Sentiment analysis is a common task in natural language processing that aims to detect polarity of a text document (typically a consumer review). In the simplest settings, we discriminate only between positive and negative sentiment, turning the task into a standard binary classification problem. We compare several ma- chine learning approaches to this problem, and combine them to achieve the best possible results. We show how to use for this task the standard generative lan- guage models, which are slightly complementary to the state of the art techniques. We achieve strong results on a well-known dataset of IMDB movie reviews. Our results are easily reproducible, as we publish also the code needed to repeat the experiments. This should simplify further advance of the state of the art, as other researchers can combine their techniques with ours with little effort.


The previous literature provides a highly ambiguous picture on the impact of trade and investment agreements on FDI. Most empirical studies ignore the actual content of BITs and RTAs, treating them as "black boxes", despite the diversity of investment provisions constituting the essence of these agreements. We overcome this serious limitation by analyzing the impact of modalities on the admission of FDI and dispute settlement mechanisms in both RTAs and BITs on bilateral FDI flows between 1978 and 2004. We find that FDI reacts positively to RTAs only if they offer liberal admission rules. Dispute settlement provisions play a minor role. While RTAs without strong investment provisions may even discourage FDI, the reactions to BITs are less discriminate with foreign investors responding favourably to the mere existence of BITs. JEL code: F21; F23; K33


Summary: We monitored the behaviour of 62 radio-collared ferrets and 25 radio-collared cats in dry, tussock grassland habitat in New Zealand's South Island. The total home range of adult male ferrets (102 ± 58 ha, mean ± 1 s.d.) was marginally greater than that of females (76 ± 48 ha), and averaged 90 ± 55 ha. Male ferret core ranges (27 ± 15 ha) were larger than those of females (16 ± 8 ha). Adult cat home ranges were similar between sexes, and were larger and more variable than those of ferrets (225 ± 209 ha). Core range size of cats was similar between sexes and averaged 54 ± 24 ha. The upper 95% confidence limits of the mean home range lengths of adult ferrets and cats were 2.7 km and 5.1 km, respectively, indicating the width of buffer zones where predator control should be extended to protect the boundaries of areas targeted for predator control in dry, tussock grasslands. Although core areas were mostly discrete, home ranges were distributed randomly, and animals that shared space neither avoided nor attracted each other. Little evidence of territoriality may be related to high densities of primary prey. Too few cats were monitored to determine territoriality. Ferrets used at least 9.4 ± 3.2 dens, and cats used 11.5 ± 3.0 dens during the study. Although 71% of dens were used only once, some were used up to nine times. Day time resting by ferrets was mostly solitary. If transmission of bovine Tb occurs between adult ferrets, simultaneous sharing of dens during the day is unlikely to be a significant mode of transmission in this habitat. We were unable to determine the extent of den sharing by cats. Cats occupied den sites with more shrubs and rocks compared with ferrets. Predator control stations in dry tussock grassland habitat may therefore be more effective at killing cats than ferrets if placed in shrubby, rocky areas.


Now marks the first time in China's nascent International Relations (IR) studies that a prestigious Western academic press has translated into English and published a collection of articles by Chinese IR scholars. Until now, this honour has been the preserve of history and philosophy, fields with distinguished pedigrees in China's intellectual history, and whose scholarly accomplishments have long been internationally recognized.1 The publication by Princeton University Press of these articles, most of them originally written in Chinese by Professor Yan Xuetong and his colleagues at Tsinghua University in Beijing, that comprise Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power suggests a turning point in China's international studies.2 As it turns out, in addition to being important in the disciplinary history of Chinese IR, the book also carries implications for the global IR discipline. It contains, moreover, theoretical insights and policy implications worth thorough review.

My aim is to situate the book within the disciplinary context of Chinese IR; to identify its promise as well as problems, and to suggest its implications for the development of Chinese IR, the emergence of Chinese theories of international relations, and the policy problems of China's rise. In what follows, I first identify what I call 'the Tsinghua approach' in Chinese IR, its significance in China's international studies and its implications for the debate on the so-called 'Chinese school of IR.' I then discuss the book's methodological assumptions and problems, its theoretical promise and problems and finally its policy implications. Professor Yan has been a distinguished pioneer of the policy, method, and theory of China's international studies for two decades, and this book leaves no doubt as to his achievements. This article is a critical engagement with his scholarship, in the hope that the Tsinghua team may address existing problems and achieve greater accomplishments on the basis of Professor Yan's pioneering groundwork.


Background At the end of 2002, a 3D whole-body white light scanner was introduced into a cosmetic surgery practice in Norfolk, Virginia. The stated purpose was to investigate this device as an aid for evaluating body contouring procedures. For the first time, the surgeon could pre-operatively scan a patient, measure "body areas of interest," and examine in detail the patient's 3D body contours to help plan for the pending surgical procedure. Multiple, custom designed measurement templates were then applied to the 3D body model to extract measurements pertinent to the surgical procedure. The pre-operative 3D body model was stored. Post-operative scans of the patient would then be taken periodically, and measured with the same measurement templates. The difference in measurements, including volume and surface area document the physical changes of patient's body resulting from the procedure. Many cosmetic surgery patients return for additional procedures over the course of years. The patient's 3D digital archive provides the surgeon with the ability to consult previous 3D body models and evaluate the measurement changes of past procedures. These unique insights, combined with a current 3D scan and traditional medical information form a contiguous and robust foundation for assessing the pending surgical procedure. Methods Three case examples are presented. Case 1 considers multiple cosmetic procedures performed in a close succession and the 3D scans and measurement templates used for pre-operative and postoperative evaluation. Case 2 presents an example 3D body scans of sequential cosmetic surgical procedures to replace and rebuild the left and right breasts of a subject. Case 3 involves multiple cosmetic procedures performed on the same patient over a period of years. In each case, the patient's 3D digital archive played an important role in documenting each surgical procedure and provided a platform to evaluate the contours of the patient for the pending surgery. Discussion A 3D whole-body scan is an independent entity. It represents the accurate physical appearance of the subject standing in the scan chamber as of the date and time of scan acquisition. A cosmetic surgery patient may undergo multiple procedures at once, such as breast reduction and abdominoplasty. The result of each procedure can be measured by applying separate customized measurement templates to the post-operative 3D body model. The patient may also undergo a sequence of procedures over time. Each post-operative 3D body model can be evaluated independently. The entire set of preoperative and post-operative 3D body scans form a historical 3D digital archive and can be appended to the traditional patient medical record. Conclusion The utility of a 3D whole-body scanner is in its ability to create an accurate 3D body model of the subject within the scan chamber, thereby creating a permanent 3D record once stored. A "clean" 3D scan documents the subject's physical body. Measurements can be extracted at any time as appropriate, but the archived 3D body model is the important record. Subsequent body scans can be measured and compared to the initial body scan. Many cosmetic surgery procedures result in immediate physical changes to the body. Each post-operative scan documents these changes. Successive post-operative scans form the patient's 3D digital archive. This archive can serve as the basis for further surgical planning, validating surgical results, or can be used as a tool for independently assessing surgical outcomes. Proceedings of 3DBODY.TECH 2017 8th International Conference and Exhibition on 3D Body Scanning and Processing Technologies, Montreal, Canada, 11-12 Oct. 2017


Brain-computer interfaces access the volitional command signals from various brain areas in order to substitute for the motor functions lost due to spinal cord injury or disease. As the final common pathway of the central nervous system (CNS) outputs, the descending tracts of the spinal cord offer an alternative site to extract movement-related command signals. Using flexible 2D microelectrode arrays, we have recorded the corticospinal tract (CST) signals in rats during a reach-to-pull task. The CST activity was then classified by the forelimb movement phases into two or three classes in a training dataset and cross validated in a test set. The average classification accuracies were 80 ± 10% (min: 62% to max: 97% ) and 55 ± 8% (min: 43% to max: 71%) for two-class and three-class cases, respectively. The forelimb flexor and extensor EMG envelopes were also predicted from the CST signals using linear regression. The average correlation coefficient between the actual and predicted EMG signals was 0.5 ± 0.13 (n = 124) , whereas the highest correlation was 0.81 for the biceps EMG. Although the forelimb motor function cannot be explained completely by the CST activity alone, the success rates obtained in reconstructing the EMG signals support the feasibility of a spinal-cord-computer interface as a concept.


IEEE 802.11 wireless networks employ the so-called RTS/CTS mechanism in order to avoid data packet collisions. The main design assumption is that all the nodes in the vicinity of a sender and a receiver will hear the RTS or CTS packets, and defer their transmission appropriately. This assumption happens to not hold, in general, even under perfect operating conditions. Often, neighboring nodes are "masked" by other ongoing transmissions nearby and, hence, are unable to receive the RTS or CTS packets correctly. We refer to such nodes as masked nodes. In this paper, we describe the masked node problem and show scenarios leading to data packet collisions. We evaluate the impact of masked nodes through mathematical analysis and real experiments on a small IEEE 802.11 ad hoc network. The analytical and experimental data closely match and reveal that the presence of a masked node in a network can result in an order of magnitude increase in data packet loss compared to a network without masked nodes. These results are further validated by extensive simulations on a large-scale network, which show that masked nodes also significantly affect delay and throughput performance. Therefore, masked nodes severely limit the effectiveness of the RTS/CTS mechanism in preventing performance degradation in wireless LANs.


