Reflectance spectroscopy in the visible and near-infrared (0.35 to 2.55 µm) offers a rapid, inexpensive, nondestructive tool for determining the mineralogy and for investigating the minor-element chemistry of the hard-to-discriminate carbonate minerals, and can, in one step, provide information previously obtainable only by the combined application of two or more analytical techniques. When light interacts with a mineral, certain wavelengths are preferentially absorbed. The positions and widths of absorptions due to vibrations of the carbonate radical, and the positions and shapes of absorptions due to transition metal cations, if present, can be used to determine mineralogy. Relative intensities of absorptions due to transition metal cations can be used to determine concentration of these cations. Because absorptions due to Fe2+ and Mn2+ occur in different regions of the spectrum, the presence of one cation does not interfere with analysis for the other. Detection limits for Mn2+ are about 0.1 wt% Mn and for Fe2+ are about 0.01 wt% Fe.

This technique is also very sensitive to the presence of water and indicates that aqueous fluid inclusions are nearly ubiquitous in carbonate minerals and rocks. Spectra indicate that inclusions are particularly abundant in skeletal carbonates and that the quantity of inclusions in skeletal material varies from one type of organism to another. Spectra indicate that inclusions are lost during diagenesis of skeletal material, providing a new criterion for diagenetic studies.


Quantifying above-ground biomass (AGB) and carbon sequestration has been a significant focus of attention within the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol for improvement of national carbon accounting systems (IPCC, 2007; UNFCCC, 2011). A multitude of research has been carried out in relatively flat and homogeneous forests (Ranson & Sun, 1994; Beaudoin et al.,1994; Kurvonen et al., 1999; Austin et al., 2003; Dimitris et al., 2005), yet forests in the highlands, which generally form heterogeneous forest cover and sparse woodlands with mountainous terrain have been largely neglected in AGB studies (Cloude et al., 2001; 2008; Lumsdon et al., 2005; 2008; Erxue et al., 2009, Tan et al., 2010; 2011a; 2011b; 2011c; 2011d). Since mountain forests constitute approximately 28% of the total global forest area (Price and Butt, 2000), a better understanding of the slope effects is of primary importance in AGB estimation. The main objective of this research is to estimate AGB in the aforementioned forest in Glen Affric, Scotland using both SAR and LiDAR data. Two types of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data were used in this research: TerraSAR-X, operating at X-band and ALOS PALSAR, operating at L-band, both are fully polarimetric. The former data was acquired on 13 April 2010 and of the latter, two scenes were acquired on 17 April 2007 and 08 June 2009. Airborne LiDAR data were acquired on 09 June 2007. Two field measurement campaigns were carried out, one of which was done from winter 2006 to spring 2007 where physical parameters of trees in 170 circular plots were measured by the Forestry Commission team. Another intensive fieldwork was organised by myself with the help of my fellow colleagues and it comprised of tree measurement in two transects of 200m x 50m at a relatively flat and dense plantation forest and 400m x 50m at hilly and sparse semi-natural forest. AGB is estimated for both the transects to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed method at plot-level. This thesis evaluates the capability of polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar data for AGB estimation by investigating the relationship between the SAR backscattering coefficient and AGB and also the relationship between the decomposed scattering mechanisms and AGB. Due to the terrain and heterogeneous nature of the forests, the result from the backscatter-AGB analysis show that these forests present a challenge for simple AGB estimation. As an alternative, polarimetric techniques were applied to the problem by decomposing the backscattering information into scattering mechanisms based on the approach by Yamaguchi (2005; 2006), which are then regressed to the field measured AGB. Of the two data sets, ALOS PALSAR demonstrates a better estimation capacity for AGB estimation than TerraSAR-X. The AGB estimated results from SAR data are compared with AGB derived from LiDAR data. Since tree height is often correlated with AGB (Onge et al., 2008; Gang et al., 2010), the effectiveness of the tree height retrieval from LiDAR is evaluated as an indicator of AGB. Tree delineation…


This dissertation analyzes the rhetoric surrounding the environmental crisis of the honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder, commonly known as CCD. Since 2007, the United States has lost on average a third of its honey bee colonies each year to CCD. The crisis has potentially serious environmental consequences. Without honey bee pollination services, over $14 billion worth of crops in the United States alone are in jeopardy. Drawing on environmental rhetoric, genre theory, and agricultural rhetorics, I offer a rhetorical analysis and genre analysis of the narratives surrounding CCD from select popular press newspaper articles, documentaries, nonfiction works, and personal interviews with beekeepers that cover the span of the early years of the U.S. crisis from 2007 to 2011. I argue that specific narratives of CCD offered by stakeholders such as scientists, reporters, beekeepers, policymakers, and environmentalists both constrained and invited deliberation about the synergistic causes of the crisis. One narrative I examine in detail in Chapter Two is the nesting genre of the "crime mystery" of CCD in news stories that often reduced consideration of the causes of CCD to a warring search for a pathogenic solution. This focus on a "smoking gun" for CCD focused the public's attention on scientists seeking a single solution instead of considering multi-factoral causes. The genre also reduced consideration of the multiple roles stakeholders played in the crisis. In contrast, beekeepers' protests, insights and perspectives (Chapters Three and Four) and the trope "listening to bees" popular in nonfiction media (Chapter Five) expanded consideration of systemic economic and cultural causes for the crisis, and allowed bees and beekeepers to emerge as informative agents. This project considers, too, how American beekeepers have approached CCD in largely individualistic terms in contrast to French beekeepers who have collectively organized in large groups to protest their sense that CCD was caused by the sale of a pesticide by the Bayer Corporation. I apply rhetorical and genre analysis to representations of CCD in popular media and beekeepers' discourse. I cite stakeholders such as scientists, researchers, journalists, beekeepers, and protestors. This dissertation contributes to scholarship in environmental rhetoric and environmental communication that analyzes the narratives and causes of environmental crises. This project evaluates the solutions and challenges that varied stakeholders have posed, specifically through analyzing the shaping and impact of their narratives. Ultimately, the concluding chapter argues for the trope of "listening to bees," the idea that bees are a critical indicator species whose behavior informs how we should approach and potentially solve this crisis.


An intensity-modulated 257-nm pump laser beam is used to induce refractive index changes inside of a capillary tube employed as an on-line detection system for capillary electrophoresis. These refractive index changes inside the capillary are monitored by demodulating the periodic lateral shifts of the interference fringes, generated by a probe laser beam oscillating at 633 nm, with a phase-sensitive amplifier. The use of capillaries with an internal diameter of 25 μm results in a twofold benefit in electrophoretic separations in conjunction with thermo-optical detection. The pumped heat is efficiently quenched at the capillary wall, and high electrical fields can be applied along the separation tube. The combination of both effects leads to highly efficient separations and fast modulations of the pump source. This is demonstrated by the separation of a test mixture of three dansylated amino acids in less than two minutes. Only 350-pg amounts of total sample are injected onto the column, and the detection volume is less than 10 pL.


How are men reacting to contemporary social change? How are they responding to changes in women's demands and women's identities? And how are national and transnational politics and policies assisting, or not, in these key challenges? Using a broad comparative perspective, contributions from scholars in seventeen countries analyze the characteristics and potential of diverse educational and political initiatives towards progressive changes in gender relations.


Paranoia is not an obscure mental state afflicting some individuals but a widespread condition of modern societies, say the authors of this book. Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, M.D., document and interpret the malign power of paranoia in a variety of contexts - in political movements like McCarthyism, in organizations like the John Birch Society, in leaders like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Jim Jones, and David Koresh, and among extreme groups that commit violence in the name of Christianity, islam, and Judaism. Indeed, Robins and Post show that paranoid dynamic has been aggressively present in every social disaster of this century. Robins and Post describe the paranoid personality, explain why paranoia is part of human evolutionary history, and examine the conditions that must exist before the message of the paranoid takes root in a vulnerable population, leading to mass movements and genocidal violence. Their wide-ranging discussion sheds lights on many troubling episodes in our history: why more than 900 people committed suicide in Guyana in 1978 with their leader, Jim Jones; how the terrorists who bombed New York's World Trade Centre in New York in 1993 justified their violence in the name of God; how the need for enemies in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire led to a rise in anti-Semitism in some eastern European countries even though the Jewish population had been nearly decimated; how paranoia manifests itself among black and white racists; and why the conspiracy theory elaborated in Oliver stone's film JFK strikes such a chord in the viewing public.


We consider a continuous optical discharge (COD) sustained by a weakly focused CO2 laser beam and stabilized by a cold gas flow incident in the direction of the laser radiation propagation. We develop and examine a two-dimensional radiative gas-dynamic model for COD which uses realistic quasi-optics and takes refraction of the laser radiation in the plasma properly into account in describing the laser beam propagation. The model is applied to calculate the parameters of COD in the air flow as functions of the laser power and inlet velocity of the incident flow.


This article gives an overview of small power problem focusing on the behaviour of small power states within coalitions and their proneness to free riding. To pursue an independent agenda and increase their significance within large associations, the authors argue, small powers tend to create 'coalitions within coalitions', essentially acting as free riders and transferring costs and political responsibility for decisionmaking to larger players. Such an asymmetric strategy makes it possible for small powers to advance their interests within alliances and save resources. The authors test this hypothesis on the behaviour of the Baltics in the European Union. It is demonstrated that Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have created a stable small coalition within the EU and actively form ad hoc alliances with the leading states to push union-level decisions, as it was the case with settling the migrant issue. In other areas, these states tend to benefit from free-riding behaviour.


