Hate oozes hardness of heart, a scourge of the human race, a fiend in human shape, a worker of iniquity, the evil eye and the cloven hoof. It sows dissentions among all. Hate is an inferno that is never quenched and it is the worm that never dies. Hate is the dominion of warped, wicked and wilted. Hate is a primordial, parochial and perversionary process of aversion towards a caste, creed, colour, customary practices, ethnicity, ideology, and nationality, membership of social group, religion, race, political opinion and social origin indoctrinated by one population to another population. It has also involved preposterous predilections, paradoxical preferences and polemical prejudices well-founded upon the damnatory discrimination against a wide variety of "non-white" sexes, groups, genders, communities, societies, regions and nation-states. White supremacy is infested with a paranoid precarity, racial raison d'etre and xenophobic xylonite. On the other hand mawkish movements such as Anti-Gay, LGBT, Racism, Religious Freedoms and Blasphemy Laws across the globe have sent shockwaves contrary to rule of law, justice, equity and good conscience. There is a great deal of social stress in India over violence between Muslims and Hindus. If the Indian government proves unable to deliver justice, it will lose its legitimacy as a government for multiple religions or ethnicities. Thus, there is a great deal riding on this: not just justice for the victims and their families, but justice for Indian society as a whole. Although religion is often seen as a force for good, in reality it is often a force for evil, too. One of the ways in which religion can cause problems is by causing people to become intolerant: intolerant of other religions, intolerant of other races, etc. particularly in India.


Fascinating packing patterns of identical spherical and discotic objects on curved surfaces occur readily in nature and science. Examples include C(60) fullerenes, (1, 2) 13-atom cuboctahedral metal clusters, (3) and S-layer proteins on outer cell membranes. (4) Numerous situations with surface-arranged objects of variable size also exist, such as the lenses on insect eyes, biomineralized shells on coccolithophorids, (5) and solid-stabilized emulsion droplets (6) and bubbles. (7) The influence of size variations on these packing patterns, however, is studied sparsely. Here we investigate the packing of nanosized silica particles on the surface of polystyrene latex particles fabricated by Pickering miniemulsion polymerization of submicrometer-sized armored monomer droplets. We are able to rationalize the experimental morphology and the nearest-neighbor distribution with the help of Monte Carlo simulations. We show that broadening of the nanoparticle size distribution has pronounced effects on the self-assembled equilibrium packing structures, with original 12-point dislocations or grain-boundary scars gradually fading out.


Abstract The technology adoption rate of Canadian manufacturers has been a subject of concern as it impacts on Canada's productivity and international competitiveness. This article builds on previous studies of upper echelons theory and examines the linkage between CEO characteristics and technological innovativeness in the Canadian context. Results show the linkage to be highly significant and lend support to the upper echelons theory. Implications for education, managerial practices, and public policies are discussed. In the 1990s the ability of Canadian companies to innovate has been an issue of national concern. While it is recognized that it is the early adoption and effective use of technology, rather than investments in RD Lefebvre & Lefebvre, 1992; Miller & Toulouse, 1986a), possibly due to the strong influence of CEOs on the strategy and performance of small businesses (Miller & Toulouse, 1986a). Research has demonstrated the relevance of CEO mind-sets and personal demographics to corporate innovativeness among small-sized firms (Julian, 1991; Lefebvre & Lefebvre, 1992; Miller & Toulouse, 1986a; 1986b). Since the current literature suggests that CEO influence on technology adoption is also significant in large companies (Lefebvre & Lefebvre, 1992) and that North American CEOs tend to be less innovative than their Japanese and European counterparts (Hayes & Abernathy, 1980; Kudos, Tachikawa, & Suzuki, 1988), research linking CEO attributes and innovativeness that includes large Canadian firms, which is the subject of the present study, is warranted. The influence of CEO characteristics on organizational performance is controversial. Subscribers to the upper echelons theory take the view that top management characteristics can be used to predict organizational outcomes (Hambrick & Mason, 1984). Attention has been drawn to the influence of CEO personalities on strategy (Miller & Toulouse, 1986b), organizational culture (Deal & Kennedy, 1982), corporate norms (Tichy & Ulrich, 1984), fostering innovativeness (Hage & Dewar, 1973; Quinn, 1985), and more generally providing effective leadership (Schein, 1985). Others have argued the contrary view, that organizational outcomes are not determined by leadership effects (Hall, 1977), suggesting variously that industry and company factors have a more important effect on corporate performance (Kimberly & Evanisko, 1983; Lieberson & O'Connor, 1972), that CEO actions are subject to environmental constraints (Aldrich, 1979), and that corporate performance owes little to CEO contributions (Galbraith, 1984). The current paper adopts the view that CEO characteristics matter, and the results suggest that they correlate highly with corporate innovativeness. To date, research that examines the relationship between CEO characteristics and corporate outcomes has followed two main streams. One is to examine CEO demographics such as age, education, work experience, and tenure (Bantel & Jackson, 1989; Globerman, 1974). …


From the former Treasury Secretary, the definitive account of the unprecedented effort to save the U.S. economy from collapse in the wake of the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression. On 26 January, 2009, during the depths of the financial crisis and having just completed five years as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Timothy F. Geithner was sworn in by President Barack Obama as the seventy-fifth Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Now, in a strikingly candid, riveting, and historically illuminating memoir, Geithner takes readers behind the scenes during the darkest moments of the crisis. Swift, decisive, and creative action was required to avert a second Great Depression, but policy makers faced a fog of uncertainty, with no good options and the risk of catastrophic outcomes. Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises takes us inside the room, explaining in accessible and forthright terms the hard choices and politically unpalatable decisions that Geithner and others in the Obama administration made during the crisis and recovery. He discusses the most controversial moments of his tenures at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and at the Treasury, including the harrowing weekend Lehman Brothers went bankrupt; the searing crucible of the AIG bonuses controversy; the development of his widely criticized but ultimately successful plan in early 2009 to end the crisis; the bracing fight for the most sweeping financial reforms in seventy years; and the lingering aftershocks of the crisis, including high unemployment, the fiscal battles, and Europe's repeated flirtations with the economic abyss. Geithner also shares his personal and professional recollections of key players such as President Obama, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and Larry Summers, among others, and examines the tensions between politics and policy that have come to dominate discussions of the U.S. economy. An insider's account of how the Obama administration saved the economy but lost the American people, Stress Test reveals a side of Timothy Geithner that only few have seen.


Emerging markets business cycle models treat default risk as part of an exogenous interest rate on working capital, while sovereign default models treat income fluctuations as an exogenous endowment process with ad-noc default costs. We propose instead a general equilibrium model of both sovereign default and business cycles. In the model, some imported inputs require working capital financing; default on public and private obligations occurs simultaneously. The model explains several features of cyclical dynamics around default triggers an efficiency loss as these inputs are replaced by imperfect substitutes; and default on public and private obligations occurs simultaneously. The model explains several features of cyclical dynamics around deraults, countercyclical spreads, high debt ratios, and key business cycle moments.


This article discusses the intermediaries between donor and beneficiary; the southern NGOs and other groups and institutions who are the recipients of grants and who carry responsibility for delivering the project to the intended population. The role of southern NGOs has changed, and so has the northern donor context; thus agencies like Oxfam have to reconcile pressures and priorities in which southern partners' interests figure less prominently than before. The article proves the value of partners, also to challenge donors to demonstrate that they are adding as much value as possible in the donor/intermediary/beneficiary relationship. It is suggested that the principal contribution of donors such as Oxfam should be in more imaginative use of their comparative advantages. Northern funding for NGO partners is much affected by the way in which Southern NGOs vary, according to their many different national contexts and histories. In the 1990s, northern development NGO donors are moving away from some of the assumptions of development practice in the last two decades. This has led to questioning of relationships with southern NGOs and to re-examination of the comparative advantages and distinctive contributions of different donors. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Patronage. Abstract supplied by kind permission of CABI. This article is hosted by our co-publisher Taylor & Francis.


Energy efficiency and resilience are two well established research topics in optical transport networks. However, their overall objectives (i.e., power minimization and resource utilization/ availability maximization) conflict. In fact, provisioning schemes optimized for best resilience performance are in most cases not energy-efficient in their operations, and vice versa. However, very few works in the literature consider the interesting issues that may arise when energy efficiency and resilience are combined in the same networking solution. The objective of this article is to identify a number of research challenges and trade-offs for the design of energy-efficient and resilient optical transport networks from the perspective of long-term traffic forecasts, short-term traffic dynamics, and service level agreement requirements. We support the challenges with justifying numbers based on lessons learned from our previous work. The article also discusses suitable metrics for energy efficiency and resilience evaluation, in addition to a number of steps that need to be taken at the standardization level to incorporate energy efficiency into already existing and well established protocols.


In the current wireless era most of wireless body area networks are establishing Anonymous communications in adversary environments. This work aimed at preserving two factors unidentifiably and unlinkabilty as essential characteristic of this wireless body area network. Even though there are several existing researches focuses on anonymous secure routing protocols the requirement is not utterly satisfied. Previously existing protocols are susceptible to the attacks of counterfeit routing packets yet the node individualities are confined by pseudonyms. This paper devised a new biometric fusion based trusted anonymous secured routing protocol which assures prevention against such attacks. More specifically, the route request packets were authenticated by an iris fused with DNA coding to generate a dynamic complex group signature and to secure beside possible active attacks exclusive of presenting the node identities. In addition this work also prevented revealing real destination to intermediate nodes by adapting key-encrypted pairing onion. Simulation results confirmed the efficacy of the projected BFTASR protocol with enhanced performance as evaluated with the existing protocols.