In cross-cultural interview, difficulties often arise, and derive from the fact that, social workers and interviewees come from much different worlds, and some major sub-cultural differencessuch as socio-economic group, race or ethnicity, gender, age and sexual orientation may differentiate the interviewer from the interviewee, and consequently, increase social distance and limit understanding, between them. The purpose of this article is to point out the meaning of counseling, in social work practice, and in addition to isolate and clarify these differences that may be of crucial importance, on how the interview will be conducted between a social worker and an individual from a different race. During the interview, there is, however, a need for balance, in assessing the importance of these keyidentifying characteristics. Despite the great number of books and articles referring to racial and ethnic data collection, social workers, rarely, discuss the explicit relevance of these information, in order to conduct an interview.


Microorganisms are present everywhere in the environment. Unbeknownst to most people Staphylococcus aureus is a primary pathogen responsible for many skin infections and is carried by 25% of humans in the anterior nares. Due to the infective nature of Staphylococcus aureus, it is important to determine its prevalence on fomites by testing commonly used surfaces. For these reasons a research experiment was designed to determine the prevalence of S. aureus and Methicillin Resistant S. aureus (MRSA) in computer labs on the campus of Southern Adventist University during the fall semester of 2010. The research experiment was conducted in computer labs found in Southern's classrooms with high student usage. Moist sterile cotton applicators were used to swab computer mice, and all locations were tested six times over a period of three months. A total of 476 fomites were tested for the presence of Staph. aureus and MRSA, both of which were found on these surfaces. Out of the 476 fomites tested, 6% contained S. aureus, and 2% contained MRSA. Based on the results of the six trials performed it can be concluded that both Staph. aureus and MRSA are present but not widespread on the campus of Southern Adventist University. Further research should be conducted to detect change in frequency of MRSA on these surfaces.


Porous materials are important in established processes, such as catalysis and molecular separations, and in emerging technologies for energy and health. Porous organic polymers (POPs), a class of highly crosslinked, amorphous polymers possessing nanopores, have recently emerged as a versatile platform for potential applications. As an emerging material, POPs offer high flexibility for the molecular design and post-synthetic modification of their conjugated skeletons and nanopores. They have shown great potential for challenging energy and environmental issues, as exemplified by their excellent performance in gas storage/separation, catalysis, environmental remediation, and sensing. This review article summarizes the recent frontiers of functional exploration and potential applications of porous organic polymers.


Aims and Objectives: The extra chin foramen (ECF) is a scarce structure in the anatomy of human lower jaw. When it is present, the dental surgeon should take care during anesthesia and surgical procedures for anterior teeth. To investigate the existence of the ECF and the direction in relation to chin foramen in chosen Ramadi City community persons, Al-Anbar Governorate, Iraq, digital panoramic and conventional intraoral (bisecting line angle technique) X-ray was used. Materials and Methods: A total of 100 patients (200 sides of mandible), 54 males and 46 females were selected. Each one was subjected to digital panoramic and conventional intraoral technique. The obtained images were evaluated for the existence of ECF in both male and female patients on each direction of lower jaw (left and right). Age relation to ECF existence was reported. Position of ECF to chin foramen (anterior or posterior) was calculated. The collected data were treated by the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software, version 22. Results: ECFs were seen within 3.5% of the chosen population. Nonsignificant variations were observed between the existence of ECFs regarding gender, side of mandible, age coterie, and position of ECF to chin foramen (P > 0.05). Conclusion: A total of 7 (3.5%) ECFs were detected from 200 sides of mandible. ECFs were observed more in males (5 ECFs, 2.5%), at left side of mandible (4 ECFs, 2%), young patients (4 ECFs, 2%), and anterior to chin foramen (5 ECFs, 2.5%), so they were subjected to complications of damage to nerves and vessels during interventional dental surgery and anesthesia.


Attentio Brand Maps (patent pending) automatically measure and visualise the evolution of perceived associations or relatedness between "entities" and "topics". Entities can be brands, products, organisations, people, etc., while topics can be, for example, events or features. Attentio Brand Maps (ABMs) can be generated for any type of textual data having a temporal aspect (timestamps): blogs, forums, news, scientific articles, patent collections, corporate data, etc. The result is a temporal visualisation of large-scale data sets, facilitating human pattern detection. Part of the commercial value of ABMs lies in the possibility to identify brands and topics that are discussed online together, as well as their evolution, and to identify why certain brands and topics are related.


Increase in blood–brain barrier (BBB) permeability is a crucial step in neuroinflammatory processes. We previously showed that N Methyl D Aspartate Receptor (NMDARs), expressed on cerebral endothelial cells forming the BBB, regulate immune cell infiltration across this barrier in the mouse. Here, we describe the mechanism responsible for the action of NMDARs on BBB permeabilization. We report that mouse CNS endothelial NMDARs display the regulatory GluN3A subunit. Increase in blood–brain barrier (BBB) permeability is a crucial step in neuroinflammatory processes. We previously showed that N Methyl D Aspartate Receptor (NMDARs), expressed on cerebral endothelial cells forming the BBB, regulate immune cell infiltration across this barrier in the mouse. Here, we describe the mechanism responsible for the action of NMDARs on BBB permeabilization. We report that mouse CNS endothelial NMDARs display the regulatory GluN3A subunit. This composition confers to NMDARs' unconventional properties: these receptors do not induce Ca2+ influx but rather show nonionotropic properties. In inflammatory conditions, costimulation of human brain endothelial cells by NMDA agonists (NMDA or glycine) and the serine protease tissue plasminogen activator, previously shown to potentiate NMDAR activity, induces metabotropic signaling via the Rho/ROCK pathway. This pathway leads to an increase in permeability via phosphorylation of myosin light chain and subsequent shrinkage of human brain endothelial cells. Together, these data draw a link between NMDARs and the cytoskeleton in brain endothelial cells that regulates BBB permeability in inflammatory conditions. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The authors describe how NMDARs expressed on endothelial cells regulate blood–brain barrier function via myosin light chain phosphorylation and increase in permeability. They report that these non-neuronal NMDARs display distinct structural, functional, and pharmacological features than their neuronal counterparts.


Myths may be understood as a special kind of literature though not found in written form. Through myths, anthropologists make attempts to describe a world which members of a literate society can barely imagine. Mythical stories about origin of numerous ethnic and tribal communities have helped in tracing their route of migration and the long journey undertaken before arriving at their present places of settlement. This study intends to highlight the myths associated with the origin of the Thangal tribe of Manipur from an anthropological perspective and interpret the stories in the context of evolution, migration and relationship with other neighbouring groups. Fieldwork was conducted using an interview guide to collect primary data and published literatures were consulted for secondary data. The result show two popular versions of origin myths are found among the Thangalfirst is origin from a cave at Makhel located in the Maram area and second is the belief that the Thangal, the Tangkhul and the Meitei are brothers who emerged out of a cave long ago. In conclusion, the origin myths of the Thangal may be confirmed and established through archaeological findings in the form of artefacts. Mention of erection of memorial stones in the second version is a good clue to start an archaeological survey of the sites which are believed to have been once occupied by the people. Keywords—Anthropology, migration, myth, Thangal


This article deals with the rural migration movement during the years of the last major famine (1867–69) in Estonia. Famine was particularly severe in the province of Estland and in the Saaremaa district of the province of Livland. A new wave of migration movement also began in Estland on the island of Hiiumaa in Western Estonia where the misery was greatest. The article studies the migration movement during one year starting with the moment when the movement entered the public spotlight in the summer 1868 until the summer of 1869 when the movement subsided. This short period stands out because of the attention of the state authorities and the publicity that the movement attracted. This article seeks to answer the question of what the standpoint of the state authorities was. Was migration seen as famine relief or something that had to be prevented? The main sources are thematic correspondence in archives of the institutions that guided and controlled the migration movement on the local and central levels from Estonian, Latvian and Russian archives.
The Baltic Governor-General Pyotr Albedinsky suggested that peasants who had lost their source of subsistence due to famine should be given land in the inland governorates of the empire and settled there with the state support. The central government and the tsar himself did not support his programme.
The migration movement was a source of discomfort for the authorities because it drew the attention of the Russian Slavophile public to agrarian relations in the Baltic provinces. When discussing possible solutions for dealing with the migration movement, the main intention of the Russian Empire's Minister of the Interior was to prevent poor peasants from flocking to Saint Petersburg, the capital of the empire. There was no intention to reorganise the principles of land ownership in the Baltic provinces. For the central government of the Russian Empire, it was also important to prevent precedents of settlement with state support that would have increased migration flow throughout the empire, strengthening the belief among peasants that the state would financially support their migration. The nobility of Estland (Ritterschaft) considered the only causes of the widespread migration movement to be the state's inadequate passport policy, incapability to restrict illegal emigration and unwillingness to take resolute measures against it.
Roughly 4500 peasants from Estland registered themselves for migration to southern provinces of the Russian Empire. Approximately 2000 peasants, who were distrustful of local officials and landlords, headed for Saint Petersburg. Those that were sent back sometimes repeatedly returned to the capital. Both numbers say little about those who actually emigrated from Estland during the famine.
Measures implemented by the authorities such as restrictions on issuing passports and hindering moving onward from Saint Petersburg (even with required passports) put peasants in a difficult situation. Large numbers of peasants departed without applying for any assistance from the authorities. Those who made it to the province of Stavropol in Caucasia had an advantage since most of the arrivals were given land. Officials of the province of origin and those of the province of destination regarded migration differently. Areas of colonisation were willing to accept peasants who wished to cultivate the fields in order to gain additional manpower.
About 300 Estonian peasants who had assembled in Saint Petersburg to obtain state support for migrating to Caucasia were forcibly settled in the province of Novgorod at state expense at the end of 1868 and beginning of 1869. A third of them died shortly after relocation and another third were minors. This forcible settlement was not carried out in the hope of improving the subsistence of peasants or to stimulate the economy of the province of Novgorod but rather was an emergency measure to prevent the spread of disease in the capital.