Abstract A record of late Paleozoic foraminiferal diversity, origination and extinction frequencies, and provincialism at million-year temporal resolution and species-level taxonomic resolution has been achieved by analyzing composite standard databases. Foraminiferal species diversity increased throughout Mississippian and Pennsylvanian time leading up to its peak at the Pennsylvanian/Permian boundary. Foraminifers then experienced a steep decline in diversity during the Early Permian. Frequencies of origination and extinction broadly tracked changes in global diversity. From Late Mississippian time onward, patterns in total foraminiferal diversity were dominated by fusulinoideans. There is no clear relationship between rates of foraminiferal evolution and the alternating glacial and nonglacial intervals that characterized the late Paleozoic ice age. Rather, high rates of origination and extinction might reflect instability of neritic environments as a consequence of high-frequency, high-amplitude base-level fluctuations (cyclothemic deposition). Further, the advent of algal symbiosis in fusulinoideans was a physiologic innovation that promoted diversification as these symbiont-bearing taxa experimented with morphologic adaptations for partitioning the low-nutrient environments to which they were specialized. Growth to large size and delayed maturation in fusulinoideans might have been enabled by the late Paleozoic hyperoxic atmosphere and the widespread development of oligotrophic, carbonate platform and shelf environments. The late Paleozoic history of foraminiferal diversification was influenced also by closure of the Rheic Ocean beginning in Late Mississippian time. Foraminiferal associations on opposite sides of Pangea exhibited relatively high similarity prior to the closure, but then similarity decreased steadily after destruction of the subequatorial marine corridor. Arctic-Eurasian and North American associations were nearly isolated from one another throughout the main burst of fusulinoidean diversification, so that parallel lineages developed independently in the two regions, resulting in many instances of convergence.


We document that the global scope and depth of the crisis the began with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the summer of 2007 is unprecedented in the post World War II era and, as such, the most relevant comparison benchmark is the Great Depression (or the Great Contraction, as dubbed by Friedman and Schwartz, 1963) of the 1930s. Some of the similarities between these two global episodes are examined but the analysis of the aftermath of severe financial crises is extended to also include the most severe post-WWII crises as well. As to the causes of these great crises, we focus on those factors that are common across time and geography. We discriminate between root causes of the crises, recurring crises symptoms, and common features (such as misguided financial regulation or inadequate supervision) which serve as amplifiers of the boom-bust cycle. There are recurring temporal patterns in the boom-bust cycle and their broad sequencing is analyzed.


This thesis investigates improved estimators of the parameters of the linear regression models with normal errors, under sample and non-sample prior information about the value of the parameters. The estimators considered are the unrestricted estimator (UE), restricted estimator (RE), shrinkage restricted estimator (SRE), preliminary test estimator (PTE), shrinkage preliminary test estimator (SPTE), and shrinkage estimator (SE). The performances of the estimators are investigated with respect to bias, squared error and linex loss. For the analyses of the risk functions of the estimators, analytical, graphical and numerical procedures are adopted. In Part I the SRE, SPTE and SE of the slope and intercept parameters of the simple linear regression model are considered. The performances of the estimators are investigated with respect to their biases and mean square errors. The efficiencies of the SRE, SPTE and SE relative to the UE are obtained. It is revealed that under certain conditions, SE outperforms the other estimators considered in this thesis. In Part II in addition to the likelihood ratio (LR) test, the Wald (W) and Lagrange multiplier (LM) tests are used to define the SPTE and SE of the parameter vector of the multiple linear regression model with normal errors. Moreover, the modified and size-corrected W, LR and LM tests are used in the definition of SPTE. It is revealed that a great deal of conflict exists among the quadratic biases (QB) and quadratic risks (QR) of the SPTEs under the three original tests. The use of the modified tests reduces the conflict among the QRs, but not among the QBs. However, the use of the size-corrected tests in the definition of the SPTE almost eliminates the conflict among both QBs and QRs. It is also revealed that there is a great deal of conflict among the performances of the SEs when the three original tests are used as the preliminary test statistics. With respect to quadratic bias, the W test statistic based SE outperforms that based on the LR and LM test statistics. However, with respect to the QR criterion, the LM test statistic based SE outperforms the W and LM test statistics based SEs, under certain conditions. In Part III the performance of the PTE of the slope parameter of the simple linear regression model is investigated under the linex loss function. This is motivated by increasing criticism of the squared error loss function for its inappropriateness in many real life situations where underestimation of a parameter is more serious than its overestimation or vice-versa. It is revealed that under the linex loss function the PTE outperforms the UE if the nonsample prior information about the value of the parameter is not too far from its true value. Like the linex loss function, the risk function of the PTE is also asymmetric. However, if the magnitude of the scale parameter of the linex loss is very small, the risk of the PTE is nearly symmetric.


Purpose: The Dokuz Eylül University Drug and Poison Information Center (DEUDPIC) has been serviced 24 hours a day and 7 days a week as a regional poison information center for 1993-2011. Our activities continue as an institutional service on regular working hours on weekdays only since 2012. We aimed to evaluate service capacity of a regional poison and drug information center by analyzing data in 2014. Methods: In this retrospective, descriptive, cross-sectional study, patients who consulted to the DEUDPIC during regular working hours on weekdays between January 01 and December 31 in 2014 were evaluated. All data were recorded in standard forms and then entered into a database program (Ruber). Chi-square test was used for statistical analysis. Results: In total, 118 patients consulted at DEUDPIC. The time interval between poison exposure and consultation to DEUDPIC was 16.79±3.62 hours. Intentional exposure was the most common reason of poisonings (66.9%), and there was a female predominance (p<0.05). Medications were the most frequent (88.9%) causes of poisoning. Nervous system medications were the most frequent agents (31.7%), and paracetamol was the most common ingestion. Recommended treatments included observation and supportive care procedures (56.3%) and decontamination methods (29.9%). There were two mortalities (1.6%) related to mushroom poisoning. Conclusion: Our results do not show an important change of pattern for demographics and the causes of poisonings. Service on regular working hours resulted in a decrease in patient number, longer time interval between poison exposure and consultation, decrease in the recommended decontamination procedure, and increase in the proportion of severe cases.


Toxins A and B of Clostridium difficile are responsible for pseudomembranous colitis, a disease that afflicts a substantial number of hospitalized patients treated with antibiotics. A major effect of these proteins is the disruption of the actin cytoskeleton. Recently, I. Just, G. Fritz, K. Aktories, M. Giry, M. R. Popoff, P. Boquet, S. Hegenbarth, and C. von Eichel-Streiber (J. Biol. Chem. 269:10706-10712, 1994) implicated Rho proteins as cellular targets of C. difficile toxin B, since pretreatment of cells or purified Rho with toxin prevented subsequent ADP-ribosylation of Rho by exoenzyme C3. Moreover, they showed that overexpression of Rho proteins in cells suppressed cell rounding normally associated with exposure of cells to C. difficile toxin B. Here we expand these findings by showing directly that Rho proteins are covalently modified by both C. difficile toxins A and B. In addition, we demonstrate that the stability of toxin-modified Rho in NIH 3T3 cells is dramatically reduced. Finally, we show that C. difficile toxins A and B do not have similar effects on the closely related Rac and CDC42 GTP-binding proteins.


The recent introduction of the European Directive on information and consultation and its forthcoming implementation into UK law has increased the focus on workplace representation arrangements. This paper examines the interplay between non-union and union representative arrangements at Eurotunnel (UK) and assesses their effectiveness in representing the needs of employees over a fi ve-year period. Importantly, the paper also examines the pros and cons of both NER and union voice arrangements. The fi ndings show that the effectiveness of non-union structures as bodies representing the interests of employees in fi lling the lack of representation is questionable. However, union recognition through an employer-union partnership agreement has also raised important issues regarding the effectiveness, impact and legitimacy of unions at Eurotunnel. This perception of the lack of effective voice is particularly important given the recent introduction of the European Directive on information and consultation and its forthcoming implementation into UK law. The main implication of this research is that the existence of a mechanism - union or non-union - for communication between management and employees at the workplace may not be a suffi cient condition for representation of employee interests. Effective employee voice over workplace issues may be essential for achieving and maintaining employee satisfaction. Voice, the right to be heard and having infl uence over workplace issues and at times an acknowledgement of differing interests may be essential conditions for a more effective decision-making process.


Cowgill's modernisation theory stipulates that older people's social status is lower in societies with higher societal modernisation. The few existing studies reveal conflicting results showing either negative or positive associations. The current study follows up seminal cross-national research on the perceived social status of people in their seventies (PSS70) in a diverse set of countries. PSS70 was defined as the relative status of people in their seventies compared to people in their forties. Data were obtained by the World Values Survey (2010–2014) and included 78,904 respondents from 58 countries. Multilevel regressions showed that the level of modernisation had a strong and negative association with the PSS70 but mostly due to one component, namely the share of older people in society. The associations were more complex when considering cultural zones of which two stood out. Irrespective of level of modernisation, Muslim countries showed higher and post-communist countries showed lower levels of PSS70. In Muslim countries, modernisation had a near-zero association with PSS70, whereas it was strongly negatively associated with PSS70 in post-communist countries. This study generally supports Cowgill's theory in a large and diverse cross-sectional sample of countries, yet it also illustrates its cultural boundary conditions.


