between MA and GFR in children with SCA.


The recursive pyramid algorithm (RPA) is a reformulation of the classical pyramid algorithm (PA) for computing the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The RPA computes the N-point DWT in real time (running DWT) using just L(log N/spl minus/1) words of storage, as compared with O(N) words required by the PA. L is the length of the wavelet filter. The RPA is combined with the short-length FIR filter algorithms to reduce the number of multiplications and additions. >


People read in the newspapers about computer chips, supercomputers, artificial intelligence, and myriad new technologies, and they want to understand them. Is there a better way to give them a grasp of computing than by providing the superficial view a typical of ordinary "computer literacy" courses, without making them struggle through the rigorous curriculum required in a computer science education? Yes, there is. This article describes a first course for nonmajors that covers a surprisingly broad set of topics in substantial depth. Advances in teaching methods involving an appropriate selection of topics, proper coverage of those topics, and the use of animated simulations can significantly ease the teaching of computer science to nonspecialists. The course described enables students to develop skill in programming, learn the fundamental mechanisms of computer hardware and software, and gain a substantial understanding of important topics such as computational intractability, noncomputability, parallel architectures, and artificial intelligence.<<ETX>>


Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003. 326 pp. $44.95. As I was finishing reading this fine book, I was in the process of negotiating the inscription for the entry to the new memorial that opened on June 2, 2004 at Belzec. The negotiations were conducted between Poles, Israelis, and American Jews, between men of two different generations and three different orientations to history and memory. Code words were being spoken: "Martyrdom," "Belzec death camp for Jews," "industrialized murder," and "Final Solution to the Jewish Question [Problem]." They meant different things to different people, different things in different languages. The Hebrew word for victim -- korban -- also has an echo of the religious meaning of sacrifice. It is no wonder that even with the best of will, the negotiations stretched on and on and on. The Psalmist said and American music made famous again: "By the waters of Babylon we sat and we wept as we remembered Zion." The place from which you remember events shapes the nature of that memory. And place is not merely a concept of space, but one of time. Public memory, as Jonathan Huener so wisely states, is a dialogue between the past and the present pointing toward the future. In tracing the history of the site of Auschwitz, Poland through the postwar years from 1945 to 79 as his title indicates, Huener in fact does more than that. He does not stop with 1979, the year of the Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland, which included a stop at Auschwitz, but traces the history through the fall of Communism. He deals with the Auschwitz Convent Controversy and stops at 1989 when Communism falls and a new democratic government takes its place. Given what is happening to the site in the post-Communist era as Poland draws close to the West and recovers a fragment of its long history with the Jews, the current book virtually mandates a sequel that should be every bit as interesting as the first book, if not more so. His title is chosen with precision. Auschwitz, Poland. The town is near the camp is Oswiecim, yet the Germans called the concentration camp of Auschwitz, and the concentration camp was actually three camps in one: Auschwitz I, the prison camp; Auschwitz II, the death camp known also as Birkenau; and Auschwitz III, the work camps that stretched many miles into the surroundings countryside (also known as Buna-Monowitz, which was the site of many German slave labor camps and the place where heavy investments were made by Nazified German industry). The Poles inherited the concentration camp after the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the future of the camp as well as the history of the camp was contested from the very beginning. The outside world -- including the Jews -- does not differentiate between Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II [Birkenau], though the camps, their populations, and their functions were vastly different. …


Jurisdictional tensions are nothing new in the Canadian federation, but recent provincial challenges to the constitutionality of Parliament's carbon pricing policy come with very large stakes for Canadians. With renewed commitments to meaningfully reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under the Paris Agreement, and details for how to do so set out in the 2016 Pan Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, Canada seemed poised to start taking the steps needed to address what can fairly be described as a very serious threat to Canada and the world. But effective climate policy requires action at multiple levels of government, and Parliament's choice to require a base level of carbon price applicable in all jurisdictions has raised the ire of some provinces who believe this is outside Parliament's jurisdiction.

