The aim of the study was to determine humus quality in hydromorphic soils of the island of Rab. The study was conducted on 16 samples collected from the anthropogenic top-soil horizon in which were determined total organic carbon according to Walkley-Black method (1934) and fractional composition of humic substances following the procedure given by Schnitzer (1982) using 0.1 M NaOH and 0.1 M Na4P2O7 as extraction solution. Spectroscopic characterization of isolated humic substances was carried out by measuring absorbance in VIS spectral range of 400-700 nm and optical indices (Q4/6, E4/6) were calculated. Investigated soils had sandy silty loam texture, acidic to alkaline pH, low content of physiologically active phosphorus and potassium, hydroameliorated by channels and were used as pastures. The total organic carbon content was low (0.95% in average) and varied from 0.42 to 1.86%. The average C/N ratio was 12.7. The humic acid content varied from 0.09 to 0.38% and fulvic acid content varied from 0.10 to 0.55%. The humification degree was low to medium, in average 21.5%. The average HA/FA ratio was 0.84 that indicated the domination of fulvic-humic type of isolated humic substances. The average optical indices Q4/6 and E4/6 were 5.92 and 5.62, respectively, which corresponded to the presence of more aliphatic and fewer aromatic compounds. The obtained results indicated low humus quality of investigated hydromorphic soils.


In Kienitz v. Sconnie Nation LLC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ultimately rejected the concept of transformative use having a central role within the doctrine of fair use. In doing so, the Seventh Circuit broke with judicial precedent, namely the Supreme Court's holding in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., where the Court unanimously held that the inquiry for the first factor of fair use is whether, and to what extent, the work is transformative. The Seventh Circuit's 2014 decision raises questions about the scope of the holding in Campbell and about whether this holding extends to cases outside of the realm of parody. This Article will examine the scope of Campbell and whether there can still be market-centered fair use postCampbell. This Article will then consider the implications of a market-centered fair use analysis. Finally, this Article will conclude that courts should continue to utilize the transformative use inquiry for the purposes of fair use, that Congress need not intervene in fair use, and that there cannot be market-centered fair use post-Campbell. * Aaron B. Wicker, American University Washington College of Law, Class of 2016. For their continued guidance and support during this process, I thank my family. For their valuable comments, I am grateful to Professor Victoria Phillips, Professor Peter Jaszi, and the editors of the Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts. 1 Wicker: Much Ado about Transformativeness: The Seventh Circuit and Market Published by UW Law Digital Commons, 2016 356 WASHINGTON JOURNAL OF LAW, TECHNOLOGY & ARTS [VOL. 11:4


Muscle power in the lower extremities and body sway were measured in 57 healthy young women volunteers in their 20's. Body sway was measured with a stabilimeter for 30 sec during two-leg standing, and for 10 sec during one-leg standing with the eyes open or closed, alternating between right and left legs (5 times each). The measured parameters of body sway were locus length per time unit, locus length per environmental area, environmental area, rectangle area, root mean square area, and the ratio of sway with eyes closed to sway with eyes open. Knee flexor and extensor power and toe flexor and abductor power were the measures representing lower extremity muscle power. The increase in sway with the eyes closed was more marked during one-leg standing than two-leg standing, as expected. We found that 36 of 57 subjects (62%) were unable to maintain one-leg standing with their eyes closed, and this failure correlated with marked body sway (P = 0.0086). Many subjects had one leg that was classified as stable and the other leg classified as unstable. Clearly, testing of both legs alternately with eyes closed is necessary to measure the full range of sway in subjects. Lower extremity muscle power did not appear to be the dominant factor in maintaining balance in these young subjects.


It is often difficult to interpret plant life form and position within a forest based on fossils of isolated plant organs. Here we propose leaf vein density as a new tool to interpret fossil angiosperm life form, and in particular to trace the emergence of angiosperms as members of the canopy. Angiosperm leaf vein density was analyzed in two tropical forests and one temperate forest. Comparisons of vein density between canopy and understory plants showed that vein density variation mainly reflected the position of the leaf in the canopy, independent of ecological strategy (shade tolerant versus sun demanding), phylogenetic position, and site (tropical versus temperate). Vein density values of a standing forest were reflected in its leaf litter, suggesting that fossil leaf assemblages are representative of past forest ecosystems. Comparison of vein density distributions of Cretaceous–Paleocene paleofloras (132.35–58.0 Ma) to those of a modern tropical leaf litter assemblage suggests that angiosperms emerged in forest canopies by at least 58 Ma.


The Teneme Formation is located in the Mayari-Cristal ophiolitic massif and represents one of the three Cretaceous volcanic Formations established in northeastern Cuba. Teneme volcanics are cut by small bodies of 89.70 ± 0.50 Ma quarz-diorite rocks (Rio Grande intrusive), and are overthrusted by serpentinized ultramafics. Teneme volcanic rocks are mainly basalts, basaltic andesites, andesites, and minor dacites, and their geochemical signature varies between low-Ti island arc tholeiites (IAT) with boninitic affinity (TiO2 < 0.4 %; high field strength elements << N-type MORB) and typical oceanic arc tholeiites (TiO2 = 0.5-0.8 %). Basaltic rocks exhibit low light REE/Yb ratios (La/Yb < 5), typical of intraoceanic arcs and are comparable to Maimon Formation in Dominican Republic (IAT, pre Albian) and Puerto Rican lavas of volcanic phase I (island arc tholeiites, Aptian to Early Albian). The mantle wedge signature of the Teneme Formation indicates a highly depleted MORB-type mantle source, without any contribution of E-MORB or OIB components. Our results suggest that Teneme volcanism represents a primitive oceanic island arc environment. If the Late Cretaceous age (Turonian or early Coniacian) proposed for Teneme Formation is correct, our results indicate that the Cretaceous volcanic rocks of eastern Cuba and the Dominican Republic are not segments of a single arc system, and that in Late Cretaceous (Albian-Campanian) Caribbean island arc development is not represented only by calc-alkaline (CA) volcanic rocks as has been suggested in previous works.


Natural Language Processing (NLP) has recently achieved success by using huge pre-trained Transformer networks. However, these models often contain hundreds of millions or even billions of parameters, bringing challenges to online deployment due to latency constraints. Recently, hardware manufacturers have introduced dedicated hardware for NxM sparsity to provide the flexibility of unstructured pruning with the runtime efficiency of structured approaches. NxM sparsity permits arbitrarily selecting M parameters to retain from a contiguous group of N in the dense representation. However, due to the extremely high complexity of pre-trained models, the standard sparse fine-tuning techniques often fail to generalize well on downstream tasks, which have limited data resources. To address such an issue in a principled manner, we introduce a new learning framework, called NxMTransformer, to induce NxM semi-structured sparsity on pretrained language models for natural language understanding to obtain better performance. In particular, we propose to formulate the NxM sparsity as a constrained optimization problem and use Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to optimize the downstream tasks while taking the underlying hardware constraints into consideration. ADMM decomposes the NxM sparsification problem into two sub-problems that can be solved sequentially, generating sparsified Transformer networks that achieve high accuracy while being able to effectively execute on newly released hardware. We apply our approach to a wide range of NLP tasks, and our proposed method is able to achieve 1.7 points higher accuracy in GLUE score than current practices. Moreover, we perform detailed analysis on our approach and shed light on how ADMM affects fine-tuning accuracy for downstream tasks. Finally, we illustrate how NxMTransformer achieves performance improvement with knowledge distillation.


Although it is a relatively new approach to biometric knowledge representation, multimodal biometric systems have emerged as an innovative alternative that aids in developing a more reliable and efficient security system.Multimodal Biometrics and Intelligent Image Processing for Security Systems provides an in-depth description of existing and fresh fusion approaches for multimodal biometric systems. Covering relevant topics affecting the security and intelligent industries, this reference will be useful for readers from both academia and industry in the areas of pattern recognition, security, and image processing domains.


The main objective of this research were to analyze the impact of some agricultural investments in rice production, The increasing trend of rice production in Jambi during the years of study (1986-2010) has been resulted from considerable increase in government improving policy programs, such as support price, and input subsidy programs. The variations of acreage, yield, and output have been affected also by the price of output and input such as fertilizer. The more effectiveness between price support policy and input subsidy policy depend on the higher magnitude between the significant coefficients of these two variables. The first policy implication from the findings of this study is that the price support policy is more effective and efficient to increase the acreage. The effect of government support prices for rice is very important in analyzing the acreage response. Since the role of government support prices in this new environment has received very much attention in policy implications. A method of measuring price expectation for analyzing acreage response is used when the influence of price support and market phenomena varies with market conditions. It assumes that the effect of changes in government policies because similar programs for acreage control and price support are likely form of future policies. A method of evaluating support, and acreage restriction is developed and tested to see the impact of changing government programs. The results show that when the support price is much below the expected market price, the truncationeffect is negligible and the price support program has only a limited impact on acreage decisions. Alternatively, as the support price levels, the truncation effects become larger, and the resulting impact on acreage decisions is more pronounced.


Nigerian society exhibits symptoms of serious moral decay. There is consequently widespread concern about the moral predicament in the nation. This paper is an attempt to investigate how commitment in teachers' behaviour could improve the teaching of Christian moral education in secondary schools in the southeast geopolitical zone of Nigeria. Two research questions guided the study. The study adopted descriptive survey research design. South-east geopolitical zone is the area of study and the population comprised of all the Christian Moral Education teachers in the states that make up the zone. 300 teachers were selected out of 967 Christian Moral Education teachers in the area using purpose sampling technique. Fixed response questionnaire was used to collect data from the respondents. Mean was used to analyze data. Result show-cased that the teaching of Christian Moral Education could be improved through commitment in teachers' behaviour. Based on the findings, the study stresses that a greater percentage of the work of improving the teaching of Christian moral education lies in the hands of the teachers as commitments in teachers' behaviour becomes a necessity of immediacy and paramount. This however forms the contribution of the study.


