Correlations between tracers of the matter density field and gravitational lensing are sensitive to the evolution of the matter power spectrum and the expansion rate across cosmic time. Appropriately defined ratios of such correlation functions, on the other hand, depend only on the angular diameter distances to the tracer objects and to the gravitational lensing source planes. Because of their simple cosmological dependence, such ratios can exploit available signal-to-noise ratio down to small angular scales, even where directly modelling the correlation functions is difficult. We present a measurement of lensing ratios using galaxy position and lensing data from the Dark Energy Survey, and CMB lensing data from the South Pole Telescope and Planck, obtaining the highest precision lensing ratio measurements to date. Relative to the concordance ΛCDM model, we find a best-fitting lensing ratio amplitude of A = 1.1 ± 0.1. We use the ratio measurements to generate cosmological constraints, focusing on the curvature parameter. We demonstrate that photometrically selected galaxies can be used to measure lensing ratios, and argue that future lensing ratio measurements with data from a combination of LSST and Stage-4 CMB experiments can be used to place interesting cosmological constraints, even after considering the systematic uncertainties associated with photometric redshift and galaxy shear estimation.


'Gempylids' (snake mackerels) and trichiurids (cutlassfishes) are pelagic fishes characterized by slender to eel‐like bodies, deep‐sea predatory ecologies, and large fang‐like teeth. Several hypotheses of relationships between these groups have been proposed, but a consensus remains elusive. Fossils attributed to 'gempylids' and trichiurids consist almost exclusively of highly compressed body fossils and isolated teeth and otoliths. We use micro‐computed tomography to redescribe two three‐dimensional crania, historically assigned to †Eutrichiurides winkleri and †Progempylus edwardsi, as well as an isolated braincase (NHMUK PV OR 41318). All from the London Clay Formation (Eocene, Ypresian), these specimens represent some of the oldest fossils identified as trichiuroids. We find that †Eutrichiurides winkleri does not show diagnostic characters of †Eutrichiurides, and it is assigned to a new genus. To investigate the placement of these fossils relative to extant lineages, we combine existing morphological character sets for 'gempylids' and trichiurids along with published mitogenomic data. Our analyses recover a monophyletic Trichiuridae nested within a paraphyletic 'Gempylidae'. The taxon formerly known as †Eutrichiurides winkleri is considered Trichiuroidea incertae sedis, while †Progempylus edwardsi and NHMUK PV OR 41318 are recovered within the 'gempylid' grade. Using previously published descriptions and character optimizations from our phylogenetic analyses we suggest possible placements for laterally compressed body fossils assigned to Trichiuroidea (†Argestichthys, †Abadzekhia, †Chelifichthys, †Anenchelum, †Eutrichiurides, †Musculopedunculus).


Two years field experiment on strawberry plants (cv. Sweet Charlie) in Qalyubia Governorate, Egypt was carried out to study the effect of different growing conditions (organic and conventional) and the effect of some colors of plastic mulch such as clear, black, and silver on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the strawberry plantations using hyper spectral remotely sensed data. As the first step, spectral reflectance pattern for the different treatments (fertilization and colors of plastic mulch) was identified through in situ spectral measurements. It was found that silver plastic mulch recorded higher values with all observed vegetative and fruit traits, as compared with an organic strawberry growing systems without plastic mulch. Spectral reflectance parameters in form of vegetation indices (VIs) were examined as yield estimators and their correlation with leaf area index (LAI) was observed. Generated models with accuracy assessment were explained and the optimal vegetation index to estimate yield under each treatment was identified. Generally, it was found that fertilization has more effect on spectral characteristics than plastic mulch. Spectral vegetation indices (VIs) showed higher accuracy than LAI as yield estimators. (Spectral – yield) models showed the same trend with adequate correlation coefficient (r) exceeded (0.7) except the treatment of black plastic mulch conventional system that showed (r) less than (0.6) with two yield estimators. All generated models with an accuracy of each model are explained in the following sections.


A new method is proposed to estimate the spatial and temporal variability of the solar radiative flux reaching the surface over land (DSSF), as well as the Aerosol Radiative Forcing (ARF), in cloud-free atmosphere. The objective of regional applications of the method is attainable by using the visible broadband of METEOSAT-7 satellite instrument which scans Europe and Africa on a half-hourly basis. The method relies on a selection of best correspondence between METEOSAT-7 radiance and radiative transfer computations. The validation of DSSF is performed comparing retrievals with ground-based measurements acquired in two contrasted environments: an urban site near Paris and a continental background site located South East of France. The study is concentrated on aerosol episodes occurring around the 2003 summer heat wave, providing 42 cases of comparison for variable solar zenith angle (from 59° to 69°), variable aerosol type (biomass burning emissions and urban pollution), and variable aerosol optical thickness (a factor 6 in magnitude). The method reproduces measurements of DSSF within an accuracy assessment of 20 W m −2 (5% in relative) in 70% of the situations, and within 40 W m −2 in 90% of the situations, for the two case studies considered here. Considering aerosol is the main contributor in changing the measured radiance at the top of the atmosphere, DSSF temporal variability is assumed to be caused only by aerosols, and consequently ARF at ground level and over land is also retrieved: ARF is computed as the difference between DSSF and a parameterised aerosol-free reference level. Retrievals are linearly correlated with the ground-based measurements of the aerosol optical thickness (AOT): sensitivity is included between 120 and 160 W m −2 per unity of AOT at 440 nm. AOT being an instantaneous measure indicative of the aerosol columnar amount, we prove the feasibility to infer instantaneous aerosol radiative impact at the ground level over land with METEOSAT-7 visible channel.


This thesis aims to build a theory for understanding the role of aid in achieving
the education Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in fragile states. In so
doing, it responds to claims that both educational research (see e.g. Cohen et
al., 2000), and the economic literature on aid and international development
(see e.g. Deaton, 2008), are insufficiently grounded in theory.

In finding a methodological voice for this thesis, I distinguish between three
research paradigms: positivist, interpretive and critical theory. I ask whether
theory is essentially a positivist project, better suited to quantitative methods
and to the natural sciences. I argue for a 'mixed-method' approach, proposing
that when qualitative methods generate data that are subjected to a stronger
process of generalisation – including comparison between data derived from
qualitative and quantitative methods, and from macro and micro level analysis –
then that evidence may be sufficiently strong to underpin theory.

I use a four step process to build theory: (i) categorising data into domains for
analysis, (ii) hypothesising linkages between these domains, (iii) investigating
these hypotheses through assessing the evidence supporting them, (iv)
organising hypotheses into a theoretical framework. To assess the strength of
evidence in support of each hypothesis, I use an instrument to 'grade the
evidence', based on a threefold assessment of method, observer bias and
corroboration. I include evidence from new research conducted for this thesis,
including: a portfolio analysis of 145 DFID education projects in fragile states
(1991-2007), and an analysis of primary data collected for the 2008 DFID
'Education Portfolio Review'.

The findings of this research confirm a potential relationship between aid inputs
and education outcomes in fragile states. Positing that this relationship might
work through intermediate financing and institutional effects, it finds weak
evidence for the former, but stronger evidence for the latter. With both aid and
non-aid inputs (e.g. diplomacy, military engagement), external inputs appear
better at supporting existing incipient reform than generating that reform,
suggesting that donors should adopt a more modest and opportunistic approach
to aid, as opposed to deploying a 'transformational' blueprint (Easterly, 2009).

The inter-dependence between aid inputs and non-aid inputs points to the
importance of deploying instruments within a single approach to strategy and possibly delivery. There is relatively strong evidence for 'pre-conditions' for
successful interventions – proposed here as political will, community ownership
and security / stability – whereas evidence for conventional proxies of 'aid
effectiveness' is weak relative to the importance generally ascribed to it.

The evidence linking education and social stability is mixed, and weakly
researched in developing country contexts – potentially significant for critical
theorists who question the wisdom and motives of donor governments investing
in education to counter radicalisation.

I conclude by assessing whether the theory generated has validity or utility. I
assess the theory against five key characteristics of theory: empirical grounding;
explanatory power; predictive power; utility; verification / falsification. I conclude
that my theory has explanatory power and utility, but that claims to
generalisability are weak, given the importance of context.

The thesis and its product (the 'theory') provide a framework that advances our
understanding of the relationships between aid and education outcomes in
fragile states. It tests the evidence base for these proposed relationships and,
notwithstanding limits of generalisability, offers a narrative and framework with
practical utility for future research, policy development and programming.


The intersections of race and copyright have been underexamined in legal scholarship, despite repeated calls for further scrutiny. The scholarship has so far focused primarily on identifying where copyright has fallen short in protecting the creative works of artists of color. This Article, instead, hopes to offer one viable solution for creating more inclusivity of different cultures in copyright: the approval of cultural adaptations under fair use.
Cultural adaptations—the transforming of preexisting works to reflect the cultural and social mores and norms of a different group—would appear on first glance to be prohibited as derivative works, which, under the Copyright Act, can be created exclusively by the copyright owners of the original works. A culture-centered approach to fair use, however, offers the possibility of permitting at least certain cultural adaptations. While this question would be one of first impression for courts, cultural adaptation can—and should—be understood to constitute fair use. Cultural adaptations comment on and transform the original work by recontextualizing it for a different cultural market. In addition, permitting cultural adaptations advances the goal of copyright and the public policy goal of diversity by fostering the creation of more works, and especially more works for and by minority artists.