Regulating one's emotions is an important psychological skill at all ages. Cognitive reappraisal—changing the meaning of a stimulus to alter its emotional impact—is an effective emotion regulation technique. Prior work shows that adults spontaneously reduce their use of present tense verbs and first-person singular pronouns (e.g., "I," "me," "mine") when engaging in cognitive reappraisal, a linguistic shift that is thought to track increased psychological distance. Here, we investigated whether such linguistic distancing during emotion regulation varied across age. Participants aged 10 to 23 (N = 112) spoke aloud their thoughts and feelings while completing a classic cognitive reappraisal task. Participants' verbal responses were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for linguistic distancing, compliance with reappraisal instructions, and use of 8 different reappraisal strategies identified by prior researchers. Results replicated prior work in a developmental sample: Reappraisal decreased negative affect and increased linguistic distancing, and stronger linguistic distancing during reappraisal was associated with more successful emotion regulation. Contrary to hypotheses, we found no age differences in linguistic distancing or reappraisal success, even after excluding trials on which participants did not comply with reappraisal instructions. However, reappraisal strategy use varied across age. Use of the changing circumstances and separating oneself (i.e., distancing) strategies increased across age whereas changing consequences use decreased across age. Additionally, in adolescence, challenging reality use was elevated and problem-solving use was reduced compared to other ages. Results suggest that linguistic distancing during emotion regulation is stable from age 10 to 23 but use of cognitive reappraisal strategies differs.


Within generative grammar, noun incorporation and other compounding processes have traditionally been the focus of morpho-syntacticians, while reduplication has been investigated primarily by morpho-phonologists. The interaction of these two phenomena in a single language has significant implications that go beyond the narrow concerns of these two sub-domains, bearing much more broadly on the architecture of grammatical theory. This paper investigates the interactions of reduplication and compounding within one language, Hiaki (Yaqui). Reduplication for aspectual inflection in Hiaki occurs inside of compounds and other derived words, marking the head of the word. We demonstrate the major architectural issues resting on the analysis of these phenomena by examining how different theoretical perspectives can (or cannot) accommodate the Hiaki data.


My thesis deals with economic cooperation between Italy and China with particular reference to the last decade approximately, that is to say the period that followed the
institutional crisis of early to mid-1990s and registered a
renewal in Italo-Chinese relations. Cooperation has proven to be the most important instrument in the definition of Italo-Chinese relations and its focus has been so far the advancement of economic partnership between the two countries. In addition, since the nineties the field of State-industry relations has experienced an important evolution in Italy, and a greater need for institutional support favouring the economic expansion abroad has emerged.
Given all these concurrent factors that make the economic cooperation scenario very dynamic at this moment, I decided to investigate how China can represent a decisive element of 'opportunity and challenge' (Bradanini, 2005) for the Sistema Italia, so as to see if economic cooperation in the case of China show original aspects, that contradicts the usual vision of a 'trading State' or a 'negotiating State', referred to Italian inability to act strategically in the sphere of globalization and fulfil the expectations due to its international comparative advantages. Therefore I first defined economic cooperation, and contextualized the notion by means of a critical historical reconstruction of Italo-Chinese relations, aimed at individuating the main feature of Italy's stance toward China, and then I examined the recent evolution in terms of actors and devices of economic cooperation, its criteria and goals. In order to do so, I structured my work in three sections: national level, sub national level, and the cooperation structures that operate in China, taking into consideration the case of Italian economic cooperation in the Chinese Province of Guangdong.
My findings do not confirm the hypothesis of a 'Chinese
exception' in Italian economic cooperation field. Even
though some important achievements have marked the initiatives taken during the last years, they do not challenge the status quo of cooperation. In particular,
more advanced fronts of activity, namely the Italian Ministry of the Environment cooperation program and the Italian Regions multiple efforts to sustain the internationalization of Italian local economies in China,
do not seem to move beyond conjuncturalism, or a reediting of some of the traditional flaws of central government intervention into the economy.


Recently, practical applications for passenger flow prediction have brought many benefits to urban transportation development. With the development of urbanization, a real-world demand from transportation managers is to construct a new metro station in one city area that never planned before. Authorities are interested in the picture of the future volume of commuters before constructing a new station, and estimate how would it affect other areas. In this paper, this specific problem is termed as potential passenger flow (PPF) prediction, which is a novel and important study connected with urban computing and intelligent transportation systems. For example, an accurate PPF predictor can provide invaluable knowledge to designers, such as the advice of station scales and influences on other areas, etc. To address this problem, we propose a multi-view localized correlation learning method. The core idea of our strategy is to learn the passenger flow correlations between the target areas and their localized areas with adaptive-weight. To improve the prediction accuracy, other domain knowledge is involved via a multi-view learning process. We conduct intensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our method with real-world official transportation datasets. The results demonstrate that our method can achieve excellent performance compared with other available baselines. Besides, our method can provide an effective solution to the cold-start problem in the recommender system as well, which proved by its outperformed experimental results.


Sickle-cell disease is a genetic disorder characterized by severe pain episodes or "vaso-occlusive crises" that may require hospitalization. This study examined the associations among emotion regulation, somatization, positive and negative affect, and hospitalizations for pain crises in youth with sickle-cell disease. Multivariate analyses indicated that emotional suppression and somatization were significantly associated with more frequent hospitalizations for pain crises in the previous year after controlling for sickle-cell disease type and pain. These results suggest that efforts to reduce emotional suppression and somatization may assist in decreasing the frequency of hospitalizations for pain crises among youth with sickle-cell disease.


Abstract Linking individuals across historical datasets relies on information such as name and age that is both non-unique and prone to enumeration and transcription errors. These errors make it impossible to find the correct match with certainty. In the first part of the paper, we suggest a fully automated probabilistic method for linking historical datasets that enables researchers to create samples at the frontier of minimizing type I (false positives) and type II (false negatives) errors. The first step guides researchers in the choice of which variables to use for linking. The second step uses the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, a standard tool in statistics, to compute the probability that each two records correspond to the same individual. The third step suggests how to use these estimated probabilities to choose which records to use in the analysis. In the second part of the paper, we apply the method to link historical population censuses in the US and Norway, and use these samples to estimate measures of intergenerational occupational mobility. The estimates using our method are remarkably similar to the ones using IPUMS', which relies on hand linking to create a training sample. We created an R code and a Stata command that implement this method.


OBJECTIVE
To determine whether a complaint of visible rectal bleeding that is elicited by a screening review of systems merits investigation and to assess the accuracy of a defined protocol to evaluate bleeding.

DESIGN
Prospective cohort study.

SETTING
Primary care clinics in a veterans medical center.

PATIENTS
We used an 8-item review of systems to identify 297 individuals with visible rectal bleeding; 201 (68%) of these individuals completed a specified protocol consisting of double-contrast barium enema (DCBE) examination, rigid sigmoidoscopy, and follow-up visit after 6 to 12 months. Ten years later we verified the diagnosis in 131 (93%) of 141 patients whose initial evaluation suggested no cause, or a benign anorectal cause, of bleeding.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Final diagnoses after 2 and 10 years; sensitivity and specificity of symptoms, DCBE, and rigid sigmoidoscopy.

RESULTS
We diagnosed serious disease in 48 (24%) of the 201 patients; 26 had polyps, 9 had inflammatory bowel disease, and 13 (6.5%) had colon cancer. Symptoms did not predict the diagnosis. Neither DCBE nor rigid sigmoidoscopy alone was sufficiently sensitive to be used alone, but the combination of DCBE and rigid sigmoidoscopy had a sensitivity of 0.96 and a specificity of 0.76 for the diagnosis of polyps, cancer, or inflammatory bowel disease.

CONCLUSIONS
Self-reported rectal bleeding detected by means of a review of systems was associated with a high likelihood of important pathology. Physicians should ask all adults about visible rectal bleeding and should visualize the entire colon in those who report bleeding.