Hereditary angioedema (HAE) is characterized by recurrent attacks of skin and mucosal swelling in any part of the body including the digestive and respiratory tract which generally improve spontaneously within 12-72 hours. The underlying mechanism in HAE is related to bradykinin dysregulation which causes these attacks not to respond to common treatment strategies including epinephrine/corticosteroid or adrenaline. There are several types of HAE with different etiology but with the same clinical picture. Type 1 is due to the deficiency of C1 Inhibitor (C1-INH) protein and type 2 is related to dysfunctional C1-INH protein. The third type of HAE which comprises the minority of cases is associated with the normal amount and function of C1-INH protein. The presented case in this report was a 15-years old girl with a history of spontaneous angioedema attacks from the age of 14. The frequency of attacks was initially every two months but consequently increased to every two weeks after using some hormonal medications for ovarian cyst. Each episode has lasted around 10 days without any symptoms in between. Complement studies including C4, C1q, and C1-INH protein, both quantitative and qualitative, were reported as normal. A genetic assessment revealed a mutation in the exon 9 on the gene related to factor XII, hence the diagnosis of HAE type 3 was confirmed. This was a rare type of angioedema with normal amount and function of C1-INH protein which is predominantly seen in women during periods of imbalanced estrogen increments like pregnancy, lactation, and menopause, and hence it is responsive to hormonal manipulation strategies such as the use of progesterone containing medications.


TiNi-based binary shape memory alloy thin films have been fabricated by means of simultaneous multi-target sputtering method. The films were deposited onto Cu foils by a D.C. magnetron sputtering system with two separate Ti and Ni targets. Deposition of the films was carried out by sputtering both targets simultaneously. Composition of the films was controlled by adjusting sputtering power for each cathode. The thin films were heat-treated at various temperatures for 1 h and then quenched into water. Microstructures of the films were characterized by scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Ti-50.5Ni thin films heat-treated above 700 °C for 1 h were perfectly crystallized, however, those heat-treated at 500 °C for 1 h were not crystallized completely. Fracture stress of the films heat-treated at 700 °C was higher than that of heat-treated at 500 °C. These results are quite different from the case of thin films deposited by sputtering a Ti-Ni alloy target. The brittleness of the films fabricated by simultaneous multi-target sputter-deposition originates in its deposition process.


In the world of continuous globalization, standards play a crucial role in transnational economic development. Being the drivers of harmonization and innovation, standards do not only facilitate production and exchange in goods and services, but also carry significant policy implications and create value for society. Against this background, the processes of standards development deserve special attention. The interests of various actors, together with a sheer abundance of standards development fora and a scarce knowledge and understanding of their procedures, renders standard-setting a rather unexplored area in legal scholarship, especially when it comes to the field of ICT and telecommunications. This paper seeks to take a first step into procedural analysis of international standard-setting by shedding light on the concept of 'due process' applicable to the formulation and adoption of standards within formal Standards Development Organizations and informal consortia. It attempts to examine different approaches to due process, namely those adopted by WTO law, competition law and global administrative law. This paper suggests that, whereas the first two approaches strive to ensure that standards do not constitute unnecessary trade barriers and that standardization activities do not become a vehicle of collusion, global administrative law also addresses the governance of standard-setting groups and organizations and thence offers a more holistic approach to international standardization, but lacks enforce-ability; it further questions whether increased procedural scrutiny will be able to adequately respond to the challenges of modern standardization, or whether a different approach is desirable.


Exchange bias in ferromagnetic (FM)/antiferromagnetic (AF) bilayers is usually investigated in the longitudinal configuration with the exchange coupling established in the film plane. In this work, we report on the perpendicular exchange bias in FeMn(8 nm)/[FeNi(2 nm)/FeMn(8 nm)]n multilayers induced by perpendicular field cooling. The thin FeNi layers give rise to large values of the exchange field and coercivity, and n=15 allows a sufficiently large magnetization for the measurements. Even though the soft FeNi layers have an intrinsic in-plane anisotropy, perpendicular exchange bias has been observed after cooling in a perpendicular external field. The exchange field in the perpendicular configuration is about 0.85 that of the longitudinal case. In both the longitudinal and perpendicular configurations, the exchange field decreases quasilinearly with temperature. The squareness of perpendicular hysteresis loops decreases with increasing temperature.


Allogeneic bone from bone banks frequently is used when large skeletal defects have to be bridged in orthopaedic surgery. Beside immunologic rejection of the graft, the loss in osteogenic potential caused by bone banking procedures may be a major reason for limited clinical success. Similar problems as described for bone have occurred with cartilage and osteochondral transplants. Improving the properties of allogenic bone so that its biologic activity becomes comparable to autologous bone could be substantially beneficial for the outcome of allograft transplantation. To dissect the steps involved in the integration of a fetal osteochondral graft as it matures to bone, the current study compared the development and biologic function of metatarsals from 18-day-old fetal mice freshly transplanted in three different immunologic settings. Morphologic assessment of (1) isografts and (2) allografts in nonsensitized hosts 12 days after transplantation revealed that the grafts bear an intrinsic potential to develop after transplantation. In allografts in nonsensitized hosts, however, a slight alteration in biologic activity as compared with isografts could be detected already in this early phase after transplantation by in situ hybridization for messenger ribonucleic acids encoding extracellular matrix proteins. (3) In contrast to isografts and allografts in nonsensitized hosts, morphologic features and biologic function of allografts transplanted to presensitized hosts were altered severely.


This review presents the results of experimental studies on the effects of hyperthermia, at a temperature of 40-45 °C, in normal and tumor tissues. These results show that there is a strong rationale for using hyperthermia in addition to radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy in patients with cancer. The following study results are summarized. Hyperthermia has cell killing effects which specifically occur in tumor regions with hypoxia and low pH. In well perfused and well oxygenated tissues, cell damage is usually not observed at temperatures of up to 43 °C. This cell killing effect of hyperthermia is complementary to the effects of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, which treatment modalities are less effective in hypoxic or insufficiently perfused areas. In combination with radio- or chemotherapy, hyperthermia further has sensitizing effects, partly through an increase in blood flow. An important feature in radiosensitization is the inhibition of DNA repair pathways. Radiosensitizing is stronger in tumor tissue than in normal tissue when radiation and hyperthermia are given with a time interval, leading to therapeutic gain. The interaction with various drugs is related to changes in pharmacokinetics, enhancement of drug accumulation and a decrease in intracellular detoxification and damage repair. It was also observed that hyperthermia can overcome chemoresistance associated with multidrug resistance, by influencing transmembrane transport, metabolism, and the functioning of involved proteins. The effects of hyperthermia are stronger with higher temperatures and longer exposure times. Treatment with hyperthermia induces heat shock proteins (HSP's). These may lead to thermotolerance to the next treatment when that is applied too soon. On the other hand it was found that HSP's induce an antitumor immune response which may further add to the therapeutic effect. A stimulating effect of hyperthermia on the development of metastases could not be demonstrated in most studies. Studies with drugs in thermosensitive liposomes show that the uptake of drugs in tumor tissues can be largely enhanced. Further, it has been shown that hyperthermia considerably increases the sensitivity of cancer stem cells to radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Sofar, there is limited experience with the combination of hyperthermia and targeted agents. Nanoparticles which can be used for local heat treatment and local drug delivery are under investigation.


A trellis-coded pulse-position modulation (T-PPM) scheme for direct-detection photon communications over unguided channels is described. The purpose of this signaling method is to combat performance degradation due to the spreading of received signal pulses caused by transmitting laser distortion and the finite area and bandwidth of optical detectors. The T-PPM scheme relies upon use of a set partitioning methodology to increase minimum distance using a simple convolutional encoder. The Viterbi algorithm is used at the receiver to separate the signaling set as part of the demodulation process. It is shown through both analysis and Monte Carlo simulation of an avalanche photodiode based receiver system that T-PPM can restore performance losses due to reduced peak intensity during the detection process. Furthermore, for a large range of background radiation levels, the average number of required signal photons per information bit for T-PPM is smaller than that of uncoded PPM. Specific examples show that for a symbol error rate of 0.001, when the received pulses extend over 4 PPM slot widths, the average laser energy per symbol for 256-ary T-PPM could be reduced by as much as 2 dB.


Abstract This paper analyses the profitability of horizontal mergers in a Stackelberg model and their impact on welfare when there is uncertainty about the marginal costs of the newly merged firms. The authors consider that the merging firms decide their production strategy knowing the actual value of the production cost, while outsiders are a priori uncertain about the exact amount of cost efficiency/inefficiency that will result from the merger. Nevertheless, the key element of the model is that the merged entity can signal its own cost to some rivals (outsiderfollowers) when it behaves as a leader; while all outsiders remain uninformed when it behaves as a follower. They show that when there is role redistribution, the merging firms always have incentives to merge, irrespective of cost uncertainty, while a merger without role redistribution is ex ante profitable if and only if uncertainty is sufficiently great. As regards the social desirability of mergers, it is found that a merger between leaders always enhances welfare if participants have incentives to merge, such that private and collective interests coincide. Nevertheless, a merger with role redistribution leads to conflict between private and collective interests.