In this study, John Kekes develops the view that good lives depend on maintaining a balance between one's moral tradition and individuality. Our moral tradition provides the forms of good lives and the permissible ways of trying to achieve them. But to do so, the author argues, we must grow in self-knowledge and self-control to make our characters suitable for realizing our aspirations. In addressing general readers as well as scholars, Kekes makes these philosophical views concrete by drawing on a rich variety of literary sources, including, among others, the works of Sophocles, Henry James, Tolstoy, and Edith Wharton. The first half of the work concentrates on social morality, establishing the conditions all good lives must meet. The second discusses personal morality, the sphere of individuality. Its development enables us to discover what is important to us and how we can fit our personal aspirations into the forms of life our moral tradition provides. Kekes's argument derives its inspiration from Aristotle's objectivism, Hume's emphasis on custom and feeling, and Mill's concentration on individuals and their experiments in living. This book is a nontechnical yet closely reasoned attempt to provide a contemporary answer to the age-old question of how to live well.


Logos, trademarks, national insignia, brand names, celebrity images, design patents, and advertising texts are vibrant signs in a consumer culture governed by a regime of intellectual property laws. In The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties , professor of law and cultural anthropologist Rosemary J. Coombe brings an illuminating ethnographic approach to an analysis of authorship and the role law plays in shaping the various meanings that animate these protected properties in the public sphere.

Although such artifacts are ubiquitous in contemporary culture, little attention has been paid to the impact of intellectual property law in everyday life or to how ownership of specific intellectual properties is determined and exercised. Drawing on a wide range of cases, disputes, and local struggles, Coombe examines these issues and dismantles the legal assumption that the meaning and value of a text or image is produced exclusively by an individual author or that authorship has a single point of origin. In the process, she examines controversies that include the service of turbanned Sikhs in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the use of the term Olympic in reference to the proposed gay Olympic Games. Other chapters discuss the appropriation of such celebrity images as the Marx brothers, Judy Garland, Dolly Parton, James Dean, and Luke Skywalker; the conflict over team names such as the Washington Redskins; and the opposition of indigenous peoples to stereotypical Native American insignia proffered by the entertainment industry. Ultimately, she makes a case for redefining the political in commodified cultural environments.

Significant for its insights into the political significance of current intellectual property law, this book also provides new perspectives on debates in cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and political theory. It will therefore interest both a wide scholarly and a general audience.


When it was originally proposed, the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) was hailed for its potential to contribute significantly to making Europe the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010. All national payments standards were supposed to disappear and be replaced by new SEPA standards, which would allow additional economies of scale and scope. After six years of intensive work on developing SEPA, however, and roughly 18 months before SEPA was due to have been completed (end of 2010), this ECRI Research Report finds that the SEPA process is in a crisis. The banks and their customers are reluctant to migrate to the new SEPA standards and some banks and banking associations are not persuaded that the benefits attributed by the European Commission to SEPA will materialise. The author, Professor Dr Jurgen Bott of the University of Applied Sciences of Kaiserslautern, argues that incentives are necessary to motivate service providers and users to change their current behaviour and to migrate to new service standards.


The invasion of foreign and native nuisances has becoming an increasing problem in society. Thus there is a constant need to find a better control in order to slow the progress or eliminate these species. One of the most well known invasives is Lythrum salicaria (purple loosestrife). Currently the most popular control for purple loosestrife is the use of beetles from the Galerucella spp. Currently there is some debate on the effectiveness of these beetles in the environment. This debate stemming from the issue of non-target feeding. A study incorporating potential limiting factors (i.e. temperature) for the beetles was conducted. It was hypothesized that when treated with these beetles areas that experience higher annual temperatures would see a greater amount of damage on purple loosestrife. Published papers were used as the primary source of data collection as well as several websites. It was found that there was little correlation between temperature and the amount of damage done on loosestrife. Other limiting factors could include the amount of precipitation an area receives. ______________________________________


Entrepreneurship Education is necessary for self-employment, self-reliance, and national development. This paper therefore examines how entrepreneurship education can help in the reduction of unemployment; engender self-reliance and sustainable national development. To realize these objectives, library research was employed in gathering data. It was found out that entrepreneurship development or education can make its recipients self-employed, self-reliant and contribute to national economic and social development .In addition to that, promoting entrepreneurship and inculcating entrepreneurship education in our youths will lead to less societal ills as more hands will be engaged and criminality becomes less attractive. It is recommended that Government should create enabling environment for entrepreneurship to thrive. Favorable environment for entrepreneurship development should be devoid of social insecurity which hampers foreign and domestic investments. Above all, prospective graduates should be made to start from secondary schools to learn and develop entrepreneurship consciousness, culture, motivation, aspirations as well as entrepreneurial skills by making "entrepreneurship studies" a compulsory course offering in our schools.


Graphics processing units (GPUs) provide significant improvements in performance and performance-per-watt as compared to traditional multicore CPUs. This energy-efficiency of GPUs has facilitated the use of GPUs in many application domains. Albeit energy efficient, GPUs consume non-trivial power independently of CPUs. Therefore, we need to analyze the power and performance characteristic of GPUs and their causal relation with CPUs in order to reduce the total energy consumption of the system while sustaining high performance. In this paper, we provide a power and performance analysis of GPU-accelerated systems for better understandings of these implications. Our analysis on a real system discloses that system energy can be reduced by 28% retaining a decrease in performance within 1% by controlling the voltage and frequency levels of GPUs. We show that energy savings can be achieved when GPU core and memory clock frequencies are appropriately scaled considering the workload characteristics. Another interesting finding is that voltage and frequency scaling of CPUs is trivial for total system energy reduction, and even should not be applied in state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated systems. We believe that these findings are useful to develop dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) algorithms for GPU-accelerated systems.


Alteration of natural habitats as a result of agricultural intensification is detrimental for wildlife. There is, however, growing evidence that land use and management can be wildlife friendly. In Europe, agricultural areas cover two‐thirds of the land and therefore play a major role in maintaining biodiversity. Agricultural land use is very intense in vineyard‐dominated landscapes but there are no refuges for wildlife in the form of ecological compensation areas. In our study, we assessed spatial variation in abundance of salamander (Salamandra salamandra) larvae in relation to land use and stream characteristics in vineyard‐dominated landscapes. Abundance of larval salamanders depended positively on weirs, amount of riparian vegetation along the streams and environment‐friendly agricultural practice in the vineyards. Surprisingly, road density also had positive effects, presumably through indirect effects (stone walls along roads may serve as refugia). Thus, abundance is determined by characteristics of both the aquatic and terrestrial habitats. Our results suggest that fire salamanders can persist in landscapes dominated by intensive agriculture like viticulture, indicate wildlife‐friendly management options and highlight that man‐made habitat can be valuable for wildlife.


The ipdC gene of Erwinia herbicola strain 299R encodes an indolepyruvate decarboxylase involved in the biosynthesis of indole-3-acetic acid (IAA). Transcriptional fusions of ipdC to an ice nucleation reporter gene (inaZ) were used to study the expression of ipdC in vitro and in situ on plants. ipdC was expressed only at low levels in liquid media and independently of factors such as richness of the medium, pH, nitrogen availability, the presence of l-tryptophan or oxygen, and growth phase of the culture. However, the transcriptional activity of ipdC increased approximately 18-fold under low solute and matric potentials in culture. ipdC was also induced 32-fold on leaves of bean and tobacco and 1,000-fold on pear flowers. This is the first report of the plant-inducible transcription of a bacterial IAA biosynthetic gene. It strongly supports the role of ipdC, and thus that of the indole-3-pyruvic acid pathway, in IAA biosynthesis by strain 299R in situ. The plant induction and apparent regulation of ipdC by...


We report the pharmacokinetics of vancomycin in an obese patient with renal insufficiency using pharmacokinetic equations, and comparing them with actual levels. A 47-year-old man with morbid obesity had a complicated hospital course with acute renal failure. Due to sputum growth of coagulase-negative Staphylococcus aureus, vancomycin 1500 mg intravenously twice daily was given empirically. Peak and trough plasma concentrations were drawn at steady state. Based on levels, true pharmacokinetic parameters for the patient were calculated using equations. This revealed that calculating individual pharmacokinetic parameters using equations may be a valid tool for dosing vancomycin in obese patients with renal insufficiency.


This report presents a method for the determination of axially-symmetric shapes with a given base area that are optimum with respect to wave drag in supersonic flow and which have finite nose angles. Use has been made of the exact non-linear differential equations for supersonic flow together with the shock equations. The computed results indicate that the optimum bodies with a finite nose angle have a lower drag than those with cusped noses. This would make their practical application of a certain significance. A number of such shapes have been presented in this report.


This paper introduces a configurable motion estimation architecture for a wide range of fast block-match- ing algorithms (BMAs). Contemporary motion estimation architectures are either too rigid for multiple BMAs or the flexibility in them is implemented at the cost of reduced performance. The proposed architecture overcomes both of these limitations. The configurability of the proposed architecture is based on a new BMA framework that can be adjusted to support the desired set of BMAs. The chosen framework configuration is implemented by an intelligent control logic which is integrated to an efficient parallel memory system and distortion computation unit. The flexibility of the framework is demonstrated by mapping five different BMAs (BBGDS, DS, CDS, HEXBS, and TSS) to the architecture. The total execution time of the mapped BMAs is shown to be almost directly proportional to the number of tested checking points in the search area, so the architecture is very tolerant of different BMA-specific search strategies and search patterns. In addition, a run-time switching between supported BMAs can be done without performance compromises. With a 0.25-μm CMOS technology, the proposed architecture configured for FULLSEARCH, BBGDS, and TSS requires only 14.2 kgates and 2.5 KB of memory at 200 MHz operating frequency. A performance comparison to the reference programmable architecture sreveals that only the proposed implementation is able to process real-time (30 fps) fixed block-size mo- tion estimation (1 reference frame) at full HDTV resolution (1920× 1080).