This thesis integrates theory and practice of team coaching into a holistic framework relevant to professional coaches and professional coach educators.

I adopt an autoethnographic approach, exploring team coaching via three fieldwork sites; two sites where I am the team coach and thirdly a discussion group of professional coaches. Fieldwork data is collated chronologically and implicit knowledge is surfaced through story telling as a mechanism of sense making to answer the question: What is going on when I am coaching a team? In analysing and interpreting my stories, I take a postmodernist theoretical perspective, adopting a deconstructive approach which seeks to elucidate multiple ways of knowing and seeing.

The resulting framework draws on four metaphors. Team as machine that follows a functionalist model of effectiveness that can be managed through behaviours and process. Team as family, which illuminates the interwoven nature of individual relationships and suggests strategies to create safe, mutually respectful collaborative behaviours. Team as living system represents the experience of teams thriving within a dynamic interrelated environment. Finally, the team and coach in Wonderland depicts a coaching assignment as analogous to following the White Rabbit into Wonderland. In a strange environment we may feel uncertain and vulnerable, however, curiosity enables us to remain open to possibilities. Each metaphorical perspective offers a 'mode of awareness' from which to operate as a coach.

The framework develops our understanding of team coaching by bringing together diverse theoretical streams to inform what is going on in a new and accessible way as the metaphorical devices encapsulate complex ideas with simplicity. I contribute to team coaching practice as professional coaches can use the metaphorical language allied with theory to plan and reflect upon coaching assignments, consider relevant coaching approaches and engage in supervision. A shared language of metaphors provides researchers and practitioners with a new way to describe team coaching, creating a foundation on which to progress development in the future. In addition, the framework provides the basis for a coach development curriculum. I distinguish between team coaching and other team-based interventions and highlight how dyadic coaching practices may be applied within the team context to enable professionals from a variety of backgrounds to engage with the framework. Finally, I offer a transparent insight into a different way of investigating professional coaching practice describing how autoethnography allows us to tell practice stories in ways that are both evocative, insightful and open to analysis.


This study is concerned with double-shear bolted connections in cold-reduced steel sheets that undergo the pure bearing failure mode of the inside sheet. Compared to the published test results of bolted connections failing in the net section fracture, those involving the bearing failure mode had very wide scatter in the ultimate test loads of specimens having seemingly similar configurations. This technical note presents the laboratory test results of 51 specimens composed of G2 and G450 steel sheets, which have very different ductility properties. One new and significant finding is that the absolute bearing capacity can be considerably higher in the rolling direction of the cold-reduced steel sheet than in the perpendicular direction, even though the tensile strength has the opposite trend. Another result is that material ductility has a much greater effect on the bearing capacity than on the net section tension capacity. It was also found that snug tightening had little effect on the bearing capacity of specimens thicker than 1.5 mm. For the inside sheet of a double-shear bolted connection, the current American Iron and Steel Institute provision for bearing capacity is reasonably accurate if the load is applied in the rolling direction of G2 steel sheet, but is overoptimistic in the perpendicular direction. Disciplines Engineering | Science and Technology Studies Publication Details Teh, L. H. & Uz, M. (2014). Effect of loading direction on the bearing capacity of cold-reduced steel sheets. Journal of Structural Engineering, 140 (12), 06014005-1-06014005-5. This journal article is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/eispapers/2626 Effect of Loading Direction on the Bearing Capacity of Cold-Reduced 1


Employing a low-cost and highly efficient electrocatalyst to replace Pt-based catalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) has attracted increasing interest in renewable energy research. Earth-abundant transition metals such as Fe, Co and Ni have been investigated as promising alternatives in alkaline electrolytes. However, these non-precious-metal catalysts are not stable in acids, excluding their application in the acidic solid polymer electrolyte (SPE). Herein, we report a strategy to encapsulate 3d transition metals Fe, Co and the FeCo alloy into nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and investigated their HER activity in acidic electrolytes. The optimized catalysts exhibited long-term durability and high activity with only an ∼70 mV onset overpotential vs. RHE which is quite close to that of the commercial 40% Pt/C catalyst, demonstrating the potential for the replacement of Pt-based catalysts. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations indicated that the introduction of metal and nitrogen dopants can synergistically optimize the electronic structure of the CNTs and the adsorption free energy of H atoms on CNTs, and therefore promote the HER with a Volmer–Heyrovsky mechanism.


This research set-out to: a) investigate attitudes of disabled people (adults) toward other disabled people; and, b) attitudes of disabled people toward different impairment groups. Comparative data from a non-disabled sample was also collected. Two new attitude rating scales were developed for this research: the General Attitude Scale Toward Disabled People (GASTDP) and the Attitude Toward Impairment Scale (A TIS). Both scales achieved acceptable levels of internal and external reliability.

Positive attitudes toward disabled people were found from both the disabled (M = 41.08; n = 193) and non-disabled samples (M = 39.29; n = 120). However, a hierarchy of impairment also appears to exist, with the disabled sample producing a rank ordering of most accepted to least of Deaf, Arthritis, Epilepsy, Cerebral Palsy, HIV/AIDS, Down's Syndrome and Schizophrenia. The nondisabled sample rank ordering was the same for five of the seven impairment groups, with only Cerebral Palsy and HIV / AIDS being placed in reverse order.

The GASTDP contains two sub-scales (Subtle and Blatant Prejudice subscales). Statistically significant results between the two sub-scales were found for both the disabled and non-disabled samples, suggesting people tend to hold subtle forms of prejudice toward disabled people. The discussion therefore utilises the term aversive disablism, based on aversive racism. This theory argues that whilst people may be reluctant to express negative attitudes toward disabled people, they may also support policies that are disablist, i.e. segregated housing.

The contact hypothesis, whereby contact with members of a minority group influence attitudes, was not supported by the data.

This thesis recommends further research into subtle forms of prejudice toward disabled people from an in-group perspective and attitudes toward different impairment groups.


Selling Shakespeare tells a new story about Shakespeare's life and career in print, a story centered on the people who created, bought, and sold books in the early modern period. The interests and investments of publishers and booksellers have defined our ideas of what is "Shakespearean," and attending to their interests demonstrates how one version of Shakespearean authorship surpassed the rest. In this book Adam Hooks identifies and examines four pivotal episodes in Shakespeare's life in print: the debut of his narrative poems, the appearance of a series of best-selling plays, the publication of collected editions of his works, and the cataloguing of those works. Hooks also offers a new kind of biographical investigation and historicist criticism, one based not on external life documents, nor on the texts of Shakespeare's works, but on the books that were printed, published, sold, circulated, collected, and catalogued under his name.


Bug Tracking System (BTS) is public ally accessible which enables geographically distributed developers to follow the work of each other and contribute in bug fixing. Developer interactions through commenting on bug reports generate a developer social network that can be used to improve software development and maintenance activities. In large scale complex software projects, software maintenance requires larger groups to participate in its activities. Most previous bug assignments approaches assign only one developer to new bugs. However, bug fixing is a collaborative effort between several developers (i.e., many developers contribute their experience in fixing a bug report). In this work, we build developers social networks based on developers comments on bug reports and detect developers communities. We also assign a relevant community to each newly committed bug report. Moreover, we rank developers in each community based on their experience. An experimental evaluation is conducted on three open source projects namely Net Beans, Free desktop, and Mandriva. The results show that the detected communities are significantly connected with high density. They also show that the proposed approach achieves feasible accuracy of bug assignment.


In November 2005, Australian author Melanie La'Brooy published a defence of 'chick lit' in the Review section of Australia's national newspaper, The Weekend Australian. La'Brooy responded to criticisms of the genre, particularly those made by prize winning authors Beryl Bainbridge and Doris Lessing. Bainbridge had asserted that people were wasting their time reading 'chick lit' while Lessing dismissed the genre's authors for writing "instantly forgettable books." La'Brooy referred to other critics who decried the genre for being antifeminist because the search for and acquisition of romantic love was a central concern of the plot. In defending 'chick lit', La'Brooy asked, "Does romantic idealism immediately polarise a desire for political, professional and social equality?" Her question highlights two concerns raised by contemporary literary and feminist scholars including Pamela Regis, Stephanie Harzewski and Imelda Whelehan. The first concern focuses on the compatibility of romance novels in particular and the romance plot more widely with 'feminism.' Historically, feminists such as Germaine Greer have criticised romance novels for their form (including their plot, characters and endings) and their supposed affect on readers. Yet, as early as 1984, Margaret Ann Jensen's Love's Sweet Return: The Harlequin Story showed that mass market paperback romances had changed in response to feminist criticism. Likewise, Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984) argued that romance novels have a complex affect on their readers. The second concern of feminist and literary scholars in relation to romance novels is how best to define and apply 'feminism' as a concept and set of theories when studying contemporary literature. This concern has been complicated by the 'posting' of feminism, where feminism's meaning is now determined largely by whom is speaking and the context of the discussion. Many definitions of feminism abound including the different perspectives mapped in Rosemarie Tong's Feminist Thought (1989) to the more recent theories of feminism as first wave, second wave, third wave and/or postfeminism. Thus, these recent theoretical developments have led to 'feminism' becoming an 'overloaded' concept and a highly contested theoretical terrain. This complexity is problematic for literary analysis.