Necessity is both the mother of invention and the source of self-reflection. Nowhere is the latter more true than in social and economic affairs, where massive social and economic dislocations rightly prompt leading theorists to reexamine their fundamental beliefs in trying to figure out, as Paul Krugman framed the question: "Just what went wrong?" (1) Unfortunately, these bouts of self-doubt have led many prominent thinkers to turn their attention back to the leading economic thinker during a past depression, John Maynard Keynes, and his most famous tome--book does not quite do--The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. (2) The tome appeared in 1936, during the depths of the Great Depression that had been running for seven years and counting. Clearly the book did not cause the Depression, but it did not do anything to abate it either. That only happened with the onset of a far greater tragedy, the Second World War. I confess that in my youth I purchased a copy of Keynes's masterpiece. Dutifully, I sought to read it several times, only to give up in frustration while trying to wade through its turgid prose. Fortunately, it is not necessary to plow through Keynes in order to get some sense of his basic position. Today's skillful expositors, including my colleague Judge Richard A. Posner, have provided lucid explanations of the Keynesian position. (3) Judge Posner's fascination with Keynes has led to a belated confession of past sins, chief of which is an excessive devotion to Chicago-type economics on both the macro and the micro levels. Thus, he tellingly writes: "Economists may have forgotten The General Theory and moved on, but economics has not outgrown it, or the informal mode of argument that it exemplifies, which can illuminate nooks and crannies that are closed to mathematics." (4) I yield to no one in the insistence that critical institutional detail often reveals far more than mathematical equations about the operation of the economic system. But that one point alone is consistent with the work of such theorists as Ronald Coase and such institutionalists as Douglass North, neither of whom is steeped in the occult mathematical arts. Try as I may, however, I cannot yield to the same level of open-mindedness on this subject that Posner expresses. I come away from reading the new Keynesians more convinced than ever that they lack a coherent diagnosis of the origins and depths of the Depression. By implication, they lack a sensible program to shake the current economic malaise. President Barack Obama may be in the thrall of Keynesian economics, or perhaps just captured by the labor unions. But either way, any move to a larger governmental role in planning or stimulating the economy is likely to make the current recession deeper and the recovery slower than they ought to be. To develop this thesis, I shall proceed in two parts. Part I deals with those issues that the Keynesians either forgot or swept under the table. In this context, I address not only the distinctive features in the current economic situation, but also those structural from the 1930s, many of which have still not run their course today. My point here is not that Keynes or modern Keynesians necessarily support these dangerous precedents. It is that they have nothing distinctive to contribute to their resolution that is not already understood within the standard neoclassical framework. Part II takes a closer look at the inner workings of the theory to explain why any centralized effort to rejigger aggregate levels of consumption or savings will only make the task of economic recovery more perilous. There is no reason to try to establish some collective priority of one type of behavior over the other. The key move is to eliminate waste so as to allow both savings and consumption to expand, without trying at the center to find what Robert Nozick rightly called "patterned principles" (5)--an effort that always turns out to misfire. …


Recent accounts of Habermas's conception of the public sphere concern the interlocking of multiple networks and spaces. In a global context new interfaces between existing (counter-) public spheres can lead to multiple counter-publics. This article explores this phenomenon through the examination of the communicative spaces that offer alternatives to Australia's mainstream public sphere from three different strands of Sydney's community media: diasporic media (Assyrian Radio SBS), Indigenous media (Koori Radio) and discursive sites that operate in between ethnic and mainstream media (Forum for Australia's Islamic Relations).


This paper presents a simple yet effective approach to modeling space-time correspondences in the context of video object segmentation. Unlike most existing approaches, we establish correspondences directly between frames without re-encoding the mask features for every object, leading to a highly efficient and robust framework. With the correspondences, every node in the current query frame is inferred by aggregating features from the past in an associative fashion. We cast the aggregation process as a voting problem and find that the existing inner-product affinity leads to poor use of memory with a small (fixed) subset of memory nodes dominating the votes, regardless of the query. In light of this phenomenon, we propose using the negative squared Euclidean distance instead to compute the affinities. We validated that every memory node now has a chance to contribute, and experimentally showed that such diversified voting is beneficial to both memory efficiency and inference accuracy. The synergy of correspondence networks and diversified voting works exceedingly well, achieves new state-of-the-art results on both DAVIS and YouTubeVOS datasets while running significantly faster at 20+ FPS for multiple objects without bells and whistles.


This is the second year that the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal Health convened a debate as part of the Festival of Learning at Bournemouth University (BU). The debate encourages members of the public and service users to get involved in our research and education and ensures that what we do at BU is relevant and current. Last year the team debated the pros and cons of allowing women free choice with regard to major medical interventions, such as caesarean section (Hundley et al. 2013). This year the focus was on the role of the media in childbirth. Social perceptions and beliefs about childbirth can increase women's requests for interventions, such as caesarean section, with long-term health implications for mothers and babies. The debate was planned to explore the role of the mass media in shaping these beliefs and identify whether media portrayals are responsible for rising rates of intervention. Attendees were given the opportunity to voice their views and to vote for or against the motion. The motion for debate was: This house believes that: The media is responsible for creating fear in childbirth.


Invasion and metastasis are later but critically important steps in multistage carcinogenesis. The inactivation of E (epithelial)-cadherin, which is a Ca 2+ -dependent cell-cell adhesion molecule, may trigger the release of cancer cells from the cancer nests. In fact, the invasion suppressing function of E-cadherin has been shown in in vitro studies. Furthermore, E-cadherin expression was strong in well differentiated carcinomas, whereas generally reduced in undifferentiated ones showing the strong invasive property. In spite of the above general rule, we found that a sizable proportion of undifferentiated gastric adenocarcinomas showing scattered histological growth pattern had definite E-cadherin expression. Therefore, human carcinoma cell lines lacking tight cell-cell adhesion were examined to clarify if alterations in catenins, which are cytoplasmic proteins interacting with cadherins, and/or structural abnormalities of normally expressed E-cadherin caused the dysfunction of the cell-cell adhesion system. Homologous deletion of part of the α-catenin gene with markedly reduced expression was observed in a human lung cancer cell line, PC9. mRNA sequence abnormalities of E-cadherin were detected in two human gastric cancer cell lines, MKN 45 and KATO-III. The wild-type allele of E-cadherin locus was lost in the two cell lines, indicating that E-cadherin gene was inactivated by a combination of loss of gene and mutation, similar to the mechanism which inactivated tumor suppressor genes. These findings suggested that varying genetic abnormalities of cell adhesion molecules could participate in multistage carcinogenesis, especially in the processes of invasion and metastasis.


Viscosities and densities of ternary systems of CaCl2–NaCl–water were measured in the range of T = (293.15 to 323.15) K at 5 K intervals and up to 4.5 mol·kg–1. Two equations based on the Exponential and Goldsack and Franchetto models were applied to correlate the experimental viscosity data as a function of concentration and temperature. The optimized parameters showed that the presence of CaCl2 had a prevailing effect on the viscosity of the ternary solutions than NaCl. The dependency of the viscosity optimized parameters on temperature was investigated, too. The average absolute deviation between calculated and experimental viscosities was below 1.4 %. The work compared the above-mentioned two models to the known extended Jones–Dole equation and found that both models do correlate the viscosity at higher concentrations better than the Jones–Dole equation. However, the exponential model shows the superior representation for the experimental viscosity values over the other two studied models. Density dat...


Background—Heart failure is an important and growing public health problem in women. Risk factors for incident hospitalized heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) compared with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) in women and differences by race/ethnicity are not well characterized. Methods and Results—We prospectively evaluated the risk factors for incident hospitalized HFpEF and HFrEF in a multiracial cohort of 42 170 postmenopausal women followed up for a mean of 13.2 years. Cox regression models with time-dependent covariate adjustment were used to define risk factors for HFpEF and HFrEF. Differences by race/ethnicity about incidence rates, baseline risk factors, and their population-attributable risk percentage were analyzed. Risk factors for both HFpEF and HFrEF were as follows: older age, white race, diabetes mellitus, cigarette smoking, and hypertension. Obesity, history of coronary heart disease (other than myocardial infarction), anemia, atrial fibrillation, and more than one comorbidity were associated with HFpEF but not with HFrEF. History of myocardial infarction was associated with HFrEF but not with HFpEF. Obesity was found to be a more potent risk factor for African American women compared with white women for HFpEF (P for interaction=0.007). For HFpEF, the population-attributable risk percentage was greatest for hypertension (40.9%) followed by obesity (25.8%), with the highest population-attributable risk percentage found in African Americans for these risk factors. Conclusions—In this multiracial cohort of postmenopausal women, obesity stands out as a significant risk factor for HFpEF, with the strongest association in African American women. Clinical Trial Registration—URL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT00000611.


The corpus callosum facilitates communication between the cerebral hemispheres. Morphological abnormalities of the corpus callosum have been identified in numerous psychiatric and neurological disorders. To quantitatively analyze the thickness profile of the corpus callosum, we adapted an automatic thickness measurement method, which was originally used on magnetic resonance (MR) images of the cerebral cortex (Hutton et al. [ 2008 ]: NeuroImage 40:1701–10; Jones et al. [ 2002 ]: Hum Brain Mapp 11:12–32; Schmitt and Böhme [ 2002 ]: NeuroImage 16:1103–9; Yezzi and Prince [ 2003 ]: IEEE Trans Med Imaging 22:1332–9), to MR images of the corpus callosum. The thickness model was derived by computing a solution to Laplace's equation evaluated on callosal voxels. The streamlines from this solution form non‐overlapping, cross‐sectional contours the lengths of which are modeled as the callosal thickness. Apart from the semi‐automated segmentation and endpoint selection procedures, the method is fully automated, robust, and reproducible. We compared the Laplace method with the orthogonal projection technique previously published (Walterfang et al. [ 2009a ]: Psych Res Neuroimaging 173:77–82; Walterfang et al. [ 2008a ]: Br J Psychiatry 192:429–34; Walterfang et al. [ 2008b ]: Schizophr Res 103:1–10) on a cohort of 296 subjects, composed of 86 patients with chronic schizophrenia (CSZ), 110 individuals with first‐episode psychosis, 100 individuals at ultra‐high risk for psychosis (UHR; 27 of whom later developed psychosis, UHR‐P, and 73 who did not, UHR‐NP), and 55 control subjects (CTL). We report similar patterns of statistically significant differences in regional callosal thickness with respect to the comparisons CSZ vs. CTL, UHR vs. CTL, UHR‐P vs. UHR‐NP, and UHR vs. CTL. Hum Brain Mapp, 2011. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


One of the major challenges for policymakers in Serbia is to improve the competitiveness of the Serbian economy. Universally applicable solution to this problem does not exist, but there are certain segments which
can be a significant driver of improving the effectiveness and productivity of the economy by implementing
diverse possibilities offered by the digital economy. A critical factor in the development of digital economy is the sector of information and communication technology (ICT), which has the potential to extremely improve the competitiveness of Serbia and start production towards modern business processes, but also contribute to
a notable synergistic effect in terms of the competitiveness of micro-enterprises. Accordingly, the aim of this
paper is to highlight the importance of information and communication technologies (ICT) as a factor for competitiveness
and development of the digital economy, to analyze the application of ICT in the economy of Serbia, to highlight the benefits of development and acceptance of new solutions in the field of ICT, to create recommendations that would contribute to improving the business environment in the ICT field, and consequently of the digital economy as a whole.