During the Great Depression, state governments assumed many of the revenue-raising and public good provision responsibilities traditionally carried out by local governments, which had important consequences for taxation and public good provision. In order to investigate the causes of this centralization, this paper focuses on Ohio, which underwent one of the most dramatic transformations in government among all states during this period. Contrary to previous work, I find that centralization came about as a response to the needs of state taxpayers and local governments, not the New Deal. The state government was, moreover, responsive to the needs of taxpayers and local governments but both voters and politicians were reluctant to expand state government, which would have overturned a long tradition of local government dominance and self-rule. It was only when the pre-existing local institutions broke down under the weight of the Depression that the state stepped in as a substitute. In doing so, it inaugurated a new era in American federalism.


Delayed discharges of patients from hospital, commonly known as bed-blocking, is a long standing policy concern. Delays can increase the overall cost of treatment and may worsen patient outcomes. We investigate how delayed discharges vary by hospital type (Acute, Specialist, Mental Health, Teaching), and the extent to which such differences can be explained by demography, casemix, the availability of long-term care and hospital governance as reflected in whether the hospital has Foundation Trust status, which gives greater financial autonomy and flexibility in staffing and pay. We use a new panel database of delays in all English NHS hospital Trusts from 2011/12 to 2013/14. Employing count data models, we find that a greater local supply of long-term care (care home beds) is associated with fewer delays. Hospitals which are Foundation Trusts have fewer delayed discharges and might therefore be used as exemplars of good practice in managing delays. Mental Health Trusts have more delayed discharges than Acute Trusts but a smaller proportion of them are attributed to the NHS, possibly indicating a relatively greater lack of adequate community care for mental health patients.


Recent years have seen increased interest in automated methods, utilizing photographs collected with a handheld digital camera, for determining the grain size distribution of coarse river sediments. Such methods are as precise as traditional field methods and have considerable time and cost advantages. Nevertheless, several unresolved issues pertaining to their deployment remain to be addressed. Using data sets collected from seven gravel bed rivers, this paper examines four key issues: (1) the minimum area required to obtain a representative sample, (2) the effect of lower‐end truncation on grain size percentiles, (3) the effect of river bed structure such as imbrication and hiding, and (4) the potential benefits of using individual particle measurements rather than the number (or mass) of particles per size class to calculate percentiles. It is demonstrated that sampling areas of between 50 and 200 times that of the largest grain are adequate to achieve percentile errors of <10% (in mm). The appropriateness of lower‐end truncation depends on the study aims and sediment properties. It has a limited effect on higher percentiles, except where sand is a major constituent. Understanding the influence of bed structure on image‐derived size information is complicated by the absence of error‐free benchmarks against which accuracy may be evaluated, but it is likely that other errors are more important. The use of individual particle measurements to calculate percentiles in preference to classified data is shown to have a small, but appreciable, effect on precision. These results will assist practitioners in making appropriate operational decisions to maximize data quality using image‐based grain size data capture.


Metabolic profiling of various microalga species and their genetic variants, grown under varied environmental conditions, has become critical to accelerate the exploration of phytoplankton biodiversity and biology. The accumulation of valuable metabolites, such as glycerolipids, is also sought in microalgae for biotechnological applications ranging from food, feed, medicine, cosmetics to bioenergy and green chemistry. In this report we describe the direct analysis of metabolites and lipids in small cell populations of the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, using laser ablation electrospray ionization (LAESI) mass spectrometry (MS) coupled with ion mobility separation (IMS). These microorganisms are capable of redirecting energy storage pathways from starch to neutral lipids depending on environmental conditions and nutrient availability. Metabolite and lipid productions were monitored in wild type (WT), and genetically modified C. reinhardtii strains with an impaired starch pathway. Lipids, such as triacylglycerols (TAG) and diacylglyceryl-N,N,N-trimethylhomoserine (DGTS), were monitored over time under altered light conditions. More than 200 ions related to metabolites, e.g., arginine, cysteine, serine, palmitate, chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, etc., were detected. The lipid profiles at different light intensities for strains with impaired starch pathway (Sta1 and Sta6) contained 26 glycerolipids, such as DGTS, monogalactosyldiacylglycerol (MGDG) and digalactosyldiacylglycerol (DGDG), as well as 33 TAG species. Results were obtained over a 72 hour time period under high and low light conditions for the WT species and the two mutants. Our results indicate that LAESI-IMS-MS can be utilized for the rapid analysis of increased TAG production at elevated light intensities. Compared to WT, the Sta6 strain showed 2.5 times higher lipid production at 72 hours under high light conditions. The results demonstrate our ability to rapidly observe numerous changes in metabolite and lipid levels in microalgal population. These capabilities are expected to facilitate the exploration of genetically altered microalgal strains for biofuel production.


This paper explores the key factors that cause changes in the economic wellbeing of rural households in Kenya. We specifically determine the relationship between the initial economic position of households and education on income growth and mobility. We use a three-period panel dataset to estimate a dynamic panel data model of full income. Results show strong evidence of (low) income persistence for the poor and those in the low agricultural potential areas that lack higher education. The low income persistence for the poor and uneducated may be evidence of cumulative dis-advantage and possible existence of poverty traps. As expected, higher education seems to eliminate the low income persistence for these vulnerable groups and allow convergence of incomes towards their average. This indicates the potential role of education in not only breaking the cycle of poverty for those trapped in it, but also its ability to allow increased recovery from income shocks.


The purpose of this paper was to explore the perception of online tax ?ling in Indonesia using prior experience, trust, and IS (Information System) Success Model. The paper examined how the IS quality will be in?uenced by attributes such as prior experience on of?ine tax ?ling, trust in government, trust in technology, and trust in e-Filing website. Following this, the in?uence of IS quality on perceived usefulness and user satisfaction will be explored. To end the model, the paper was intended to answer question on whether the last two dimensions (perceived usefulness and user satisfaction) will have an effect on perceived net bene?t. This paper used primary data generated by distributing online questionnaire and able to get the total of 1.095 respondents, 993 of which are actively using online tax-?ling (e-?ling) and valid. The data were analyzed by the Structured Equation Model (SEM). The results suggested that trust in government and trust in technology positively affect the trust in e-Filing website, which subsequently in?uence all three IS quality dimensions. Information quality, system quality and service quality was found to be consistently and signi?cantly in?uence the perceived usefulness and user satisfaction. It was evident that tax payers in Indonesia placed the robustness and the safety features of the online system as the most important attributes that will in?uence the usefulness and satisfaction of online tax ?ling.


By 2030, half of the EU's electricity demand will be covered by renewables and will need to be accompanied by flexible conventional back-up resources. Due to the high upfront costs inherent to renewables and the progressively lower running times associated with back-up capacity, the cost of capital will have a proportionately greater impact on total costs than today. This report examines how electricity markets can be designed to provide long-term price signals, thereby reducing the cost of capital for these technologies and allowing for a more efficient transition. It finds that current market arrangements are unable to provide long-term price signals. To address this issue, we argue that a system for long-term contracts with a regulated counterparty could be implemented. A centralised system where capacity or energy or a combination of both is contracted, could be introduced for conventional and renewable capacity, based on a regional adequacy assessment and with a competitive bidding system in place to ensure cost-effectiveness. Member states face a number of legislative barriers while implementing these types of systems, however, which could be reduced by merging legislation and setting EU framework rules for the design of these contractual agreements.


Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a heterogeneous disease with poorer outcomes compared to other breast cancer subtypes. Contributing to the worse prognosis in TNBC is the higher rates of relapse and rapid progression after relapse. Advances in targeted therapeutics and conventional chemotherapy for TNBC have been stymied due to the lack of specific targets. Moreover, the responses to chemotherapy in TNBC lack durability, partially accounting for the higher rates of relapse. Immunotherapy, notably immune-checkpoint blockade, has shown to improve survival and maintain robust antitumor responses in both hematologic and solid malignancies. Unlike lung cancer, melanoma, and bladder cancer, most breast cancers are not inherently immunogenic and typically have low T cell infiltration. However, among breast cancer subtypes, TNBC is characterized by greater tumor immune infiltrate and higher degree of stromal and intratumoral tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), a predictive marker for responses to immunotherapy. Moreover, in TNBC, the high number of stromal TILs is predictive of more favorable survival outcomes and response to chemotherapy. Immunotherapy is being extensively explored in TNBC and clinical trials are showing some promising results. This article focuses on the rationale for immunotherapy in TNBC, to explore and discuss preclinical data, results from early clinical trials, and to summarize some ongoing trials. We will also discuss the potential application of immunotherapy in TNBC from a clinician's perspective.


Global reserves of mineral phosphorus are finite and the recycling of phosphorus from wastewater, a significant sink for phosphorus, can contribute to a more sustainable use. In Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, an increasing percentage of municipal sewage sludge is incinerated and the contained phosphorus is lost. This paper reviews current technologies and shows that a complete phosphorus recovery from wastewater is technically feasible. Depending on the composition of the sewage sludge ash (SSA), there are various options for phosphorus recovery that are presented. Iron-poor SSAs can be used directly as substitute for phosphate rock in the electrothermal phosphorus process. SSAs with low heavy metal contents can be used as fertilizer without prior metal elimination. Ashes not suitable for direct recycling can be processed by thermal processes. Operators of wastewater treatment plants can additionally influence the ash composition via the selection of precipitants and the control of (indirect) dischargers. This way, they can choose the most suitable phosphorus recovery option. For sewage sludge that is co-incinerated in power plants, municipal waste incinerators or cement kilns phosphorus recovery is not possible. The phosphorus is lost forever.