The relatively new genre of 'chick lit', female authored novels with contemporary settings and eighteen to forty-five year old heroines, enables an exploration of these concerns about romance and feminism. Most chick novels employ a traditional romance plot to represent a heroine living in the 1990s or 2000s. The use of contemporary settings means that 'chick lit' automatically represents Western culture radically transformed by the modern women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The most interesting avenue for inquiry raised by 'chick lit' is the inherent tension between the genre's representation of a post 'second wave feminist' setting and the romantic narrative structure.

This thesis explores the relationship between romance and feminism in a selection of Australian chick lit novels. I undertake a traditional literary analysis focusing on the plot, character and themes of the novels. Five permutations of Australian chick lit are examined: urban romances, cosmopolitan Koori lit (Indigenous chick lit), comical suburban novels, the rural romance and the red dirt romance. My reading of Australian chick lit draws upon Pamela Regis's A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003) to examine how the novels utilise romantic narrative elements, construct romantic characters and represent themes of love and romance. I do this to determine the degree to which chick novels adhere to the essential elements of romance and explore how companionate love is portrayed. My feminist reading of Australian chick lit also examines the plot, characterisation and themes of the selected novels. I assess whether chick lit deviates from the romance plot and whether such deviations can be deemed feminist. I apply feminist theory to explore the representation of the protagonists in chick lit, particularly the genre's heroines. I focus on the gendered identities of each heroine and consider whether they exhibit postfeminist and/or third wave feminist characteristics. I then apply contemporary feminist theory to critically analyse the central themes raised by each subgenre of Australian chick lit including consumption, body image, gender and racial discrimination, social relationships, success and 'having it all' and gender inequality in the workplace. I argue that my selected novels use their narrative structure to critically engage with these themes while seeking out resolutions for the main characters.

My analysis of Australian chick lit reveals that some novels can be read as strong examples of feminist romance. However, this depends on the text, who is reading it and the characteristics of feminism and romance being applied. I argue that the subgenres of Australian chick lit examined here continue the tradition of prose romance while engaging with, and sometimes championing, the quest for women's empowerment.


Expansion and puffing are specific characteristics of fried products critical for consumer preferences. To obtain expanded and puffed dried products that fit well with consumer acceptance criteria, it is necessary to pay attention to the process conditions which change the raw material characteristics during frying. The important changes include volume and density ratio of the products during frying. Hypothetically, these changes are due to water vaporization and the decrease dry matter in the products. The objective of this research is to develop a mathematical model of volume and density ratio changes for jack fruit during vacuum frying as a function of water and starch content reductions. Samples were vacuum fried at 70–100OC and pressure of 80-90 kPa for 15–60 min. The parameters observed were volume and density as well as water and starch contents of samples before and after vacuum frying. The results showed that the developed model can be used to predict changes in volume and density ratio of jack fruit during vacuum frying.


A number of works are dedicated to the investigation of the effects of the excluded volume interactions on the dynamics of cyclic polymers in good solvents using the Yu-Fujita model. Unfortunately, this latter does not satisfy the circularity condition. To overcome this problem, use is made of the Bensafi-Benmouna model which describes quite well their thermodynamic and structural properties in good solvents. This paper deals with the dynamic scattering properties of both cyclic homopolymers and copolymers in good solvents. These properties, such as the relaxation frequencies and the diffusion coefficient, are briefly discussed and the implications of the excluded volume interactions on such properties are emphasized more. Finally, cyclic chains dynamic properties are compared to those of their linear counterparts, in order to comprehend the effects of the cyclization of linear polymers under good solvent conditions.


Abstract:Unlike its English version, first published in 2011, Discours, figure was published in Spanish in 1979, four years after Francisco Franco's death, during the Spanish transition to democracy. The relevance of this information is connected to the fact that the man who introduced Lyotard to the Spanish intellectual scene was the now controversial Spanish liberal-conservative journalist Federico Jiménez Losantos. However, at the time, Losantos was not only known for being an unwavering supporter of Maoism, but he was also among the first promoters of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Barcelona and one of the main theorists devoted to the study of reductive abstraction in Spain. The purpose of this article is threefold, as it intends to (1) break down the publishing dynamics that led to Lyotard's work being translated into Spanish so early on; (2) delve into the context of that translation within a very specific framework, which is the shift toward liberalism of many post-' 68 Maoists; and (3) analyze the poor reception of Lyotard's work by the Spanish-speaking public. To approach these questions, this article resorts to one of the fundamental premises of the economy of desire that Lyotard postulated in the 1970s: that any research on political economy must be paired with an analysis of its libidinal economy.


Societal, economic and scientific interests in knowing where biodiversity is, how it is faring and what can be done to efficiently mitigate further biodiversity loss and the associated loss of ecosystem services are at an all‐time high. So far, however, biodiversity monitoring has primarily focused on structural and compositional features of ecosystems despite growing evidence that ecosystem functions are key to elucidating the mechanisms through which biological diversity generates services to humanity. This monitoring gap can be traced to the current lack of consensus on what exactly ecosystem functions are and how to track them at scales beyond the site level. This contribution aims to advance the development of a global biodiversity monitoring strategy by proposing the adoption of a set of definitions and a typology for ecosystem functions, and reviewing current opportunities and potential limitations for satellite remote sensing technology to support the monitoring of ecosystem functions worldwide. By clearly defining ecosystem processes, functions and services and their interrelationships, we provide a framework to improve communication between ecologists, land and marine managers, remote sensing specialists and policy makers, thereby addressing a major barrier in the field.


The 24/7Globalisation E-Business Assumption underpins most of the current E-Business models. This paper analyses the current E-Business models to identify the 24/7 Globalisation E-Business Assumption. These assumptions are then used in the analysis of an interpretive study of six New Zealand life-style winery owners to explain the contradictions between business practice and E-Business models reported in the literature. The identification and description of the 24/7 Globalisation E-Business Assumption will help researchers understand how to work with life-style businesses in a more flexible way to design more applicable E-Business models. It may also provide some hope for life-style business owners who have found current E-Business models difficult to apply.


N AIROBI, Kenya—When Bina Maseno was 23, she decided to run for Council Assembly in Nairobi City County and reached out to a few experienced female politicians for advice. She expected to hear suggestions for navigating party power dynamics or articulating campaign messages for a broader audience. But what she got was a primer in protecting herself from sexual assault by male politicians and putative voters.


We aimed to develop a beam monitoring system based on a fiber-optic radiation sensor (FORS), which can be used in real time in a beam control room, to monitor a beam in proton therapy, where patients are treated using a pencil beam scanning (PBS) mode, by measuring the beam spot width (BSW) and beam spot position (BSP) of the PBS. We developed two-dimensional detector arrays to monitor the PBS beam in the beam control room. We measured the BSW for five energies of the PBS beam and compared the measurements with those of Lynx and EBT3 film. In order to confirm the BSP, we compared the BSP values of the PBS calculated from radiation treatment planning (RTP), to five BSP values measured using FORS at 224.2 MeV. When comparing BSW values obtained using developed monitoring system to the measurements obtained using commercial EBT3 film, the average difference in BSW value of the PBS beam was 0.1 ± 0.1 mm. In the comparison of BSW values with the measurements obtained using Lynx, the average difference was 0.2 ± 0.1 mm. When comparing BSP measurements to the values calculated from RTP, the average difference was 0.4 ± 0.2 mm. The study results confirmed that the developed FORS-based beam monitoring system can monitor a PBS beam in real time in a beam control room, where proton beam is controlled for the patient.


Since the initial breakthroughs in the 1960's and 70's that led to the development of the glucose biosensor, the oxygen electrode, ion-selective electrodes, and electrochemical/optochemical diagnostic devices, the vision of very reliable, affordable chemical sensors and bio-sensors capable of functioning autonomously for long periods of time (years) remains unrealized. This is despite massive investment in research and the publication of many thousands of papers in the literature. It is over 40 years since the first papers proposing the concept of the artificial pancreas, by combining glucose monitoring with an insulin pump1. Yet even now, there is no chemical sensor/biosensor that can function reliably inside the body for more than a few days, and such is the gap in what can be delivered (days), and what is required (years) for implantable devices, it is not surprising that in health diagnostics, the overwhelmingly dominant paradigm for reliable measurements is still single use disposable sensors. Realising disruptive improvements in chem/bio-sensing platforms capable of long-term independent operation requires a step-back and rethinking of strategies, and considering solutions suggested by nature and materials science, rather than incremental improvements in existing approaches2.
Through recent developments in 3D fabrication technologies in recent years, we can now build and characterize much more sophisticated 3D platforms than was previously possible. We can create regions of differing polarity and hydrophobicity, mix passive and binding behaviours, and regions of differing flexibility/rigidity, hardness/softness. In addition, we can integrate materials that can switch between these characteristics, enabling the creation of biomimetic microfluidic building blocks that exhibit photoswitchable characteristics such as programmed microvehicle movement (chemotaxis), switchable binding and release, switchable actuation (e.g. valving), and photodetection. These building blocks can be in turn integrated into microfluidic systems with hitherto unsurpassed functionalities that can contribute to bridging the gap between what is required for many applications, and what we can currently deliver3. The transition from the current paradigm from engineering inspired 2D fluidics to bioinspired 3D fluids is a major milestone in the evolution of microfluidics. Another lesson we can learn from biofluidics is that the entire system is active. Currently, the only role of the substrate in a microfluidic chip is to define the channels. In biology, the channel walls have a very active role, as has the surrounding tissue. Walls can sense, and respond e.g. open pores and release active agents such as functionalised micro/nanoparticles, vesicles, droplets). Implementation of these disruptive concepts may open the way to biochemical sensing systems with performance characteristics far beyond that of current devices. A key development will be the integration of biomimetic functions like self-diagnosis of condition and self-repair capabilities to extend their useful lifetime4.
References
(1) Albisser, A. M.; Leibel, B. S.; Ewart, T. G.; Davidovac, Z.; Botz, C. K.; Zingg, W.; Schipper, H.; Gander, R. Clinical Control of Diabetes by the Artificial Pancreas. Diabetes 1974, 23 (5), 397–404.
(2) Diamond, D.; Byrne, R.; Lopez, F. B.; Cleary, J.; Maher, D.; Healy, J.; Fay, C.; Kim, J.; Lau, K.-T. Biomimetics and Materials with Multiple Personalities - The Foundation of Next Generation Molecular Sensing Devices. In 2010 IEEE SENSORS; IEEE Sensors; IEEE, 2010; pp 1079–1082.
(3) Benito-Lopez, F.; Byrne, R.; Răduţă, A. M.; Vrana, N. E.; McGuinness, G.; Diamond, D. Ionogel-Based Light-Actuated Valves for Controlling Liquid Flow in Micro-Fluidic Manifolds. Lab Chip 2010, 10 (2), 195–201.
(4) Florea, L.; Wagner, K.; Wagner, P.; Wallace, G. G.; Benito-Lopez, F.; Officer, D. L.; Diamond, D. Photo-Chemopropulsion - Light-Stimulated Movement of Microdroplets. Adv. Mater. 2014, 26 (43), 7339–7345.