Background/Aims: In addition to their action of lowering blood cholesterol levels, statins modulate biological characteristics and functions of arterial myocytes such as viability, proliferation, apoptosis, survival and contraction. The present study tested whether simvastatin, as a prototype statin, enhances autophagy in coronary arterial myocytes (CAMs) to thereby exert their beneficial effects in atherosclerosis. Methods and Results: Using flow cytometry, we demonstrated that simvastatin significantly increased the autophagsome formation in CAMs. Western blot analysis confirmed that simvastatin significantly increased protein expression of typical autophagy markers LC3B and Beclin1 in these CAMs. Confocal microscopy further demonstrated that simvastatin increased fusion of autophagosomes with lysosomes, which was blocked by autophagy inhibitor 3-methyladenine or silencing of Atg7 genes. Simvastatin reduced mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) activity, which was reversed by Rac1-GTPase overexpression and the mTOR agonist phosphatidic acid. Moreover, both Rac1-GTPase overexpression and activation of mTOR by phosphatidic acid drastically blocked simvastatin-induced autophagosome formation in CAMs. Interestingly, simvastatin increased protein expression of a contractile phenotype marker calponin in CAMs, which was blocked by autophagy inhibitor 3-methyladenine. Simvastatin markedly reduced proliferation of CAMs under both control and proatherogenic stimulation. However, this inhibitory effect of simvastatin on CAM proliferation was blocked by by autophagy inhibitor 3-methyladenine or silencing of Atg7 genes. Lastly, animal experiments demonstrated that simvastatin increased protein expression of LC3B and calponin in mouse coronary arteries. Conclusion: Our results indicate that simvastatin inhibits the Rac1-mTOR pathway and thereby increases autophagy in CAMs which may stabilize CAMs in the contractile phenotype to prevent proliferation and growth of these cells.


Background and purpose Prosthetic joint infections can be caused by bacteria derived from the patient's skin. The aim of the study was: (1) to determine which bacteria colonize the nose and groin in patients planned for primary hip or knee arthroplasty, (2) to determine the antimicrobial resistance patterns, and (3) to monitor changes in bacterial colonization and resistance patterns connected to surgery. Patients and methods 2 weeks before scheduled primary hip or knee arthroplasty, culture samples were taken from the anterior nares and from the groin of 133 consecutive patients. At surgery, cloxacillin was given prophylactically and cement with gentamicin was used. 2 weeks after surgery, another set of samples were taken from 120 of these patients. Bacterial findings and resistance patterns were analyzed. Results Preoperatively, 95% of the patients had coagulase-negative staphylococci (CNS) in the groin and 77% in the nose. The proportion of patients with a methicillin-resistant CNS in the groin increased from 20% preoperatively to 50% postoperatively (p < 0.001), and the proportion of patients with a gentamicin-resistant CNS in the groin increased from 5% to 45% (p < 0.001). 28% of the patients had Staphylococcus aureus in the nose preoperatively, and 7% in the groin. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was found in the nose of 1 patient. Interpretation In southern Sweden, beta-lactams were effective against 99% of the Staphylococcus aureus strains and 80% of the CNS strains colonizing the patients undergoing primary hip or knee arthroplasty. Gentamicin protects against most CNS strains in cemented primary joint replacements.


Introduction. Overdue Reports The Consideration of a State Party's Record in the Absence of a Report Periodicity of Reports Focussed and Consolidated Reporting Inadequate Reports Special Reports Order of Considering Reports The Timing of the Consideration of Individual Communications Considering Individual Communications Working Groups The Special Rapporteur on New Communications The Special Rapporteur on Follow-up to Individual Communications County Rapporteurs List of Issues Country Information within OHCHR Core Documents Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) UN Agencies, Bodies and Programmes The Special Procedures/Mechanisms The Dialogue Concluding Observations Reservations Follow-up on State Reporting or Operationalising the Human Treaty body Visits or Missions to State Parties General Comments and Recommendations Media Meetings of Chairpersons of the Treaty Bodies Treaty Body Members' Performance Languages Streaming Complaints Documentation The Venue for CEDAW Servicing and Resources Amendment List of Recommendations Annexes.


Abstract. The aim of this paper is to outline a genealogy of the concept of Lebensraum. It will focus on the way that Darwinian evolutionary thought was translated into 19th Century German geography, particularly in the work of Friedrich Ratzel and his formulation of the concept of Lebensraum. The paper argues that the Ratzelian Lebensraum must be viewed as a concept aimed towards a synthesis between biogeography and anthropogeography. The paper will also trace how the Ratzelian Lebensraum came to play a vital part in Rudolf Kjellen's later formulation of an organic theory of the state. Here the paper will focus specifically on Kjellen's organic taxonomy of the political system. The paper will end with a short discussion on the synthetic aspects of the Lebensraum concept, focusing on the seemingly divergent ways that the Lebensraum concept was mobilised within National socialist ideology and planning.


Historians of the Civil War often speak of "wars within a war"--the military fight, wartime struggles on the home front, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. In this broadly conceived book, Thavolia Glymph provides a comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War--North and South, white and black, slave and free--showing how women were essentially and fully engaged in all three arenas. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women's actions, allegiances, and politics. We encounter women as they stood their ground, moved into each other's territory, sought and found common ground, and fought for vastly different principles. Some women used all the tools and powers they could muster to prevent the radical transformations the war increasingly imposed, some fought with equal might for the same transformations, and other women fought simply to keep the war at bay as they waited for their husbands and sons to return home. Glymph shows how the Civil War exposed as never before the nation's fault lines, not just along race and class lines but also along the ragged boundaries of gender. However, Glymph makes clear that women's experiences were not new to the mid-nineteenth century; rather, many of them drew on memories of previous conflicts, like the American Revolution and the War of 1812, to make sense of the Civil War's disorder and death.


Kepler ultra-high precision photometry of long and continuous observations provides a unique dataset in which surface rotation and variability can be studied for thousands of stars. Because many of these old field stars also have independently measured asteroseismic ages, measurements of rotation and activity are particularly interesting in the context of age-rotation-activity relations. In particular, age-rotation relations generally lack good calibrators at old ages, a problem that this Kepler sample of old-field stars is uniquely suited to address. We study the surface rotation and photometric magnetic activity of a subset of 540 solar-like stars on the main-sequence and the subgiant branch for which stellar pulsations have been measured. The rotation period was determined by comparing the results from two different analysis methods: i) the projection onto the frequency domain of the time-period analysis, and ii) the autocorrelation function of the light curves. Reliable surface rotation rates were then extracted by comparing the results from two different sets of calibrated data and from the two complementary analyses. General photometric levels of magnetic activity in this sample of stars were also extracted by using a photometric activity index, which takes into account the rotation period of the stars. We report rotation periods for 310 out of 540 targets (excluding known binaries and candidate planet-host stars); our measurements span a range of 1 to 100 days. The photometric magnetic activity levels of these stars were computed, and for 61.5% of the dwarfs, this level is similar to the range, from minimum to maximum, of the solar magnetic activity. We demonstrate that hot dwarfs, cool dwarfs, and subgiants have very different rotation-age relationships, highlighting the importance of separating out distinct populations when interpreting stellar rotation periods. Our sample of cool dwarf stars with age and metallicity data of the highest quality is consistent with gyrochronology relations reported in the literature.


Detecting and tracking moving objects are important and challenging problems which have attracted much attention from the research community. However, in most cases, it is not enough to only track the objects. The goal should be to detect the occurrences of events of interest, which is important for applications such as video surveillance, video browsing and indexing. Yet, event detection introduces the challenge of providing the flexibility to specify customized events with varying complexity, and entering them to a system in a generic way. The event definitions should not be pre-defined and hard-coded. We introduce a spatio-temporal event detection system which lets the users to specify multiple composite events of high-complexity, and then detects their occurrence automatically. Events can be defined on a single camera view or across multiple camera views. Semantically higher level event scenarios can be built by using the building blocks, which we call the primitive events, and combining them by operators. More importantly, the newly defined composite events can be combined with each other. This layered structure makes the definition of events with higher and higher complexity possible. The event definitions are written to an XML file, which is then parsed and communicated to the tracking engines running on the videos of the corresponding cameras. With the proposed system, we have reached the next level and managed to go from detecting "a person exiting the building" to detecting "a person coming from the south corridor of the building and then exiting the building".


Translesion synthesis past Pt-DNA adducts can affect both the cytotoxicity and mutagenicity of the platinum adducts. We have shown previously that the extent of replicative bypass in vivo is influenced by the carrier ligand of platinum adducts. The specificity of replicative bypass may be determined by the DNA polymerase complexes that catalyze translesion synthesis past Pt-DNA adducts and/or by DNA damage-recognition proteins that bind to the Pt-DNA adducts and block translesion replication. In the present study, primer extension on DNA templates containing site-specifically placed cisplatin, oxaliplatin, JM216, or chlorodiethylenetriamine-Pt adducts revealed that the eukaryotic DNA polymerases beta, zeta, gamma, and human immunodeficiency virus type 1 reverse transcriptase (HIV-1 RT) had a similar specificity for translesion synthesis past Pt-DNA adducts (dien >> oxaliplatin >/= cisplatin > JM216). Primer extension assays performed in the presence of high mobility group protein 1 (HMG1), which is known to recognize cisplatin-damaged DNA, revealed that inhibition of translesion synthesis by HMG1 also depended on the carrier ligand of the Pt-DNA adduct (cisplatin > oxaliplatin = JM216 >> dien). These data were consistent with the results of gel-shift experiments showing similar differences in the affinity of HMG1 for DNA modified with the different platinum adducts. Our studies show that both DNA polymerases and damage-recognition proteins can impart specificity to replicative bypass of Pt-DNA adducts. This information may serve as a model for further studies of translesion synthesis.