In Homo Sacer Agamben proposes a vision of politics as biopolitics since its Greek origins. While this new awareness becomes the conceptual domain in which re-interpret some political categories, at the same time it shows how sovereign power, in this biopolitical perspective, reduces individual human beings to mere life and makes every kind of right, included human rights, a screen hiding what reveals to be a tyranny. For a possible way out of this dead end we can look at the Foucauldian reading of power as domination. In this article we will try to show how Foucauldian replacement of sovereignty with domination is rooted in a vision of history to Nietzsche's genealogies, and that seems having interesting contacts with some concepts of Benjamin, in particular the idea of reactivation of apparently exhausted historical lines. Waiting for further studies about the compatibility of domination with human rights, this article suggests that the historico-philosophical tools Foucault uses to oppose domination to sovereign power can be used to set human rights free from the dead end the sovereign vision constrains them. A comparison between the Foucauldian and the Agambenian reading of Hobbes will be used to better illustrate the differences among the two perspectives.


Abstract : We propose a multilevel (hierarchical) ON/OFF model to simultaneously capture the mono/multifractal behavior of Internet traffic. Parameter estimation methods are developed and applied to estimate the model parameters from real traces. Wavelet analysis and simulation results show that the synthetic traffic (using this new model with estimated parameters) and real traffic share the same statistical properties and queuing behaviors. Based on this model and its statistical properties, as described by the Logscale diagram of traces, we propose an efficient method to predict the queuing behavior of FIFO and RED queues. In order to satisfy a given delay and jitter requirement for real time connections, and to provide high goodput and low packet loss for non-real time connections, we also propose a parallel virtual queue control structure to offer differential quality of services. This new queue control structure is modeled and analyzed as a regular nonlinear dynamic system. The conditions for system stability and optimization are found (under certain simplifying assumptions) and discussed. The theoretical stationary distribution of queue length is validated by simulation.


Modern in-memory services rely on large distributed object stores to achieve the high scalability essential to ser-vice thousands of requests concurrently. The independent and unpredictable nature of incoming requests results in random accesses to the object store, triggering frequent remote memory accesses. State-of-the-art distributed memory frameworks leverage the one-sided operations offered by RDMA technology to mitigate the traditionally high cost of remote memory access. Unfortunately, the limited semantics of RDMA one-sided operations bound remote memory access atomicity to a single cache block; therefore, atomic remote object access relies on software mechanisms. Emerging highly integrated rack-scale systems that reduce the latency of one-sided operations to a small multiple of DRAM latency expose the overhead of these software mechanisms as a major latency contributor. This technology-triggered paradigm shift calls for new one-sided operations with stronger semantics. We take a step in that direction by proposing SABRes, a new one-sided operation that provides atomic remote object reads in hardware. We then present LightSABRes, a lightweight hardware accelerator for SABRes that removes all atomicity-associated software overheads. Compared to a state-of-the-art software atomicity mechanism, LightSABRes improve the throughput of a microbenchmark atomically accessing 128B-8KB objects from remote memory by 15-97%, and the throughput of a modern in-memory distributed object store by 30-60%.


Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell line development (CLD) is a long and laborious process, which requires up to 5 − 6 months in order to generate and bank CHO lines capable of stably expressing therapeutic molecules. Additionally, single cell cloning of these production lines is also necessary to confirm clonality of the production lines. Here we introduce the utilization of viability staining dye in combination with flow cytometer to isolate high titer clones from a pool of selected cells and single cell deposit them into the wells of culture plates. Our data suggests that a stringent selection procedure along with viability dye staining and flow cytometry‐based sorting can be used to isolate high expressing clones with titers comparable to that of traditional CLD methods. This approach not only requires less labor and consumables, but it also shortens CLD timelines by at least 3 weeks. Furthermore, single cell deposition of selected cells by a flow sorter can be regarded as an additional clonality assurance factor that in combination with Day 0 imaging can ensure clonality of the production lines. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog., 32:198–207, 2016


For decades markets have been proposed for allocating computer resources in distributed systems like the Clusters or Grids. Nevertheless, none of these approaches has made it into practice. The reasons for the adoption failure of markets are manifold. One reason that has been hitherto rarely discussed is the bidding process. Theoretic approaches assume that the bidders know how to derive their bids exactly. This does not only include the specific computer resource, which is needed at some time in the future, but also the price. This assumption simplifies reality and can thus not contribute to the development of markets in Grid. What is needed to establish a prospering market for Grid resources are rules how to conduct the bidding. Since demand and supply are extremely dynamic in computing resources, manual bidding is too slow to accommodate abrupt shifts in demand or supply. This paper introduces a policy based autonomous agent approach for automated bidding. By means of the policies resource providers and consumers can specify the way how they trade Grid resources (e.g., resource isolation definitions, security specifications).


In a previous article by Aihua Li and Duane Randall, the existence of solutions to certain matrix equations is demonstrated via nonconstructive methods. A recurring example appears in that work, namely the matrix equation AXA = X 2 AX, where A is a fixed, square matrix with real entries and X is an unknown square matrix. In this paper, the solution space is explicitly constructed for all 2×2 complex matrices using Grobner basis techniques. When A is a 2×2 matrix, the equation AXA = X 2 AX is equivalent to a system of four polynomial equations. The solution space then is the variety defined by the polynomials involved. The ideal of the underlying polynomial ring generated by the defining polynomials plays an important role in solving the system. In our procedure for solving these equations, Grobner bases are used to transform the polynomial system into a simpler one, which makes it possible to classify all the solutions. In addition to classifying all solutions for 2 × 2 matrices, certain explicit solutions are produced in arbitrary dimensions when A is nonsingular. In higher dimensions, Grobner bases are extraordinarily computationally demanding, and so a different approach is taken. This technique can be applied to more general matrix equations, and the focus here is placed on solutions coming from a particular class of matrices.


Embolism from atherosclerotic plaques of the carotid bifurcation is being recognized as a frequent cause of occlusion of intracranial arteries producing transient ischemic attacks or strokes. Fifty carotid bifurcation lesions were performed in an attempt to establish roentgenographic criteria for ulceration, and judge the accuracy of radiologic diagnosis of ulceration. The preoperative radiologic impression of the carotid lesion was compared with the actual appearance of the lesion as seen at operation and pathologic examination. Sixteen of the lesions contained small areas of ulceration and 22 contained large ulcers, for an overall incidence of ulceration of 76%. The accuracy of the radiologic diagnosis of ulceration was 86%. Four criteria were established for radiologic ulceration. These are (1) a penetrating niche; (2) irregularity of the silhouette of the artery; (3) delayed washout of contrast medium in a segment of artery between areas of stenosis; and (4) a well-circumscribed double density of contrast medium superimposed on the artery.


The medium of instruction issue has continuously been discussed in relation to standards of education. It has been for a long time a controversial issue and sometimes a complicated one in many countries, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The main objective of this study was to investigate prospective teachers' views about the use of English as the medium of instruction in KG classes. Sixty-two students in the Early Childhood Program in the College of Education at the UAE University participated in the study and only 21 students volunteered to take part in the focus-group interviews. A questionnaire and a focus group interview were used as the two main tools for collecting data. The overall results demonstrate prospective teachers' positive views about English language and its use as the medium of instruction in children's classes. Major results highlight the importance of using English in KG classes for developing children's communication skills and assisting them to gain more confidence at subsequent stages of their education. Another important result demonstrates the role of English in helping children to develop intellectually, socially and linguistically. In order to guide future research in this area, recommendations were discussed and recorded toward the end of the article.


Research in sports science has historically been grounded in positivist traditions. This means that ethics committees may not be adequately sensitized to the ethical problems posed by qualitative research. Qualitative researchers may thus be disadvantaged in the research approval process. Our paper argues that the traditional biomedical ethics model may not always be appropriate in evaluating qualitative proposals. Due to the nature of its methods, qualitative work may have emergent and ongoing ethical issues that require consultation and resolution. We argue that, contrary to the judgements of many ethics committees, methods such as deception and covert observation can be justified if certain conditions are met. In reaffirming a commitment to the overarching ethical principle of respect for persons, we conclude that researchers need to recognize and plan for ethical issues in their work. Likewise, ethics committees need to recognize that qualitative work poses unique problems, but that these need not necessarily be insurmountable obstacles to project approval.


We report a versatile, and automatic method for sorting cells and particles in a three dimensional polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) structure consisting of two cross-microchannels. As microspheres or yeast cells are fed continuously into a lower channel, a line shaped focused laser beam is applied (perpendicular to the direction of flow) at the crossing junction of the two channels. The scattering force of the laser beam was employed to push microparticles matching specific criteria upwards from one channel to another. The force depends on the intrinsic properties of the particles such as their refractive index and size, as well as the laser power and the fluid flow speed. The combination of these parameters gives a tunable selection criterion for the effective and efficient sorting of the particles. The introduction of the cylindrical lens into the optical train allows for simultaneous manipulation of multiple particles which has significantly increased the efficiency and throughput of the sorting. A high aspect ratio microchannel (A.R.=1.6) was found to enhance the sorting performance of the device. By careful control of the microparticle flow rate, near 100% sorting efficiency was achieved.