This study explores students' perceptions related to the implementation of e-portfolios in the context of Taiwanese higher education. Thirty Taiwanese university students were interviewed, and data analysis includes 14 interviewees' e-portfolios and responses to 281 valid surveys from non-interviewed students. The study presents students' perspectives using textual descriptions and visual presentations related to developing e-portfolios. A three-stage model developed by the first author links five critical success factors for implementing e-portfolios in Taiwan. Overall, the students' perceived usefulness, university support, and e-portfolio audiences (i.e., educators, employers, and friends) as well as intentions to visit e-portfolios are the major components used to promote e-portfolios in Taiwanese higher education. The findings of the study indicate that the value of developing an e-portfolio can be enhanced by using incentives such as design contests or encouragement through various other activities (e.g., class activities, team projects, and extracurricular activities). Accessibility, interactivity, and ownership are university students' concerns when they are deciding to develop e-portfolios. For implementing a system of e-portfolios, the study suggests guidelines that can become important references for countries with similar cultural backgrounds in higher education. New insights relevant for scholars from Western countries also appear at the end.


Kdump, a kexec based kernel crash dumping mechanism, has witnessed a lot of new significant development activities recently. Features like, the relocatable kernel, dump filtering, and initrd based dumping have enhanced kdump capabilities are important steps towards making it a more reliable and easy to use solution. New tools like Linux Kernel Dump Test Module (LKDTM) provide an opportunity to automate kdump testing. It can be especially useful for distributions to detect and weed out regressions relatively quickly. This paper presents various newly introduced features and provides implementation details wherever appropriate. It also briefly discusses the future directions, such as early boot crash dumping.


We analyze the role of oil price volatility in reducing US macroeconomic instability. Using a Markov Switching Rational Expectation New Keynesian model we revisit the timing of the Great Moderation and the sources of changes in the volatility of macroeconomic variables. We find that smaller or fewer oil price shocks did not play a major role in explaining the Great Moderation. Instead oil price shocks are recurrent sources of economic fluctuations. The most important factor reducing overall variability is a decline in the volatility of structural macroeconomic shocks. A change to a more responsive (hawkish) monetary policy regime also played a role. (JEL E12, E23, E52, Q35, Q43)


We present Sparse Non-negative Matrix (SNM) estimation, a novel probability estimation technique for language modeling that can efficiently incorporate arbitrary features. We evaluate SNM language models on two corpora: the One Billion Word Benchmark and a subset of the LDC English Gigaword corpus. Results show that SNM language models trained with n-gram features are a close match for the well-established Kneser-Ney models. The addition of skip-gram features yields a model that is in the same league as the state-of-the-art recurrent neural network language models, as well as complementary: combining the two modeling techniques yields the best known result on the One Billion Word Benchmark. On the Gigaword corpus further improvements are observed using features that cross sentence boundaries. The computational advantages of SNM estimation over both maximum entropy and neural network estimation are probably its main strength, promising an approach that has large flexibility in combining arbitrary features and yet scales gracefully to large amounts of data.


Some receptor tyrosine kinases can activate apoptotic pathways in the absence of ligand. Most transmembrane receptors are believed to be inactive in the absence of their cognate ligand and initiate downstream signal transduction only upon ligand binding. However, research has shown that some receptors are also active in the absence of their ligand and induce a "negative" signal to trigger apoptosis. Thus, these receptors, dubbed dependence receptors, create a cellular state of dependence on ligand availability. The dependence receptor theory postulates key roles for these receptors during embryonic development, neurodegenerative diseases, or cancer progression and metastasis and is bolstered by new evidence.


Knowledge tracing is a sequence prediction problem where the goal is to predict the outcomes of students over questions as they are interacting with a learning platform. By tracking the evolution of the knowledge of some student, one can optimize instruction. Existing methods are either based on temporal latent variable models, or factor analysis with temporal features. We here show that factorization machines (FMs), a model for regression or classification, encompasses several existing models in the educational literature as special cases, notably additive factor model, performance factor model, and multidimensional item response theory. We show, using several real datasets of tens of thousands of users and items, that FMs can estimate student knowledge accurately and fast even when student data is sparsely observed, and handle side information such as multiple knowledge components and number of attempts at item or skill level. Our approach allows to fit student models of higher dimension than existing models, and provides a testbed to try new combinations of features in order to improve existing models.


"The Seeker's Guide to Harry Potter" offers 'seekers' of all kinds profound and fascinating insights into the narrative themes, symbols and mythic elements encountered in the Harry Potter books. Drawing from diverse spiritual and scholarly sources, it is an open-minded guide to the rich layers of meaning and symbolism we encounter in all seven of the novels. The Seeker's Guide doesn't try to 'read' J.K. Rowling's mind about the symbolism she may or may not have meant to put in the books, but to read the symbols as they appear, with some of the layers of meaning that they have traditionally held. Drawing from anthropology, theology, psychology and the history of the human experience of the Sacred, "The Seeker's Guide to Harry Potter" offers fans of any or no spiritual faith a deeper sense of magic and meaning in the novels and in their own lives.


Principles of Risk Management and Patient Safety identifies changes in the industry and describes how these changes have influenced the functions of risk management in all aspects of healthcare. The book is divided into four sections. The first section describes the current state of the healthcare industry and looks at the importance of risk management and the emergence of patient safety. It also explores the importance of working with other sectors of the health care industry such as the pharmaceutical and device manufacturers. The last three sections focus on the three main components of the risk manager's responsibility: claims management, risk financing and proactive loss control. The final section touches on solutions for seamless integration between risk management and patient safety functions. Using an integrative approach Principles of Risk Management and Patient Safety offers a comprehensive review of the current issues which formulate the basis of a risk management program and provide the knowledge that a risk manager would be expected to have. Accompanied by a complete package of instructor resources including Instructor's Manual, TestBank, and PowerPoints.


A statistical technique new to lung function testing is described and has been applied to a study of flow-volume loop tests in normal subjects. Maximal expiratory flow-volume loops were performed on air, then breathing an 80% helium: 20% oxygen mixture for three deep breaths (3B) then three minutes (3M) twice daily for five consecutive days on 25 asymptomatic subjects (eight smokers and 17 non-smokers). The tests were performed on an Ohio differentiating spirometer and recorded on a storage oscilloscope. The standard lung function tests—forced vital capacity (FVC), forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) and peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR)—were the most reproducible. Maximal expiratory flow rate at 50% vital capacity (MEF50) and at 75% vital capacity (MEF75) were passably reproducible. MEF50 and MEF75 were as reliable breathing helium as breathing air, with 3B as reliable as 3M. However ratios of MEF helium/MEF air were very unreliable indeed, for both MEF50 and MEF75 and 3B and 3M. Thus percentage improvement in MEF after breathing helium appears to be an unreliable test in normal subjects. Helium isoflow volume was also very poorly reproducible with, on average, more variation within a single subject than between subjects. These conclusions apply to normal subjects and will require further work to assess them in specific diseases. However the very poor performance of isoflow volume and flow ratios in normal subjects suggests that it may be relatively difficult to distinguish normal subjects from patients with small airways obstruction using these tests. An application of canonical variate analysis to the data is described. This statistical technique assesses which indices or combinations of indices vary independently and hence are measuring qualitatively different parameters. Almost all the data variation was encompassed by variations in four parameters. Thus there are probably only four features in the flow-volume curve which can be used to discriminate between individuals. Repeating this analysis in patients with a specific disease should enable the best tests for use in that particular disease to be defined precisely. Canonical variate analysis should also be a useful method of assessing a new lung function test, since it assesses a test's reliability and more importantly whether it contributes any new information not given by older tests.


Although neutron-induced activation in a fusion reactor is a nonlinear problem whose solution requires the use of both neutron transport and activation codes, a simplified analytical approach to bismuth and polonium build-up in lead is proposed to estimate the polonium inventory and the related biological hazards of LiPb-bearing blankets. All neutronic reactions of polonium build-up in lead and in its bismuth impurities are surveyed and discussed. The contribution of the different possible chains to the build-up of polonium is evaluated. A set of differential equations for the densities of {sup 209}Bi and {sup 210}Po isotopes in the lead is worked into simplified, easy-to-use expressions. These analytical formulas obtained for the densities can be used for the estimation of both the bismuth and the polonium densities after any reactor operation time and allow identification of the build-up mechanisms of those isotopes. A simplified formula for polonium inventory estimations at any blanket zone is proposed as well. The polonium inventory evaluation takes into account the initial conditions (primarily bismuth impurity in the lead) and the reactor operation conditions, such as the average availability of a fusion reactor and the blanket operation scenario. 44 refs., 11 figs., 5 tabs.