With a focus on empirical evaluation and practical application, Criminological Theories: Introduction, Evaluation, and Application, Sixth Edition, helps students draw connections between criminological theory and practical applications. In clear, engaging language, authors Ronald L. Akers and Christine S. Sellers explore each principal criminological theory using a three-part analysis * An Introduction presents a succinct exposition of the theory's central concepts, assertions, and hypotheses. * Next, an Evaluation provides a detailed critique of the theory, with an emphasis on empirical validity. * Finally, an Application extends the evaluation to determine each theory's relevance, as well as its potential for controlling and preventing crime and delinquency.


A primitive 3-smooth partition of $n$ is a representation of $n$ as the sum of numbers of the form $2^a 3^b$, where no summand divides another. Partial results are obtained in the problem of determining the maximal and average order of the number of such representations. Results are also obtained regarding the size of the terms in such a representation, resolving questions of Erdős and Selfridge.


The incidence of cystic fibrosis over the last 10 years in East Anglia (a region of the United Kingdom with a population of 2.1 million) has halved. This has happened during the establishment of a neonatal screening programme, which has enabled early diagnosis, genetic counselling, and lately the option of prenatal diagnosis in subsequent pregnancies. One hundred and seven children were born with cystic fibrosis between 1981 and 1990, eight of whom were siblings. The Guthrie blood spots of 82 infants detected by neonatal immunoreactive trypsin screening between 1981 and 1990 were examined for the presence of the most common cystic fibrosis gene mutation (delta F508). It was present in 135 (82%) of the 164 cystic fibrosis genes analysed with 54 (66%) cases being homozygous and 27 (33%) heterozygous. Sixty nine per cent of infants were symptomatic at the time of diagnosis regardless of genotype. No association was found between the early clinical or biochemical features of the disease and homozygosity or heterozygosity for this mutation. Screening for cystic fibrosis using the blood immunoreactive trypsin assay alone remains an effective method of identifying infants with the disease soon after birth, thereby allowing early therapeutic intervention. Genetic counselling and prenatal diagnosis have contributed to a reduction in the number of children born with cystic fibrosis, but may not entirely explain the decreasing incidence of the disease.


Ginkgo biloba has been advocated as a neuroprotective agent for several years in glaucoma. In this study, immunohistochemistry was used to identify known potential molecular targets of Ginkgo biloba related to retinal ganglion cell (RGC) apoptosis in experimental glaucoma, including amyloid precursor protein (APP), As, cytochrome c, caspase-3 and tumor necrosis factor receptor-1 (TNF-R1). Furthermore, using apoptotic inducers related to mechanisms implicated in glaucoma, namely Dimethyl sulphoxide (DMSO), ultraviolet C (UVC) and Sodium Azide (NaN3), the effects of the terpenoid fraction of Ginkgo biloba (Ginkgolide A, Ginkgolide B and Bilobalide) were investigated separately in cultured retinal ganglion cells (RGC-5). Cell viability was determined by 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay and morphological analysis of DMSO treated RGC-5 was performed using Hoechst 33342 stain.
Immunohistochemistry showed a strong inverse correlation between As and APP in ocular hypertension (OHT) animals, with APP and As accumulation peaking at 1 and 12 weeks after intraocular pressure (IOP) elevation respectively. Cytochrome c and TNF-R1 expression peaked at 3 weeks, and active caspase 3 activity at 12 weeks after IOP elevation. 1% DMSO, UV40, 1mM NaN3 and 50μM Aβ25-35 dose dependently reduced RGC-5 survival at 24 hours by 27%, 20%, 35% and 27% respectively. These effects were inhibited by Ginkgolide A, Ginkgolide B and Bilobalide in different assays at different levels. In these experiments, all three compounds showed a dose-related response although some intrinsic toxicity was observed with Ginkgolide A.
Ginkgolide B had the most profound neuroprotective effects in the majority of assays at a concentration range of 0.5-5μg/ml, whereas Ginkgolide A and Bilobalide had variable activity. Although the effect of simultaneous administration of all three fractions was not assessed, work in this thesis suggest that Ginkgolide B can be neuroprotective to RGCs in preventing apoptosis and cell death, therefore may be of use as a neuroprotective strategy in glaucoma management.


Confocal microscopy rejects out-of-focus light from the object by scanning a pinhole through the image and reconstructing the image point by point. Volume holographic imaging systems with bright-field illumination have been proposed as an alternative to conventional confocal-type microscopes that does not require scanning of a pinhole or a slit. However, due to wavelength-position degeneracy of the hologram, the high Bragg selectivity of the volume hologram is not utilized and system performance is not optimized. Confocal-rainbow illumination has been proposed as a means to remove the degeneracy and improve optical sectioning in these systems. In prior work, two versions of this system were illustrated: the first version had a separate illumination and imaging grating and the second used a single grating to disperse the incident light and to separate wavelengths in the imaging path. The initial illustration of the dual-grating system has limited depth resolution due to the low selectivity of the illumination grating. The initial illustration of the single-grating system has high depth resolution but does not allow optimization of the illumination path and requires high optical quality of the holographic filters. In this paper we consider the design and tolerance requirements of the dual-grating system for high depth resolution and demonstrate the results with an experimental system. An experimental system with two 1.8 mm thick planar holograms achieved a depth resolution of 7 μm with a field of view of 1.9 mm and a hologram dispersion matching tolerance of ±0.008°.


BACKGROUND
Selective laser trabeculoplasty (SLT) is a relatively new treatment strategy for the treatment of glaucoma. Its principle is similar to that of argon laser trabeculoplasty (ALT), but may lead to less damage to the trabecular meshwork.

METHODS
We assessed the 2-year efficacy of SLT in a noncomparative consecutive case series. Any adult patient either suspected of having glaucoma or with open-angle glaucoma, whose treatment was judged insufficient to reach target intraocular pressure (IOP), could be recruited. IOP and number of glaucoma treatments were recorded over 2 years after the procedure.

RESULTS
Our sample consisted of 44 consecutive eyes of 26 patients, aged 69+/-8 years. Eyes were treated initially on the lower 180 degrees . Three of them were retreated after 15 days on the upper 180. Fourteen eyes had ocular hypertension, 17 primary open-angle/normal-tension glaucoma, 11 pseudoexfoliation (PEX) glaucoma, and two pigmentary glaucoma. Thirty-six eyes had previously been treated and continued to be treated with topical anti-glaucoma medication, ten had had prior ALT, nine iridotomy, and 12 filtering surgery. The 2-year-follow up could not be completed for eight eyes because they needed filtering surgery. In the remaining 36 eyes, IOP decreased by a mean of 17.2%, 3.3 mmHg, (19.2+/-4.7 to 15+/-3.6 mmHg) after 2 years (p<0.001). As a secondary outcome, the number of glaucoma treatments decreased from 1.44 to 1.36 drops/patient. Other results according to subgroups of patients are analyzed: the greatest IOP decrease occurred in eyes that had never been treated with anti-glaucoma medication or with PEX glaucoma. SLT was probably valuable in a few eyes after filtering surgery; however, the statistical power of the study was not strong enough to draw a firm conclusion. When expressed in survival curves after 2 years, however, only 48% and 41% of eyes experienced a decrease of more than 3 mmHg or more than 20% of preoperative intraocular pressure, respectively.

CONCLUSION
SLT decreases IOP somewhat for at least 2 years without an increase in topical glaucoma treatment. However, it cannot totally replace topical glaucoma treatment. In the future, patient selection should be improved to decrease the cost/effectiveness ratio.


In a green IT obsessed world hardware efficiency and usage of computer systems becomes essential.
There is a multiplier effect when this is applied to High Performance Computing systems. With an
average compute rack consuming between 7 and 25kW it is essential that resources be utilised in the
most optimum way possible. Currently the batch schedulers employed to manage these multi-user
multi-application environments are nothing more than match making and service level agreement
(SLA) enforcing tools. System Administrators strive to get maximum "usage efficiency" from the
systems by fine-tuning and restricting queues to get a predictable performance characteristic, e.g. any
software package running in queue X will take N number of cores and run for a maximum of T time.
These fixed approximations of performance characteristics are used then to schedule queued jobs in
the system, in the hope of achieving 100% utilisation. Choosing which queue to place a job in, falls on the user. A savvy user may use trial an error to establish which queue is best suited to his/her needs, but most users will find a queue that gives them results and stick to it – even if they change the model being simulated. This usually leads to a job receiving either an over or under allocation of resources, resulting in either hardware failure or inefficient utilisation of the system. Ideally the system should know how a particular application with a particular dataset would behave when run.
Benchmarking Schemes have historically been used as marketing and administration tools. Some
schemes like Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) and Perfect Benchmark used
"real" applications with generic datasets to test a systems performance. This way a scientist looking for a cluster computer could ask questions such as "How well will my software run?" rather than "How many FLOPS can I get out of this system?" If adapted to include an API to plug in any software to benchmark and to pass results to other software, these toolkits can be used for purposes other than sales and marketing. If a job scheduler can get access to performance characteristic curves for every application on the system, optimal resource allocation and scheduling/queuing decisions can be made at submit time by the system rather than the user. This would further improve the performance of
Mouldable schedulers that currently follow the Downey model. Along with the decision-making
regarding resource allocation and scheduling, if the scheduler is able to collect a historic record of simulations by the particular users, then further optimisation is possible. This would lead to better and safer utilisation of the system. Currently AI is used in some decision making in Mouldable schedulers. Given a user inputted variance of resources required the scheduler makes a decision on resource
allocation by selecting from the available range. If the user supplied range is incorrect, the scheduler is powerless to adapt, and on a next run cannot learn from previous mistakes or successes. This project aims to adapt an open-framework benchmarking scheme to feed information to a job scheduler. This job scheduler will also use gathered heuristic data to make scheduling decisions and optimise the resource allocation and the system utilisation. This work will be further expanded to include elastic or even shared resource environments where the scheduler can expand the size of its world based on either financial or SLA driven decisions


YURDUGÜL, S., 2016. Effects of edible coating – SemperfreshTM, ascorbic acid and whey protein treatment on certain microbiological, physical and chemical qualities of peeled bananas "Musa sapientum". Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 22: 647–654 Banana is one of the most economically important fruits in the world with a huge consumption demand, as offering a valuable reserve of vitamins, potassium and energy. In this study, certain quality parameters in peeled banana was investigated by the treatment of vitamin C, SemperfreshTM (a sucrose polyester base coating), and whey protein during cold storage (277 K). According to microbiological analysis, the vitamin C application was found to be the most effective group by extending the shelf life depending on its acidic feature of bananas allowing to decrease the total mesophilic aerobic bacteria(TMAB), yeast and the mold counts with respect to control. The weight determination and the fi rmness results showed that the sole SemperfreshTM treatment was found to indicate a high chemical and physical quality at the end of the experiments.