The reliance of a society on watercraft is nowhere more apparent that in
ancient Egypt, where the Nile River provided the means for all but the most
local transport. It is not surprising that ancient Egyptians would incorporate
watercraft, an important object from their everyday lives, into their funerary
furniture for use in the next world. The primary goal of this study is the
reclassification of Egyptian watercraft models from the standard 1898 George
Reisner typology in order to demonstrate that these artifacts graphically
represent the evolution of nautical technology through the recognition of major
and minor construction attributes. Other secondary objectives include the
recognition of site specific or regional patterns in watercraft design that may
reflect the social conditions of a geographic area based upon hull forms,
quality, color, iconography, and the equipment on-board. Further, certain
artifacts shed light on the social structure of Egyptian life including the hierarchy
of workers and the represented status of boat men, servants, the military,
clerics, and nobility that are depicted on-board. Other identified factors can
affect model outcome including the talent of the model builder, raw material
availability, the economic and political climate, and the requirements of the
model watercraft's owner.
Ancient Egyptian watercraft-building and hull design transformed over
thousands of years and models survive from the Predynastic to Roman
Periods. Clay, ivory, mud, and stone models from the Predynastic and Early
Dynastic Periods are used to demonstrate that even at these early dates, the
Egyptians constructed substantial watercraft. Hundreds of models made of
wood, clay, one of gold, and one of silver from the Old Kingdom to Third
Intermediate Period represent the progressive stages of Egyptian maritime
architectural development. Unprovenanced artifacts are included in this study,
many with suggestions for their probable context based on provenanced boats
that have identical attributes. Further, several models are anomalous in that
they exhibit non-standard construction, iconography, color, and lack provenance
to such an extreme that their authenticity must be questioned. In some cases,
documentation confirms these suspicions.


Purpose: The purpose of the study is to examine educational history through television's portrayal of educational activity in post-apocalyptic society. The paper examines how and why television drama set after a catastrophe is in dialogue with, but rejects, both contemporary government discourse of "protect and survive". Design/methodology/approach: The paper treats television programmes as historical artefacts made during periods of heightened anxiety about nuclear and bacteriological war. This paper follows established methods for interpreting educational history by examining the representation of schooling and the discursive construction of teachers and their practices via television. This paper proceeds by tight selection of sections from two texts, examining them as documentary evidence of education in later-20th-century Britain and representations of specific types of schooling that were found in real-world Britain in the period, namely, the minor public school and educational television. Findings: Television drama showing education during and after an apocalyptic event was a reaction to and critique of official assurances that life would continue after a large-scale catastrophe. The representations of schooling reflect the preoccupations of the writers and depict the intersection of schooling, teachers and students with contemporary anxieties in a period where global war and large-scale catastrophe were prominent fears in popular consciousness. Representations of schooling enabled a twofold critique of education. One is critique of the industrial and civil society that had called formal schooling into existence, questioning the value of what in the 1970s and 1980s was being taught in schools. The second is the subversion of the assurances contained in "disaster" education, which promised that disaster would be a temporary setback and underlying social structures and institutions would survive. This paper suggests these sources of educational history present the need to unlearn old knowledge, urge the recourse to self-teaching and question the reliance on a television to teach. Originality/value: This paper endorses educational, historical and popular cultural research that has found meaning and importance in popular television as a reflection of actual educational practice. Efforts to educate a civilian population about civil defence have received some scholarly attention; however, so far, the way educational practice is portrayed in television that shows the end of the world as we know it has received limited attention. These sources yield valuable insights regarding the interaction between education, disaster and popular consciousness.


Though Alexander the Great lived more than seventeen centuries before the onset of Iberian expansion into Muslim Africa and Asia, he loomed large in the literature of late medieval and early modern Portugal and Spain. Exploring little-studied chronicles, chivalric romances, novels, travelogues, and crypto-Muslim texts, Vincent Barletta shows that the story of Alexander not only sowed the seeds of Iberian empire but foreshadowed the decline of Portuguese and Spanish influence in the centuries to come. "Death in Babylon" depicts Alexander as a complex symbol of Western domination, immortality, dissolution, heroism, villainy, and death. But Barletta also shows that texts ostensibly celebrating the conqueror were haunted by failure. Examining literary and historical works in Aljamiado, Castilian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, and Portuguese, "Death in Babylon" develops a view of empire and modernity informed by the ethical metaphysics of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. A novel contribution to the literature of empire building, "Death in Babylon" provides a frame for the deep mortal anxiety that has infused and given shape to the spread of imperial Europe from its very beginning.


A battery of recorded spoofing scenarios has been compiled for evaluating civil Global Positioning System (GPS) signal authentication techniques. The battery can be considered the data component of an evolving standard meant to define the notion of spoof resistance for commercial GPS receivers. The setup used to record the scenarios is described. A detailed description of each scenario reveals readily detectable anomalies that spoofing detectors could target to improve GPS security.


Australian dollar-denominated bonds issued by non-resident entities in Australia are referred to as Kangaroo bonds and represent a significant share of the Australian bond market. Issuance has generally been dominated by highly rated issuers such as supranational and quasi-sovereign agency entities; more recently there has been an increase in non-financial corporate issuance, albeit from a low base. Kangaroo bond issuance has increased substantially since the early 2000s, supported by the global demand for highly rated and relatively high-yielding Australian dollar-denominated assets. Kangaroo bonds have been attractive to non-resident issuers as they enable non-residents to diversify their funding bases and have relatively favourable issuance costs (including hedging costs) compared with issuance in other currencies. Kangaroo issuers play an important role in the cross-currency swap market because, by converting the Australian dollars they raise into foreign currency, they act as indirect counterparties for Australian corporations looking to convert funds raised offshore into Australian dollars.


Importance
Patients with cardiac amyloidosis demonstrate reduced myocardial strain with associated sparing of the cardiac apex. In the APOLLO randomized clinical trial, patisiran, an RNA interference therapeutic that inhibits transthyretin synthesis, improved left ventricular (LV) global longitudinal strain (LV GLS) compared with placebo in patients with hereditary transthyretin-mediated (hATTR) amyloidosis with polyneuropathy and evidence of cardiac involvement.

Objective
To evaluate the treatment association of patisiran with regional LV myocardial strain in cardiac manifestation in hATTR amyloidosis.

Design, Setting, and Participants
This exploratory analysis of APOLLO, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 3, multicenter international clinical trial that was conducted from December 2013 to January 2016, included patients with hATTR amyloidosis with polyneuropathy who were randomized 2:1 to receive patisiran or placebo. The prespecified cardiac subpopulation (126 of 225 [56%]) comprised patients with a baseline LV wall thickness of 13 mm or more and no history of hypertension or aortic valve disease. This post hoc data analysis was performed between September 2018 and January 2019.

Intervention
Placebo or patisiran, 0.3 mg/kg, via intravenous infusion once every 3 weeks for 18 months.

Main Outcomes and Measures
The association of patisiran with LV regional longitudinal strain at 18 months.

Results
Of the 126 patients included in the prespecified cardiac subpopulation, 36 patients (28.6%) received placebo (median [interquartile range] age, 62 [57-72] years) and 90 patients (71.4%) received patisiran (median [interquartile range] age, 60 [54-66] years); 98 (77.8%) were men, 28 (22.2%) were from North America, and 43 (34.1%) were from Western Europe. At baseline, LV GLS was impaired and regional longitudinal strains were lowest in the basal segments with apical sparing. There were no differences in regional longitudinal strains between the treatment groups at baseline. Patisiran improved the absolute GLS (least-squares mean [SE] difference, 1.4% [0.6%]; 95% CI, 0.3%-2.5%; P = .02) compared with placebo at 18 months, with the greatest differential increase observed in the basal region (overall least-squares mean [SE] difference, 2.1% [0.8%]; 95% CI, 0.6%-3.6%; P = .006) and no significant differences in the mid and apical regions among groups.

Conclusions and Relevance
Patisiran prevented the deterioration of LV GLS over 18 months, driven primarily by attenuating disease progression in the basal region, suggesting that basal longitudinal strain may be a more sensitive marker of treatment associations with the cardiac manifestation in hATTR amyloidosis and that basal region may be influenced by disease-modifying therapies more than other ventricular regions.

Trial Registration
ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01960348.


Increasing evidence from the empirical economic and psychological literature suggests that positive and negative well-being are more than opposite ends of the same phenomenon. Two separate measures of the dependent variable may be needed when analyzing the determinants of subjective well-being. We argue that this conclusion reflects in part the use of too restrictive econometric models. A flexible multiple-index ordered probit panel data model with varying thresholds can identify response asymmetries in single-item measures of subjective well-being. An application to data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for 1984-2004 shows that income has only a minor effect on positive subjective well-being but a large effect on negative well-being.