M. Reda Bhacker looks at the role of Oman in the Indian Ocean prior to British domination of the region. Omani merchant communities played a crucial part in the development of commercial activity throughout the territories they held in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially between Muscat and Zanzibar, using long established trade networks. They were also largely responsible for the integration of the commerce of the Indian Ocean into the nascent global capitalist system. The author, himself a member of an important Omani merchant family, looks in detail at the complex relationship between the merchant community and Oman's rulers, first the Ya'ariba and then the Albusaidis. He analyses the tribal and religious dynamics of Omani politics both in Arabia, where he looks especially at the Wahhabi/Saudi threat, and in Oman's sprawling 'empire', with particular reference to Zanzibar where the Omani ruler Sa'id b Sultan had his court from 1840. His aim is to consider all Oman's overseas territories as a single entity, without the usual misleading compartmentalisation of African and Arab history. Dr Bhacker finds that despite their prestige and influence in the region neither the merchant communities nor the government were able to respond to Britain's determined onslaught. Bhacker traces the local and regional factors that allowed Britain to destroy Oman's largely commercial challenge and to emerge by the end of the nineteenth century as the commercially and politically dominant power in the region.


Abstract

Chronic pain is prevalent in both children and adults and has major negative consequences for their daily life, e.g. reduced participation in activities and depressive and anxious feelings. Therefore, it is important to early signal and treat chronic pain. This thesis aimed to provide answers to two important questions: 1. How to improve early signaling and assessment of chronic pain in adolescents? and 2. How to improve self-management of chronic pain in both adolescents and adults?
Psychosocial stress seems to serve as an important risk factor for the occurrence of pain. In chapter 2 we examined if early adversities, e.g. bullying, abuse, and family conflict are risk factors for chronic pain in adolescents. Additionally, we described the pain characteristics of chronic pain in adolescents in a community sample of Dutch adolescents. Participants in the present study were 15,220 adolescents, attending schools (grade 7 and 8) in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Chronic pain was measured with a newly developed questionnaire; the Pain Barometer. Early adversities were measured using single item questions from the Rotterdam Youth Monitor, a longitudinal youth health surveillance system. Cross-sectional associations between early adversities and chronic pain were investigated using logistic multilevel analysis, adjusted for potential confounding. In school year 2010-2011, 9.2% of the 15,220 adolescents reported chronic pain. Physical abuse by others (OR=1.51, 95% CI=1.07-2.14), sexual abuse (OR=1.46, 95% CI=1.05-2.05), family conflict (OR=1.79, 95% C=1.61-1.99), and being bullied (OR=1.23, 95% CI=1.17-1.29) are more common in adolescents with chronic pain. Physical abuse (OR=1.28, 95% CI=.95-1.71) by parents and parental divorce (OR=1.07, 95% CI=.93-1.22) were not significantly related to chronic pain. The results of the present study suggest that bullying, abuse, and family conflict may be risk factors for chronic pain. Early signaling these stressors might, prevent chronic pain.
In chapter 3 we determined whether pain is associated with specific aspects of academic performance, i.e. lower grades, and with factors critical to an adolescent's academic performance, i.e. decreased emotional well-being and attention problems. We hypothesized that the association between pain and school grades is mediated by emotional well-being and attention problems. In a large cross-sectional study, we collected data from 2215 pupils, aged 12-13 years old. Pain, emotional well-being, and attention problems were reported by a self-rating scale. Dutch, English, and math grades were taken as an index of academic performance. Frequent pain in adolescents was associated with lower grades (Dutch p = .02 and math p = .01). Both occasional and frequent pain were associated with reduced emotional well-being (p =< .01) and reduced self-reported attention (p = <.01). Furthermore, the association between pain and lower grades was partially mediated by both emotional well-being and reduced self-reported attention (p-values = <.01). The results of the present study show that the association between pain and grades can be partially explained by both reduced emotional well-being and attention problems. The results suggest that an intervention targeted at subjective pain in adolescents could have a positive effect on emotional well-being and school performance.
Behavioral migraine approaches are effective in reducing headache attacks. Availability of treatment might be increased by using migraine patients as trainers. Therefore, Merelle and colleagues developed and evaluated a home-based behavioral management training (BMT) by lay trainers. The maintenance of effects at long-term follow-up are reported in chapter 4. Measurements were taken pre-BMT (T0), post-BMT (T1), at six-month follow-up (T2), and at long-term follow-up, i.e. two to four years after BMT (T3). Data of 127 participants were analyzed with longitudinal multi-level analyses. Short-term improvements in attack frequency and self-efficacy post-BMT were maintained at long-term follow-up ( DT0T3  = -.34 and DT0T3  = .69, respectively). The level of internal control that increased during BMT decreased from post-BMT to long-term follow-up ( DT0T3  = .18). Quality of life and migraine-related disability improved gradually over time ( DT0T3  = .45 and DT0T3  = -.26, respectively). Although the results should be interpreted with caution because of the lack of a follow-up control group and the inability to gather information about additional treatments patients may have received during the follow-up period, the findings suggest that lay BMT for migraine may be beneficial over the long term. If so, this could make migraine treatments more widely available.
Chapter 5 describes a study protocol to early promote the self-management skills of adolescents with chronic pain, using an internet-based self-management program: Move It Now. This program includes cognitive behavioral techniques, including relaxation exercises and positive thinking. The objective of the intervention was to improve the ability of adolescents to cope with pain.
In chapter 6 the effects of Move It Now were evaluated. Because of treatment attrition and loss to follow-up we could not apply the originally proposed between-group design but had to employ a within-group design, comparing the waiting list trajectory with the treatment trajectory. The Internet intervention consisted of seven weekly interactive Internet modules, which adolescents worked through independently. Additionally, a therapist weekly contacted them by e-mail or telephone. Adolescents (N = 69) were assessed on the outcome measures pain, coping, disability, catastrophizing, rewarding of pain behavior by parents, and quality of life. Measures were taken seven weeks before treatment, pre-treatment, post-treatment, and at three months follow-up. Multi-level modelling was used for longitudinal analysis of the data. Pain intensity, rewarding of pain behavior by parents, and sleep problems significantly decreased from pre-treatment to post-treatment in adolescents with chronic pain. Results for quality of life and pain coping were mixed. No significant differences were found for pain-related disability and pain catastrophizing. Contrary to expectations, an Internet-based self-management intervention for chronic pain is difficult to employ in adolescents, as it suffers from treatment attrition and loss to follow-up. We found indications that an Internet intervention has potential in decreasing pain, rewarding of pain behavior by parents, and sleep problems.
In conclusion, this thesis shows that early signaling of chronic pain is very important. Chronic pain is highly prevalent among adolescents and not only negatively influences their quality of life, but also their grades. Adolescents who have experienced early adversities seem to be more vulnerable to experience chronic pain. Signaling for these early adversities might prevent chronic pain. Online self-management may reduce pain in adolescent with chronic pain, but is difficult to employ in adolescents. In future, more research should be done to improve adherence to online therapy. Since the patient-therapist relation seems so important, strategies to strengthen this relationship should be studied. In adults, home-based BMT provided by lay trainers seems to improve the self-management skills of migraine patients, even at long-term follow-up. If the cost-effectiveness has been proven, BMT by lay trainers could be implemented at large scale. This would make treatment for migraine patients more available.


Scholarly conversations about the influence of religion on professional communication have largely been absent in our discipline's published literature, yet religion often intersects with the work of teachers, researchers, and practitioners. It intersects with rhetorical patterns at many levels and contexts, including the organizations in which we work and volunteer, the sites where we conduct research and solve problems, and our teaching/training practices with students, clients, co-workers, community partners, and the many other populations we regularly serve in our professional lives. This special issue of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization includes four articles on the topic of "World Religions and Professional Communication," broadly envisioned, that address relevant theories and practices of the discipline.


Until recently, most writings on the relationship between climate change and security were highly speculative. The IPCC assessment reports to date offer little if any guidance on this issue and occasionally pay excessive attention to questionable sources. The articles published in this special issue form the largest collection of peer-reviewed writings on the topic to date. The number of such studies remains small compared to those that make up the natural science base of the climate issue, and there is some confusion whether it is the effect of 'climate' or 'weather' that is being tested. The results of the studies vary, and firm conclusions cannot always be drawn. Nevertheless, research in this area has made considerable progress. More attention is being paid to the specific causal mechanisms linking climate change to conflict, such as changes in rainfall and temperature, natural disasters, and economic growth. Systematic climate data are used in most of the articles and climate projections in some. Several studies are going beyond state-based conflict to look at possible implications for other kinds of violence, such as intercommunal conflict. Overall, the research reported here offers only limited support for viewing climate change as an important influence on armed conflict. However, framing the climate issue as a security problem could possibly influence the perceptions of the actors and contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy.


The spatio-temporal dynamics of pulse propagation in dispersive Kerr media is studied based on the variational principle. By performing a Ritz optimization procedure with spatio-temporal Gaussian test functions, the equations of motion for the pulse parameters are derived. Comparison of these analytical results with numerically obtained solutions of the exact problem show very good agreement over a broad range of dispersion, diffraction, and nonlinearity parameters.