For high-resolution measurements of tempera- ture fields in the atmospheric boundary layer and the lower free troposphere a scanning eye-safe lidar which deploys the rotational Raman technique at 355 nm was developed. To optimize the filters of the receiver for both high nighttime and daytime performance, detailed simulation studies have been performed. The receiver is fiber-coupled to a sequential setup of multicavity interference filters used under small an- gles of incidence. Examples of nighttime and daytime mea- surements with the system which has a total power-aperture- efficiency product of 0.006 W m 2 are presented. Noontime temperature measurements with a temporal resolution of 60 s result in 1-sigma statistical temperature uncertainty of <1 K up to 1 km height and <2 K up to 2 km height. With an integration time of 60 min and a gliding average of 750 m a 1-sigma statistical temperature uncertainty of <1 K up to 14 km height is achieved during night.


This brief contribution provides a bird's eye view of the second eldest written and still existing constitution in the world: the Dutch Constitution (1814). One would think that this is cause for great popular pride, for warm constitutional patriotism in the Netherlands. In fact it isn't. Although the Dutch indicated that they think the Constitution is important in national survey in the run up to the bicentennial anniversary of the Constitution, they hardly know the content and do not seem particularly taken with the document. An bit of an enigma. What do these lukewarm feelings of the Dutch as regards their Constitution tell us? Maybe that the Dutch do not have strong cultural constitutional tradition. The Dutch constitution with its 142 provisions has a very austere quality. No big symbols, preambles or constitutional poetry, or moral appeals. Just some basics: a relatively small catalogue of fundamental rights (most of them covered in human rights treaties to which the Netherlands are party), the main state institutions (King, cabinet, parliament, the judiciary and high offices of state), their relation, elections, taxes, the military, international law, provinces and municipalities, professional bodies and the revision process. No explicit mention of the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, sovereignty of the people, the idea of limited government. Fertile soil for a strong constitutional tradition that raises the people into the core constitutional values of a political system seems to be completely absent. But this maybe to superficial a view. One can also argue that after 200 years the core constitutional values of rule of law and democracy need no longer to be amplified by the constitutional document, they have already been ingrained in political, social and cultural life.


We report on power, tuning, and temporal characteristics of an optical parametric oscillator (OPO) based on a periodically poled stoichiometric lithium tantalate (PPSLT) crystal and pumped by a high-power mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser. Focus is given to the OPO operating range spanning from 900 to 1350 nm, which is important in nonlinear optical microscopy and spectroscopy. Generation of peak powers beyond the 10 kW level is strongly affected by the onset of intracavity power-dependent loss, which is due to the high ultrafast Kerr nonlinearity of the gain material. The crystal withstands combined power densities higher than 60 GW/cm2 for ∼100 fs optical pulses before breakdown occurs. A resonator design that mitigates self- and cross-beam focusing effects delivers ∼40 kW peak power for 85–160 fs pulses. The high parametric gain of the PPSLT allows OPO operation at the twelfth harmonic of the pump laser repetition rate (∼0.91 GHz). Stable operation with the possibility of broad wavelength tuning is demonstrated without active cavity length stabilization at a repetition rate of ∼530 MHz and average powers above 150 mW. In addition, up to 50 mW of power at ∼530 nm is output as a result of SHG of the 1060 nm signal beam resulting from third-order quasi phase matching.


It is estimated that more than 600,000 new cases of cancer will be reported in Brazil during the 2018–2019 biennium, especially with regard to prostate, breast, lung and colorectal cancers. Due to the high prevalence, incidence and mortality rates of these diseases, cancer campaigns such as 'Pink October' and 'Blue November' were strongly promoted in the past decade throughout the country to raise awareness of breast and prostate cancer, respectively. Nevertheless, whether the implementation of these campaigns has been proven efficient is still unknown. In the present study, we analysed the effectiveness of these campaigns on eliciting population online interest for cancer information. The Google Trends database was evaluated for the relative Internet search popularity for the terms 'breast cancer' and 'prostate cancer' from 2014 to 2019. Aside from some regional differences, we found that there was a high demand for 'breast cancer' and, to a lesser extent, 'prostate cancer' searches in a seasonal fashion (during October and November, respectively). Despite the worldwide high incidence of lung and colorectal cancers, searches including these keywords did not show increases in any specific period of the year, demonstrating the efficiency of the 'Pink October' and 'Blue November' campaigns in engaging the interest of the Brazilian population on the subject. These results allow us to infer that campaigns are effective in mobilising the attention of the Brazilian population with regard to breast and prostate cancers, but the practical aspects in reducing incidence and mortality should still be discussed.


Ensuring the freshness of client data is a fundamental problem for applications that rely on cloud infrastructure to store data and mediate sharing. Thialfi is a notification service developed at Google to simplify this task. Thialfi supports applications written in multiple programming languages and running on multiple platforms, e.g., browsers, phones, and desktops. Applications register their interest in a set of shared objects and receive notifications when those objects change. Thialfi servers run in multiple Google data centers for availability and replicate their state asynchronously. Thialfi's approach to recovery emphasizes simplicity: all server state is soft, and clients drive recovery and assist in replication. A principal goal of our design is to provide a straightforward API and good semantics despite a variety of failures, including server crashes, communication failures, storage unavailability, and data center failures. Evaluation of live deployments confirms that Thialfi is scalable, efficient, and robust. In production use, Thialfi has scaled to millions of users and delivers notifications with an average delay of less than one second.


Given the low carbon transformation of our energy systems, demand response has the potential to increase the adaptability of electricity demand to a volatile electricity supply. In this article, we investigate the demand response potential for the case where substituting technologies are available in an energy-intensive industrial production process. The available production technologies may not only differ in their technical characteristics, but also vary by the necessary input materials. We present a generic linear optimization model for such a production process and apply it to a real-world example in the paper industry. The results show that the question of which substituting technologies are used in an optimal production schedule to which degree, is highly influenced by the combination of current input parameters such as prices. In direct consequence, the corresponding demand response potential is not a fixed number. From an operational perspective, this input dependency implies that the price relation of raw input materials used in substituting technologies can be a crucial driving force for the ability and willingness of industrial enterprises to provide demand response. In addition, from a strategic perspective, long-run investments in demand response potentials may rely on expected price development of major input factors.


In this paper I analyse the potential that participatory action research holds for educating pre-service teachers to become more critically reflective and socially conscious. I also describe the rationale for and process of engaging pre-service teachers in their teacher education programme. Involving these candidate teachers in participatory action research (PAR) projects may provide opportunities for aspiring teachers to develop pedagogical content knowledge, examine their beliefs about teaching, and gain confidence in addressing social justice issues. More than merely exposing them to applying the technique of action research, the PAR project encouraged them to become more socially conscious, critical, imaginativ,e and argumentative as teacher-researchers. In the project I used a participatory approach in action research to prepare the pre-service teachers to become emancipatory action researchers. Supporting and fostering inquiring practices is a strategy to help pre-service teachers move beyond just receiving hand-outs in a teacher education programme and beginning to focus on their work with learners and challenges in the real school environment. Keywords : critical reflection; emancipatory action research; participatory action research; pre-service teachers; social justice; teacher graduate attributes.


Abstract The spin states of iron in deep magmas are one of the most important properties that affect the partitioning of iron between magmas and minerals and, thus, the gravitational stability of magmas in the Earth. We investigated the spin state and electronic environments of iron in a basaltic glass containing ~70 Fe3+/ΣFe at room temperature and pressures from 1 bar to 130 GPa using a diamond-anvil cell combined with energy domain synchrotron 57Fe Mössbauer source spectroscopy. The basaltic glass represents an analog of a multi-component magma typical for the Earth. The Mössbauer spectra could be fitted by a two pseudo-Voigt doublet model including a high quadrupole splitting (QS) doublet and a low QS doublet, which were assigned to high-spin Fe2+ and high-spin Fe3+, respectively. The high-spin states of Fe2+ and Fe3+ remained up to 130 GPa corresponding to the pressure in the lowermost mantle. The center shift values of high-spin Fe2+ and Fe3+ did not show large changes with pressure, ruling out sharp electronic changes in the basaltic glass. Therefore, a sharp and complete spin crossover of Fe2+ from the high-spin to the low-spin state does not appear to occur in the basaltic glass although the possibility of a partial spin transition cannot be fully excluded. The QS values of Fe2+ increased slightly at 0–20 GPa and above 100 GPa, and the higher value was preserved after decompression to ambient conditions. This behavior may be related to distortion of Fe2+ polyhedra due to short-range ordering on compression. Such a distortion of Fe2+ polyhedra could gradually stabilize Fe2+ in the basaltic glass with pressure compared to bridgmanite according to the Jahn-Teller effect, and thus could gradually enhance the partitioning of iron into deep magmas in the lower mantle.