This study was designed to examine the changes of immunological markers in elite (n = 7) and club amateur (n = 8) triathletes, who completed the 2006 TONG YUNG international triathlon race, by investigating changes of total amounts of leukocytes, neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, immunoglobulins (Igs), IL-6, CK and CRP. Three days prior to the race, all participants had a blood sample drawn from an antecubital vein. Blood samples were also taken immediately after finishing the race, and during recovery periods (2-hours after and 7-days after). The total number of leukocytes immediately after triathlon race was significantly increased in both groups and in the recovery times (p < .05). The number of neutrophils immediately after triathlon race was also significantly increased in both groups and significantly increased in the recovery times (p < .05). The elite triathletes (EG) recovered after 7 days.
In the lymphocytes and monocytes, there were significant increases immediately after the triathlon and in the recovery periods in both groups (p < .05). However, with regard to the monocytes, there were no differences in the period of 7-day R in both groups. With regard to the immunoglobulins, IgA and IgG were significantly increased after the triathlon, while there was no significant increase in the IgM. In IL-6 and CK, these were significantly increased after the race. CRP was, however, not significantly changed.
In conclusion, the triathlon caused an increase in leukocytes, neutrophils, IgG, IL-6, CK, and CRP in the Elite Group (EG) (IgG and IL-6 and CRP was not significantly changed in the Recreational Group (RG)) and there was a decrease in lymphocytes, monocytes, IgA (RG only), and IgM (RG only). Also, elite triathletes responded well and recovered more quickly than the amateur triathletes after the prolonged exercise.


The pollution load of palm oil mill effluent (POME) is in the range of 50,000 mg COD/L. With more than 500 palm oil mills, Malaysia produces some 13.9 million tonnes of crude palm oil annually and generates around 35 x 106 m3 POME. Typically, raw POME is difficult to degrade because it contains significant amounts of oil (tryacylglycerols) and degradative products such as di-and monoacylglycerols and fatty acids. The fatty acids composition (C12 – C20) of each of this fraction are different from one another and contribute to the high value of pollution load in POME. Thus POME has to be treated, usually in a series of anaerobic and aerobic treatment steps, for the organic matter to be degraded before the effluent is allowed to be discharged into public waterways. The objective of this study was to observe the performance of a hybrid membrane bioreactor (MBR) for POME. The raw POME was introduced into sequencing processes of anaerobic, anoxic and aerobic in order to achieve biological nutrient removal and the membrane modules were submerged into the aerobic zone. The critical flux of MBR using the flux-step method based on transmembrane pressure (TMP) was conducted as well as flux and permeability studies for assessing fouling in a membrane bioreactor operating at constant flux. The reactor was operated at a mixed liquor suspended solid (MLSS) concentration of 4000 to 8000 mg/l. The removal efficiency of COD, SS, TN and TP achieved were 94%, 98%, 83% and 64% respectively. The hybrid MBR was found to be able to degrade POME significantly and high quality effluent could be reused for various other applications.Keywords:


With the purge of the Military Forces and the creation of a new National Civilian Police ( PNC ) as mandated by the 1992 Peace Accords, El Salvador set the stage for the construction of a less state-oriented security approach. However, a failure to question issues of security and a lack of consideration of gender in the Peace negotiations and the Security Reform resulted in an overly gendered understanding of security, were the State remained as its subject and the practice privileged a militarized masculinity that has hindered the implementation of democratic policing. In this context, 25 years after the Peace Accords, the police have been unable to consolidate a democratic policing practice as oppressive policing strategies remain deeply embedded in the institution, side-by-side with heavy-handed measures that use repression to control social violence. From a feminist critical security approach, the article questions the gendered nature of security in El Salvador, and investigates the implication of the introduction of militaries into the work of the police, in terms of its symbolic influence in the gendered expectations of police men and women, and the practical impact it has on their work, e.g., the difficulty of consolidating Community-Oriented Policing. The argument is based on interviews and focus groups with police men and women, as well as with feminist organizations. The information was gathered during fieldwork in 2018 and 2019, and through extensive literature review.


This study presents in a new unified way, optimal instrumental variable methods for identifying discrete-time transfer function models when the system operates in a closed loop. The conditions for the optimal design of prefilters and instruments depending on common model structures are analysed and different approaches are developed according to whether the controller is known or not. The performance of the proposed approaches is evaluated by Monte-Carlo analysis in comparison with other alternative closed-loop estimation methods.


Few question the 'right turn' America took after 1966, when liberal political power began to wane. But if they did, "No Right Turn" suggests, they might discover that all was not really 'right' with the conservative golden age. A provocative overview of a half century of American politics, the book takes a hard look at the counterrevolutionary dreams of liberalism's enemies - to overturn people's reliance on expanding government, reverse the moral and sexual revolutions, and win the Culture War - and finds them largely unfulfilled. David Courtwright deftly profiles celebrated and controversial figures, from Clare Booth Luce, Barry Goldwater, and the Kennedy brothers to Jerry Falwell, David Stockman, and Lee Atwater. He shows us Richard Nixon's keen talent for turning popular anxieties about morality and federal meddling to Republican advantage - and his inability to translate this advantage into reactionary policies. Corporate interests, boomer lifestyles, and the media weighed heavily against Nixon and his successors, who placated their base with high-profile attacks on crime, drugs, and welfare dependency. Meanwhile, religious conservatives floundered on abortion and school prayer, obscenity, gay rights, and legalized vices like gambling, and fiscal conservatives watched in dismay as the bills mounted. We see how President Reagan's melange of big government, strong defense, lower taxes, higher deficits, mass imprisonment, and patriotic symbolism proved an illusory form of conservatism. Ultimately, conservatives themselves rebelled against George W. Bush's profligate brand of Reaganism. Courtwright's account is both surprising and compelling, a bracing argument against some of our most cherished cliches about recent American history.


Abstract Introduction: Psychostimulants are among the most commonly used pharmacological agents for countering cognitive dysfunction and/or enhancing rehabilitation in persons with brain injury. It was postulated that milnacipran, a serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, would be effective against cognitive dysfunction in non-depressed persons with brain injury. Methods: Eighteen patients were recruited with at least moderate disability more than 4 months after a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and they were randomized to an 8-week, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial. Cognitive dysfunction was assessed at baseline with the Trail Making Test, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R), the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised (WMS-R) and measurement of event-related potentials (ERPs) both before randomization and after an 8-week administration of milnacipran or placebo. Results: N2 and P3 latencies in the milnacipran group were significantly shortened by the intervention. Moreover, the Verbal Intelligence Quotient and Full Intelligence Quotient scores of the WAIS-R and the delayed recall score of the WMS-R were significantly higher than baseline after milnacipran intervention. Conclusion: Milnacipran administration improved ERP measures of attention and information processing in non-depressed persons with brain injury and also improved scores on three sub-scales of standard neuropsychological tests of cognitive dysfunction. Therefore, this intervention merits validation by additional, larger studies.


Recognizing the significance of factual velocity fields in a rapid mixer, this study focuses on analyzing local velocity gradients in various mixer geometries with particle image velocimetry (PIV) and comparing the results of the analysis with the conventional G-value, for reviewing the roles of G-value in the current design and operation practices. The results of this study clearly show that many arguments and doubts are possible about the scientific correctness of G-value, and its current use. This is because the G-value attempts to represent the turbulent and complicated factual velocity field in a jar. Also, the results suggest that it is still a good index for representing some aspects of mixing condition, at least, mixing intensity. However, it cannot represent the distribution of velocity gradients in a jar, which is an important factor for mixing. This study as a result suggests developing another index for representing the distribution to be used with the G-value.


Despite the success of large-scale empirical risk minimization (ERM) at achieving high accuracy across a variety of machine learning tasks, fair ERM is hindered by the incompatibility of fairness constraints with stochastic optimization. We consider the problem of fair classification with discrete sensitive attributes and potentially large models and data sets, requiring stochastic solvers. Existing in-processing fairness algorithms are either impractical in the large-scale setting because they require large batches of data at each iteration or they are not guaranteed to converge. In this paper, we develop the first stochastic in-processing fairness algorithm with guaranteed convergence. For demographic parity, equalized odds, and equal opportunity notions of fairness, we provide slight variations of our algorithm--called FERMI--and prove that each of these variations converges in stochastic optimization with any batch size. Empirically, we show that FERMI is amenable to stochastic solvers with multiple (non-binary) sensitive attributes and non-binary targets, performing well even with minibatch size as small as one. Extensive experiments show that FERMI achieves the most favorable tradeoffs between fairness violation and test accuracy across all tested setups compared with state-of-the-art baselines for demographic parity, equalized odds, equal opportunity. These benefits are especially significant with small batch sizes and for non-binary classification with large number of sensitive attributes, making FERMI a practical, scalable fairness algorithm. The code for all of the experiments in this paper is available at: https://github.com/optimization-for-data-driven-science/FERMI.


Pastoralists tend to occupy highlands and drylands lands with uncertain climates and are experienced at coping with climatic variability and drought. Increasingly, however, the speed with which climate patterns are changing has become an issue of concern. This study examines household water management strategies of pastoralists in western Argentina. In this semi-arid region, pastoralists rely primarily on streams and springs fed by snow and glacier melt from the Andes, and have developed various strategies to meet their water needs. They also deal with myriad challenges posed by climate, economic, and socio-cultural change and work vigorously to maintain their herds – a combination of cattle, goats, and sheep – in this water scarce region. The goal of this study is to understand: 1) different household water management strategies; 2) the ways pastoral livelihoods are changing in response to changes in water supply; and 3) the socio-economic changes that affect pastoral livelihoods. Information from interviews, household surveys, and participant observations reveals that climate fluctuation impacts water supplies and use, herd size, and expenses made on tanks, technology, and infrastructure for the storage and transport of water, food for animals, and subsistence crops. Understanding the micro-scale, water practices of pastoral households provides insight into the ways rural populations in semi-arid and arid environments respond to changes in climate and meet their water needs. Moreover, these findings can contribute to scholarship on traditional and local knowledge and resource management systems, and may potentially inspire the development of adaptive management solutions.