The metaphor of scaffolding is ubiquitous in the field of education and that of Language Teaching in particular. However, the term has become literalized thus losing its original meaning and is now an umbrella term encompassing various forms of teacher intervention. Added to this, the methaphor has come under extended criticism as a consequence of the spread of Sociocultural Learning Theory. This paper explores the metaphor of scaffolding and attempts to validate it as a legitimate form of mediation within the sociocultural construct of Zone of Proximal Development by promoting a reconceptualization of the term in light of alternative definitions. Implications for language teaching and language teacher education are highlighted and new perspectives advanced.


This Article focuses on problems in implementing the U.S. Supreme Court's expansion of its doctrine of unconstitutional conditions pertaining to land development approvals in Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District. As earlier developed in Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and Dolan v. City of Tigard, the doctrine applied only to unrelated or disproportional exactions of interests in real property. The doctrine was expanded in Koontz to include denials of development approval after landowner refusal to accede to unreasonable exaction demands, and also to exactions of money as well as real property interests.Drawing an analogy to Yale Kamisar's disparate treatment of criminal defendants in the "mansion" of the judicial system and the "gatehouse" of the police station, the Article discusses difficulties in implementing Koontz. It examines the difficulty of enforcing prohibitions on unreasonable coercion in informal bargaining between land development approval applicants and local regulators. The Article concludes by discussing specific procedural and substantive problems, and proposes some partial solutions.


A field experiment was conducted to investigate the influence of the addition of organic manure on the maturity stage and quality of pineapple fruits ripened in winter. Fertilization was performed with 200 mL peanut-press pulp liquid fertilizer + 20 g compound fertilizer per plant (T1) or 100 mL peanut press pulp liquid fertilizer + 20 g compound fertilizer per plant (T2). Fertilization with 20 g compound fertilizer per plant (T0) was used as the control. The results indicated that organic fertilizer addition promoted maturity. The weight per fruit was increased, and the contents of TSS and total sugars were enhanced, whereas the titratable acid contents were decreased. A sensory evaluation indicated that, after the addition of organic manure, the pineapple fruits were sweeter and more fragrant. More types of ester aroma components having a higher total relative content were identified in T1, and more types of alkenes having a higher total relative content were identified in T2. The relative contents of propanoic acid, 3-(methylthio)-, and methyl ester were increased by organic manure treatments, with the highest being noted in T1 (5.79%), followed by T2 (5.59%), and the lowest was documented in T0 (4.36%).


The history of the Hong Kong-based film production company Milkyway Image from its inception in 1996 to present day examplifies the metamorphosis of the contemporary Hong Kong film industry to an era characterised by Hong Kong's integration into a Chinese national context and the transnationalisation of world cinema. Drawing upon literature that studies film companies, this thesis adopts an integrative research framework that primarily combines industrial and discourse analysis to investigate Milkyway from a range of perspectives. It looks into the company's ownership and organisational structure and the constitution of its creative team, comparing its similarities and differences to previous Hong Kong film companies and discussing how Milkyway bases itself on contemporary industry and its production models, business experiences and human resources from established studios such as the Shaw Brothers. Secondly, I explore Milkyway's business and production practices in Hong Kong and mainland China by examining its genre films, including crime thrillers and romantic comedies, illustrating the Hong Kong film industry's cooperation, negotiation and resistance in the process of Hong Kong cinema's mainlandisation post-transfer of Hong Kong's sovereignty from Britain to China. I then examine the discourse regarding Milkyway both inside and outside of Hong Kong, focussing on how the company and its work are received by various players in the film industry and community. The Hong Kong cultural community's interpretations of Milkyway's films represent an effort to maintain local cinema's independence and local culture's autonomy. International cultural bodies, such as film festivals, distributors and critics, receive Milkyway's productions against the background of the increased globalisation of cinema and the development of the film industry and film institutions. Milkyway's image changes as the company's films travel across contexts and as various cultural forces provide multiple understandings of contemporary Hong Kong cinema. In shaping the discourse about Milkyway and its work, the company plays an active role by taking advantage of transnational platforms, such as film festivals, and interacting with film journalism and academia.


The study was conducted to determine the effect of long term use of bovine somatotropic hormone (bST) on days to first oestrus post-partum, number of services per conception, pregnancy rate, lactation length, dry period and calving interval for a period of three years, from 2004 to 2007. Thirty Nili-Ravi lactating buffaloes with approximately similar milk yields and stage of lactation were selected and randomly allocated to two treatments, A and B, with 15 animals in each group. Group A served as control while animals in group B were given injections of bovine somatotropic hormone (250 mg intramuscular per animal) at intervals of 14 days over a period of three years. The calving interval, dry period and lactation length were shorter by 71, 63.9 and 7 days, respectively, in the treated compared with the control group. The days to first oestrus post-partum, service period and services per conception were 160 ± 56.9 vs.98.2 ± 76.4 days, 207.0 ± 85.0 vs. 115.1 ± 107.0 days and 1.47 ± 1.1 vs. 1.31 ± 0.5 in group A vs. B, respectively. Statistically, differences were significant for post-partum oestrous and service period but for services per conception the difference was non-significant. Prevalence of mastitis was significantly higher in the treated animals while differences in body weights of the animals in the groups were not significant.


A Sertoli-Leydig cell tumor of the ovary characterized by the presence of spindle-shaped gonadal stromal cells and Sertoli cells, some of which are atypical. Leydig cells are also present forming clusters at the periphery of the cellular aggregates. Metastases have been reported in a minority of patients.


The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. By Maria Tatar. Expanded second edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xxxvi + 325 pp. The fairy-tale scholarship that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s is remarkable in both its quantity and quality. Most of this work occurred in the wake of the Grimm bicentennial celebrations in 1985-86, which occasioned a fundamental reassessment of the brothers' tales and generated enormous interest-both scholarly and popular-in the fairy tale. Among the influential works of scholarship that were published during those two decades, I think in particular of the several editions of Grimms' tales edited by Heinz Rolleke; Ruth B. Bottigheimer's Grimms' Bad Girls and Bold Boys (1987); James M. McGlathery's The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (1988); and the many books authored, edited, or translated by Jack Zipes, from Breaking the Magic Spell (1979) and The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (1983), to The Complete Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1987) and The Brothers Grimm (1988). I also think of Maria Tatar's elegant study of the fairy tale's "hard core," The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. Published in 1987, The Hard Facts is not only one of the most important studies that emerged from the bicentennial years, it is also, in a broader context, an exemplary work of scholarship. Attesting to the book's enduring values, Princeton University Press has now reissued it in a second expanded edition. When I reviewed The Hard Facts after its first publication, I emphasized its successful interdisciplinary mix of methods from folklore, literary criticism, social history, and psychoanalysis; its lucid introduction to the fundamental realities of Grimms' collecting, editing, and rewriting; its sound analysis of the Grimms' male and female characters; and Tatar's compelling deconstruction of the Bluebeard tale and its critical reception, which in the meantime has become one of the most frequently cited passages of her book. My assessment and admiration for this book have not changed. Its arguments and demonstrations remain fresh, and the expanded second edition brings new materials that enhance the book's usefulness, especially in teaching. Specifically, the expanded edition includes a new preface that speaks eloquently to the problems and power of Grimms' fairy tales in our cultural and personal lives and the need to "interrogate and take the measure of their project" (xvii) precisely because of that power. The new edition also offers translations and commentaries for six tales from the 1857 edition of the Kinder- und Hausmarchen ("Little Red Riding Hood," "Hansel and Gretel," "The Robber Bridegroom," "Cinderella," "Snow White," and "Thousandfurs"). …


Dioscoreales, the 'true' yams and allies, are a group whose current circumscription is dictated by results of molecular phylogenetic analyses. Consisting as it does of several nontraditional members, the group is made up of a heterogeneous set of taxa: unremarkable liliaceous plants, minute chlorophyll-less plants that live off their associated fungal partners, and large, robust, green plants of the tropics, some of which store starch in large underground tubers (Dioscorea yams) that are important human food across the world, especially in Africa and the Pacific Islands. Some species are important sources of folk medicines and pharmaceuticals; the original birth pills were manufactured from relatives of the edible yams. Dioscorea is remarkable in the 'dicot'-like appearance of its stalked, net-veined leaves borne on vines. Dioscoreales occur across the world and may existed by about 120 million years ago.

Key Concepts:

Dioscoreales are herbaceous monocots of northern temperate regions and the tropics.