In the last 4 years, a high-resolution 3D motion capture system named 3DVision was installed at ENEA Casaccia as integration to more conventional instrumentation for measuring motion parameters during seismic tests, such as accelerometers, LVDTs, wire transducers and laser displacement sensors. In the present paper, some examples are illustrated to show the ENEA experiences with this relatively new technique in comparison to the other consolidated measurement systems. 3DVision is described in terms of flexibility and accuracy and specific potentialities are stressed. The main peculiarities of the 3DVision system derive from its capability of monitoring in real-time the absolute 3D position of more than a hundred measurement points without locating any active sensor or cable on the studied structure and on the shaking table, but only by means of cheap passive markers. Consequently, any risk of instrumentation damage in case of destructive tests is intrinsically avoided and the acquisition of hundreds of channels is guaranteed. Within the DySCo virtual lab, the 3DVision friendly graphical interface for real-time monitoring and its synchronous overlay function between markers wireframe and tests movies revealed particularly effective for remote sharing of the experimental campaigns with research partners via the internet. Also a remarkable contribution is given by the possibility of integrating and comparing experimental data with FE results at the same positions, calibrating FEM boundary conditions (materials properties, model constraints, loads etc.) in order to improve the simulation significance and reliability for similar cases. Through the DySCO web portal such numerical simulations and computations can be carried out exploiting the software and hardware resources available in the ENEA-GRID.


Traditional database operators such as joins are relevant not only in the context of database engines but also as a building block in many computational and machine learning algorithms. With the advent of big data, there is an increasing demand for efficient join algorithms that can scale with the input data size and the available hardware resources. In this paper, we explore the implementation of distributed join algorithms in systems with several thousand cores connected by a low-latency network as used in high performance computing systems or data centers. We compare radix hash join to sort-merge join algorithms and discuss their implementation at this scale. In the paper, we explain how to use MPI to implement joins, show the impact and advantages of RDMA, discuss the importance of network scheduling, and study the relative performance of sorting vs. hashing. The experimental results show that the algorithms we present scale well with the number of cores, reaching a throughput of 48.7 billion input tuples per second on 4,096 cores.


The landscape of scholarly communications is transforming into an Open Access environment. Policies are being set by national funding agencies and universities, among others. This session will present an overview of major policy issues, the academic (teaching faculty) perspective on open access publishing and self-archiving and what it all means in the real-world university (library) environment.


Many cities and urban centers around the world experience high air pollution episodes attributable to increased anthropogenic alterations of natural environmental systems. World Health Organization estimates indicate strong exceedances of prescribed limits in developing countries. However, the evidence on local pollution measures is limited for such cities and Uganda is no exception. Informed by the practical realities of air quality monitoring, this paper employs a low-cost approach using passive and active monitors to obtain characterization of pollution levels based on particulate matter 2.5, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone over a six-month period (starting in December 2018) for selected urban centers in three of the four macro-regions in Uganda. This is the first attempt to comprehensively assess pollution levels at a near-national level in Uganda. A combination of distributed stationary monitors and mobile monitors installed on motorcycle taxis (boda-boda) was employed in selected parishes to obtain spatiotemporal variations in the pollutant concentrations. The results suggest that seasonal particulate levels heavily depend on precipitation patterns with a strong inverse relation, which further corroborates the need for longer monitoring periods to reflect actual seasonal variations. Informed by the observed level of data completeness and quality in all the monitoring scenarios, the paper highlights the practicability and potential of a low-cost approach to air quality monitoring and the potential to use this information to inform citizens.


Within the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century which resulted in the triumph of the protestant ethic - the ideology of the propertied class - there threatened another, quite different, revolution. Its success 'might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic. In "The World Turned Upside Down" Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them. The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering 'masterless' men, the outbursts of sexual freedom, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan - these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs.


The African Salivarian trypanosomes are the causative agents of both Human African Trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, and Animal African Trypanosomiasis, more widely known as Nagana. Primarily spread through the tsetse fly vector both diseases are distributed across the sub-Saharan tsetse belt, afflicting some of the poorest communities in the world. Three species of trypanosomes are predominantly responsible for these two diseases. T. brucei, which is comprised of the three morphologically identical sub-species T. b. brucei, T. b. gambiense (further separated into two subgroups) and T. b. rhodesiense, with the latter two sub-species exclusively responsible for infections in humans. The animal infective species T. congolense, comprised of the Forest, Kilifi and Savannah subtypes, and T. vivax meanwhile are responsible for millions of livestock and wild animal infections across the continent, with severe downstream economic consequences.

A crucial component in understanding the diseases caused by these parasites is through understanding the diversity present in the field, as it is ultimately the combination of host, vector and parasite diversity that gives rises to the disease phenotypes observed during clinical diagnosis and treatment. In order to truly understand the role of such diversity in the field it is necessary to know how individuals within a population interact with one another, if they do at all. Mating between individuals allows for the direct interaction of genomes, allowing for the generation of new chromosomal sequences through meiotic recombination and new chromosomal pairings through bi-parental inheritance of genetic material. Identified as a non-obligatory process in T. brucei the importance of mating in natural trypanosome populations is both a controversial and understudied topic despite the significant role of the process in shaping the evolutionary development of these clinically important parasites.

In order to further investigate the genetic diversity and role of mating in the trypanosomes populations from The Gambia, Uganda and Malawi have been examined through the use of microsatellite markers specific to the genomes of T. brucei, T. congolense and T. vivax. The results presented here demonstrate drastically different levels of diversity in the respective populations and evidence for a spectrum of genetic exchange, with both highly clonal and frequently mating populations identified in this manner.

T. vivax, sampled from horses, donkeys and cattle in The Gambia would appear to most closely fit with the traditional views of clonality in trypanosomes, extensive clonal reproduction of a single genotype, significant disagreement with Hardy-Weinberg principles and the presence of significant linkage between the loci examined. These results, which closely resemble those observed for T. b. gambiense Group 1, suggest that genetic exchange may be absent or rare in T. vivax, which may lead to the eventual divergence of independent populations as they slowly accumulate unique mutations. The apparent dominant clonality of T. vivax is a sharp contrast to the situation observed for T. congolense in The Gambia, with strong evidence for frequent mating and a high rate of inbreeding. That this evidence originated from the same sample sets used in the T. vivax studies presented here highlights the differences between these two species and the requirement for further work independent of the studies into T. brucei.

The final half of this thesis has focused upon the population genetics and genomics of T. brucei, the species responsible for sleeping sickness in humans. Examination of five of T. b. rhodesiense populations, four from Uganda and one from Malawi has demonstrated the potential for variation in the population structure within a single species. The Ugandan populations are dominated by clonality; with repeated bottlenecks reducing the genetic diversity present as the parasites has spread northwards. The Malawi population, genetically distinct from the populations of Uganda, instead appears to favour genetic exchange over clonality, with a genetically diverse population and only a limited number of repeated genotypes. This provides the first evidence of mating playing a significant role in a field population of human infective trypanosomes, introducing a significant role for meiotic recombination and chromosomal reassortment which may drastically alter the way in which these parasites respond to selective pressures and evolutionary forces. Finally, this thesis has aimed to bridge the gap between traditional low resolution studies and the developing field of genomics by examining the SNP variation present between three laboratory strains of T. brucei, providing the building blocks in understanding genome wide variation in trypanosomes. Utilising these data, and through sequencing of progeny generated in the process of constructing the TREU 927 genetic map, it has been possible to partially reassemble the haplotypes for the megabase chromosomes of this strain, previously selected as the T. brucei genome reference strain. Collected together these data provide an important resource of genomic variation for both laboratory studies and as a baseline for future investigations into the genomic diversity of field populations.

In summary this thesis has demonstrated the variable nature and versatile role of genetic exchange in the trypanosomes, bringing together data not only from the human infective sub-species of T. brucei but from the animal infective species T. congolense and T. vivax. Finally in looking to the future this work has begun the process of transitioning from the relatively low density microsatellite markers by examining high density SNP variation in common laboratory strains, the first step towards future adoption of these markers for the purpose of population genomics.


Omega-3 fatty acids (FA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) have long been consumed as medical supplements for their far-reaching health benefits, ranging from alleviating asthma symptoms to mitigating kidney and inflammatory diseases like colitis and diabetes. These fatty acids produce a variety of lipid mediator metabolites including maresins, protectins, and resolvins, and are essential for aiding the resolution pathways in inflammation. However, their roles in regenerative responses are relatively unknown. We decided to investigate the effect of Resolvin D1 (RvD1) in Dugesia dorotocephala regeneration, as RvD1is the most widely studied lipid mediator. We foundthat regenerating planaria released significantly higher amounts of RvD1 in water than control and that D. dorotocephala could synthesize their own RvD1 from the omega-3 FA precursor 17-hydroxy docosahexaenoic acid (17-HDHA). We also observed that both RvD1 and 17-HDHA enhanced regeneration responses in planaria by using eye scoring and a modified cell metabolism assay (MTT). We conclude that planarians may utilize similar biosynthetic pathways to mammals in producing resolvins and that resolvins hold immense potential in enhancing regenerative responses in tissues.