Throughout the descent and at the surface, the downward-looking (DLIS) and upward-looking (ULIS) infrared spectrometers from the DISR/Huygens instrument recorded spectra of the atmospheric radiation and of the surface at the landing site. These spectrometers cover the range 850--1700 nm with a resolution of 15--20 nm. ULIS measurements of the downward flux in the stratosphere are consistent with the 1.6 % methane mole fraction inferred by Cassini/CIRS and Huygens/GCMS. ULIS spectra recorded in the lowest km of the atmosphere strongly vary in intensity depending whether the Sun is within the instrument field of view or not. The contrast in the methane windows, increasing from 4 at 940 nm up to 18 at 1600 nm, is strongly sensitive to the total aerosol optical depth. Using an aggregate haze particle model derived from visible spectra and solar aureole data from DISR, we derived optical depths of about 2 at 940 nm decreasing to 0.5 at 1600 nm. The set of ULIS spectra recorded during the descent provides constraints on the vertical profile of the aerosols in the range 150-40 km, using the residual intensity in the core of the methane bands. A constant-with-height particule concentration provides a good fit of the spectra whereas a cutoff in the lower stratosphere is at odds with the data. A spectrum at an altitude of 20 m with the DISR 20-W lamp turned on indicates a methane mole fraction of 5±1 %, corresponding to a relative humidity of 50 % near the surface. The reflectivity of the dark terrain at the landing site decreases from about 0.18 near 830 nm to 0.06 near 1500 nm and is relatively low and flat from 1500 to 1600 nm. This spectrum is consistent with water ice mixed with an unidentified dark material showing a featureless``blue slope'' in the infrared.


Polar stratospheric clouds (PSC) have been observed in early winter (December 2002) during the SOLVE II/Vintersol campaign, both from balloons carrying comprehensive instrumentation for measurements of chemical composition, size distributions, and optical properties of the particles, as well as from individual backscatter soundings from Esrange and Sodankyla. The observations are unique in the sense that the PSC particles seem to have formed in the early winter under synoptic temperature conditions and not being influenced by mountain lee waves. A sequence of measurements during a 5-days period shows a gradual change between liquid and solid type PSCs with the development of a well-known sandwich structure. It appears that all PSC observations show the presence of a background population of solid particles, occasionally mixed in with more optically dominating liquid particles. The measurements have been compared with results from a detailed microphysical and optical simulation of the formation processes. Calculated extinctions are in good agreement with SAGE-III measurements from the same period. Apparently the solid particles are controlled by the synoptic temperature history while the presence of liquid particles is controlled by the local temperatures at the time of observation. The temperature histories indicate that the solid particles are nucleated above the ice frost point, and a surface freezing mechanism for this is included in the model. Reducing the calculated freezing rates by a factor 10-20, the model is able to simulate the observed particle size distributions and reproduce observed HNO 3 gas phase concentrations.


Potassium phosphotungstate spheres, prepared by a simple coprecipitation method, are introduced for the first time as an anode material for a solar rechargeable battery. The microstructure of the as-prepared potassium phosphotungstate spheres is characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The results show that the obtained potassium phosphotungstate particles were monodisperse and uniform spheres and present good photo-generated electron storage capacity with suitable redox potentials. Correspondingly, the as-fabricated battery using potassium phosphotungstate as the anode material exhibits satisfactory solar energy conversion and storage as well as rechargeable capability. Therefore, the potassium phosphotungstate spheres can be used as potential anode material for applications in the solar rechargeable battery.


Abstract The ego or speaking subject of Pindar's Sixth Paian is anomalous, as has been acknowledged by many scholars. In a genre whose ego is predominantly choral, the speaking subject at the beginning of Paian 6 differentiates himself from the chorus and confidently analogizes his poetic authority to the prophetic power of Delphi by his self-description as ααοοίίδδιιμμοονν ΠΠιιeeρρίίδδωωνν ππρροοfάάτταανν. I would like to correlate Pindar's exceptional ego in this poem with what has recently emerged as the poem's exceptional performance context. Following Ian Rutherford's 1997 discovery of a second marginal title for the third triad (""For the Aiginetans, a prosodion to Aiakos""), we might postulate performance by two choruses: the first two triads sung by a Delphian chorus stationary at the altar, the last triad sung by an Aiginetan chorus as they process to the altar. The need to reconcile within the poem and the space of performance two choruses, two communities, and two local mythic traditions generates the strikingly prominent speaking subject of Paian 6 as a mediating figure.


We use a new database to perform a comprehensive analysis of the mutual fund industry. We find that funds hold stocks that outperform the market by 1.3 percent per year, but their net returns underperform by one percent. Of the 2.3 percent difference between these results, 0.7 percent is due to the underperformance of nonstock holdings, whereas 1.6 percent is due to expenses and transactions costs. Thus, funds pick stocks well enough to cover their costs. Also, high-turnover funds beat the Vanguard Index 500 fund on a net return basis. Our evidence supports the value of active mutual fund management.


Based on the modeling and experiments concerning the surface roughness in abrasive jet finishing with grinding wheel as restraint, the effect of abrasive size, abrasive fluid concentration, machining cycle, wheel velocity and carrier fluid on machined surface quality was investigated. Surface grinder M7120 was employed in a jet machining experiment conducted with W18Cr4V and 40Cr materials, profilometer TALYSURF was used to measure the micro geometrical parameters after machining, and SEM was used to observe surface micro-morphology. Experimental results show that with W7 Al2O3 powder at the mass fraction of 10% and antirust lubricating liquid being adopted in jet machining for 20 to 30 cycles, not only high surface shape precision can be kept or obtained, but also defect-free machined surface with the roughness of Ra0.15~1.6µm can be obtained with high efficiency. Experimental observation and experimental results proved that the experimental results agree well with a mechanism-based machining model.


Objective: To assess the clinical implications of cryoanalgesia for pain management in children undergoing minimally invasive repair of pectus excavatum (MIRPE). Background: MIRPE entails significant pain management challenges, often requiring high postoperative opioid use. Cryoanalgesia, which blocks pain signals by temporarily ablating intercostal nerves, has been recently utilized as an analgesic adjunct. We hypothesized that the use of cryoanalgesia during MIRPE would decrease postoperative opioid use and length of stay (LOS). Materials and Methods: A multicenter retrospective cohort study of 20 US children's hospitals was conducted of children (age below 18 years) undergoing MIRPE from January 1, 2014, to August 1, 2019. Differences in total postoperative, inpatient, oral morphine equivalents per kilogram, and 30-day LOS between patients who received cryoanalgesia versus those who did not were assessed using bivariate and multivariable analysis. P value <0.05 is considered significant. Results: Of 898 patients, 136 (15%) received cryoanalgesia. Groups were similar by age, sex, body mass index, comorbidities, and Haller index. Receipt of cryoanalgesia was associated with lower oral morphine equivalents per kilogram (risk ratio=0.43, 95% confidence interval: 0.33–0.57) and a shorter LOS (risk ratio=0.66, 95% confidence interval: 0.50–0.87). Complications were similar between groups (29.8% vs 22.1, P=0.07), including a similar rate of emergency department visit, readmission, and/or reoperation. Conclusions: Use of cryoanalgesia during MIRPE appears to be effective in lowering postoperative opioid requirements and LOS without increasing complication rates. With the exception of preoperative gabapentin, other adjuncts appear to increase and/or be ineffective at reducing opioid utilization. Cryoanalgesia should be considered for patients undergoing this surgery.


Before 1967, Israel had the overwhelming support of world opinion. So long as Israel's existence was in harmony with politically correct assumptions, it was supported, or at least accepted, by the majority of "progressive" Jews, especially in the wake of the Holocaust. This is no longer the case. "The Jewish Divide Over Israel" explains the role played by prominent Jews in turning Israel into an isolated pariah nation.After their catastrophic defeat in 1967, Arabs overcame inferiority on the battlefield with superiority in the war of ideas. Their propaganda stopped trumpeting their desire to eradicate Israel. Instead, in a calculated appeal to liberals and radicals, they redefined their war of aggression against the Jews as a struggle for the liberation of Palestinian Arabs. The tenacity of Arabs' rejection of Israel and their relentless campaign - in schools, universities, churches, professional organizations, and, above all, the news media - to destroy Israel's moral image had the desired impact. Many Jewish liberals became desperate to escape from the shadow of Israel's alleged misdeeds and found a way to do so by joining other members of the left in blaming Israeli sins for Arab violence.Today, Jewish liberals rationalize violence against the innocent as resistance to the oppressor, excuse Arab extremism as the frustration of a wronged party, and redefine eliminationist rhetoric and physical assaults on Jews as "criticism of Israeli policy." Israel's Jewish accusers have played a crucial and disproportionate role in the current upsurge of antisemitism precisely because they speak as Jews.The essays in this book seek to understand and throw back the assault on Israel led by such Jewish liberals and radicals as Tony Judt, Noam Chomsky, George Steiner, Daniel Boyarin, Marc Ellis, Israel Shahak, and many others. Its writers demonstrate that the foundation of the state of Israel, far from being the primal sin alleged by its accusers, was one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame.