Dioscoreales contain five families: Burmanniaceae, Dioscoreaceae, Nartheciaceae, Taccaceae and Thismiaceae, with 24 genera and 643 species; new species of Burmanniaceae and Thismiaceae are still being discovered.

The flower has an inferior ovary, short style and branched stigma, anthers often with apical extension. Many species contain steroidal saponins.

The order includes heterotrophs that depend on associated fungi for their nutrition (Burmannicaeae and Thismiaceae) and autotrophic tuberous plants that are a food source for other organisms including humans (Dioscoreaceae).

Dioscorea, the genus of 'true' yams, contains about 10 cultivated species.

Dioscoreales are at least 123 million years old according to molecular clock estimates.

Keywords:

true yams;
tuber crop;
famine food;
steroidal saponins;
myco-heterotroph;
oral contraceptive;
human migration


This dissertation contributes a jam-resistant communications protocol for use in a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). Specific focus is given to the network layer routing of packets within a MANET. A MANET is a self-organizing multi-hop wireless network that is comprised of many mobile hosts communicating wirelessly. As a result of their mobility and dependence on wireless communications, network layer routing is especially prone to errors. An algorithm has been developed using the concept of concurrent codes to allow for jam-resistant wireless communications without a pre-shared secret. The algorithm allows for the recovery of messages even in the presence of significant noise. Experimental results show that a cross-layer protocol designed to take advantage of this property allows for more effective communications in noisy environments such as disaster sites where current network protocols experience significant packet loss rates. Ultimately, this research presents a communications protocol that adapts to the level of interference in the environment to which the network is deployed to allow for effective communication.


Peripheral intravenous (IV) access can be difficult to achieve in critically ill patients who require vascular access in order to administer life-saving blood products, fluids and medications, especially in disasters and combat casualty care. Intraosseous access (IO) has become the standard of care for all medical emergencies, pre-hospital and hospital, when peripheral IV access cannot be rapidly established, and the techniques have been endorsed by multiple professional medical organizations. Research is rapidly expanding, both in the indications for IO, routes of administration, and clinical outcomes of intraosseous administration. The American Journal of Disaster Medicine is pleased to have the opportunity to publish two Special Issues1 focusing on current intraosseous research studies.


We propose a new game theoretic approach to modeling large elections that overcomes the "paradox of voting" in a costly voting framework, without reliance on the assumption of ad hoc preferences for voting. The key innovation that we propose is the adoption of a "smooth" policy rule under which the degree to which parties favor their own interests is increasing in their margin of victory. In other words, mandates matter. We argue that this approach is an improvement over the existing literature as it is consistent with the empirical evidence. Incorporating this policy rule into a costly voting model with paternalistic voters yields a parsimonious model with attractive properties. Specifically, the model predicts that when the size of the electorate grows without bound, limiting turnout is strictly positive both in terms of numbers and proportions. Further, the model preserves the typical comparative statics predictions that have been identified in the extant costly voting models such as the underdog effect and the competition effect. Finally, under the case of selfish agents, we are able to extend Palfrey and Rosenthal's (1985) zero turnout result to a general class of smooth policy rules. Thus, this new approach reconciles the predictions of standard costly voting, both in terms of positive turnout and comparative statics predictions with the assumption of a large electorate environment.


We introduce a two-body quantum Hamiltonian model of spin-1/2 on a 2D spatial lattice with exact topological degeneracy in all coupling regimes. There exists a gapped phase in which the low-energy sector reproduces an effective color code model. High energy excitations fall into three families of anyonic fermions that turn out to be strongly interacting. The model exhibits a Z_2xZ_2 gauge group symmetry and string-net integrals of motion, which are related to the existence of topological charges that are invisible to moving high-energy fermions.


For performance and injury prevention in sport, core strength and endurance are focused prerequisites. Therefore we evaluated characteristics of trunk muscle activation and performance during strength-endurance related trunk field tests. Strength-endurance ability, as total time to failure, and activation of trunk muscles was measured in 39 football players of the highest German female football league (Bundesliga) (N = 18, age: 20.7 y [SD 4.4]) and the highest national male under-19 league (N = 21, age: 17.9 y [0.7]) in prone plank, side plank, and dorsal position. Maximal isometric force was assessed during trunk extension and flexion, rotation, and lateral flexion to normalize EMG and to compare with the results of strength-endurance tests. For all positions of endurance strength tests, a continuous increase in normalized EMG activation was observed (P < .001). Muscle activation of the rectus abdominis and external oblique in prone plank position exceeded the maximal voluntary isometric contraction activation, with a significantly higher activation in females (P = .02). We conclude, that in the applied strength-endurance testing, the activation of trunk muscles was high, especially in females. As high trunk muscle activation can infer fatigue, limb strength can limit performance in prone and side plank position, particularly during high trunk muscle activation.


Introduction Children's literature is part of the fabric of school life and instruction. Hispanic American children's literature is rich with allusions to culture and religion. Sharing books featuring Hispanic Americans resonates with the students who share this culture. The same books also provide a lens for those not of the culture to see within and to appreciate the similarities and differences. The literature shared in schools should offer children a broad selection of choices. As a social justice issue in the United States, students should see a breadth of rich literature selections reflecting the diversity of the American population. Of course, no one book can represent all the complexity of a particular cultural group, which means multiple selections representing a cultural group need to be shared. This paper provides examples of cultural and religious content found in Hispanic American children's literature. It also provides context on changing demographic groups in the United States, and the need to increase the number of literature selections that reflect the richness and variety within the Hispanic culture. It will share information about three awards for Hispanic children's literature as sources to access. While the term Hispanic is used in the article's title for brevity purposes, the Hispanic culture is very broad containing many different groups and labels. Some are based on geographic histories: Mexican American, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Spanish. Other terms relate to language and/or political action: Latino/Latina, Chicano/Chicana, and other distinctions. This article addresses subgroups using Hispanic as a broad term. Cultural and Religious Allusions in Selected Books Selections of children's literature specifically written with Hispanics as primary characters generally reveal aspects of the Hispanic culture that may not be known by readers outside of the culture. Recurrent themes are family and extended family support, the role of religion, the marking of significant events, and the connections across political borders. One can learn about culture through the ways individuals mark significant life events related to birth, marriage and death. Examples follow that provide cultural and religious insights associated with the Hispanic culture. The examples are helpful for those who are outside of the culture. Hispanic Cultural Theme of Family and Extended Family Support Children's books reflecting Hispanic culture often have a theme emphasizing the importance of the family and its provision of security, care, and support. While the father is often portrayed as the authority figure in the family, strong resourceful women are also featured. In the picture book, My Very Own Room/Mi propio cuartito, the main character shares a room with her five brothers. While she loves her brothers, she yearns for a room of her own. The house has limited space but her family finds a way to clear a storage area so she can have it to herself. Everyone contributes in some way so that she can achieve her goal. Her uncle assists too, delivering a small bed that will fit in the space for his niece. The uncle's efforts serve as an illustration of the role of extended family in the support system. The author, Amada Irma Perez, revealed in a public lecture that others asked about the use of so many brothers in the telling of the story. The questioners were possibly concerned that critics might say it was "stereotypical" to have so many family members. Mrs. Perez expressed her concern, worried as to which of her brothers she would have to leave out of the story. She ultimately did not leave any brother out. The short story, "She Flies" from the David Rice collection, Crazy Loco, tells about Milagros and her relationship to her great-aunt, Tia Mana Garza. Milagros is very talented academically. Her great-aunt encourages her to seek the opportunities that Milagros desires. …


Reaction videos by White celebrity-fans of K-pop reveal hybridity's formations in the global reception of K-pop in the West. A deeply understudied genre of YouTube, the reaction video needs scholarly attention. This article reveals that White celebrity-fans produce YouTube reaction texts that perform limited hybridity. Their hybridity is open to the symbolic meanings of K-pop texts and resistive practices demonstrated through deep commitments to non-White music and performers, but it is constrained by White racial logics that support postracism and gendered logics of their local spaces.


This dissertation reports on qualitative and quantitative investigations on the intonation and the prosodic structure of Beaver, an endangered Athabaskan language of Northwest Canada. The focus of the study is on the Northern Alberta dialect of Beaver, which has lexical tone and is a high marking Athabaskan language. The theoretical framework of the analysis is the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) theory. Following some background on intonation and prosody as well as the theoretical modelling, we summarize contributions dealing with intonation in languages that share certain features with Beaver, i.e. tone languages, polysynthetic languages and finally the related Athabaskan languages. After a brief introduction to the grammatical structure and the sociolinguistic situation of Northern Alberta Beaver, the database of the present study is introduced. It consists of narratives and task oriented dialogues as well as recordings elicited with stimuli sets. In the domain of intonation and prosody, three topics are investigated in detail. First, domain initial prosodic strengthening is analyzed. We show that a boundary initial position at higher constituents of the prosodic hierarchy has a lengthening effect on VOT of both aspirated and unaspirated plosives, while nasals are shortened in this context. Additionally, effects of morphological category (stem vs. prefix) and intervocalic position � two mechanisms that have been described for other Athabaskan languages � are also attested for Beaver to some degree. Second, the intonational tones that have been found in the corpus are analyzed within the AM theory. In Northern Alberta Beaver, boundary tones and phrase accents make up the intonational inventory. Most notably, an initial phrase accent is used to mark contrast, which is a device that has not been reported for the marking of information structure in other languages. Lastly, the interaction of information structure with pitch range in complex noun phrases is tested in a controlled experiment. Here, we find that pitch range is significantly wider for new information than for given, which is due to a raising of the top line, while the baseline is not affected to the same extend.