A review of the history of paleoanthropology leads to the conclusion that the discipline is far less objective than that for physics, chemistry, or even biology. The field is rife with controversy and fraud, including outright faking. Classic examples include Piltdown man and Hesperopithecus but many other less well-known examples exist that are reviewed in this paper. Several well-documented examples are cited in some detail to illustrate the types of problems encountered, and the results of fraud in paleoanthropology.


Etiquette is about adhering to prescribed norms in social interactions, or about negotiating and making explicit interactional norms when they do not already exist. While these play a role in most realms of human interaction, the establishment of such norms has been demonstrated to be especially crucial in domains in which a person is attempting to undergo a change in behavior or cognitive or affective state. In the field of psychotherapy, the construct of working alliance has been demonstrated to have a significant correlation with outcomes across a broad range of therapies, and has been hypothesized to be the single common factor underlying the therapeutic benefit of therapies ranging from behavioral and cognitive therapies to psychodynamic therapy [6]. The working alliance is one dimension of the relationship between the therapist and patient, based on trust and belief in each other as team-members in achieving a desired outcome [4]. The working alliance has three subcomponents: a goal component (the therapist and client agree on the goals of the therapy); a task component (the therapist and client agree on the therapeutic tasks to be performed); and a bond component (reflecting the trusting, empathetic relationship between the client and therapist). The alliance is thus a change-inducing relationship in which the interactional norms (goals and tasks) have been made explicit and are understood and agreed to by both the therapist and the patient.


Undergraduate and postgraduate medical education entails acquiring and maintaining technical skills of various natures. Peripheral venous cannulation, splinting of fracture, wound suturing, venous cut-down and intra-osseous catheter placement for the most part, are considered minimally invasive procedures. The traditional way of skill acquisition could be summarised by the adage "See one, do one, teach one". Although the saying may be a misrepresentation of the reality, it should not be an optional educational approach. Patients undergoing a procedure under general anaesthesia are often not informed of the possibility that they could be used for "ghost procedures"- part or whole of the procedure is performed by a trainee. An attitude of "don't ask, don't tell" devalues patients' autonomy and the trainee's moral integrity. In view of the polarisation of the views about teaching, acquiring, and maintaining technical skills, institutions should consider and deliberate on these principles and reach consensus on a set of guidelines to clarify and limit the practice of learning technical skills on patients and on the newly dead. Informed consent procedures and requirements must be clearly established and communicated. The learning and proficiency practices should be restricted to the staff that can truly benefit from the experience. The practice of 'don't ask, don't tell' is not an option.


Application of graphene as transparent electrodes is an active research area due to its excellent electrical and optical properties. Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is an attractive material since it is a thermochromic material that undergoes a structural phase transition when heat is applied. The phase transition results in the change of electrical and optical characteristics. We report optical characteristics of hybrid materials of graphene and VO2. We observed a 12% improvement in infrared transmittance with VO2 films deposited on graphene sapphire substrates compared to that of bare sapphire substrates. We also found that the phase transition temperature decreases as the number of graphene layers on the substrates increases. In the case of VO2 films on the substrate that was coated with four layers of graphene, the mean phase transition temperature was lowered to ∼56 °C.


Ethyl pyridine-4-carboxylate (1) treated with hydrazine hydrate in methanol give pyridine-4-carboxy hydrazide (2). Compound 2 react with substituted aroyl chlorides affords N-substituted aroyl pyridine-4-carbonyl hydrazines (3-9), which on treatment with POCl3 yield 2(substituted phenyl)-5-(pyridine-4-yl)-1,3,4-oxadiazoles (10-16). The newly synthesized compounds 10-16 were confirmed by elemental (C, H, N) and spectral (IR, H NMR and mass) analysis. Compounds 10-16 have been tested for their antibacterial activity using ampicillin as a reference compound.


Background Primary gastric B-cell lymphomas arise from mucosa-associated lymphatic tissue (MALT) in patients with chronic Helicobacter pylori infection. We investigated whether germline variants in the CDH1 gene, coding for E-cadherin, genetically predispose patients to primary gastric B-cell lymphoma. Design and Methods Single marker analyses of the CDH1 gene were conducted in patients with primary gastric B-cell lymphoma (n=144), in patients with primary gastric high-grade lymphoma (n=61), and in healthy blood donors (n=361). Twelve single nucleotide polymorphisms were genotyped by TaqMan® technology. Allelic imbalance was tested by pyrosequencing and clone direct sequencing of heterozygote genomic and cDNA. Mutation detection was conducted around the poly-A signal of the CDH1 3′-untranslated region. The influence of the 3′-untranslated region on protein translation was determined by a luciferase reporter assay. Results Single marker analyses identified two single nucleotide polymorphisms in strong linkage disequilibrium located in the CDH1 3′-untranslated region. One of them was significantly associated with primary gastric diffuse large B-cell lymphomas after correction for multiple testing and this association was confirmed in an independent sample set. Patients homozygous for the rare T allele (rs1801026) had a 4.9-fold increased risk (95% CI: 1.5–15.9) of developing primary gastric diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. Allelic imbalance and reporter gene assays indicated a putative influence on mRNA stability and/or translational efficacy. Conclusions We identified variants in CDH1 as the first potential genetic risk factors for the development of primary gastric diffuse large B-cell lymphomas. One of the potentially causative variants affects allelic CDH1 expression. These findings support the hypothesis that besides somatic alterations of B-cells, germline variants in the CDH1 gene contribute to a predisposition to the development of primary gastric diffuse large B-cell lymphomas.


Charitable giving has been about 2% of US GDP since the turn of the century. A popular fundraising tool is donation matching where every dollar is matched by a third party. But field experiments find that matching does not always increase donations. This may occur because individuals believe that peer donors will exhaust the matching funds. We develop a theory of how beliefs about peers' donations affect one's own likelihood of donation. We test our theory using novel "threshold match" treatments in field and laboratory experiments. These treatments form small groups and offer a flat matching bonus if a threshold number of donations is received. One "threshold match" treatment more than doubles the donation rate in the field relative to no match. To better understand the mechanism behind this huge increase, we use a lab study to replicate the field results and further show that beliefs about peers' donations matter. Our theoretical, lab, and field results combined suggest people are more likely to donate when they believe they are more pivotal to securing matching money. Beliefs about others matter, and they should be taken into account when trying to increase donations.


This thesis contains three essays study markets for two types of agents in the financial market, CEOs and financial analysts.
The first essay focuses on a particular kind of CEO succession that involving a lame duck CEO. We evaluate the firm's performance around the succession period and provide possible explanations for the observed performance pattern.
The second essay tries to understand the positive correlation between new CEOs' incentive pay and firms' performance change. More specifically, it distinguishes (i) the selection effect that better CEOs are matched with firms provide higher incentive pay and (ii) the incentive effect that CEOs receive higher incentive pay are better motivated.
The third essay investigates the positive impact of brokerage houses' reputation on financial analysts' forecasting accuracy. By using a matching model and a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method, it distinguishes the relative importance of (i) the influence effect that more reputable brokerage houses provide more resources to help their analysts make better forecasts and (ii) the selection effect that more reputable brokerage houses attract better analysts.


Detailed summary: First year medical students (n=102) were each assigned a Turning Technologies Response Card RF at the start of the academic year in exchange for a small deposit. They were regularly assessed on their understanding in physiology lectures throughout the Cardiovascular, Respiratory and Renal Medicine module by answering questions using the Turning Technologies ARS. In class, students were provided with instant feedback, including explanations of the answers. Participant lists were used to track individual responses and Turning Point reports were generated. In addition to in-class feedback, generalised and personalised feedback was available to students via our VLE. The generalised feedback consisted of a graphical representation of the class results along with written explanations of the answers, and was identical for all students. The personalised feedback comprised a record of the responses chosen by each student, whether these were correct or incorrect, and an overall percentage score for each session. This was provided using the VLE (blackboard) GradeCentre. Students were asked to complete an online evaluation form including Likert-scale and free-text questions (completion rate = 42.2%). Students rated their satisfaction with the feedback provided in-class and via the VLE. Students also rated their use of the feedback received to target their self-directed learning towards meeting their Learning Objectives and in examination preparation. We will discuss these quantitative findings alongside the qualitative data. When implementing any learning technology, practical issues must be considered alongside pedagogical benefits. A number of factors were uncovered during the project which may influence the use of this method in future. These relate to students forgetting to bring, or losing, their Response Cards, some software issues and the time required to upload results into the VLE. These, and potential solutions, will be discussed. 3 Take home messages: 1. The majority of students felt that the use of KEEpads in lectures provided individualised feedback. 2. Personalised feedback delivered within a VLE does provide additional individualised feedback, above that provided in class, to some students. 3. A number of factors should be considered when implementing this method of ARS use combined with personalised feedback via a Virtual Learning Environment.


German science minister Johanna Wanka, a mathematician from the former East Germany, faces a major challenge: She must find a way to bridge the differences between state and federal leaders on how to fund research and education. Discussions on how to spend €9 billion over the next 4 years are dragging on because of deep disagreements over who decides how the money is used. Wanka also wants to push through a constitutional amendment that would allow the federal government to help fund the country9s ailing universities. German science leaders say time is running short: Further delays put at risk the recent gains made during years of generous budget increases.