In this paper, I have examined three central issues that Saskatchewan and Ontario's constitutional references will require the Courts to examine. First, I analyse the main basis of jurisdiction argued by Canada to justify the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act (GGPPA), Parliament's authority to legislate for Peace, Order and Good Government (POGG) under the National Concern branch. In particular, I address the argument made by the challenging provinces that conferring jurisdiction to Parliament over GHG emissions as a matter of national concern would displace provincial GHG emissions. I conclude that this argument is unfounded in light of recent jurisprudential approaches to the division of powers, proper characterization of the subject matter, applications of the double aspect doctrine, and the interpretative principle of cooperative federalism. While provincial concerns about federalism should not be minimized, there is ample constitutional space for provincial and federal legislation on GHG emissions to peacefully co-exist, especially when they are both aimed at the same broad goal of reducing GHG emissions. Second, I examine the prospects for justifying the GGPPA under the Emergency branch of POGG. In light of recent scientific evidence, there is a legitimate basis for qualifying the GGPPA as legislation addressing the global and national climate emergency. I examine the contours of the temporal limitation on the emergency branch, since it is through the temporary limit that courts justify this branch's intrusion on provincial powers, and suggest that the window of time between now and 2030 may be the most appropriate timeframe for this power, given the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Climate (IPCC)'s findings in its 1.5 degree report identifying this as the crucial timeframe within which to make the rapid, unprecedented changes needed to avert dangerous levels of climate change. Third, I consider a tension that arises when jurisprudential tests accustomed to dealing with regulatory charges that are aimed at offsetting regulatory costs are applied to a behaviour-modifying economic instrument, such as carbon pricing. While the courts have already recognized that behaviour-modifying measures can themselves constitute regulatory charges, thereby satisfying the jurisprudential test for finding a connection between a regulatory scheme and a charge, they have an opportunity in these cases to fill in the contours of this branch of the test.

While the provincial challenges raise important questions about the balance of power in our federation, their arguments – if successful – would leave a gaping hole in Canada's ability to enact a country-wide policy to reduce GHG emissions. While they may not like the policy choice Parliament made in using carbon pricing, the choice of policy itself is not under scrutiny. The heart of the matter is whether Parliament has the jurisdiction to enact the GGPPA. My article concludes that the legislation is intra vires. The fact is that meaningfully reducing GHG emissions is going to require some difficult choices. But the difficulty is already here, being felt in floods, fires, droughts, extreme storms, and melting permafrost. Our future depends on the Courts recognizing that the Constitution is equipped with the flexibility and adaptability needed to enable the country to legislate an effective, full response to an issue with such grave repercussions as climate change, without leaving any cracks through which Canadians' futures could fall.


Abnormal heart rate characteristics of reduced variability and transient decelerations are present early in the course of neonatal sepsis. To investigate the dynamics, we calculated sample entropy, a similar but less biased measure than the popular approximate entropy. Both calculate the probability that epochs of window length m that are similar within a tolerance r remain similar at the next point. We studied 89 consecutive admissions to a tertiary care neonatal intensive care unit, among whom there were 21 episodes of sepsis, and we performed numerical simulations. We addressed the fundamental issues of optimal selection of m and r and the impact of missing data. The major findings are that entropy falls before clinical signs of neonatal sepsis and that missing points are well tolerated. The major mechanism, surprisingly, is unrelated to the regularity of the data: entropy estimates inevitably fall in any record with spikes. We propose more informed selection of parameters and reexamination of studies where approximate entropy was interpreted solely as a regularity measure.


Experimental research of subcooled flow boiling heat transfer of de-ionized water in a high-aspect-ratio, one-sided heating, vertical rectangular microchannel having a hydraulic diameter of 0.94 mm (5.01 mm × 0.52 mm) is carried out. The tested heat flux, mass flux, and inlet fluid subcooling are in the ranges of 0–30 W/cm2, 200–500 kg/m2 s, and 5–20 °C, respectively. A series of 24 existing correlations for subcooled flow boiling heat transfer are systematically reviewed and evaluated against the experimental data containing 328 points, which give significantly different predictions. Some typical conventional correlations such as Kandlikar, Shah, Chen, and Liu and Winterton predict well, among which the Shah correlation performs the best with the mean absolute deviation (MAD) of 10.45%. However, they all neglect the effect of fluid subcooling, especially in low-subcooling regime. Based on the Shah correlation, a new correlation for subcooled flow boiling heat transfer in the vertical narrow microchannel considering the subcooling effect is developed, which shows higher precision of prediction with the MAD of 7.87%.