Moore's law states that the amount of computational power available at a given cost doubles every 18 months and indeed, for the past 20 years there has been a tremendous development in microprocessors. However, for the last few years, Moore's law has been subject for debate, since to manage heat issues, processor manufacturers have begun favoring multicore processors, which means parallel computation has become necessary to fully utilize the hardware. This also means that software has to be written with multiprocessing in mind to take full advantage of the hardware, and writing parallel software introduces a whole new set of problems. For the last couple of years, the demands on telecommunication systems have increased and to manage the increasing demands, multiprocessor servers have become a necessity. Applications must fully utilize the hardware and such an application is the Diameter Credit Control Application (DCCA). The DCCA uses the Diameter networking protocol and the DCCA's purpose is to provide a framework for real-time charging. This could, for instance, be to grant or deny a user's request of a specific network activity and to account for the eventual use of that network resource. This thesis investigates whether it is possible to develop a Diameter Credit Control Application that achieves linear scaling and the eventual pitfalls that exist when developing a scalable DCCA server. The assumption is based on the observation that the DCCA server's connections have little to nothing in common (i.e. little or no synchronization), and introducing more processors should therefore give linear scaling. To investigate whether a DCCA server's performance scales linearly, a prototype has been developed. Along with the development of the prototype, constant performance analysis was conducted to see what affected performance and server scalability in a multiprocessor DCCA environment. As the results show, quite a few factors besides synchronization and independent connections affected scalability of the DCCA prototype. The results show that the DCCA prototype did not always achieve linear scaling. However, even if it was not linear, certain design decisions gave considerable performance increase when more processors were introduced.


Objectives: The aim of the present study was to determine the antimicrobial property of the solvent extracts of flowers and aerial parts of S. indicus. Methods: The flowers and the aerial parts of Sphaeranthus indicus were extracted with n-hexane, benzene, chloroform, ethyl acetate and acetone respectively. The extracts were analyzed for the antimicrobial effect by disc diffusion method at concentrations of 5, 2.5 and 1.25 mg/disc. The Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC) was tested using broth micro dilution method at concentrations ranging from 5 to 0.039 mg/ml. Results: There was a significant antibacterial and antifungal activity in hexane extract of flower and aerial parts. The MIC was seen at 0.15 mg/ml against Staphylococcus aureus and the highest MIC (5 mg/ml) was noted for S. epidermidis. The n-hexane extracts of flower and aerial parts showed MIC as 0.15 and 1.25 mg/ml respectively against Candida albicans. Conclusion: Concluding it can be said that the S. indicus flower n-hexane extract showed promising antimicrobial agent.


A series of semi-crystalline, wide band gap (WBG) photovoltaic polymers were synthesized with varying number and topology of fluorine substituents. To decrease intramolecular charge transfer and to modulate the resulting band gap of D–A type copolymers, electron-releasing alkoxy substituents were attached to electron-deficient benzothiadiazole (A) and electron-withdrawing fluorine atoms (0–4F) were substituted onto a 1,4-bis(thiophen-2-yl)benzene unit (D). Intra- and/or interchain noncovalent Coulombic interactions were also incorporated into the polymer backbone to promote planarity and crystalline intermolecular packing. The resulting optical band gap and the valence level were tuned to 1.93–2.15 eV and −5.37 to −5.67 eV, respectively, and strong interchain organization was observed by differential scanning calorimetry, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and grazing incidence X-ray scattering measurements. The number of fluorine atoms and their position significantly influenced the photophysical, morphological and optoelectronic properties of bulk heterojunctions (BHJs) with these polymers. BHJ photovoltaic devices showed a high power conversion efficiency (PCE) of up to 9.8% with an open-circuit voltage of 0.94–1.03 V. To our knowledge, this PCE is one of the highest values for fullerene-based single BHJ devices with WBG polymers having a band gap of over 1.90 eV. A tandem solar cell was also demonstrated successfully to show a PCE of 10.3% by combining a diketopyrrolopyrrole-based low band gap polymer.


The British collector William Beckford helped to define many of the most significant parameters of nineteenth-century collecting, as he was unbound by conventional intellectual or aesthetic prejudice. He was among the first of the great connoisseurs to collect Asian and Islamic art while breaking with the taste of his contemporaries. He assembled an eclectic and luxurious collection that included ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art, as well as seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early-nineteenth-century objects. His active participation in the design of various objects reveals a discriminating aesthetic sensibility that set him apart from his contemporaries. His influence also extended beyond his day: generations of renowned private collectors in Great Britain, on the Continent, and in the United States have reflected his interest in the art of many cultures and periods. This magnificent book describes Beckford's flamboyant personality and unconventional life. Authorities tell us that at an early age, Beckford was known as "England's wealthiest son", due to a prodigal income generated from Jamaican sugar plantations. As a youth, he travelled widely and made his mark as a novelist, composer of music, and impresario of design. His most ambitious project was his fantastic residence Fonthill Abbey; the construction and furnishing of this Gothic Revival edifice consumed nearly twenty-five years of Beckford's life and vast amounts of his fortune, branding him with a reputation as a recluse and eccentric. In addition to providing details about Beckford's life, the book discusses 175 of the finest works of art that once were part of Beckford's legendary collections and examines his travels and great building projects. This richly illustrated book is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture from October 2001 to January 2002 and at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, from February to April 2002.


Using data on upper-division students in the University of California system, we show that two distinct cultures of engagement exist on campus. The culture of engagement in the arts, humanities and social sciences focuses on interaction, participation, and interest in ideas. The culture of engagement in the natural sciences and engineering focuses on improvement of quantitative skills through collaborative study with an eye to rewards in the labor market. The two cultures of engagement are strongly associated with post-graduate degree plans. The findings raise questions about normative conceptions of good educational practices in so far as they are considered to be equally relevant to students in all higher education institutions and all major fields of study.


Close-up photography is one of the most fascinating areas in photography. This illustrated guide will take the reader on a journey into the wonderful world of small, smaller, and smallest objects and show him how he can capture their beauty with photographic images. Each step of the way will be carefully explained; how to choose the right equipment, how to use ambient light or create artificial lighting, and how to conceptualize and frame the perfect shot. Whereas the nature photographer is exploring facets and structures in his environment, the "table top photographer" is trying to shoot a small object, a product, or a small treasure for display on the web (e.g., eBay) or in print. Here, the choice of the appropriate lighting and backdrop, and the creative use of the camera's features are key to a perfect image. Cyrill Harnischmacher explains all aspects of close-up shooting for both inside the studio, as well as outdoors. This book is filled with beautifully illustrated examples and detailed instructions on how to set up a system and workflow for successful close-up photography.


High-temperature tolerance in plants is important in a warming world, with extreme heatwaves predicted to increase in frequency and duration, potentially leading to lethal heating of leaves. Global patterns of high-temperature tolerance are documented in animals, but generally not plants, limiting our ability to assess risks associated with climate warming. To assess whether there are global patterns in high-temperature tolerance of leaf metabolism, we quantified Tcrit (high temperature where minimal chlorophyll a fluorescence rises rapidly, and thus where photosystem II is disrupted) and Tmax (temperature where leaf respiration in darkness is maximal, beyond which respiratory function rapidly declines) in upper-canopy leaves of 218 plant species spanning seven biomes. Mean site-based Tcrit values ranged from 41.5 °C in the Alaskan arctic to 50.8 °C in lowland tropical rainforests of Peruvian Amazon. For Tmax, the equivalent values were 51.0 and 60.6 °C in the Arctic and Amazon, respectively. Tcrit and Tmax followed similar biogeographic patterns, increasing linearly (~8 °C) from polar to equatorial regions. Such increases in high temperature tolerance are much less than expected based on the 20 °C span in high temperature extremes across the globe. Moreover, with only modest high-temperature tolerance despite high summer temperature extremes, species in mid-latitude (~20°-50°) regions have the narrowest thermal safety margins in upper-canopy leaves; these regions are at the greatest risk of damage due to extreme heat-wave events, especially under conditions when leaf temperatures are further elevated by a lack of transpirational cooling. Using predicted heat-wave events for 2050 and accounting for possible thermal acclimation of Tcrit and Tmax, we also found that these safety margins could shrink in a warmer world, as rising temperatures are likely to exceed thermal A cc ep te d A rt ic le This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. tolerance limits. Thus, increasing numbers of species in many biomes may be at risk as heatwave events become more severe with climate change.


Transposable elements (TEs) can affect the structure of genomes through their acquisition and transposition of novel DNA sequences. The 134-bp repetitive elements, Lep1, are conserved non-autonomous Helitrons in lepidopteran genomes that have characteristic 5′-CT and 3′-CTAY nucleotide termini, a 3′-terminal hairpin structure, a 5′- and 3′-subterminal inverted repeat (SIR), and integrations that occur between AT or TT nucleotides. Lep1 Helitrons have acquired and propagated sequences downstream of their 3′-CTAY termini that are 57–344-bp in length and have termini composed of a 3′-CTRR preceded by a 3′-hairpin structure and a region complementary to the 5′-SIR (3′-SIRb). Features of both the Lep1 Helitron and multiple acquired sequences indicate that secondary structures at the 3′-terminus may have a role in rolling circle replication or genome integration mechanisms, and are a prerequisite for novel end creation by Helitron-like TEs. The preferential integration of Lep1 Helitrons in proximity to gene-coding regions results in the creation of genetic novelty that is shown to impact gene structure and function through the introduction of novel exon sequence (exon shuffling). These findings are important in understanding the structural requirements of genomic DNA sequences that are acquired and transposed by Helitron-like TEs.