Movement generation that is consistent with observed or demonstrated behaviour is an efficient way to seed movement planning in complex, high-dimensional movement systems like humanoid robots. We present a method for learning potential-based policies from constrained motion data. In contrast to previous approaches to direct policy learning, our method can combine observations from a variety of contexts where different constraints are in force, to learn the underlying unconstrained policy in form of its potential function. This allows us to generalise and predict behaviour where novel constraints apply. We demonstrate our approach on systems of varying complexity, including kinematic data from the ASIMO humanoid robot with 22 degrees of freedom.


The nonlinear response of liquid water was investigated at 1064 and 532 nm using a Nd:YAG laser delivering pulses of 17 ps and its second harmonic. The experiments were performed using the D4σ method combined with the Z-scan technique. Nonlinear refractive indices of third- and fifth-order were determined, as well as the three-photon absorption coefficient, for both wavelengths. A good agreement was found between theory and experiment.


Off-axis electron holography in the transmission electron microscope is used to characterize the magnetic microstructure of magnetotactic bacteria. The practical details of the technique are illustrated through the examination of single cells of strains MV-1 and MS-1, which contain crystals of magnetite (Fe 3 O 4 ) that are ∼50 nm in size and are arranged in chains. Electron holography allows the magnetic domain structures within the nanocrystals to be visualized directly at close to the nanometer scale. The crystals are shown to be single magnetic domains. The magnetization directions of small crystals that would be superparamagnetic if they were isolated are found to be constrained by magnetic interactions with adjacent, larger crystals in the chains. Magnetization reversal processes are followed in situ , allowing a coercive field of between 30 and 45 mT to be measured for the MV-1 cell. To within experimental error, the remanent magnetizations of the chains are found to be equal to the saturation magnetization of magnetite (0.60T). A new approach is used to determine that the magnetic moments of the chains are 7 and 5×10 −16 Am 2 for the 1600-nm long MV-1 and 1200-nm long MS-1 chains examined, respectively. The degree to which the observed magnetic domain structure is reproducible between successive measurements is also addressed.


Until recently, critical attention given to captivity narratives has focussed upon two key types. The first, frontier tales of white settler captivity at the hands of Native Americans, have received the most scholarly attention. The second type to attract critical interest is concerned with Mediterranean trade, and the captivity of Christians on the Barbary coast, particularly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study, by contrast, examines lesser-known, British captivity narratives of the Romantic era, including those available in the Travel Writing section of the Corvey archive, some of which have received little, if any, critical attention to date. The study ranges in location from North America and Africa to India. These British captivity narratives are valuable and subversive documents revealing the sometimes troubled progress of British colonialism and imperialism. These narratives yield fruitful study as texts in their own right, and should be seen as more than overlooked historical sources. The thesis discusses the complex relation of such narratives to 'truth'. It has been suggested by critics such as Pratt (1992), Baepler (1999), and Snader (2000), that captivity narratives are a 'safe' site for the representation of British vulnerability, as the fact of publication presupposes an outcome favourable to imperial authority. This thesis argues against this presumption. By following Edward Said's influential 1978 work Orientialism, postcolonial analysis of imperial and colonial texts has paid scant attention to the fluidity of the boundary between coloniser and colonised, self and Other. This thesis uses the work of Homi K. Bhabha as a way forward from this position. Bhabha questions the binary formulation of colonial relations, arguing that colonial discourse is fundamentally and necessarily ambivalent. The narratives examined in this thesis are used to exemplify this ambivalence, through consideration of the discourses of savagery and civilisation, the representation of British captives at the hands of non-Europeans, and the possibility of 'going native'. This thesis argues that captivity narratives cannot be considered a 'safe' site for the representation of the vulnerability of both British individuals and of British national identity, because in Bhabha's view, the ambivalence of colonial discourse unsettles its authority.


BACKGROUND
Studies have rarely compared health outcomes for patients with breast cancer at different treatment stages.

OBJECTIVE
The purpose of the study was to compare symptoms and quality of life among patients with breast carcinoma receiving target, chemotherapy, or combined therapy.

METHODS
A longitudinal study was carried out with 57 patients receiving chemotherapy, 30 receiving target therapy, and 34 receiving combined therapy. Data were collected before the start of treatment, at 4 weeks, and at 12 weeks following the start of treatment. Symptom severity and interference were assessed by the M. D. Anderson Symptom Inventory. The physical and mental components of quality of life (physical component score [PCS] and mental component score [MCS]) were assessed using SF-36.

RESULTS
There were no significant differences in symptom severity and interference for patients in the 3 therapy groups. The PCSs did not differ significantly according to the therapy group but did decrease significantly after each treatment. Patients receiving target therapy had significantly higher MCSs than did patients receiving chemotherapy, but the MCSs did not differ significantly before and after the treatment. Patients with higher symptom severity and interference had worse PCS and MCS.

CONCLUSIONS
Patients at all treatment groups had worse physical components quality of life after treatment as compared with before treatment. Patients receiving target therapy had better mental components of quality of life. The mental components of quality of life remained stable during treatment.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE
Nurses should assess the patients' symptoms during treatment and provide timely intervention to optimize their quality of life.


Cryptococcus gattii, an emerging fungal pathogen of humans and animals, is found on a variety of trees in tropical and temperate regions. The ecological niche and virulence of this yeast remain poorly defined. We used Arabidopsis thaliana plants and plant-derived substrates to model C. gattii in its natural habitat. Yeast cells readily colonized scratch-wounded plant leaves and formed distinctive extracellular fibrils (40–100 nm diameter ×500–3000 nm length). Extracellular fibrils were observed on live plants and plant-derived substrates by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and by high voltage- EM (HVEM). Only encapsulated yeast cells formed extracellular fibrils as a capsule-deficient C. gattii mutant completely lacked fibrils. Cells deficient in environmental sensing only formed disorganized extracellular fibrils as apparent from experiments with a C. gattii STE12α mutant. C. gattii cells with extracellular fibrils were more virulent in murine model of pulmonary and systemic cryptococcosis than cells lacking fibrils. C. gattii cells with extracellular fibrils were also significantly more resistant to killing by human polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMN) in vitro even though these PMN produced elaborate neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs). These observations suggest that extracellular fibril formation could be a structural adaptation of C. gattii for cell-to-cell, cell-to-substrate and/or cell-to- phagocyte communications. Such ecological adaptation of C. gattii could play roles in enhanced virulence in mammalian hosts at least initially via inhibition of host PMN– mediated killing.


Recent progress in cancer therapy has been exceptional, particularly the clinical development of immune stop inhibitors, like anti-CTLA-4 and anti-PD-1 antibodies. The success of those agents has discovered the importance of anti-tumor immune activities in action cancers. Cancer peptide vaccines represent another approach to eliciting and boosting anti-tumor immune responses. whereas typical cancer vaccines have had restricted clinical effectivity, targeting primarily tumor-associated self-antigens, a completely unique approach is currently being explored to focus on growth-specific antigens cistronrated from gene mutations occurring in tumor cells throughout growth transformation. system is developed in such some way that it will with efficiency acknowledge, target and eliminate foreign pathogens effectively, however leave the host self-architecture intact. Throughout the organic process self-reactive high eagerness immune effectors area unit deleted, and a number of other mechanisms area unit place in situ to make sure that the self-reactive low eagerness immune effectors cannot generate harmful response reactions. T cells area unit vital immune effectors of a protecting substance specific adaptive reaction. whereas engagement of the lymphocyte receptor (TCR) vital for the event of substance specific lymphocyte response, development of effector perform in T cells is fine-tuned by positive factors, the co-stimulatory factors, and negative factors, the co-inhibitory receptors.


This exploratory paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the use of design experimentation to augment students' approaches to speculative projects within the context of professional interior design education. By analysing student-based research as integrated into final comprehensive graduate-level design projects at a major North American university, the potential for experimentation to inform design process is articulated. Although the results of such acts are not always easily assessed within the constraints of real-life criteria, it is optimum for generating innovations in design process and hybrid theoretical frameworks that ultimately challenge the profession to define its boundaries in new ways.


Ferric methemoglobin is reduced to its ferrous form by photoirradiation either by direct photoexcitation of the heme portion to induce electron transfer from the surrounding media (Sakai at al. (2000) Biochemistry 39, 14595-14602) or by an indirect electron transfer from a photochemically reduced electron mediator such as flavin. In this research, we studied the mechanism and optimal condition that facilitates photoreduction of flavin mononucleotide (FMN) to FMNH(2) by irradiation of visible light, and the succeeding reduction of concentrated metHb in phospholipid vesicles to restore its O(2) binding ability. Visible light irradiation (435 nm) of a metHb solution containing FMN and an electron donor such as EDTA showed a significantly fast reduction to ferrous Hb with a quantum yield (Phi) of 0.17, that is higher than the method of direct photoexcitation of heme (Phi = 0.006). Electron transfer from a donor molecule to metHb via FMN was completed within 30 ns. Native-PAGE and IEF electrophoresis indicated no chemical modification of the surface of the reduced Hb. Coencapsulation of concentrated Hb solution (35 g/dL) and the FMN/EDTA system in vesicles covered with a phospholipid bilayer membrane (Hb-vesicles, HbV, diameter: 250 nm) facilitated the metHb photoreduction even under aerobic conditions, and the reduced HbV restored the reversible O(2) binding property. A concentrated HbV suspension ([Hb] = 8 g/dL) was sandwiched with two glass plates to form a liquid layer with the thickness of about 10 microm (close to capillary diameter in tissue, 5 microm), and visible light irradiation (221 mW/cm(2)) completed 100% metHb photoreduction within 20 s. The photoreduced FMNH(2) reacted with O(2) to produce H(2)O(2), which was detected by the fluorescence measurement of the reaction of H(2)O(2) and p-nitrophenylacetic acid. However, the amount of H(2)O(2) generated during the photoreduction of HbV was significantly reduced in comparison with the homogeneous Hb solution, indicating that the photoreduced FMNH(2) was effectively consumed during the metHb reduction in a highly concentrated condition inside the HbV nanoparticles.