continent. 2.1 (2012): 56–58 Nechvatal, Joseph, Immersion Into Noise , Open Humanities Press, 2011, 267 pp, $23.99 (pbk), ISBN 1-60785-241-1. As someone who's knowledge of "art" mostly began with the domestic (Western) and Japanese punk and noise scenes of the late 80's and early 90's, practices and theories of noise fall rather close to my heart. It is peeking into the esoteric enclaves of weird music and noise that helped me understand what I think I might like art to be: A way of learning about the world through perturbation—exploration by incitement and speculation of possible conditions. What I have always loved about artistic investigations influenced by noisy aesthetics or sensibilities is that they can be simultaneously transcendent and absurd, amusing and revelatory, singular and pluralistic, mindless and intensely penetrating. The provocative friction that noise brings to bear on aesthetic experience, artistic practice, and "the" Art World acts as a kind of impulse response, proposing new energies while revealing underlying structure; noise signals are a simultaneous synthesis and analysis of spaces, subjects and relations. About two weeks prior to Christmas 2011, Joseph Nechvatal was generous enough to spend some time with me at 39 Quai des Grands Augustins, Paris . We each had one glass of red wine, briefly discussed common acquaintances, shared points of interest, and his published writings. We also, I recall, disagreed lightheartedly about how much contemporary relevance the ideas of telematic-artist Roy Ascott have for today's art-and-technology practitioner (Joseph > Jamie). After the encounter, I read through a PDF version of Immersion Into Noise Joseph was kind enough to send me ( the HTML version is here ). A number of points of entry into cultures of "noise" are available these days. There are the acoustic-spatial approaches of thinkers like Douglas Kahn, Brandon LaBelle and Salome Voegelin; the techno-cultural musicologies of Jonathan Sterne and David Toop; the political writings of Jacques Attali, former adviser to President Francois Mitterrand, in his Noise: The Political Economy of Music (spoiler alert: It's not really about music). Enter the new writings of one Joseph Nechvatal, with his invitation of an Immersion Into Noise . Nechvatal has been active for over 20 years in on- and off-line discussions of art, technology, virtuality, as well as his own set of art-theoretical departures and terminologies. A practicing artist, and instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Immersion Into Noise , is Nechvatal's third published volume. His writings, broadly, address a concern with the possibilities of a synthesis between the biological and the virtual, and the contemporary artistic resonances that these possibilities suggest. Nechvatal's project is to try to name contemporary currents of artistic practice within our technologized culture. He comes at this through art history, post-modern philosophy, anthropology and consciousness studies. Portions of Immersion Into Noise have appeared in his PhD dissertation, as well as online art publications like Zing Magazine . An open-access publication, and part of the impressive and heartening activities of the Open Humanities Press, Nechvatal's book is a somewhat unexpected addition to the Critical Climate Change series edited by Tom Cohen of SUNY University and Claire Colebrook of Penn State. Other titles in the series have address themes of post-globalism and cultures of threat. Joseph Nachvetal's title is the first to focus entirely on art history, art practice and aesthetics. It is awkward to too easily fit Nechvatal's writings in with the aforementioned burgeoning canon of cultural and artistic practice in, and writings on, noise (Russolo, Schaeffer, Cage and Yves Klein through to Kahn, LaBelle, Voegelin, et. al). Immersion Into Noise is not primarily an examination of sound-noise or phenomenologies of sound, and the relativist, non-objectivist possibilities arising therefrom in social, public, and exhibition art practices. Although Nechvatal makes mention of sonic practice and experience (his own encounter in 1968 with the technological complex was set in motion at a Jimi Hendrix concert at the Chicago Coliseum), he does so only by way of introducing a broader concept of "art-noise." The noise-scape can envelope various kinds of involvement in all kinds of art, by artists, audiences, and distributed amalgams of all of these. Midway through the book, we are offered characteristics of an "immersive noise vision theory." This theory, leading to an even more syncretic thinking about the art experience, is sketched out through further reference to the author's personal observation, as well as his art-historical research and notes. Personal examples take on the reflex of a kind of art-noise-travel-writing, as Nechvatal visits Ryoji Ikeda's Datamatics [ver 2.0] installation at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), hears Cecil Taylor at Alice Tully Hall in New York, spends time with the cave paintings of Lascaux, France, and explores the Wagner-inspired Venus Grotto of Linderhof, Bavaria, to name a few. These site-events, to varying degrees, are renderings of noise-art's potential to "place us back into a ritual position by dragging art down into the felt 360° noise-perspective of the enthusiastic and participatory." (p.103) The arc of the ideas proposed here position immersiveness, saturation and "scopic all-over tension" as most productively foundational to noise art, or art-noise. An itinerary from the most ancient of artistic expressions (cave drawings) to the most digital of presentations is charted (Ikeda's minimal/maximal bitwise works for synchronized audio and visual projection). The harsh sonic onslaught of Masami Akita (a.k.a. Merzbow), is, under this analysis, not so far from colossal denseness of the churches of the High Baroque (Nechvatal visits the Rosario Chapel in Santo Domingo Church, Puebla, Mexico). And there is much more here, eaten up by noise: A rethinking of the work of Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Nicolas Schoffler (whom Nechvatal names the true "the Father of Cybernetic Art") and the Happenings of Alan Kaprow, all as art-noise in their own right. Each of these artists and moments demonstrate techniques of destabilization, immersiveness, frame-breaking and "all-over fullness and fervor." Here is writing on art and art history that is as ambitious as it is promising: "wildly visionary," Nechvatal states as in conclusion. Self-admittedly far-reaching to the point of verging on totalization, we are asked to consider that the moments, spaces, arts and artists Nechvatal appreciates in the book all derive from an increasingly prevalent "noise consciousness." Along the way we gain an appreciation of noise as a productive and proactive tension in art, rather than an unwanted signal or unwelcome intrusion. Most promising here for me are Nechvatal's revealing descriptions of the potential for noise to make manifest the material-perceptual framework of individual and collective art experience. How might we allow what we have been repeatedly taught is our contemporary condition of "information overload" to transform itself into a calm, warm, sympathetic kind of inundation. Treatment of experience in this way, dissolves boundaries between the bodily, informational, material and technical complexes that make up our world, and is the promise of a radical, if momentary, Immersion Into Noise .