For neutralization of the H- beams with an energy of ≤ 1 MeV, it is reasonable to use plasma targets with the yield of atoms much higher than that in gas targets. The target plasma is proposed to be confined in a magnetic trap with weak longitudinal magnetic field, the inverse plugs and circular multipole walls. Because of conservation of canonical angular momentum in the axially-symmetric system, the longitudinal confinement of particles by inverse plugs is rather hard. Transversal confinement of plasma is rather good. The target plasma is proposed to be generated by the 100-200 eV electrons. A possibility to develop the experimental plasma target with a 10 cm aperture is considered for neutralization of the H- ion beam with a current up to 2 A. A magnetic field is planned to be formed by circular NdFeB magnets and iron screens. Results are given of the computer simulations for the magnetic system and its optimization for the plasma confinement and especially for restriction of its escape through the end wall holes. Numerically calculated trajectories of the ensemble of plasma electrons with various initial coordinates and trajectories of beam ions are given.


One summer of nearly a hundred years ago saw one of the high sunlit meadows of English history. A new king was crowned; audiences swarmed to Covent Garden to see the Ballet Russes and Nijinsky's gravity-defying leaps. The aristocracy was at play, bounding from house party to the next - the socialite Lady Michelham travelled with her nineteen yards of pearls. Rupert Brooke (a 23-year-old poet in love with love, Keats, marrons glaces and truth) swam in the river at Grantchester. But perfection was over-reaching itself. The rumble of thunder from the summer's storms presaged not only the bloody war years ahead: the country was brought to near standstill by industrial strikes, and unrest exposed the chasm between privileged and poor - as if the heat was torturing those imprisoned in society's straitjacket and stifled by the city smog. Children, seeking relief from the scorching sun, drowned in village ponds. What the protagonists could not have known is that they were playing out the backdrop to WWI; in a few years time the world, let alone England, would never be the same again. Through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals - a debutante, a suffragette, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler and the Queen - Juliet Nicolson illuminates a turning point in history. With the gifts of a great storyteller she rekindles a vision of a time when the sun shone but its shadows fell on all.


This thesis reviews the law that governs Australia's international, natural disaster
response arrangements An international response to a disaster occurs when aid is
sent to, or received by, a state that has been affected by the disaster event. From
Australia's perspective this means there is an international disaster response if
Australia sends disaster relief to an affected state or if Australia, affected by a
disaster, receives assistance from another state or internationally based nongovernment
or inter-government organisation.
To conduct this review of Australia's legal position, relevant international law is
identified and it is demonstrated that, although there are theoretical scenarios that
could justify the provision of international assistance without the consent of the
affected state, for all practical purposes the consent of the affected state is a
necessary pre-condition for the delivery of international disaster assistance. This
means that Australia will not send aid without the consent of a disaster-affected
State, and Australia need not receive assistance unless that is consented to by the
Commonwealth government.
After reviewing the international law of general application between states,
particular bi-lateral and multi-lateral agreements that Australia has entered are
reviewed and their impact upon Australia's legal position on sending or receiving
disaster assistance is identified.
Having identified international law that impacts upon Australia, relevant
Australian domestic law is considered. This analysis identifies the basis of
Commonwealth legislative power in the area of disaster response and identifies
legislation from Canada and the United States that can serve as examples for
Australian legislative action. Australian law and policy is then benchmarked
against the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies'
Guidelines for the Domestic Facilitation and Regulation of International Disaster
Relief and Initial Recovery Assistance (2007).
The process of reviewing and benchmarking Australia's law and policies shows
that the legal and policy arrangements that are in place do not adequately address
foreseeable legal issues that will arise in the event of a catastrophic natural
disaster in Australia, or where Australia wishes to provide natural disaster relief
assistance to another state.
It is the recommendation of this thesis that the Commonwealth should pass a
comprehensive counter-disaster Act to formalise and strengthen Australia's ability
to respond to a catastrophic natural disaster both in Australia and overseas. A
model Act, based on Canadian, American and Australian state and territory
legislation, is developed. The model Act identifies the essential features that
should be incorporated into Commonwealth legislation.
This thesis identifies the law and policy applicable in Australia as at 6 February
2009. On 7 February 2009 bushfires swept through Victoria killing 173 people
and destroying at least 2000 homes. At the same time floods in Queensland and
New South Wales did significantly more property damage. This was followed by
cyclone Hamish off the Queensland coast. During the cyclone a cargo ship, the
Pacific Adventurer, lost several containers of fertiliser and 230 litres of fuel,
causing a widespread environmental emergency. There is to be a Royal
Commission into the Victorian fires and there will, inevitably, be 'lessons
learned' reports from the other events. Whether or not these reports will lead to
recommendations regarding Australia's emergency arrangements remains to be
seen, but the outcomes from the inquiries into these events may well impact upon
the findings in this thesis. Accordingly this thesis identifies the position at
February 2009, but this will inform any subsequent recommendations for change
arising out of the 2009 natural disasters.


Recent automating technologies have sparked discussions on "robot taxes," aimed to dissuade the displacement of labor and to generate revenue to redistribute to displaced laborers. Implementing such taxes is challenging, however, in part because of the difficulty in clearly separating which technologies substitute for labor from those which complement it. Modeling automating technologies as intermediate goods, I consider the optimal tax policy in this environment. As in standard models, non-linear labor taxes are assigned without the knowledge of a laborer's type. Additionally, due to tax avoidance concerns and arbitrage opportunities, intermediate goods are uniformly and linearly taxed without the knowledge of their complementarity or substitutability with labor. Despite the potential for automating technologies to be complementary to workers, I find that the optimal tax regime includes a strictly positive tax on these intermediate goods. I discuss the implications of these findings for the robustness of robot-tax policy proposals.


The Average Camper Who Doesn't Exist. Elwood L. Shafer, Jr. Northeastern Forest Experiment Station, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 6816 Market St., Upper Darby, Pennsylvania 19082. 1969. 27p. Free. Readers are encouraged to submit items for inclusion in the Travel Research Bookshelf. All items submitted should include the author, title, source of availability, length, and price. Anyone wishing copies of the materials listed in the Travel Research Bookshelf should write to the source indicated and not to the Travel Research Bulletin.


Mesophotic reef corals remain largely unexplored in terms of the genetic adaptations and physiological mechanisms to acquire, allocate, and use energy for survival and reproduction. In the Hawaiian Archipelago, the Leptoseris species complex form the most spatially extensive mesophotic coral ecosystem known and provide habitat for a unique community. To study how the ecophysiology of Leptoseris species relates to symbiont–host specialization and understand the mechanisms responsible for coral energy acquisition in extreme low light environments, we examined Symbiodinium (endosymbiotic dinoflagellate) photobiological characteristics and the lipids and isotopic signatures from Symbiodinium and coral hosts over a depth‐dependent light gradient (55–7 μmol photons m−2 s−1, 60–132 m). Clear performance differences demonstrate different photoadaptation and photoacclimatization across this genus. Our results also show that flexibility in photoacclimatization depends primarily on Symbiodinium type. Colonies harboring Symbiodinium sp. COI‐2 showed significant increases in photosynthetic pigment content with increasing depth, whereas colonies harboring Symbiodinium spp. COI‐1 and COI‐3 showed variability in pigment composition, yield measurements for photosystem II, as well as size and density of Symbiodinium cells. Despite remarkable differences in photosynthetic adaptive strategies, there were no significant differences among lipids of Leptoseris species with depth. Finally, isotopic signatures of both host and Symbiodinium changed with depth, indicating that coral colonies acquired energy from different sources depending on depth. This study highlights the complexity in physiological adaptations within this symbiosis and the different strategies used by closely related mesophotic species to diversify energy acquisition and to successfully establish and compete in extreme light‐limited environments.


An important problem for the Internet is how to provide a guaranteed quality of service to users, in contrast to the current "best-effort" service. A key aspect of this problem is how routers should share network capacity between different classes of traffic. This decision needs to be made for each incoming packet, and is known as the packet scheduling problem. A major challenge in packet scheduling is that the behaviour of each traffic class may not be known in advance, and can vary dynamically. In this paper, we describe how we have modelled the packet scheduling problem as an application for reinforcement learning (RL). We demonstrate how our RL approach can learn scheduling policies that satisfy the quality of service requirements of multiple traffic classes under a variety of conditions. We also present an insight into the effectiveness of two different RL algorithms in this context. A major benefit of this approach is that we can help network providers deliver a guaranteed quality of service to customers without manual fine-tuning of the network routers.


Based on data from 2091 call centre representatives working in 85 call centres in the UK, central assumptions of affective events theory (AET) are tested. AET predicts that specific features of work (e.g. autonomy) have an impact on the arousal of emotions and moods at work that, in turn, co-determine job satisfaction of employees. AET further proposes that job satisfaction is an evaluative judgement that mainly explains cognitive-based behaviour, whereas emotions and moods better predict affective-based behaviour. The results support these assumptions. A clear separation of key constructs (job satisfaction, positive and negative emotions) was possible. Moreover, correlations between several work features (e.g. supervisory support) and job satisfaction were, in part, mediated by work emotions, even when controlling for gender, age, call centre type (in-house versus outsourced centres) and call centre size. Predictions regarding consequences of satisfaction and affect were partly corroborated as continuance commitment was more strongly related to job satisfaction than to positive emotions. In addition, affective commitment and health complaints were related to both emotions and job satisfaction to the same extent. Thus, AET is a fruitful framework for explaining why and how specific management strategies used for designing work features influence important organizational attitudes and well-being of employees.


