OBJECTIVE
To analyze nursing home utilization patterns in order to identify potential targeting criteria for transitioning residents back to the community.

DATA SOURCES
Secondary data from minimum data set (MDS) assessments for an annual cohort of first-time admissions (N=24,648) to all Minnesota nursing homes (N=394) from July 2005 to June 2006.

STUDY DESIGN
We conducted a longitudinal analysis from admission to 365 days. Major MDS variables were discharge status; resident's preference and support for community discharge; gender, age, and marital status; pay source; major diagnoses; cognitive impairment or dementia; activities of daily living; and continence.

PRINCIPAL FINDINGS
At 90 days the majority of residents showed a preference or support for community discharge (64 percent). Many had health and functional conditions predictive of community discharge (40 percent) or low-care requirements (20 percent). A supportive facility context, for example, emphasis on postacute care and consumer choice, increased transition rates.

CONCLUSIONS
A community discharge intervention could be targeted to residents at 90 days after nursing home admission when short-stay residents are at risk of becoming long-stay residents.


Control of the indoor humidity in a marine climate is a challenge, especially under operating conditions where high indoor humidity is a norm. Outdated mechanical equipment, inefficient ventilation design, and occupants' life styles are some of the contributing factors to high indoor humidity. In this field experimental study, the moisture buffering potential of unfinished drywall in reducing daily indoor humidity peaks, coupled with various ventilation strategies are investigated. Two identical test buildings exposed to real climatic conditions in Burnaby, BC are monitored under varying ventilation rates and schemes. The interior of the test building is clad with unfinished drywall, while the control building is covered with polyethylene, which has negligible moisture buffering. In this way, the moisture buffering potential of drywall under four test cases is isolated. Under the test cases, the indoor air quality in terms of CO2 concentration, and ventilation heat loss of the two buildings are also evaluated. The results show that the moisture buffering potential of drywall effectively regulates indoor humidity peaks, and maintains relative humidity levels within acceptable thresholds, when coupled with adequate ventilation as recommended by ASHRAE. When coupled with time-controlled and demand-controlled ventilation schemes, the moisture buffering effect of drywall shows competing benefits when it comes to managing indoor humidity, indoor air quality, and minimizing ventilation heat loss.


Prostate cancer is widely known to be one of the most common cancers among men around the world. Due to its high heterogeneity, many of the studies carried out to identify the molecular level causes for cancer have only been partially successful. Among the techniques used in cancer studies, gene expression profiling is seen to be one of the most popular techniques due to its high usage. Gene expression profiles reveal information about the functionality of genes in different body tissues at different conditions. In order to identify cancer-decisive genes, differential gene expression analysis is carried out using statistical and machine learning methodologies. It helps to extract information about genes that have significant expression differences between healthy tissues and cancerous tissues. In this paper, we discuss a comprehensive supervised classification approach using Support Vector Machine (SVM) models to investigate differentially expressed Y-chromosome genes in prostate cancer. 8 SVM models, which are tuned to have 98.3% average accuracy have been used for the analysis. We were able to capture genes like CD99 (MIC2), ASMTL, DDX3Y and TXLNGY to come out as the best candidates. Some of our results support existing findings while introducing novel findings to be possible prostate cancer candidates. keywords: Support Vector Machines; prostate cancer; Y-chromosome; differential expression; microarray data; log fold change.


After digesting lessons from US operations during the Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan, the White House National Security Council staff created several interagency working groups to examine procedural issues associated with responding to international chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) incidents. What emerged were best practices and lessons learned designed to transform data to decisions across the many levels of government during an international CBRN incident for those people making life-saving and life-sustaining choices. Actions at both the strategic and operational levels are needed to enable a country to more effectively transfer its domestic response capabilities and infrastructure to an international consequence management response. International complications include varying organizational relationships and legal authorities; resource limitations in overseas jurisdictions; nonstandard sources and formats of information; differing public health and protection standards; and language barriers. The technical data needed for emergency personnel to safely and effectively respond to CBRN incidents are especially difficult to obtain, require specialized analytical tools to process, and demand particular procedures for sharing in an international context. Without addressing these issues up front, any country responding to a CBRN event beyond its borders may struggle to effectively respond.