While language teacher education programmes and language syllabi in secondary education encourage the use of the target language in the classroom, resources to support teachers in this endeavour, such as books with useful phrases, do not state that the examples they provide are corpus-based, i.e. drawn from actual language use rather than invented phrases. This paper investigates whether consultation of a corpus of classroom discourse can be of benefit in language teacher education. The paper describes a project involving the creation of corpora of classroom discourse in French and Spanish, and the use of these corpora with student teachers. After setting the research in the context of corpora and classroom interaction, it examines issues such as the content of the corpora, the type of consultation (direct or mediated by the teacher), and the student teachers' evaluation of the activity. Special attention is paid to one particular aspect of classroom interaction, discourse markers.


This paper reads Abdellah Taia's Salvation Army, a semi-autobiographical film that chronicles the coming of age of a Moroccan boy through its queer affects. Set in both Morocco and Switzerland, Taia's protagonist is neither a victim nor oppressed by the socio-economic and patriarchal conditions of his existence. His sexuality is naive and perverse, exploited and exploitative. Queer knowledge in this film breaks down at many levels. The effect of this confusion is the film's insistence on reading the narrative outside of easy sexual epistemologies. This paper defines "queer" not simply in terms of sexual orientation but as an affective relationship to loss. Borne from the traces of sexual being, queer affects resist the domestication of the sexual for social recognition. They are the parts of us that refuse to be colonized into affable, upright subjects. In Salvation Army, the protagonist grows up to be gay, as we have come to understand this word, but his subjectivity remains ambivalent and in mourning.


SUMMARY Perturbation Hamiltonians simplify considerably the solution of various traveltime perturbation problems of seismic body waves propagating in heterogeneous, isotropic or anisotropic, weakly dissipative media. In addition to the phase-space coordinates, representing the Cartesian coordinates and Cartesian components of the slowness vector, the perturbation Hamiltonians also depend on one or more dimensionless perturbation parameters, which can be chosen in different ways. General traveltime perturbation procedures, based on the perturbation Hamiltonians, were proposed by Klimey s. The evaluation of the perturbation expansions for the traveltime and for its derivatives does not require the computation of perturbed rays in these procedures. It consists in dynamic ray tracing along the reference ray, in the determination of the partial derivatives of the perturbation Hamiltonian with respect to the perturbation parameters, and in additional quadratures along a reference ray, computed in the reference medium. Different forms of the perturbation Hamiltonian yield different perturbation expansions with different accuracy and numerical efficiency of computations. In this paper, the special case of the perturbation Hamiltonian, herein referred to as the linear perturbation Hamiltonian, is used to compute the second-order perturbation expansion of the complex-valued traveltime and the first-order perturbation expansion of the complex-valued traveltime gradient. The advantage of the linear perturbation Hamiltonian is that it is linear with respect to perturbation parameters. Heterogeneous, perfectly elastic, isotropic or anisotropic, reference media are considered, in which reference rays can be calculated without problems by well-known methods. The derived perturbation expansions are valid very generally. For the isotropic reference model, the perturbed medium may be isotropic perfectly elastic, isotropic weakly dissipative, weakly anisotropic perfectly elastic or weakly anisotropic weakly dissipative. For the anisotropic reference model, the perturbed medium may be anisotropic perfectly elastic, or anisotropic weakly dissipative. Expressions for the attenuation vector, the dissipation filter, the global absorption factor, the direction-dependent scalar local quality factor and the attenuation coefficient are also derived for seismic body waves propagating in heterogeneous anisotropic weakly dissipative media.


We present the GRIDS programming system for parallel computations on unstructured grids. The need for adaptive parallelization is discussed. It takes into account the specific reasons for the degradation of parallel efficiency in parallel systems ranging from workstation clusters to parallel supercomputers. Implications are shown on the design of programming models for unified parallel and distributed computing. Some strategies for adaptive optimization that are integrated in the GRIDS system are presented in detail. The effects of balancing the load bundling messages, and dynamically reordering the operations are analysed in the general context of computations on unstructured grids. Performance measurements show the impact on the parallel efficiency of these schemes on a workstation cluster and a parallel computer.<<ETX>>


Recently, narrowband emissions ordered near the H+ (proton) gyrofrequency (fcH) were reported in the stimulated electromagnetic emission (SEE) spectrum during active geomagnetic conditions. This work presents new observations and theoretical analysis of these recently discovered emissions. These emission lines are observed in the stimulated electromagnetic emission (SEE) spectrum when the transmitter is tuned near the second electron gyroharmonic frequency (2fce) during recent ionospheric modification experiments at the High Frequency Active Auroral Research (HAARP) facility near Gakona, Alaska. The spectral lines are typically shifted below and above the pump wave frequency by harmonics of a frequency roughly 10% less than fcH (≈ 800 Hz) with a narrow emission bandwidth less than the O+ gyrofrequency (≈ 50 Hz). However, new observations and analysis of emission lines ordered by a frequency approximately 10% greater than fcH are presented here for the first time as well. The interaction altitude for the heating for all the observations is in the range of 160 km up to 200 km. As described previously, proton precipitation due to active geomagnetic conditions is considered as the reason for the presence of H+ ions known to be a minor background constituent in this altitude region. DMSP satellite observations over HAARP during the heating experiments and ground‐based magnetometer and riometer data validate active geomagnetic conditions. The theory of parametric decay instability in multi‐ion component plasma including H+ ions as a minority species described in previous work is expanded in light of simultaneously observed preexisting SEE features to interpret the newly reported observations. Impact of active geomagnetic conditions on the SEE spectrum as a diagnostic tool for proton precipitation event characterization is discussed.


Photoluminescence (PL) measurements in CdTe/Cd1-xMnx Te (x=0. 24) single quantum well (SQW) structure with different quantum well (QW) widths and bulk Cd1-xMnxTe (x=0. 15) under high hydrostatic pressures up to 2. 68 GPa and DC magnetic fields up to 30 T are reported. We analyze the Zeeman shift of the band-edge exciton PL peaks, taking into account a linear magnetization term, and obtain pressure dependence of spin exchange parameters. Negative pressure dependence of the p-d hybridization is found for the barrier of the SQW structure and the bulk sample. A possibility that the hybridization is weakened due to the pressure induced relaxation of the distortion around Te atoms is proposed.


In a condition of such complexity as bronchial carcinoma and at a time when the scientist's understanding of malignant disease is still incomplete, it is inevitable that views within the medical profession will proliferate. This book is an attempt to assemble these views in the light of 33 years of surgical experience and is intended for those specialists who will be concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer in the foreseeable future. The wide clinical experience of the contributing authors has ena bled every aspect of this disease to be considered, with emphasis being placed on diagnostic techniques such as CT scanning and fine needle transpleural biopsy, as well as on the latest method of treatment by lasers. Bronchial carcinoma remains the major cause of cancer death in the United Kingdom, accounting for 60Jo of all deaths. While the incidence has decreased slightly in the male population, there has been an equivalent increase in the female population."


The high data rates of IEEE 802.11p-based VANETs and the wide coverage area of 3GPP networks, this paper envision VANET-UMTS integrated network architecture. In this Architecture, vehicles are dynamically clustered according to different related metrics. From these clusters, a minimum number of vehicles, equipped with IEEE 802.11p and UTRAN interfaces, are selected as vehicular gateways to link VANET to UMTS. Issues pertaining to gateway selection, gateway advertisement and discovery, service migration between gateways are all addressed and an adaptive mobile gateway management mechanism is proposed. Simulations are carried out using NS2 to evaluate the performance of the envisioned architecture incorporating the proposed mechanisms. Encouraging results are obtained in terms of high data packet delivery ratios and throughput, reduced control packet overhead, and minimized delay and packet drop rates. NS-2 is an object-oriented modular discrete event network simulator.


On the basis of theoretical approaches to ethnic group formation and belonging, this article examines how Russian au pairs in Germany relate to the Russian-speaking migrant community in the context of their migration processes. It shows how au pairs use their bilingual skills as an emblem of identity but also as a tool to establish social relationships. At the beginning of their stay au pairs use their native language to draw on the Russian-speaking community, explore their host city, and get social support during their au pair year. In later stages of settlement au pairs, who may enroll in university or enter highly skilled work, emphasize social relationships with German citizens and migrants of the same socioeconomic background. In biographical narratives they seek to distance themselves from the Russian-speaking community by creating intra group boundaries and rejecting interest in speaking Russian or socializingwith Russian speakers. They use their German-language skills as markers of education and upward mobility in order to position themselves as members of society without any of the negative attributes commonly ascribed to members of the Russian-speaking community.  In English, extended summary in Russian .