Endovascular treatment of acute traumatic aortic rupture Background: Traumatic rupture of the thoracic aorta as a result from high-speed deceleration injury is associated with a mortality rate of 80% to 90% at the scene of the accident. Survivors usually have life-threa- tening injuries to other organ systems. Standard open repair is associated with a high perioperative morbidity and mortality. Endografting offers a less invasive alternative to open surgical repair. Aim: To evaluate results of endovascular management of acute traumatic descending thoracic aortic ruptures. Methods: Between August 2002 and March 2010, patients treated for this trauma were reviewed. Results: 16 patients (fourteen males mean age 42.7 ± 15.8 years, range 24-74) underwent endovascular treatment of an acute aortic rupture. Associated traumas in fi fteen patients were: severe brain (7), spleen (4), liver (1), kidney (3) and large bone (9) injuries. Motor vehicle accidents caused 13 of the injuries and fall from height 3. Rupture was diagnosed with admission CT scan and confi rmed by intraoperative angiogram. Patients were treated with thoracic aortic endograft, in 11 cases the left subclavian artery was covered with no need for further revascularization. Tech- nical success was 100%, no procedure-related mortality or paraplegia was observed. One patient died 5 days after the procedure due to severe associated injuries. During a mean follow-up of 30.8 months (range 1-80), no deaths, complications or need for further interventions presented. Conclusion: Endovascular treatment of acute traumatic aortic isthmic rupture is encouraging and compares favorably to open surgical approach with low morbidity and mortality rates.


Opinion on the stability or otherwise of the demand for money in Australia can be characterised as divided. In this paper, several conventional single-equation models representing the demand for money are re-estimated with extended and revised data sets, and subjected to a range of stability tests. Some attention is paid to the possibility of heteroskedasticity in the residuals, which is important in the context of stability tests. Apart from testing for stability in a general sense, particular emphasis is given to the first half of the 1980's, where wide-ranging financing deregulation might be expected to affect relationships between the money stock, income and interest rates. The conclusion is that it is difficult to accept the proposition that the conventional equations have not been subject to instability. This is particularly so for M3; the evidence is more mixed in the case of M1.


In this study, we investigated fifth-graders' (n=52) fall literacy, academic language, and motivation, and how these skills predicted fall and spring comprehension monitoring on an eye movement task. Comprehension monitoring was defined as the identification and repair of misunderstandings when reading text. In the eye movement task, children read two sentences; the second included either a plausible or implausible word in the context of the first sentence. Stronger readers had shorter reading times overall suggesting faster processing of text. Generally fifth-graders reacted to the implausible word (i.e., longer gaze duration on the implausible v. the plausible word, which reflects lexical access). Students with stronger academic language, compared to those with weaker academic language, generally spent more time re-reading the implausible target compared to the plausible target. This difference increased from fall to spring. Results support the centrality of academic language for meaning integration, setting standards of coherence, and utilizing comprehension repair strategies.


An analytical approach is provided for determining the performance of a virtual circuit connection for data transmission in high speed asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network buffers at wide area network (WAN) nodes. The analysis assumes that the network operates using the best effort delivery strategy and that the end-to-end virtual circuit is responsible for guaranteeing the integrity of the connection. As the normal Markovian assumptions do not apply, a concise exact solution is impossible to obtain. A hybrid model incorporating finite buffers at the nodes was developed to study the effect on the performance of both link errors and buffer overflow in conjunction with an end-to-end packet loss recovery scheme.<<ETX>>


Ligand gated ion-channels are proteins that are embedded in the membranes of cells. They play many crucial physiological roles, enabling fast cell-to-cell communication be- tween neuronal cells and communication between the nervous and musculoskeletal sys- tems. A key feature of their physiology is their ability to form a pore, through which a small quantal current in the form of ions can ow. Such channels are statistically modelled as Markov processes. However, given the limitations of experimental data, establishing model parameter identi�ability and robust model comparison remain im- portant statistical issues. This Thesis considers the use of Likelihood and Bayesian methods to investigate the parameterisation and selection of mechanistic Markov models for ion-channel gating. The biological and statistical background is placed in context, particularly with regard to statistical issues of limited time resolution of electrophysiological recordings which signi�cantly complicates the model likelihood. A canonical ion-channel model for the Acetylcholine receptor is described, which is used to assess the use of pro�le likelihoods to answer questions concerning model parameter identi�ability. MCMC techniques are then introduced to sample from model posterior distributions in order to examine candidate models within the Bayesian paradigm. Even simple mod- els exhibit complex posterior distributions. This motivates a thorough assessment of sophisticated MCMC samplers to perform Bayesian inference in such models. A prin- cipled method using preconditioned or adaptive MCMC algorithms is found to provide an e�ective sampling strategy. Model parameterisation and predictive uncertainty in model posterior outputs is then assessed using both real and synthetic data. Model discrimination based on visual inspection of posterior predictive output is not always conclusive. A parallel tempering sampling strategy is successfully implemented to estimate Bayes Factors for candidate models. This quantitative technique can dis- criminate between competing models that otherwise produce visually similar predictive output for the gating dynamics of the Acetylcholine receptor.


A special Slag-Prop Cu database has been developed to archive data from laboratory and industrial tests related to post-reduction slags. In order to enrich the data areas, it was decided to design a system for measuring the temperature of the liquid slag and its viscosity. Objectives of research work are to gather information on the properties of post-slags such as the temperature of liquid slag and its viscosity. The discussed issues are especially important in the foundry practice. Designed research stand and using of database applications can greatly facilitate the work of metallurgists, foundrymen, technologists and scientists. The viscosity measurement was developed and presented earlier. The author's analytical methodology was supplemented by a thyristor measuring system (described in the article). The system temperature measurement can be performed simultaneously in 3 ways to reduce the measurement error. Measurement of the voltage mV using the Seebeck effect can be measured throughout the entire range of thermocouple resistance, up to 1300 °C. Direct temperature measurement 0C measurement only below 1000 0C. Additional measurement the measurement can also be read from the pyrometer set above the bath. The temperature and the reading frequency depend on the device itself. The principle of measurement is that in a molten metal / slag crucible, we put a N-type thermocouple. The thermocouples are hung by means of a tripod above the crucible and placed in a crucible. The thermocouple is connected to a compensating line dedicated to this type of thermocouple. The cable is in turn connected to a special multimeter that has the ability to connect to a computer and upload results. Temperature measurement can be performed simultaneously in 3 ways to reduce the measurement error. The Sn-Pb alloy has been subjected to testing for proper operation of the device. In this foot should be observed the supercooling of the liquid, which initiates the crystallization process and in which latent heat begins to exude raising the temperature until the coagulation temperature is reached.


We would like to make a few pertinent comments regarding the article Intraoperative Barotrauma During Ophthalmologic Surgery. Case Report, by Affonso Henrique Zugliani et al. In our service we have available, for some time now, a few Conquest 3000 HB mechanical ventilators similar to the one mentioned in this report, which are used daily in our anesthesias and, therefore, we are familiarized with its performance. When justifying the pulmonary barotrauma, the authors attributed it to the kinking of the connecting tube between the ventilator and the anesthetic circuit as the cause of the accident (Figure 3). However, we disagree with their conclusion. The angulation of the tube prevents the volume in the bellows, which would be the inspiratory volume, to be ejected into the circuit, causing it to escape through the safety pressure limiting valve that is close to the connection with the ventilator, as can be seen in figure 3. This escape mechanism produces a characteristic sound. If the volume cannot be ejected into the lungs of the patient, it cannot be responsible for the barotrauma. In our opinion, the most likely explanation would be the closure of the pop-off valve, located above the respiratory bag, preventing elimination of the excess of fresh gases, which continue to enter into the respiratory circuit and, therefore, preventing their elimination into the environment which, as time went by, caused the barotrauma. In the diagram (Figure 4), we noticed a series of errors that are not in agreement with the proper assembly of the device. The following statement "The reservoir bag is excluded from the circuit in controlled ventilation" is not completely correct. If the selector key is placed in the Controlled Ventilation position, the reservoir bag is in fact excluded from the circuit, but only during the inspiratory phase, since it prevents the volume ejected by the bellows to be deviated into the bag. This does not happen during expiration because the connection between the reservoir bag and the bellows that aspirates, when it descends, its contents along with fresh gases and the anesthetic agent that continue to enter the system and, therefore, feeding it. As mentioned before, kinking of the tube prevents the volume ejected by the bellows to enter the system but does not prevent, as stated by the authors, the elimination of excess gas through the pop-off valve, which should always be opened to allow the elimination of excess gas to prevent excessive pressure in the circuit.


Social Work in England is generally seen as a profession concerned with the fulfilment of statutory functions concerning safeguarding and risk management, and recent developments in social work and social work education have focused on improving the quality of statutory social workers, especially in children's services. However, workforce statistics suggest that more than 50% of registered social workers are not so employed, and may be found working in 'welfare' organisations outside the statutory sector, although detailed information about this group is not easily accessible. This paper reports findings from a qualitative study based on interviews with recently qualified social workers (within the last five years)employed in positions not requiring social work registration and qualification. It discusses the motivations and experiences of recently qualified social workers who have sought posts not requiring social work registration and the issues they identify as important in maintaining individual and collective social work identity.


. The historical centre of Puebla was included in the UNESCO list as World Heritage Site in 1987. Founded for poor Spanish people (1531), the "Puebla de los Ángeles" became very soon an important urban centre, with its splendour in the Virreinal middle period. This paper presents the idea that for the real preservation of the historical city it is necessary to recover the 'residential value' of this historical urban space. For it we have a great opportunity in the Puebla's urban block (83,5m. x 167 m.), an incredible 'microcosm' dominated by the structure of 'patios'. Here there is a lot of abandoned or semi-abandoned buildings and tourism, with the administrative and commercial functions, are not sufficient for recreate the urban space in its true potential. It is possible to think in the historical city as a liveable place, in a more sustainable way.