Quantifying variable riverine sediment discharge over time in response to climate and human pressure is crucial to understanding past, present and future patterns of sediment flux to the worlds' oceans. The need for this data is critical in light of changing anthropogenic activities, global warming and sea level rise; however, adequate observational datasets on most rivers are rare. In this dissertation, six medium to large watersheds from North America (Part I) and Europe (Part II) are examined using HydroTrend (v. 3.0), a climate driven hydrologic model, and results are validated with modern-day data. Our results indicate that over a period of only 100 years, humans caused a significant increase (145%), followed by a decrease (55%) in suspended sediment load contribution to the Atlantic coastal region through deforestation and dam construction, respectively. On average, major southeastern rivers currently transport even less sediment (16%) than prior to European settlement. Similarly, modeled results suggest that reservoir impoundment in the Danube watershed has reduced sediment flux to the Black Sea by approximately 60%. This region of Europe was directly affected by the Little Ice Age (ca. 15001850) during which time suspended sediment flux was up to five times higher than under current conditions. Simulated results imply that without the impact of anthropogenic activities within the basin, current day sediment flux would be 5% higher today than during the Little Ice Age due to significantly warmer modern-day temperatures, which highlights the considerable control that man has on the natural environment. Projected future temperatures (IPCC) are implemented to simulate the potential impact of erosion and sediment flux in tributaries of the Danube and results suggest that sediment erosion could increase by up to 45% by the end of this century. This study is the first application of HydroTrend in these regions of the world and provides insight on how human induced modifications and climatic changes can alter sediment flux in a watershed over relatively short periods of time.