We study two data structuring problems under the bit probe model: the dynamic predecessor problem and integer representation in a manner supporting basic updates in as few bit operations as possible. The model of computation considered in this paper is the bit probe model. In this model, the complexity measure counts only the bitwise accesses to the data structure. The model ignores the cost of computation. As a result, the bit probe complexity of a data structuring problem can be considered as a fundamental measure of the problem. Lower bounds derived by this model are valid as lower bounds for any realistic, sequential model of computation. Furthermore, some of the problems are more suitable for study in this model as they can be solved using less than w bit probes where w is the size of a computer word. The predecessor problem is one of the fundamental problems in computer science with numerous applications and has been studied for several decades. We study the colored predecessor problem, a variation of the predecessor problem, in which each element is associated with a symbol from a finite alphabet or color. The problem is to store a subset S of size n, from a finite universe U so that to support efficient insertion, deletion and queries to determine the color of the largest value in S which is not larger than x, for a given x ∈ U. We present a data structure for the problem that requires O(k k √ log U log log U ) bit probes for the query and O(k log U log log U ) bit probes for the update operations, where U is the universe size and k is positive constant. We also show that the results on the colored predecessor problem can be used to solve some other related problems such as existential range query, dynamic prefix sum, segment representative, connectivity problems, etc. The second structure considered is for integer representation. We examine the problem of integer representation in a nearly minimal number of bits so that increment and decrement (and indeed addition and subtraction) can be performed using few bit inspections and fewer bit changes. In particular, we prove a new lower bound of Ω( √ n) for the increment and decrement operation, where n is the minimum number of bits required to represent the number. We present several efficient data structures to represent integers that use a logarithmic number of bit inspections and a constant number of bit changes per operation.


This article does not directly consider the feelings and emotions that occur in mental illness. Rather, it concerns a higher level methodological question: To what extent is an analysis of feelings and felt emotions of importance for psychiatric classification? Some claim that producing a phenomenologically informed descriptive psychopathology is a prerequisite for serious taxonomic endeavor. Others think that classifications of mental disorders may ignore subjective experience. A middle view holds that classification should at least map the contours of the phenomenology of mental illness. This article examines these options. I conclude that it is not true that phenomenology is a logical prerequisite for classification, nor even that classification should necessarily respect phenomenological boundaries, but that detailed phenomenological examination can sometimes inform classification.


Multiple antenna systems are capable of providing high data rate transmissions over wireless channels. When the channels are dispersive, the signal at each receive antenna is a combination of both the current and past symbols sent from all transmit antennas corrupted by noise. The optimal receiver is a maximum-likelihood sequence detector and is often considered to be practically infeasible due to high computational complexity (exponential in number of antennas and channel memory). Therefore, in practice, one often settles for a less complex suboptimal receiver structure, typically with an equalizer meant to suppress both the intersymbol and interuser interference, followed by the decoder. We propose a sphere decoding for the sequence detection in multiple antenna communication systems over dispersive channels. The sphere decoding provides the maximum-likelihood estimate with computational complexity comparable to the standard space-time decision-feedback equalizing (DFE) algorithms. The performance and complexity of the sphere decoding are compared with the DFE algorithm by means of simulations.


Summary Livestock protection dogs (LPDs) in the United States have helped to protect livestock herds from certain predators, but expanding large-carnivore populations pose new challenges, and the number of LPDs killed by large predators is increasing. We conducted a literature review to identify LPD breeds that may be more suited for use around large carnivores, such as gray wolves. The use of spiked collars to increase the survivability for LPDs in areas of coexistence with large carnivore populations is also discussed. This paper advances the adoption of techniques and LPD breeds used outside of the United States in areas where large carnivores exist with livestock production.


Neopterin, a compound derived from GTP, represents a precursor molecule of biopterin that is an essential cofactor in neurotransmitter synthesis. We have recently reported that in vivo as well as in vitro immune responses are accompanied by an increased release of neopterin and that this phenomenon can be used for the biochemical monitoring of diseases accompanied by hyperimmune stimulation. This article deals with the cellular origin and the control of this immune response- associated neopterin release in vitro. Using highly purified or monoclonal cellular reagents we demonstrate that macrophages (M phi) stimulated with supernatants from activated T cells release large amounts of neopterin into culture supernatants. Further experiments involving induction of neopterin release from M phi with various human recombinant interferons (IFNs) or neutralization of the effect of T cell supernatants with various monoclonal anti-IFN antibodies revealed immune IFN as the active principle. It thus appears that a metabolic pathway so far exclusively known in context with the generation of an essential cofactor of neurotransmitter-synthesis during immune responses is also activated in M phi under stringent control by immune IFN-like lymphokines.


Purpose/aimThe aim is to examine the distribution of hotel ownerships and star-rated levels in different regions. This thesis depends on the analysis of the examination to find out if the change of investment behaviors can decrease or avoid the adverse effects of bureaucracy in the Chinese hotel industry.Design/methodology/approachData has been collected through the third-party electronic distribution channel. The analysis includes a description of the samples and statistical tests.FindingsThe analysis showed that there is a connection between hotel ownerships, star-rated levels, and different regions. The adverse effects of bureaucracy in the second-tier cities and third-tier cities are stronger than that in the first-tier cities and tourist cities. The state-owned hotels also can do the enterprise transformation in the tourist cities to avoid or decrease the adverse effects of the bureaucracy.Originality/valueThe original idea is using the hotel ownerships distribution in different regions to find out the different levels of adverse effects of the bureaucracy in different regions. This thesis should be a meaningful contribution to knowledge development.


Simultaneous spatial and temporal focusing pulses are created using parametric pulse shaping and characterized with scanning SEA TADPOLE. Multiple foci are created with optically-controlled longitudal and transverse spatial positions. The characterized foci are in agreement with the predictions of a Fourier optics model. The measurements reveal significant pulse front tilt resulting from the simultaneous spatial and temporal focusing optics.


We will examine the ways in which university and industry are reacting to the demands for continuous education as a key issue for Real Estate professionals development. The focus will be on a key issues and problems encountered in Europe and Slovenia. New model, of lifelong learning in the context of university education which has been developed at the University of Ljubljana, will be presented. The aim of the model is to fulfil the needs of professional development in a contemporary society. The model is based on the computer supported collaborative learning, supporting the new organization of teaching and learning with the ICT.


Driven by falling photovoltaic (PV) installation costs and potential support policies, rooftop PV is expected to expand rapidly in Thailand. As a result, the relevant stakeholders, especially utilities, have concerns about the net economic impacts of high PV adoption. Using a cost–benefit analysis, this study quantifies the net economic impacts of rooftop PV systems on three utilities and on ratepayers in Thailand by applying nine different PV adoption scenarios with various buyback rates and annual percentages of PV cost reduction. Under Thailand's current electricity tariff structure, Thai utilities are well-protected and able to pass all costs due to PV onto the ratepayers in terms of changes in retail rates. We find that when PV adoption is low, the net economic impacts on both the utilities and retail rates are small and the impacts on each utility depend on its specific characteristics. On the other hand, when PV adoption ranges from 9–14% in energy basis, five-year retail rate impacts become noticeable and are between 6% and 11% as compared to the projected retail rates in 2036 depending on the PV adoption level. Thus, it is necessary for Thailand to make tradeoffs among the stakeholders and maximize the benefits of rooftop PV adoption.


This paper presents a novel spatiotemporal optimization approach for maximizing the output power of an ocean current turbine (OCT) under uncertain ocean velocities. In order to determine output power, ocean velocities and the power consumed and generated by an OCT system are modeled. The stochastic behavior of ocean velocities is a function of time and location, which is modeled as a Gaussian process. The power of the OCT system is composed of three parts, including generated power, power for maintaining the system at an operating depth, and power consumed for changing the water depth to reach the maximum power. Two different algorithms, including model predictive control (MPC) as a model-based method and reinforcement learning (RL) as a learning-based method, are proposed to design the optimization structure, and comparative studies are presented. On one hand, the MPC based controller is faster in finding the optimal water depth, while the RL is also computationally feasible considering the required time for changing operating depth. On the other hand, the cumulative energy production of the RL algorithm is higher than the MPC method, which verifies that the learning-based RL algorithm can provide a better solution to address the uncertainties in renewable energy systems. Results verify the efficiency of both presented methods in maximizing the total power of an OCT system, where the total harnessed energy after 200 hours shows an over 18% increase compared to the baseline.


This is the first part of a revision of the type specimens of the South American Sericini. Herein, we examine type specimens of Astaena described by Lawrence Webster Saylor (1913–1999). We provide diagnostic redescriptions, images of habitus, aedeagus, and labels of the type specimens of all 18 species described by him in the genus Astaena. We raise Sayloria Frey, 1973, a former subgenus of Symmela Erichson, 1835 that includes three species, to genus level. Our study results in the following new combinations and synonymy: Sayloria bicoloripes (Saylor, 1946) comb. nov. (= A. postnodata Frey, 1973 syn. nov.), S. abcora (Saylor, 1946) comb. nov. (= A. apolinarmaria Saylor, 1946 syn. nov.) and S. pottsi (Saylor, 1946) comb. nov.