We studied the effects of re-oligotrophication and climate warming on plankton richness and community stability over a period of 30 years in the deep mesotrophic Lake Zurich (Switzerland). We assembled monthly time-series of phytoplankton and zooplankton taxonomic richness, phytoplankton functional groups (species with similar functional traits) and physico-chemical environmental descriptors (temperature, conductivity, pH, P-PO43-, N-NO3-, light absorption). We used multiple linear regression to test: 1) the effect of environmental variability over time and depth on the accrual of plankton richness; and 2) the relative effect of richness and environmental variability on the stability of plankton. Environmental change was characterised by increase in temperature, decrease in phosphorus levels, reduced temporal variability of both, and higher heterogeneity of phosphorus over depth (spatial heterogeneity). These conditions occurred concurrently with accrual in plankton taxonomic and functional richness. Increase in temperature and spatial heterogeneity were the best predictors of phytoplankton richness, while phytoplankton richness and spatial heterogeneity had the strongest effects on zooplankton richness. Temporal stability in phytoplankton biovolume was mainly affected by variability in phosphorus and temperature, while zooplankton abundance levels were more strongly linked to fluctuations in nitrogen, temperature and phytoplankton biovolumes. Our analysis highlights that climate warming and re-oligotrophication may favour an increase in spatial (depth) heterogeneity in the water column of deep lakes, enhancing the potential for phytoplankton species co-existence and an increase in plankton richness. Our analysis also suggests that the intensity of fluctuations in key environmental variables can be a better predictor of plankton community stability then average richness.


What's in a fold? Bacterially secreted peptides known as PSMs (phenol-soluble modulins) stimulate inflammatory responses, lyse human cells, and contribute to biofilm structuring. PSMα3 is a virulent 22-residue amyloid peptide secreted by Staphylococcus aureus. Tayeb-Fligelman et al. present a high-resolution structure encompassing the full length of the amyloid's sequence. This structure reveals an unexpected departure from the common amyloid cross-β folded architecture. Instead, PSMα3 forms amphipathic α-helices that are folded to stack perpendicular to the fibril axis into sheets. This unusual cross-α structure was important for fibril toxicity. Science, this issue p. 831 Fibrillation-dependent cytotoxicity of PSMα3 functional amyloid is encoded by an unusual cross-α peptide architecture. Amyloids are ordered protein aggregates, found in all kingdoms of life, and are involved in aggregation diseases as well as in physiological activities. In microbes, functional amyloids are often key virulence determinants, yet the structural basis for their activity remains elusive. We determined the fibril structure and function of the highly toxic, 22-residue phenol-soluble modulin α3 (PSMα3) peptide secreted by Staphylococcus aureus. PSMα3 formed elongated fibrils that shared the morphological and tinctorial characteristics of canonical cross-β eukaryotic amyloids. However, the crystal structure of full-length PSMα3, solved de novo at 1.45 angstrom resolution, revealed a distinctive "cross-α" amyloid-like architecture, in which amphipathic α helices stacked perpendicular to the fibril axis into tight self-associating sheets. The cross-α fibrillation of PSMα3 facilitated cytotoxicity, suggesting that this assembly mode underlies function in S. aureus.


Abstract Context: Residency directors require myriad skills to perform their jobs efficiently. However, many residency directors receive no training prior to obtaining their positions. Objective: To determine the effectiveness of the Residency Directors Residency Administration Program (RD RAP)—a 1-year fellowship training program for Ohio osteopathic residency directors sponsored by the Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine/Centers for Osteopathic Research and Education—by measuring the administrative knowledge and skills of Ohio osteopathic residency directors before and after completion of the program. Methods: The authors administered a 54-item self-assessment instrument to RD RAP participants before and after the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 programs. The assessment asked participants to rank their knowledge and skills in administration on a 5-point Likert scale, with lower values indicating higher knowledge and skills. We analyzed data from the pre- and postprogram assessments by using the Wilcoxon signed rank nonparametric test. The 54 assessment items were categorized into 10 content domains. Results: Ten RD RAP participants completed the assessments. Median scores were statistically significantly lower for each of the 10 content domains after the RD RAP program. The content domain with the greatest change between pre- and postprogram assessment Likert scale scores was Legal Issues in Residency Training, with a median change of 1.7 (P=.007). Role of Program Directors, Personality, and Professional Development had the smallest change in pre- and postprogram assessment Likert scores, with a median change of 0.8 (P=.011). Conclusion: Statistically significant improvements were found in the osteopathic residency directors' self-reported administrative knowledge and skills after participation in the RD RAP.


Abstract We raise some critical points against a naïve interpretation of "green finance" products and strategies. These critical insights are the background against which we take a closer look at instruments and policies that might allow green finance to become more impactful. In particular, we focus on the role of a taxonomy and investor activism. We also describe the interaction of government policies with green finance practice – an aspect, which has been mostly neglected in policy debates but needs to be taken into account. Finally, the special case of green government bonds is discussed.


The United States has long been a global leader in refugee resettlement. Still, many refugees face extraordinary difficulties with poverty and unemployment after arriving in the country. Currently, refugees are barred from applying to jobs in the Federal Civil Service, the largest employer in the United States. A change in this policy could mitigate these challenges for the refugee population. Not only is the current policy misguided from a humanitarian and economic perspective, it is also potentially unconstitutional as it may be in conflict with U.S. obligations under the 1967 Protocol on the Status of Refugees.


Laser-induced breakdown spectra were measured by using a 1.3 ps laser pulse on glass, steel, and copper. Material ablation with the use of picosecond excitation is very precise with well-formed sharp-edged craters. The spectra obtained with 570 nm, 1.3 ps excitation decay more quickly and show significantly lower background emission than those that use 1064 nm, ∼ 7 ns excitation. The background was low enough that excellent laser-induced spectroscopy (LIBS) spectra were obtained on the three samples by using a single 1.3 ps laser pulse and a nongated detector. Similar results were obtained by using nanosecond excitation but with higher relative background signals. The radiance was similar with the use of pico- or nanosecond excitation; however, the radiant intensity was larger with nanosecond excitation because of the larger plasma.


Nowadays companies are facing increasing market dynamics, rapidly evolving technologies and shifting user expectations. Together with the adoption of lean and agile practices this situation makes it increasingly difficult to plan and predict upfront which products, services or features should be developed in the future. Consequently, many organizations are struggling with their ability to provide reliable and stable product roadmaps by applying traditional approaches. This paper aims at identifying and getting a better understanding of which measures companies have taken to transform their current product roadmapping practices to the requirements of a dynamic and uncertain market environment. This also includes challenges and success factors within this transformation process as well as measures that companies have planned for the future. We conducted 18 semi-structured expert interviews with practitioners of different companies and performed a thematic data analysis. The study shows that the participating companies are aware that the transformation of traditional product roadmapping practices to fulfill the requirements of a dynamic and uncertain market environment is necessary. The most important measures that the participating companies have taken are 1) adequate item planning concerning the timeline, 2) the replacement of a fixed time-based chart by a more flexible structure, 3) the use of outcomes to determine the items (such as features) on the a roadmap, 4) the creation of a central roadmap which allows deriving different representation for each stakeholder and department.


Abstract This paper presents an experimental investigation of the evolution of the wetted surface and of the hydrodynamic force during the water exit of a body initially floating at the water surface, and during combined water entry and exit. The evolution of the surface of contact between the body and the water is measured using transparent mock-ups and an LED edge-lighting system. This technique makes it possible to follow the evolution of the wetted surface during both the entry and exit phases with a high-speed video camera placed above the mock-up. The feasibility of the technique is shown for different axisymmetric bodies: a circular disc, a cone and a sphere. The evolution of the hydrodynamic force and of the radius of the wetted surface measured during the experiments are compared with theoretical results obtained with a combined Wagner-modified von Karman approach (Tassin et al. J. Fluids Struct., vol. 40, 2013, pp. 317–336), the linearized water exit model of Korobkin et al. (J. Fluids Struct., vol. 69, 2017a, pp. 16–33) and the small-time self-similar solution of Korobkin et al. (J. Engng Maths, vol. 102, 2017b, pp. 117–130).


This paper outlines the findings of a two-year evaluation of learner use of software tools in a multimedia software package for teaching Indonesian listening comprehension and culture. This software package was introduced into the Introductory language program to help address the need of total beginners for exposure to native speakers using daily language in ordinary ways, on common, everyday topics. The package is designed to introduce, develop, and reinforce appropriate learning strategies at the same time. Data on learner perceptions of the ease of use, and appropriateness of the software interface were investigated, in order to improve our understandings of the perceptions and reactions of novices compared to experienced users of multimedia software packages. This investigation includes an analysis of the differences in strategy use between high, medium and low proficiency learners, and their use of the software Help tools such as grammar reference notes, language laboratory simulation, replay facility, and mid-task answer checking.


Article history: Received: February 1, 2016 Received in revised format: April 16, 2017 Accepted: May 23, 2017 Available online: May 23, 2017 Small-Scale and Individual Entrepreneurs (SIEs) play a key role in economic growth of developing countries. The principal objective of this study is to investigate M-money and M-commerce contribution to business growth in Ghana. A cross-sectional survey is used to collect the necessary data and a total of 480 SIEs respondents participated in the study. The data is collected from three different locations in the capital city Accra where the activities of SIEs are predominate (Lapaz=230, Kaneshie=150, and Kasoa= 170). The researchers used Stata in analyzing the quantitative data. The findings reveal that M-money and M-commerce facilitate the growth of business among SIEs. However, few people reported of savings (3.5%) and make merchandise payments (4.8%), due to perceived risk issues. The study used cross-sectional survey design and convenience sampling which makes it difficult to generalize the findings. © 2017 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Automatic image captioning is a well-known problem in the field of artificial intelligence. To solve this problem efficiently, it is also required to understand how people caption images naturally (when not instructed by a set of rules, which tell them to do so in a certain way). This dimension of the problem is rarely discussed. To understand this aspect, we performed a crowdsourcing study on specific subsets of the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million Dataset (YFCC100M) where annotators evaluate captions with respect to subjectivity, visibility, appeal and intent. We use the resulting data to systematically characterize the variations in image captions that appear "in the wild". We publish our findings here along with the annotated dataset.