Current guidelines relating to
the diabetic foot advise that all
patients with diabetes should
receive regular assessment
of their lower limb circulation
(vascular assessment) and regular
testing for loss of sensation in the
feet (neurological assessment)
(Scottish Intercollegiate
Guidelines Network [SIGN], 2001;
National Institute for Health and
Clinical Excellence [NICE], 2004).
However, it is also important that
professionals involved in diabetes
care provide regular visual
examination of the lower limb.
Changes to the skin can give an
early indication of the patient's
circulatory and neurological status
as well as ulceration risk.
Evidence from trials studying
the impact of podiatry in the
prevention of diabetic foot
ulceration shows that regular
care of skin and nail problems
by podiatrists results in a lower
occurrence of ulceration for
Caroline McIntosh and Veronica Newton are Senior Lecturers in Podiatry, University of Huddersfi eld, Yorkshire
Patients with diabetes mellitus are more prone to ulceration and infection than non-diabetics. Routine
skin assessment allows detection of early changes. Patients presenting with skin or nail conditions
should receive prompt referral to podiatry for skilled debridement and regular palliative care to
prevent ulceration. This article will examine the important stages of the assessment process.
diabetic patients (Ronnemaa et
al, 1997; Plank et al, 2003). The
diabetic foot should therefore
be inspected regularly for skin
abnormalities, breaks in the skin
or pressure lesions.


DARk matter WImp search with liquid xenoN (DARWIN) will be an experiment for the direct detection of dark matter using a multi-ton liquid xenon time projection chamber at its core. Its primary goal will be to explore the experimentally accessible parameter space for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) in a wide mass-range, until neutrino interactions with the target become an irreducible background. The prompt scintillation light and the charge signals induced by particle interactions in the xenon will be observed by VUV sensitive, ultra-low background photosensors. Besides its excellent sensitivity to WIMPs above a mass of 5 GeV/c2, such a detector with its large mass, low-energy threshold and ultra-low background level will also be sensitive to other rare interactions. It will search for solar axions, galactic axion-like particles and the neutrinoless double-beta decay of 136Xe, as well as measure the low-energy solar neutrino flux with < 1% precision, observe coherent neutrino-nucleus interactions, and detect galactic supernovae. We present the concept of the DARWIN detector and discuss its physics reach, the main sources of backgrounds and the ongoing detector design and R&D efforts.


The increase in flood intensity and frequency poses a threat to community infrastructure and affects the total well-being of children in regard to: access to food, health, school attendance, access to clean water and sanitation, physical and social security. Using both qualitative and quantitative data, this article provided an overview of flood disasters and their potential effects on children's access to quality education in Zimbabwe. The purpose of the study was to analyse school children's specific vulnerabilities to flood disasters that need to be taken into account in policy development. Research indicated that floods cause loss of learning hours, loss of qualified personnel, outbreak of waterborne diseases, high absenteeism and low syllabus coverage leading to children's poor academic performance. Children noted a range of experiences, from food insecurity to being withdrawn from school and sometimes forced into early marriages. These challenges compromise children's rights and access to quality education. This article therefore recommended that a culture of safety be promoted through disaster education, development of good road networks and enforcement of building codes during construction of school infrastructure. Findings also supported the need for adaptation strategies to ensure that the risks specific to school children are addressed.


In this chapter we focus on participation in open strategy. We examine how the issue of participation has been dealt with in previous strategy literature and elaborate on how research on open strategy can be linked with and advance this body of work. We identify three main views on participation in strategy research: participation as an inherent part of the strategy process, participation as enabled or constrained by practices, and participation as an issue of subjectivity. We then elaborate three distinctively different approaches to participation that might inform our understanding of inclusion in open strategy: open strategy as limited participation, open strategy as co-creation of strategies, and open strategy as 'deep engagement' defining the rules of the game. Based on these approaches, we discuss their implications on open strategy research and suggest a research agenda for future studies of participation in open strategy.