The recognition that supportive mechanical ventilation can also damage the lung, the so called ventilation induced lung injury (VILI), has revived the more than 40 year long debate on the optimal level of PEEP to be used. It is established that the prevention of VILI improves patient outcome and that PEEP exerts protective effects by preventing unstable diseased alveoli from collapsing. Therefore, the term "open lung PEEP" (OL-PEEP) has been introduced as the end-expiratory pressure that keeps the lung open after its collapse has been eliminated by an active lung recruitment manoeuvre. The determination of such an optimal level of PEEP under clinical circumstances is difficult and remains to be investigated.The aim of this study was to investigate the usefulness of breath by breath monitoring of dynamic compliance (Cdyn) as a clinical means to identify OL-PEEP at the bedside and to demonstrate the improvement in lung function resulting from its application.In a porcine lung lavage model of acute lung injury PEEP at maximum Cdyn during a decremental PEEP trial after full lung recruitment was related to the onset of lung collapse and OL-PEEP could be found 2 cmH2O above this level Ventilation at OL-PEEP was associated with improved gas exchange, efficiency of ventilation, lung mechanics and less than 5% collapse on CT scans. In addition, dead space, especially its portion related to alveolar gas changed characteristically during recruitment, PEEP titration and collapse thereby helping to identify OL-PEEP.The beneficial effects of OL-PEEP on lung function and mechanics was demonstrated in a porcine model of VILI. OL-PEEP improved lung function and mechanics when compared to lower or higher levels prior to or after lung recruitment. By using electrical impedance tomography it could be shown that PEEPs within the range of 14 to 22 cmH2O resulted in a similar redistribution of both ventilation and perfusion to the dorsal regions of the lung. OL-PEEP resulted in the best regional and global matching of ventilation and perfusion explaining the drastic improvements in gas exchange. Also regional compliance was greatly improved in the lower half of the lung as compared to all other situations.In ARDS patients OL-PEEP could be identified applying the same protocol. The physiological changes described could now be reproduced and maintained during a four hours study ventilation period in real patients at four study centres.In conclusion, the usefulness of dynamic compliance for identifying open lung PEEP during a decremental PEEP trial was demonstrated under experimental and clinical conditions. This PEEP should then be used as an essential part of any lung protective ventilation strategy. The impact of ventilating ARDS patients according to the principles described in these studies on outcome are currently being evaluated in an international randomized controlled trial.


Agricultural education play a central role in disseminating knowledge, skills and attitudes toward managing environmental resources which support food productivity. Its goals are basically achieved through formal education. Hitherto, youths have been involved in environmental stress mitigation efforts both at the school and community levels but are still short of adequate knowledge. Current trends of environmental stress and its associative impact on the food growing soils and space call for its integration into agricultural education programme. This paper identifies mechanisms for ensuring Food Security (FS) and Sustainable Environment (SE) through Youths' Agricultural Education. First, the paper discussed the concepts of sustainability as it affects the environment and food security. It also discussed constraints of FS and SE. Mechanisms discussed includes: curriculum content review and update, adequate funding by government, training and retraining of manpower, and involvement of youth clubs and organizations. Furthermore, use of mass media; extension services; school farm; and organizing workshops, seminars; and integration of population studies in the curriculum were also considered. Finally, it was suggested among others that government should review school curriculum and renew her commitment through designing and implementing policies and programmes aimed at ensuring FS and SE. Keywords: Agricultural Education, Mechanisms, National Food Security, Sustainable Environment, Youths.


Savings in construction costs through improved production and productivity can be critical on green building projects, as they can be used to offset the costs of high performance building components. Prefabrication of building components is often used by contractors to reduce costs. If employed effectively, prefabrication can enable process standardisation, shorten lead times, improve quality control, and reduce material waste. Several tools have been developed to help select prefabrication strategies and most of them focus on design-bid-build project environments. This paper explores how benefits achieved in lean approaches to prefabrication can impact green project goals. More specifically, the paper examines the effects of how an expanded use of on-site/offsite prefabricated systems can contribute or detract from green building goals through evaluating the interplay between multiple economic, environmental, and social variables. Building on previous research that has developed tools for guiding the adoption of prefabrication practices, the design of new metrics for lean and green construction will be developed and presented to provide selection guidance for the use of prefabrication on green building projects in design-build environments.


The MEA-study deals with the future development of the so-called pension gap. Firstly, simulations are carried out under different assumptions on the example of the standard pensioner. Secondly, the MEA study examines the savings behavior of German households and the individual ways to close the pension gap, using the representative data SAVE (Saving and Retirement in Germany) and SHARE-RV, the German sub-sample of the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe developed in cooperation with the Gesetzliche Rentenversicherung. The standard projections and calculations with budget data clearly show that a funded supplementary pension can cushion the fall of the state pension to some extent: Over the half of all households are secured in a way that they can fill the pension gap even with a prolonged low interest rate. Through the current low interest rates, however, it is difficult for some households to completely close the gap. Households which cannot achieve this goal because they have up to now not made adequate savings, can be found in all income and educational levels.


The world-wide trend of a growing organic sector is also detectable in South Africa. From 2000 to 2002 the number of farmers who had converted to organic farming in South Africa increased sixfold, and although organic farming still accounts only for a minute percentage of the total number agricultural producers, the increasing importance of this sector is apparent. Based on survey results, information was gathered about organic farmers in South Africa concerning socio-demographic aspects, farming operations, motivations and problems of the conversion process. These results were analysed in the context of possibilities to support the organic farming movement theoretically and practically. With respect to the findings it is recommended that the conversion to organic farming should be supported, not necessarily via direct financial support to the organic farmers, but by means of different instruments such as the development of an improved infrastructure for marketing, networking and information exchange. Several areas for future research are identified to increase our understanding of organic farming in the South African context.


Scientific uncertainty affecting the demonstration of the causal link in medical, environmental, and product liability often proves fatal to plaintiffs' claims for judicial compensation of their personal injuries. Responding to this challenge, the tribunals of several legal traditions have relaxed their application of the traditional rules of causation and evidence. Others refuse to do so, however, despite the resulting adverse impact on the victims' chances of obtaining compensation for their injuries. This text examines the French and Quebec civil law courts' willingness to adapt rules of evidence and causation to respond to causal uncertainty in cases involving injuries to human health allegedly caused by medical acts, environmental pollution or defective products. It studies how this desire has expressed itself across these disciplines, but also how it differs depending on the civil law jurisdiction concerned. Ultimately, this paper defends the idea that a more flexible approach aimed at assisting victims in facing causal uncertainty should be adopted by the courts of both jurisdictions when dealing with product and environmental liability cases.


Background: Disorders of urea cycle constitute approximately 50% of severe neonatal hyperammonemia. These disorders are consequence of the deficiency of some of the enzymes involved in the cycle. The prognosis will depend on the degree of enzymatic deficiency, as well as on the timely diagnostic approach and the early treatment. Case report: A neonate with neonatal crisis of difficult management associated to hyperammonemia, which allowed to suspect an inborn error of the metabolism, specifically urea cycle disorder. Timely treatment was initiated, with symptoms control and favorable clinical course. Discussion: Urea cycle disorders are part of innate errors in ammonia detoxification or arginine synthesis, secondary to defects in the enzymes involved in this cycle. Clinical manifestations are secondary to elevated levels of serum ammonia. The treatment is composed of an acute and chronic phase.


Sphaeromorphic algal cysts, most probably of the prasinophyte Tasmanites, and acanthomorphic acritarch vesicles, most probably Solisphaeridium, occur in a single 20 cm thick bed of micritic limestone in the lower part of the Middle Devonian (Givetian) Tully Formation near Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. Specimens are composed of authigenic calcite and pyrite crystals about 5–10 µm in length. Some specimens are completely calcitic; some contain both pyrite and calcite; and many are composed totally of pyrite. The microfossils are about 80 to 150 µm in diameter. Many show signs of originally containing a flexible wall composed of at least two layers. Some appear to have been enclosed in a mucilaginous sheath or membrane when alive. The acanthomorphic forms have spines that are up to 20 µm in length, expand toward the base, and are circular in cross-section. The microflora occurs with microscopic molluscs, dacryoconarids, the enigmatic Jinonicella, and the oldest zooecia of ctenostome bryozoans known from North America. The microalgal horizon lacks macrofossils although small burrows are present. Microalgae and acritarchs have been preserved via a complex preservational process involving rapid, bacterially-mediated post-mortem mineralization of dead cells. The microfossil horizon, and possibly much of the Tully Formation at Lock Haven with similar lithology, formed in a relatively deep, off-shore basin with reduced oxygen availability in the substrate.


Abstract The objective of this study was to investigate prebiotic potential, chemical composition, and antioxidant capacity of spice extracts. Seven culinary spices including black pepper, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, ginger, Mediterranean oregano, rosemary, and turmeric were extracted with boiling water. Major chemical constituents were characterized by RP‐HPLC‐DAD method and antioxidant capacity was determined by measuring colorimetrically the extent to scavenge ABTS radical cations. Effects of spice extracts on the viability of 88 anaerobic and facultative isolates from intestinal microbiota were determined by using Brucella agar plates containing serial dilutions of extracts. A total of 14 phenolic compounds, a piperine, cinnamic acid, and cinnamaldehyde were identified and quantitated. Spice extracts exhibited high antioxidant capacity that correlated with the total amount of major chemicals. All spice extracts, with the exception of turmeric, enhanced the growth of Bifidobacterium spp. and Lactobacillus spp. All spices exhibited inhibitory activity against selected Ruminococcus species. Cinnamon, oregano, and rosemary were active against selected Fusobacterium strains and cinnamon, rosemary, and turmeric were active against selected Clostridium spp. Some spices displayed prebiotic‐like activity by promoting the growth of beneficial bacteria and suppressing the growth of pathogenic bacteria, suggesting their potential role in the regulation of intestinal microbiota and the enhancement of gastrointestinal health. The identification and quantification of spice‐specific phytochemicals provided insight into the potential influence of these chemicals on the gut microbial communities and activities. Future research on the connections between spice‐induced changes in gut microbiota and host metabolism and disease preventive effect in animal models and humans is needed.