Heart Language: Elsie Singmaster and Her Pennsylvania German Writings By Susan Colestock Hill. Foreword by Charles H. Glatfelter. Pennsylvania German History and Culture Series. The Pennsylvania German Society. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2009. A new century with all its energy and expectations had slipped into place and challenged Americans with fresh promises. The year was 1900. Elsie Singmaster had spent two years at Cornell University immersed in writing classes, and she would return home to Gettysburg eager to write. Her professors had been encouraging. She would always remember one of them who commented on her work for the day by exclaiming, "Who are these queer, unreal people?" ''They're NOT queer!" Elsie retorted. "And they're very real. They are my people living in the traditional ways of their ancestors." "Then," he urged "write more about them!" [excerpt]


The prohibition of certain types of anticompetitive unilateral conduct by firms possessing a substantial degree of market power is a cornerstone of competition law regimes worldwide. Yet notwithstanding the social costs of monopoly modern legal regimes refrain from prohibiting it outright. Instead, competition laws prohibit monopolies or dominant firms from engaging in those types of anticompetitive conduct that amount to "monopolizing" or an "abuse of dominant position." Importantly, anticompetitive conduct can take place both on the road to monopoly and, later on, once substantial market power has been achieved. Legal regimes nevertheless tend either to ignore or pay only limited attention to the unilateral conduct of firms lacking substantial market power. This Article argues, however, that such conduct merits legal attention where it led or would lead if unstopped to the acquisition of substantial market power. Specifically, competition law regimes that fail to incorporate an appropriately-designed unilateral conduct liability in this area are unable to address some increasingly important classes of potentially harmful unilateral practices, such as those that concern cheap exclusion, multi-product (but not necessarily dominant) firms, network tipping effects, and more. This failure, moreover, may lead to distortions in other areas of unilateral conduct policy in these regimes that seek to compensate for the absence of any liability for the conduct of non-dominant firms. The analysis concludes by drawing together the lessons from the critical evaluation of the EU and the U.S. approaches for the appropriate design of unilateral conduct regimes worldwide.


In this paper we propose a new statistical model for multiscale traffic, and present an exact queueing analysis for the model. The model is based on the central moments and the marginal distributions of the cumulative traffic loads in different time scales. Only the first two moments are needed to characterize the traffic process, which greatly simplifies the representation and estimation. The queueing analysis uses a very general approach and can evaluate not only the steady state performance but also the transient queueing behavior. The analysis reveals that there exist two classes of packet losses, the absolute loss and the opportunistic loss, both of which can be examined exactly with the method. Based on the statistical model and the queueing analysis method, a compound model is constructed for the practical multiscale traffic, and its performance is evaluated from various aspects. This work provides a good basis for practical application of the multiscale traffic characterizations in network dimensioning and resource management.


&NA; In the present study, we review the indications, technical aspects, preliminary results, risks, and clinical implications of fetal endoscopic tracheal occlusion (FETO) for severe congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) performed outside the United States and its potential future directions in this country and globally. &NA; Congenital diaphragmatic hernia occurs in approximately 1 in 2500 live births and results in high neonatal morbidity and mortality, largely associated with the severity of pulmonary hypoplasia and pulmonary arterial hypertension. With the advent of prenatal imaging, CDH can be diagnosed before birth, and in utero treatment is now available in some centers. The prognosis of CDH can be evaluated by assessing the fetal lung size, the degree of liver herniation, and the fetal pulmonary vasculature in isolated forms of CDH. These parameters help classify fetuses as having mild, moderate, severe, or extremely severe isolated CDH. Severe and extremely severe diaphragmatic hernias have poor outcomes and thus are candidates for innovative therapies such as FETO. &NA; Fetal endoscopic tracheal occlusion is usually performed between 26 and 30 weeks' gestation. In utero, an endoscope is passed through the fetal mouth and down to the carina; the balloon is deployed just above the carina. After the procedure, ultrasound surveillance every 2 weeks ensures the balloon's structural integrity and measures the fetal pulmonary response. At approximately 34 weeks' gestation, the balloon is deflated and removed. Fetal endoscopic tracheal occlusion is thought to improve outcomes by decreasing mortality and allowing more rapid neonatal stabilization. Ultimately, the goal of FETO is to minimize pulmonary hypoplasia and pulmonary arterial hypertension. Following delivery, neonates still require diaphragm repair. Target Audience Obstetricians and gynecologists, family physicians Learning Objectives After completing this CME activity, physicians should be better able to evaluate the different imaging modalities available for determining prognosis in fetuses with congenital diaphragmatic hernias, identify the indications for fetal endoscopic tracheal occlusion, and compare the potential benefits and complications of fetal endoscopic tracheal occlusion.


The thesis investigates determinants of participation in the supplementary pension savings scheme in the Czech Republic and estimates their change with respect to the policy intervention realized in 2013. Using the time series of cross-sectional microeconomic data provided by the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, the probability of participation and the level of contributions are estimated separately by probit and multiple linear regressions, respectively. The estimated coefficients of both models are tested for structural differences caused by the policy change, employing the pooled dataset of multiple years with additional coefficients to treat the compared period. The analysis confirms that income, age, education and economic activity have a positive effect on both the probability of participation and expected level of contributions. Whereas gender differences for the level of contributions have not been detected, single women on average show, ceteris paribus, 4.6 percentage points higher probability of participation than single men. Unexpectedly high level of activity was observed in case of retired individuals, who in 2014 represented approximately 15% of all participants and collected 20% of the credited direct state subsidy. With respect to the 2013 policy change, no evidence of a significant long-term effect on the participation rate was found. In terms of contributions, the intervention registered a positive impact in general, however the greatest response was observed in case of older and higher educated individuals. In contrast, the low-income, young and less-educated individuals were affected with lower intensity, suggesting that the policy change failed to diminish the existing disparities in participation of various population groups. JEL Classification J32, J11, H24, C21, C25


1. Ex-arable fields have been suggested as potential sites for re-creation of semi-natural grasslands, but information is still limited on the temporal scales needed for the natural assembly of these communities and whether colonization is related to dispersal or establishment limitation. 2. We investigated grazed ex-arable fields of different age and adjacent semi-natural grasslands in terms of species richness of plants, community similarity, colonization pattern and recruitment ability of 16 sown grassland species. The functional trait distribution of successful and unsuccessful colonizing species was compared using five traits related to dispersal and persistence: seed mass, seed bank persistence, specific leaf area, plant height and potential for lateral spread. 3. The youngest ex-arable fields had the lowest species richness and contained communities with the lowest similarity to semi-natural grassland. Species richness and similarity to semi-natural grassland both increased with time since grazing started on ex-arable fields, but were still significantly lower than in semi-natural grasslands even after more than 50 years of grazing. 4. Colonization was not related to any of the investigated functional traits. The rank order of the species in terms of abundance was correlated between young and old ex-arable fields suggesting that species performance remains the same with field age. 5. Recruitment after sowing was generally lower in ex-arable fields than in semi-natural grasslands, although the basic recruitment ability varied between species. Recruitment did not change with field age, suggesting that dispersal limitation rather than establishment limitation caused the temporal pattern of colonization. However, establishment limitation may act as a filter for colonization of all ex-arable fields, regardless of their age. 6. Synthesis and applications. This study demonstrates that the temporal scale for natural assembly of semi-natural grassland communities in ex-arable fields extends over 50 years, even when source pools are nearby. Results suggest that a field age-independent establishment limitation, combined with dispersal limitation, cause the delayed assembly in ex-arable fields. Management that aims to re-create semi-natural grassland communities in ex-arable fields should consider introducing seeds or improving germination conditions at the sites.


Feature Issue on Optical Performance Monitoring (OPM). An integrated, high-resolution spectral polarimeter is demonstrated in 4%-index-contrast Ge-doped silica waveguides. A ring resonator achieves a wavelength selectivity of less than 2 GHz FWHM, and tunability is realized via thermo-optic phase shifters with scanning speeds on the millisecond time scale. Real-time, in-service polarization-mode dispersion monitoring is thus possible for studying dynamic channel behavior and for feedback to adaptive compensators. Measurements of the differential group delay, output state of polarization, and principal states of polarization of 10- and 40-Gbit/s modulated signals are presented. Measurements of time-varying PMD and higher-order PMD are also presented to demonstrate the device's capability.


Crete presents a puzzle to historians of ancient Greece. In standard accounts of seventh-century Aegean history, Crete serves as a crucial intermediary between Greece and the Near East. By contrast, the island in the fifth century seems to fall outside the political, cultural, and economic fold of mainland Greece and notably refused to participate in the war against the Persians. What caused this remarkable turnaround? Important new evidence calls for a major reassessment of Late Archaic and Classical Cretan foreign relations. This article examines the relevant literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and archaeological testimony. It also draws from the author's recent work on the island's ceramic sequences and overseas imports. Connections with the Peloponnese in the sixth century form a necessary prelude to interpreting subsequent Cretan developments. Current evidence points to a temporary lapse in external contacts at sites across the island in the fifth century. Although various explanations are considered for this lull, the most promising is that Athenian economic intervention shut Crete off from a major Peloponnesian trade artery.


Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) has been one of the most popular yet affordable navigation systems for indoor and even outdoor applications. VIO can augment or replace Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) under signal degradation or service interruptions. Conventionally, the fusion of visual and inertial modalities has been performed using optimization-based or filtering-based techniques such as nonlinear Least Squares (LS) or Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). These classic techniques, despite several simplifying approximations, involve sophisticated modelling and parameterization of the navigation problem, which necessitates expert fine-tuning of the navigation system. In this work, a calibration-free visual-inertial fusion technique using Deep Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (DCRNN) is proposed. The network employs a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to process the spatial information embedded in visual data and two Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to process the inertial sensor measurements and the CNN output for final pose estimation. The network is trained with raw Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data and monocular camera frames as its inputs, and the relative pose as its output. Unlike the conventional VIO techniques, there is no need for IMU biases and scale factors, intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the camera to be explicitly provided or modelled in the proposed navigation system, rather these parameters along with system dynamics are implicitly learned during the training phase. Moreover, since the inertial and visual data are fused at mid-layers in the network, deeper correlations of these two modalities are learned compared to a simple combination of the final pose estimates of both modalities at the output layers, hence, the fusion can be considered as a tightly-coupled fusion of visual and inertial modalities. The proposed VIO network is evaluated on real datasets and thorough discussion is provided on the capabilities of the deep learning approach toward VIO.