Total genomic DNA from 24 normal cows and a normal male cattle were isolated
from leucocyte preparation. Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplification of these
genomic DNA using the PI-5EZ and P2-3EZ primers for ZFX/ZFY gene resulted in a
fragment of approximately 440 bp in size from both male and female samples. This PCR
product represents part of the ZFX/ZFY gene defined by the primers used. The PCR
products were proven to be amplified from bovine genomic DNA from the dot blot
hybridization studies. After Pst I digestion, the female samples (ZFX) remained
undigested while the male (ZFX/ZFY) showed three fragments of approximately 440 bp,
340 bp and 100 bp. Thus the ZFY gene has a unique Pst I site. The PCR product from a population of 45 female and 47 male cattle was further tested for the presence of the Pst I
cleavage. There was no Pst I site in all the female (ZFX) samples, while 45 out of 47
samples from the male were cleaved. From X2 analysis of the data, the Pst I cleavage on
ZFY was significantly sex dependent. The restriction analysis of ZFX/ZFY gene showed
the existence of a unique Mnl I site on ZFX and more than one Alu I restriction site on
both ZFX and ZFY. The PCR product from an infertile female cattle (supposedly, 60, XX
and therefore ZFX/ZFX) was subjected to the Pst I digestion, and found to be cleaved
indicating the presence of the ZFY gene and possibly the Y chromosome. The latter was
confirmed by cytogenetic analysis. Post mortem and autopsy evaluation of the animal
showed a partial development of male characteristic and a defective female reproduction
system The use of the peR diagnosis for the presence of the Y chromosome was applied
to a population of 30 suspected infertile female animals, and two were found to have the
ZFY gene indicating the possible presence of the Y chromosome. Thus, peR
amplification of the ZFX/ZFY gene followed by Pst I digestion and analysis on gel
electrophoresis can be used as an approach to establish the presence of the Y chromosome
in an infertile female cattle. This approach however, needs to be supported by
karyo typing to establish unequivocally the screening procedure.


Successful treatment decisions in cancer depend on the accurate assessment of patient risk. To improve our understanding of the molecular alterations that underlie deadly malignancies, we analyzed genomic profiles from 33,036 solid tumors with known patient outcomes. Contrary to expectations, we find that mutations in cancer driver genes are almost never associated with patient survival time. In contrast, copy number changes in these same genes are broadly prognostic. Analysis of methylation, microRNA, mRNA, and protein expression patterns in primary tumors define several additional prognostic patterns, including signatures of tumor mitotic activity and tissue de-differentiation. Co-expression analysis with a cell cycle meta-gene distinguished proliferation-dependent and ‐independent prognostic features, allowing us to construct multivariate survival models with improved stratification power. In total, our analysis provides a comprehensive resource for biomarker and therapeutic target identification, and suggests that copy number and methylation profiling should complement tumor sequencing efforts to improve patient risk assessment.


OBJECTIVES
Previous studies of cats in the USA and New Zealand have identified a number of risk factors for the development of hyperthyroidism including feeding of canned cat food and being non-purebred. The objective of this study was to examine these and other risk factors in cats from London, UK.

METHODS
A questionnaire-based case-control study of hyperthyroidism in cats greater than eight years of age was undertaken. Cases and controls were recruited from two groups of first opinion clinics in London, UK (five locations in total). The two-page questionnaire investigated details of lifestyle, diet and exposure to environmental chemicals. Data analysis included multivariable analysis of risk factors using binary logistic regression.

RESULTS
One hundred and nine hyperthyroid cats and 196 control cats were surveyed. Increasing age, non-pure breed, use of a litter box, more than 50 per cent wet food in the diet, a diet that included fish and exposure to food in a can were identified as risk factors for the development of hyperthyroidism using multivariable analysis.

CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE
Risk factors for hyperthyroidism in cats from the UK appear similar to those of other countries. Exposure to food packaged in a can was identified as the major risk factor for the development of hyperthyroidism.


Our knowledge of species diversity within the inland waters of Indo-Burma is poorly documented and the region remains relatively under-surveyed. In this volume we aim to address this knowledge gap and present the most up-to-date information on the distribution and extinction risk of freshwater species in all inland water ecosystems across the Indo-Burma hotspot, and where appropriate, the reasons behind their declining status. This represents the most comprehensive assessment yet of freshwater biodiversity at the species level for this part of the world. As a major contribution towards the provision of information, an assessment of the status (according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species) and distribution of all described species of freshwater fishes, molluscs, odonates, crabs, and selected families of aquatic plants from across the Indo-Burma hotspot was conducted. A total of 2,515 species were assessed and documented. With species information compiled for each of 1,082 individual river or lake subcatchments, this volume represents a major advance in knowledge for informing development actions at a scale appropriate for conservation management.


The contributors to this volume describe the many facets shamanism and depth psychology have in common: animal symbolism; recognition of the reality of the collective unconscious; and healing rituals that put therapist and patient in touch with transpersonal powers. By reintroducing the core of shamanism in contemporary form, these essays shape a powerful means of healing that combines the direct contact with the inner psyche one finds in shamanism with the self-reflection and critical awareness of modern consciousness. The contributors' draw from experiences both inside and outside the consulting room, and with cultures that include the Lakota Sioux, and those of the Peruvian Andes and the Hawaiian Islands. The focus is on those aspects of shamanism most useful and relevant to the modern practice of depth psychology. These explorations bring the young practice of analytical psychology into perspective as part of a much more ancient heritage of shamanistic healing.


A novel low power compact loop filter using a single amplifier biquad (SAB) network is presented for continuous-time (CT) delta-sigma (ΔΣ) modulators. This new technique reduces power consumption and die area by minimizing the number of active elements and simplifying the modulator topology. The new SAB network has a transfer function (TF) zero, which implements a local feedforward (FF) path in system-level diagram. By having a local FF branch embedded in the SAB network, the FF branches to the summing block in the SAB based feedforward modulator topology is reduced to half the number of FF branches in the conventional topology. Consequently, the SAB based modulator utilizes a switch-capacitor (SC) adder replacing the commonly used CT adder and the sample & hold blocks in the conventional architecture. The SAB based loop filter with reduced FF branches simplifies the design and implementation of the high-order continuous-time ΔΣ modulator. The proposed loop filter is a general filter, which can be used for both high and low oversampling ratios (OSRs). A 4th-order low pass continuous-time ΔΣ modulator is designed and implemented in 130 nm process to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. Within a 7.2 MHz signal bandwidth, the measured dynamic range and SFDR of this prototype IC are 80 dB and 83.1 dB, respectively, and the total power consumption of 13.7 mW.


Introduction: At the international level, Directly Observed Treatment Short-Course (DOTS) is a public health strategy to effectively fight Tuberculosis (TB) epidemic. However, because of the irrational use of anti-tuberculosis drugs, Mycobacterium tuberculosis is developing more and more resistance to antibiotics and the number of cases of multidrug-resistant Tuberculosis (MR-TB and XDR-TB) is increasing. Thus, the therapeutic arsenal used in this context becomes limited and the care also becomes difficult.
Objective: The study aims to demonstrate in vitro efficacy of MATHESIA on Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Methods: Thirty eight (38) positive Ziehl or Auramine sputum from failures and relapses cases were collected. After treatment with 4% sodium hydroxide, the direct method of proportion technique was used. It consisted of inoculating the pellets on Lowenstein-Jensen's medium (LJ), on incorporated LJ of MATHESIA at different concentrations and on LJ incorporated anti-tuberculosis drugs with well-known critical concentrations. The tubes were incubated at 37°C and read at 28 and 42 days for susceptibility testing.
Results: Six strains (15.8%) were sensitive to all the anti- TB drugs tested and also to MATHESIA. In contrast, 32 strains (84.2%) were resistant to at least one antituberculosis drug. In contrast to MATHESIA, all the 32 strains resistant to at least one antituberculous drug showed growth only on a single concentration (0.01 mg/ml) whereas in the other 4 concentrations, growths were not observed, even for 21 MDR-TB souches (55.3%).
Conclusion: The anti-mycobacterial activity is certain in the MATHESIA and more in-depth research must be done to determine its behavior in the treatment.


Anonymisation has the goal of manipulating speech signals in order to degrade the reliability of automatic approaches to speaker recognition, while preserving other aspects of speech, such as those relating to intelligibility and naturalness. This paper reports an approach to anonymisation that, unlike other current approaches, requires no training data, is based upon well-known signal processing techniques and is both efficient and effective. The proposed solution uses the McAdams coefficient to transform the spectral envelope of speech signals. Results derived using common VoicePrivacy 2020 databases and protocols show that random, optimised transformations can outperform competing solutions in terms of anonymisation while causing only modest, additional degradations to intelligibility, even in the case of a semi-informed privacy adversary.