We live in an incredible period in history. The Computer Revolution may be even more life-changing than the Industrial Revolution. We can do things with computers that could never be done before, and computers can do things for us that could never be done before. But our love of computers should not cloud our thinking about their limitations. We are told that computers are smarter than humans and that data mining can identify previously unknown truths, or make discoveries that will revolutionize our lives. Our lives may well be changed, but not necessarily for the better. Computers are very good at discovering patterns, but are useless in judging whether the unearthed patterns are sensible because computers do not think the way humans think. We fear that super-intelligent machines will decide to protect themselves by enslaving or eliminating humans. But the real danger is not that computers are smarter than us, but that we think computers are smarter than us and, so, trust computers to make important decisions for us. The AI Delusion explains why we should not be intimidated into thinking that computers are infallible, that data-mining is knowledge discovery, and that black boxes should be trusted.


The U.S. Department of Agriculture reimburses schools for meals provided to students participating in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs. Reimbursement amounts are based on national average estimated costs of meal production. Food prices, however, vary across the United States, suggesting regional cost differences. This paper uses a qualityadjusted translog variable-cost function to show how costs per meal vary across twenty-one U.S. locations. The average deviation from national average cost is about $0.38 per meal; the average cost deviation attributed to input prices is $0.17 and the scale effect is $0.135.


Given a set of points in the Euclidean plane, we are interested in its triangulations, i.e., the maximal sets of non-overlapping triangles with vertices in the given points whose union is the convex hull of the point set. With respect to the area of the triangles in a triangulation, several optimality criteria can be considered. We study two of them. The MaxMin area triangulation is the triangulation of the point set that maximizes the area of the smallest triangle in the triangulation. Similarly, the MinMax area triangulation is the triangulation that minimizes the area of the largest area triangle in the triangulation. In the case when the point set is in a convex position, we present algorithms that construct MaxMin and MinMax area triangulations of a convex polygon in O(n 2 log n) time and O(n 2) space. These algorithms are based on dynamic programming. They use a number of geometric properties that are established within this work, and a variety of data structures specific to the problems. Further, we study polynomial time computable approximations to the optimal area triangulations of general point sets. We present geometric properties; based on angular constraints and perfect matchings, and use them to evaluate the approximation factor and to achieve triangulations with good practical quality compared to the optimal ones. These results open new direction in the research on optimal triangulations and set the stage for further investigations on optimization of area.


Emotion theories in present philosophical discussion pro- pose different models of relationship between feeling and appraisal. The multicomponent model considers appraisal as separate compo- nent and distinguishes it from feeling and physiological body changes thus p resupposing what m ay be called 'disembodied' a nd 'disembedded' appraisal as representational. The recently emerged concept of enactment, in contrast, argues that appraisal is closely linked to feeling and physiological body changes presupposing what can be called 'embodied'and 'embedded'appraisal as relational. The aim of the paper is to investigate which concept of appraisal, the 'disembedded' or the 'embedded' one, is better compatible with current neuroimaging data on emotion processing and thus neuro- philosophically more tenable. The 'disembodied' and 'disembedded' concept implies distinct and independent brain regions underlying feeling and appraisal whereas 'embodied' and 'embedded' appraisal implies overlapping a nd d ependent b rain regions. Recent neuroimaging studies demonstrate that medial and lateral prefrontal cortical regions are involved in both feeling and appraisal and that there seems to be reciprocal modulation between these regions. Though preliminary, these data suggest that feeling and appraisal are associated with different patterns of neural activity across overlap- ping and interdependent brain regions. I therefore conclude that cur- rent neuroscientific evidence is rather in favor of the 'embodied' and


The recent advancement in Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) has largely been driven by the use of deeper and increasingly data-hungry transformer-based models. However, video masks are tedious and expensive to annotate, limiting the scale and diversity of existing VIS datasets. In this work, we aim to remove the mask-annotation requirement. We propose MaskFreeVIS, achieving highly competitive VIS performance, while only using bounding box annotations for the object state. We leverage the rich temporal mask consistency constraints in videos by introducing the Temporal KNN-patch Loss (TK-Loss), providing strong mask supervision without any labels. Our TK-Loss finds one-to-many matches across frames, through an efficient patch-matching step followed by a K-nearest neighbor selection. A consistency loss is then enforced on the found matches. Our mask-free objective is simple to implement, has no trainable parameters, is computationally efficient, yet outperforms baselines employing, e.g., state-of-the-art optical flow to enforce temporal mask consistency. We validate MaskFreeVIS on the YouTube-VIS 2019/2021, OVIS and BDD100K MOTS benchmarks. The results clearly demonstrate the efficacy of our method by drastically narrowing the gap between fully and weakly-supervised VIS performance. Our code and trained models are available at http://vis.xyz/pub/maskfreevis.


Recent research found insomnia is a risk factor for psychiatric disorders in adults. To see if the same would be true in adolescents, the current study re-analyzed data from a national longitudinal study collected by ADDHealth that evaluated health behaviors in 4552 adolescents (mean age 14.9 years [SD 1.7]) at baseline and again 7-8 years later (n = 3489) during young adulthood. Insomnia was reported by 9.2% of the adolescents. Cross-sectionally, adolescent insomnia was associated with alcohol, cannabis, non-cannabis drugs, and tobacco use, and depression after controlling for gender and ethnicity. Prospectively, adolescent insomnia was a significant risk factor for depression diagnosis, suicidal ideation, and the use of depression and stress prescription medications in young adulthood after controlling for gender, ethnicity, and significant baseline variable. In addition, a trend was noted for suicidal attempts.


In this investigation, the postnatal morphologic and morphometric characteristics of Leydig cells and testicular interstitial tissue in 20 healthy donkey testes were studied. The volume percentage of the interstitial tissue was about 87.24% in neonates and decreased gradually with postnatal age reaching about 21.56% in mature animals. The Leydig cell population underwent evident morphologic and morphometric changes during the postnatal life. Morphologically, there were two discrete types of Leydig cells, which recognized side by side in the testis of neonatal and suckling animals. The first type (steroidogenic fetal Leydig cells), was large, contained partially shrunken nucleus together with vacuolated granular cytoplasm. This cellular type, were predominant in neonates, underwent degeneration and decreased gradually until being very few at two months of age. The second type (non-steroidogenic) was small, few at birth and contained large central nucleus. This type develops from undifferentiated fibroblastic elements and underwent gradual increase in number with age, where it dominated in the late suckling period. Some of these cells were degenerated and the remaining became transformed into the adult type of Leydig cells. The volume percentage and absolute number of Leydig cells displayed the same pattern of undulation during postnatal development, which being very high in late suckling animals. The volume percentage of the vascular components of the interstitial tissue displayed a slight decrease between neonatal and early suckling periods (from about 8% to about 7% of the interstitium); however, they increased steadily through premature and mature animals (about 12% and 20% respectively). The present study provides baseline information for further experimental or quantitative studies exploring the normal development of the Leydig cells in donkey testis and other related species.


In Ayurveda, metal-based preparations are familiarly known as bhasmas. Yashada bhasma is one such bhasma. Textbooks of Ayurveda recommends Yashada bhasma (incinerated Zinc) as the treatment of choice in many diseases. Though bhasmas are being safely practiced in therapeutics in Indian scenario; concerns are being raised on safety issues in the recent past. So there is a necessity to assess and develop safety profile and to generate evidence. As a part of it, many research works are being carried out in various institutes of India. Five Postgraduate studies dealing with classical guidelines developing safety profile and therapeutic utilities of Yashada bhasma, carried out in Institute of postgraduate teaching and research in Ayurveda, Gujarat are selected for the present paper. Experimental Studies revealed that Yashada bhasma doesn't have serious deleterious effect on body function as a whole. Clinical trials revealed its usefulness in Prameha (Diabetis mellitus), Swetapradara (Leucorrhoea) and Vicharchika (Eczema). No adverse effects were reported during the treatment period. Though certain limitations were observed, the results can be considered as a lead for further well stratified studies covering larger population.


Safety in Numbers is the phenomenon by which the per-walker or per-bicyclist frequency of being struck by motorists declines as the amount of walking or bicycling on a street or in a region increases.1 That is, while the absolute number of walkers or bicyclists struck by motorists may increase with more people walking or bicycling, due to the increase in exposure, the number of such collisions is observed to increase more slowly than the increase in the number of walkers or bicyclists, or even decrease.

The emergence of Safety in Numbers in the 1990s as a widely observed phenomenon reinforces the understanding that the number of injuries suffered by walkers or bicyclists is an imperfect indicator of the danger of walking or bicycling. Rather, the number of walking or bicycling injuries must be adjusted for the numbers of individuals walking or bicycling.

An example from a different context may be helpful here. The fact that no one is attacked in shark-infested waters doesn't demonstrate that the waters are safe for swimming. The low casualties could simply mean no one swims. Similarly, people tend to refrain from walking or bicycling where they believe they will place themselves in danger by doing so.2 Consequently, safety is best measured by the risk of injury, not by the number of injuries. Safety is indicated by the absence of danger, not by an absence of injuries.

The Safety in Numbers effect for motorist collisions with pedestrians and bicyclists was first described in the context of intersections in Sweden in 1993.3 Thereafter, the effect was also found to apply to entire towns, cities and countries, and even across time periods.1 Numerous additional studies using a variety of data sources confirmed the existence of the Safety in Numbers effect.4

Mathematically, the most …