For three days in July of 1863, the Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, the dean of New York City's black clergy, and four of his friends remained sequestered in Garnet's Manhattan home on West 30th Street. Garnet's daughter Mary had removed his nameplate from the front door, and the group waited "in tense silence, as the mob passed his very door." (2) The mob was part of several days of explosive violence that came to be known as the New York City Draft Riots. A broad range of issues, some decades in the making, related to slavery, abolition, social class, politics, ethnicity, race, labor, and capital inspired the riots that resulted as New York began to implement the nation's first military draft in the second year of the Civil War. As a city of commerce, many New York merchants had strong financial ties with the southern planter class against whom the war was being waged. As a northern bastion of the Democratic Party, many New York Democrats opposed the Civil War and sympathized with their fellow Democrats in the South. But New York was also a center of abolitionism, with the city's presses producing thousands of anti-slavery tracts, and its churches and other meeting houses for decades serving as gathering places for meetings denouncing slavery. New York had also become a base of the new anti-slavery Republican Party. Earlier in 1863 elite New Yorkers founded the Union League Club to "undermine the social and political leadership of New York's foremost conservatives." (3) The city's working men were divided as well. The rapid growth of the city's Irish population, primarily consigned to unskilled employment, and the popularizing of the notion that if the Civil War succeeded, freed blacks would quickly travel north to compete for their jobs, created a particularly hostile attitude toward blacks among many white New York working people from various backgrounds. Detailed accounts of the Draft Riots, such as Adrian Cook's The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (1974) and Iver Berstein's The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance fir American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (1990) discussed these issues in detail. During the riots, black New Yorkers and their allies were targeted for violence. Draft Riot accounts describe these attacks as well as the ways that, in the aftermath of the riots, white New York leaders organized aid to African Americans. (4) But very little has been written regarding what Black New Yorkers did to assist each other in the aftermath of the riots. Black New Yorkers' responses to the Draft Riots provide a window highlighting who some of the black leaders of nineteenth century New York City were, and the tactics they adopted to support the black community while also challenging the white community to treat them in a just manner in the future. The spark for the Draft Riots was the federal Conscription Act, the nation's first, passed by Congress in March of 1863. The law targeted men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five and all unmarried white men up to the age of forty-five for military service. (5) While the law itself was a departure from all-volunteer military service, the provision that enabled draftees to be released from service by paying $300 to a replacement ensured that the draft would target lower income men. In New York City, this fact seemed to confirm for some white working men the rhetoric circulating in the streets suggesting that white draftees's jobs would be taken by the very black men critics said they were being drafted to set free. Frustration regarding the draft was directed at the black population and their sympathizers. (6) The draft selection had begun routinely on Saturday, July 11th and was scheduled to resume on Monday morning, July 13th. Several hours before the draft resumption, "hundreds" of white workers failed to appear at their jobs. By eight o'clock they had begun a procession up Eighth and Ninth Avenues, gathering numbers as they moved. …


This study extends the contention that national culture affects human resource management (HRM) policies and practices and explores meaning and values of work orientation (MVWO) as an element of national culture in predicting HRM policy‐practice design choices. The data were obtained in a sample of 487 employees in domestic and foreign‐invested firms (FIF) in Sri Lanka. Eight distinct MVWO patterns emerged from the sample. Twenty‐six HRM design choices were clustered into four components: planned and open career and empowering system, qualifications and performance based reward system, generic functional perspective of job‐person fit, and job‐related competence and rewards. All the four HRM preference practices are influenced by MVWO. The evidence suggests MVWO relativity of HRM design choices in Sri Lankan context. The question of transferability of empowering and performance management to developing countries becomes evident. Moreover, MVWO relativity of HRM design choices is relatively high in FIF, reflecting that the "type of ownership" can have an impact not only on actual HRM practices but also on preferred HRM practices in FIF. The existence of business in the long‐run and host government expectations also seem to be important factors in understanding HRM preferences in FIF. Theoretical and practical implications for international HR managers are discussed.


A search for sidereal modulation in the flux of atmospheric muon neutrinos in IceCube was performed. Such a signal could be an indication of Lorentz-violating physics. Neutrino oscillation models, derivable from extensions to the standard model, allow for neutrino oscillations that depend on the neutrino's direction of propagation. No such direction-dependent variation was found. A discrete Fourier transform method was used to constrain the Lorentz and CPT-violating coefficients in one of these models. Because of the unique high energy reach of IceCube, it was possible to improve constraints on certain Lorentz-violating oscillations by 3 orders of magnitude with respect to limits set by other experiments.