This study investigates the morphology and syntax of Argobba verbs. The term Argobba signifies both the people and the language. The Argobba people live in different regional states in Ethiopia. The Argobba language is a member of the South Ethio-Semitic subgroup and is one of the seriously endangered languages in the country. It is a syntactically head-final and morphologically complex language. The dissertation is organized in eleven chapters. The presentation in each chapter follows the pattern data and descriptive analysis first followed by a formal analysis. Chapter 1 provides introductory information about the Argobba people, the language, previous work on the language, a short note on the phonology of the language, the basic word order of the language and the status of the language. Chapter 2 reviews some aspects of HPSG, the theoretical framework adopted for the study. Chapter 3 addresses the morphology of the non-verbal categories, which comprise noun, adjective, determiner and adposition. Chapter 4, which is organized in nine sections, explores the verb morphology focusing on root, stem formation, derivation and inflection. Like in other Semitic languages, the input in the verbal stem formation process is the consonantal root, and verbal stems are formed by vowel specification between radicals. The verbal stems obligatorily require subject agreement affixes to derive verbal words. Chapter 5 examines verb phrase structures by identifying verbal heads and different non-head constituents depending on their syntactic function and syntactic property of the verbal heads. Chapter 6 deals with the causative structures of the language. The chapter provides the data and descriptive analysis followed by an HPSG analysis. In its final section, it addresses the semantics of the causative structures. Chapter 7 treats the passive constructions by providing basic data and an analysis in HPSG formalism, addressing morphologically related structures and passives and morphological causatives. Chapter 8 explores anaphora. It provides theoretical assumptions as a background, and morphological and syntactic analyses of personal pronouns, reflexives and reciprocals. Chapter 9, which deals with the relative clause structures, identifies different types of relative clause constructions followed by an HPSG analysis of the respective types. Chapter 10, which is on negation, has three sections which respectively address the negative marker, n-words and formal analysis. Finally, Chapter 11 summarizes the discussion and the main findings of the study.


This study of Renaissance adventures and struggles against fate brings to life a brilliant age and its exemplars. It is a story of how several men, including Julius II, worked, intrigued, and made business deals against the backdrop of an Italy invaded by continental countries and England. The future of the once great Republic of Venice was at stake as it was besieged and in desperate need of allies. The Papacy switched sides, breaking the seemingly invincible and mostly foreign League of Cambrai, and saw that Venice was offered a loan by Agostino Chigi, the richest man of his time. The Pope's banker, as daring as Julius II, negotiated with the formidable communal rulers of Venice and Italy was kept from further dismemberment.As a dramatic account that brings together diplomacy, war, business, and politics, viewed through one long entrepreneurial venture, this book is unique. It juxtaposes differing institutional structures and the various political ways among Italy's city states; it also brings into sharp focus the new men of the Renaissance. Their dealings and lifestyles were original and bold. They were successful against great odds and flaunted their new wealth and position in society in building great palaces and estates and becoming patrons of art. Felix Gilbert is a master teacher of history, and his new work is as luminous as the men and events he tells about.


Antony Duff's "The Realm of Criminal Law" offers an appealing moral reconstruction of the criminal law. I agree that the criminal law should be understood to predicate punishment upon sufficient proof that the defendant has committed a public wrong for which she is being held to account and censured. But the criminal law is not only about censoring people for public wrongs; it must serve other purposes as well, such as preventing people from committing serious crimes and more generally from violating reasonable regulations. These purposes, and perhaps retributive justice, require the criminal law also to mete out harsh treatment, but only insofar as such treatments are proportional to the culpable wrong committed. The problem for the criminal law is that many mala prohibita crimes consist of a minor wrong but also call for a relatively severe punishment. To accommodate that mismatch, it is necessary to complement the criminal law, as Duff conceives of it, with penal law. Penal law relies on forfeiture to explain why hard treatment is permissible. The forfeiture must be fair, and it comes with its own proportionality limits. But those limits are not as strict as the limits implicit in the criminal law. It allows penalties that are harsher than the punishments that could justifiably be meted out for many mala prohibita offenses. One and the same act can count as a crime and a penal infraction, and one and the same criminal justice system can and should handle both crimes and the penal infractions. It is, I think, only in that way that we can accommodate both the need to prevent wrongdoing and the distinct importance of holding people accountable for the commission of public wrongs.


Intellectual property protection affects the manner in which multinational enterprises facilitate technology transfer from the innovating North to the developing South. Firms with products that are complex or technologically sophisticated will tend to internalize production through foreign direct investment. Firms that face a lower risk of imitation, or are less technically advanced, will tend to license production to non-affiliated Southern firms. Changes in intellectual property protection affect the level and the composition of technology transfer, depending on the value of the firm's proprietary asset.


Revista Cubana de Medicina. 2009; 48(2) http://scielo.sld.cu 2 Helicobacter pylori (HP) is a bacterium causing colonization and infection of gastric epithelium of man. Infection allows appearance of a gastritis that may to evolve to a peptic ulcer, a gastric adenocarcinoma, or a type MALT lymphoma. In other cases, infection has a silent presentation. Authors studied presence of HP in patients with gastritis and in others with a healthy mucosa, seen in endoscopy consultation of "Hermanos Ameijeiras" Surgical Clinical Hospital by others disorders in high digestive tract pathways. Fifty patients were investigated, 30 of them had an erosive gastritis, and 20 had a healthy mucosa histology confirmed. HC was detected by amplification of a fragment of Ure A gen, by means of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), in 90% of cases with erosive gastritis, and in 75 % of subjects with a healthy mucosa. The reason of odds ratio (OR) was of 3 with a confidence interval (IC) of 0.52-18.9. We conclude that HP infection is so high in patients with gastritis than in those with a healthy gastric mucosa.


Cyclic AMP signaling plays a central role in regulating activity at a number of synapses in the brain. We showed previously that pairing activation of receptors that inhibit adenylate cyclase (AC) and reduce the concentration of cyclic AMP, with elevation of the concentration of cyclic GMP is sufficient to elicit a presynaptically expressed form of LTD at Schaffer collateral-CA1 synapses in the hippocampus. To directly test the role of AC inhibition and G-protein signaling in LTD at these synapses, we utilized transgenic mice that express a mutant, constitutively active inhibitory G protein, Galpha(i2), in principal neurons of the forebrain. Transgene expression of Galpha(i2) markedly enhanced LTD and impaired late-phase LTP at Schaffer collateral synapses, with no associated differences in input/output relations, paired-pulse facilitation, or NMDA receptor-gated conductances. When paired with application of a type V phosphodiesterase inhibitor to elevate the concentration of intracellular cyclic GMP, constitutively active Galpha(i2) expression converted the transient depression normally caused by this treatment to an LTD that persisted after the drug was washed out. Moreover, this effect could be mimicked in control slices by pairing type V phosphodiesterase inhibitor application with application of a PKA inhibitor. Electrophysiological recordings of spontaneous excitatory postsynaptic currents and two-photon visualization of vesicular release using FM1-43 revealed that constitutively active Galpha(i2) tonically reduced basal release probability from the rapidly recycling vesicle pool of Schaffer collateral terminals. Our findings support the hypothesis that inhibitory G-protein signaling acts presynaptically to regulate release, and, when paired with elevations in the concentration of cyclic GMP, converts a transient cyclic GMP-induced depression into a long-lasting decrease in release.


We propose a representation of individual preferences with a subsistence requirement in consumption, and examine its implications for substitutability and sustainability. Specifically, we generalize the standard constant-elasticity-of-substitution (CES) utility specification for manufactured goods and environmental services, by adding a subsistence requirement for environmental services. We find that the Hicksian elasticity of substitution strictly monotonically increases with the consumption of environmental services above the subsistence requirement, and approaches the standard CES value as consumption becomes very large. Whether the two goods are market substitutes depends on the level of income. We further show that the subsistence requirement may jeopardize the existence of an intertemporally optimal and sustainable consumption path. Our results have important implications for growth, development and environmental policy.


The objectives of study were to identify and assess the amino acid diversity of Cytochrome b (Cyt b) gene, genetic marker and characteristic of specific amino acid in Kacang and Ettawa Grade goat. Nineteen heads of Kacang goat (KG) and twelve heads of Ettawa Grade goat (EG) were purposively sampled. The genomic DNA was isolated by Genomic DNA Mini Kit (Geneaid) and amplified Cyt b using PCR method with CytbCapF and CytbCapR primers and was sequenced. The results showed that there were two specific amino acids that distinguish KG and EG goat with C. hircus and C. aegagrus and four specific amino acids that distinguish KG and EG goat with C. falconeri, but there were no specific amino acids can be used as a genetic marker to distinguish between Kacang and EG goat. In conclusion, specific amino acids in Cyt b gene can be used as a genetic marker among KG and EG goat with 3 goat others comparator.


ABSTRACT We tested prey preferences of adult (200- to 222-mm long) redear sunfish (Lepomis microlophus) on two size classes of zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) and two-ridge rams-horns (Helisoma anceps) in experimental aquaria. We also tested physical limitations on consuming these mollusks and determined prey bioenergetic profitability. Redear sunfish strongly preferred rams-horns over zebra mussels, but they displayed no size preference for either prey. Ingestion was not physically limited since both prey species up to 15-mm long fit within the pharyngeal gapes of redear sunfish. Rams-horns were more bioenergetically profitable than zebra mussels and ingestion of rams-horn shell fragments was about three times less than zebra mussels. Rams-horns were somewhat more resistant to shell-crushing, but all size ranges of both prey species tested were crushable by redear sunfish. These studies suggested that the redear sunfish should not be considered a panacea for biological control of zebra mussels.