To understand the complex picture of poverty and the ways of addressing the issue poses a difficult challenge to development. This book is about the lives and livelihoods of the poor people of rural Bangladesh. It draws upon the stories they have narrated to a group of researchers over a period of three years. The project aims to understand their livelihood constraints, opportunities and identify key components to help implement development policies and strategies for targeting and reaching out to the poorest. The book also helps to understand the causes of poverty. Drawing on a conceptual framework based on the livelihoods approach and taking a structured and holistic view of the problem, the contributors attempt to look beyond material poverty. They seek to understand how it 'feels' to be poor. The particular constraint faced by women and adolescent girls are the focus of two chapters in the book. In their recommendations, the contributors take into account that 'livelihood' is not only constructed of material assets but also from cultural values and identities. The book calls for more attention to be paid to the many ways in which the poorest make a living, so that various programmes for poverty alleviations are responsive to what people do or want to do.


ABSTRACT Stive, M.J.F.; de Schipper, M.A.; Luijendijk, A.P.; Aarninkhof, S.G.J.; van Gelder-Maas, C.; van Thiel de Vries, J.S.M.; de Vries, S.; Henriquez, M.; Marx, S., and Ranasinghe, R., 2013. A new alternative to saving our beaches from local sea-level rise: the sand engine. A boldly innovative soft engineering intervention, comprising an unprecedented 21.5 Mm3 sand nourishment known as the Sand Engine, has recently been implemented in the Netherlands. The Sand Engine nourishment is a pilot project to test the efficacy of local mega-nourishments as a counter measure for the anticipated enhanced coastal recession in the 21st century. The proposed concept, a single mega-nourishment, is expected to be more efficient, economical, and environmentally friendly in the long term than traditional beach and shoreface nourishments presently being used to negate coastal recession. Preliminary numerical model results indicate that this local nourishment will result in the widening of the beach along a 10 to 20 km stretch of the coastline and a beach area gain of 200 ha over a 20-year period. First observations show indeed a redistribution of the sand feeding the adjacent coasts, roughly 40% toward the south and 60% toward the north. While the jury is still out on this globally unique intervention, if proven successful, it may well become a global generic solution for combating sea-level-rise driven coastal recession on open coasts.


We report the discovery and spectroscopic confirmation of the quad-like lensed quasar system DES J0408-5354 found in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 1 (Y1) data. This system was discovered during a search for DES Y1 strong lensing systems using a method that identified candidates as red galaxies with multiple blue neighbors. DES J0408-5354 consists of a central red galaxy surrounded by three bright ( ) blue objects and a fourth red object. Subsequent spectroscopic observations using the Gemini South telescope confirmed that the three blue objects are indeed the lensed images of a quasar with redshift z = 2.375, and that the central red object is an early-type lensing galaxy with redshift z = 0.597. DES J0408-5354 is the first quad lensed quasar system to be found in DES and begins to demonstrate the potential of DES to discover and dramatically increase the sample size of these very rare objects.


This paper is about economists and their opinions on economic policies. Using a representative sample of Italian economists as a case study, we show that disagreement is large on both the causes of the economic difficulties in Italy and the economic policies to be implemented for a recovery. Searching for the sources of this disagreement, we regress individual opinions concerning economic policy proposals on a large set of covariates: (1) the respondent's socio-demographic characteristics; (2) her level of expertise and research interest in the Italian economy; (3) her judgment on which are the causes of the economic difficulties of Italy; (4) the research field and school of thought of the respondent; and (5) her political opinions, pro-market orientation and degree of optimism. While the first two groups of covariates are not systematically correlated with individual opinions on economic policy proposals, the last three are indeed. In particular, the political view, the degree of pro-market orientation and the level of optimism are all relevant in explaining differences in economists' opinions on economic policy proposals characterized by low consensus among economists. On the contrary, for policy proposals showing high consensus, the political view and the degree of optimism loose significance and the ultimate variable associated to the disagreement among economists is their level of pro-market orientation. The different opinion on which mechanism (Market vs State) should organize the economic system turns out to be the most profound source of differentiation among economists.


Genomic imprinting is a process by which heritable epigenetic marks at a subset of genomic loci are established in a sex-specific manner in parental gametes and then maintained in nascent offspring. This study probes the poorly understood function of genomic imprints in placental biology. Genomic imprints are responsible for the regulation of parent-of-origin specific monoallelic expression of clusters of imprinted genes. The primary epigenetic mark that distinguishes parental alleles at imprinted loci is 5-methylcytosine in the context of cytosine-guanine (CpG) dinucleotides within differentially methylated domains (DMDs). The Dnmt1 gene encodes the maintenance DNA methyltransferase, an enzyme responsible for replicating CpG methylation that is critical throughout the process of genomic imprinting. Genetic disruption of the oocyte specific isoform of Dnmt1 (Dnmt1o) results in partial and wide-spread loss of DMD methylation during preimplantation development and has strong effects on embryonic and extraembryonic development. In this dissertation the morphology of DNMT1o-deficient placentas is examined and their abnormal phenotypes correlated with loss of methylation at specific DMDs. A strong association between loss of methylation at the Kcnq1 DMD and accumulation of trophoblast giant cells was made. In addition, an association between loss of methylation at the Peg10 DMD and loss of fetal viability and placental labyrinthine volume was made. In conjunction with my study of the Dnmt1Δ1o model, I have engineered a novel targeted deletion of the imprinted Klf14 gene and found it has an effect on placental growth. My thesis unambiguously shows that genomic imprints are essential for placental development.


Multiple herbicide-resistant (MHR) Palmer amaranth is an increasing management concern for Kansas grain producers. The main purpose of this research was to 1) characterize the resistance levels to glyphosate (Roundup PowerMax) and mesotrione (Callisto) in an MHR Palmer amaranth population collected from Stafford County, KS, compared to a known herbicide-susceptible (SUS) population; and 2) to evaluate the effectiveness of preemergence (PRE), PRE followed by (fb) early post emergence (EPOST), and PRE fb late POST (LPOST) herbicide programs for controlling this MHR population in Roundup Ready and LibertyLink corn. To achieve these objectives, a whole plant dose-response study was conducted in a greenhouse at the Kansas State University Agricultural Research Center near Hays, KS; and a field study was conducted in Stafford County, KS (from where the MHR population was originally collected). Doseresponse study indicated that the MHR population had 7.2and 3.5-fold resistance to glyphosate and mesotrione, respectively, on the basis of visual control (LD50 values). Results from field study indicated that PRE application of Clarity + Acuron in combination with Aatrex, Callisto, Dual II Magnum, or Sencor fb a sequential EPOST application of Acuron alone or in combination with Aatrex, Callisto, or Dual II Magnum provided 80 to 95% control of MHR Palmer amaranth population in corn throughout the season. Furthermore, control with PRE applied Clarity + Acuron fb a LPOST application of Acuron + Status or Acuron + Liberty averaged 85% at the final rating. Based on these results, the tested Palmer amaranth population from Stafford County has evolved multiple resistance to glyphosate and mesotrione. Two-pass herbicide programs, including PRE fb EPOST or LPOST investigated in this research can provide adequate control of this population throughout the season in Roundup Ready and LibertyLink corn.


"I find that a bad head cold clears up if the sufferer kisses a mule on the nose," advises Pliny the Elder (Natural Histories 30.31). This kind of homespun remedy is not perhaps the kind of treatment we imagine when we think of ancient medicine. We expect cool and rational observations from the first men to have come close to what we call physicans, men such as Hippocrates, the "Father of Medicien." However, the figure of Hippocrates himself, idealized over much of the subsequent history of Western medicine as the clinical observer par excellence, envisaged sitting at the patient's bedside watching and working out what to do (with the resulting case histories providing a model of the inductive method), is more of a fabrication than a reality. Only a few hundred years after his death, stories already circulated in which Hippocrates cured the plague of Athens, found out why the philosopher Democritus behaved so oddly, and was approached by the king of Persia to heal a disease ravaging his empire (Pinault 1992). In fact, not one treatise of the seventy or so in the "Hippocratic corpus" can be attributed to the historical Hippocrates with any certainty, while his persona has been created by our expectations of what a doctor should be like.


A growing body of research has shown that executive functions play an important role in effective and sensitive parenting. No studies have examined this relation in mothers with problematic substance use, who may be at particular risk given biological, psychological, and contextual risks that may undermine executive functions and increase parenting stress. The
purpose of this study was to investigate the relation between three executive functions and parenting stress. Sixty-five mothers attending substance use treatment completed tasks assessing updating, inhibition, and shifting executive functions and questionnaires assessing parenting stress, reflecting both relational and household chaos definitions of the construct. Controlling for SES and age of youngest child, lower performance on both inhibition and updating tasks was associated with increased parenting stress, when a relational definition was employed. However, no significant relations were found between executive functions and household chaos definitions of parenting stress, after depression and SES were controlled for. These preliminary results suggest a role for executive functions in parenting stress in mothers with problematic substance use, but highlight the importance of considering the type of executive function assessed and the definition of parenting stress employed. Directions for future research and clinical implications are discussed.