Dietary plant lignans have been implicated in the prevention of several chronic diseases including breast cancer, colon cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Plant lignans can be converted to the physiologically active enterolignans enterodiol and enterolactone by anaerobic bacteria residing in the intestine. Significant interindividual variation has been observed regarding the ability of intestinal bacterial communities to metabolize plant lignans to enterolignans. However, little is known about what characterizes a high enterolignan-producing community from a low enterolignan-producing community. This work presents the development of a platform that can be used to study communities of lignan-converting intestinal bacteria in vitro. Variables that were tested include media type, fecal inoculum concentration, stool processing, and sample headspace. Optimal conditions for enterolignan production and reproducibility consisted of a simple media containing sodium acetate and sodium formate, a total fecal concentration of greater than 1.0%, homogenized slurry processed in a batch, and a headspace-slurry ratio of 3:2. Metabolism of Plant Lignans by Human Intestinal Bacteria


In the near future the areal extent of the planned offshore wind farms (OWF) will be round about 25 % of the German exclusive economic zone (Status: Jan. 2012). The potential OWF areas are mostly characterised by considerable water depths (30 - 40 m) and distances from the coast (40 - 190 m). Each OWF project requires an environmental impact assessment (EIA) based on a BACI sampling design (before-after-control-impact). The soft bottom benthos as well as the benthic communities of the artificial hard structures has to be surveyed by various sampling techniques.
Next to the EIA a research project, studying the effects of the OWF alpha ventus (German Bight, North Sea) on the endobenthic assemblages, is applied. First results showed that differences in the endobenthic assemblages among the impact and control locations significantly increased from 2008, before alpha ventus was built, to the 1st year of operation in 2010. For example, after the construction the abundance pattern of some species changed in the alpha ventus area relative to the control locations. Moreover, from before to after the construction mean species richness vary significantly in the alpha ventus area, but not in the control locations. If the detected changes are related to the wind turbines or are due to the exclusion of trawling should reveal by further studies.


Intelligent transportation system is to apply advanced information technology to realize a large scale of systems integration, which requires a reference architecture to guide the modeling, analysis, design and implementation of systems integration. This paper combines UML modeling technique and systems integration reference architecture in the field of computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) to support the design and implementation of intelligent transportation management system - a pilot project in China. Function, process and information domains are modeled by use of a case diagram, sequence diagram and class diagram, respectively. The relationship among function, process and information domain related to UML is revealed to demonstrate how to describe intelligent transportation management system in an integrative way.


The Work Coordination Engine (WCE) is a Java application integrated into the Service Management Database (SMDB), which coordinates the dispatching and monitoring of a work order system. WCE de-queues work orders from SMDB and orchestrates the dispatching of work to a registered set of software worker applications distributed over a set of local, or remote, heterogeneous computing systems. WCE monitors the execution of work orders once dispatched, and accepts the results of the work order by storing to the SMDB persistent store. The software leverages the use of a relational database, Java Messaging System (JMS), and Web Services using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) technologies to implement an efficient work-order dispatching mechanism capable of coordinating the work of multiple computer servers on various platforms working concurrently on different, or similar, types of data or algorithmic processing. Existing (legacy) applications can be wrapped with a proxy object so that no changes to the application are needed to make them available for integration into the work order system as "workers." WCE automatically reschedules work orders that fail to be executed by one server to a different server if available. From initiation to completion, the system manages the execution state of work orders and workers via a well-defined set of events, states, and actions. It allows for configurable work-order execution timeouts by work-order type. This innovation eliminates a current processing bottleneck by providing a highly scalable, distributed work-order system used to quickly generate products needed by the Deep Space Network (DSN) to support space flight operations. WCE is driven by asynchronous messages delivered via JMS indicating the availability of new work or workers. It runs completely unattended in support of the lights-out operations concept in the DSN.