Previous research has shown that vocal errors can be simulated using a pitch perturbation technique. Two types of responses are observed when subjects are asked to ignore changes in pitch during a steady vowel production, a compensatory response countering the direction of the perceived change in pitch and a following response in the same direction as the pitch perturbation. The present study investigated the nature of these responses by asking subjects to volitionally change their voice fundamental frequency either in the opposite direction ("opposing" group) or the same direction ("following" group) as the pitch shifts (±100 cents, 1000 ms) presented during the speaker's production of an /a/ vowel. Results showed that voluntary responses that followed the stimulus directions had significantly shorter latencies (150 ms) than opposing responses (360 ms). In addition, prior to the slower voluntary opposing responses, there were short latency involuntary responses that followed the stimulus direction. These following responses may involve mechanisms of imitation or vocal shadowing of acoustical stimuli when subjects are predisposed to respond to a change in frequency of a sound. The slower opposing responses may represent a control strategy that requires monitoring and correcting for errors between the feedback signal and the intended vocal goal.


Maintenance of patent airway, adequate ventilation, and pulmonary gas exchange is very important in critically ill patients. Airway management in intensive care patients differs significantly from routine surgical procedures in the operating room. The airway compe‐ tence in intensive care unit (ICU) should be coping with the rapidly evolving advances in airway management. Therefore, efforts should be focused on the three pillars of air‐ way master: airway providers as intensivists or critical care physicians, equipment, and operational plans. Not all institutions can afford all airway equipment in the market; however, they should make sure that critical care providers have a full access to the avail‐ able tools and they are comfortable using it. Educational sessions and refresher courses should be tailored to meet the competence level of the ICU providers and equipment availability. Operational plan includes developing institutional airway protocols and implementing difficult airway guidelines. The protocols should consider different staff‐ ing models of ICU and make sure all the time at least one member of the team with the highest experience in airway should be always available. The aim of writing this chapter is to enable the intensivist to optimize their use of airway equipment and managing high‐ risk patients in ICU.


This historically situated, UK-based review of New Labour's human rights and mental health policy following the 1998 Human Rights Act (HRA) and 2007 Mental Health Act (MHA), draws on Klug's identification of three waves of human rights. These occurred around the American and French Revolutions, after World War II, and following the collapse of state communism in 1989, and the article assesses impacts on mental health policy up to and including the New Labour era. It critiques current equality and rights frameworks in mental health and indicates how they might be brought into closer alignment with third wave principles.


The Church of the SubGenius, usually regarded as a "parody religion," offers a sophisticated critique of Western values focused on resistance to a consumerist conspiracy. This article draws on Guy Debord's contention that the capitalist spectacle has replaced the religious worldview, rendering everyday life mysterious and the acquisition of goods compulsive, and argues that, when stripped of science fiction tropes, the Church of the SubGenius' vision of a world in the grip of a totalitarian materialist conspiracy is largely realistic. Yet, this "rational" rejection of consumerism is undermined by the portrayal of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, the salesman messiah, based (partly) on L. Ron Hubbard, and the science fictions trappings of the extraterrestrial conspiracy. It is argued that humor is the key to making sense of the Church, as it integrates the bad taste, shock value, and contrariness of the religion into an effective spiritual path of resistance.


Abstract The critical heat flux (CHF) on the reactor vessel outer wall was measured using the two-dimensional slice test section. The radius and the channel area of the test section were 2.5 m and 10 cm × 15 cm, respectively. The flow channel area and the heater width were smaller than those of the ULPU experiments, but the radius was greater than that of the ULPU. The CHF data under the inlet subcooling of 2 to 25°C and the mass flux 0 to 300 kg/m2·s had been acquired. The measured CHF value was generally slightly lower than that of the ULPU. The difference possibly comes from the difference of the test section material and the thickness. However, the general trend of CHF according to the mass flux was similar with that of the ULPU. The experimental CHF data were compared with the predicted values by SULTAN correlation. The SULTAN correlation predicted well this study's data only for the mass flux higher than 200 kg/m2·s, and for the exit quality lower than 0.05. The local condition-based correlation was developed, and it showed good prediction capability for broad quality (-0.01 to 0.5) and mass flux (<300 kg/m2·s) conditions with a root-mean-square error of 2.4%. There were increases in the CHF with trisodium phosphate-added water.


SUMMARY: Studies on decapod distribution patterns and reproductive and energetic conditions were carried out along the islands and shallows of the Scotia Arc (Southern Ocean) during the RV "Polarstern" LAMPOS expedition (ANT XIX/5) between April and May 2002. A clear biogeographic zonation was found. The Subantarctic Magellan-South Atlantic decapod fauna consisting of both "natant" (caridean) and "reptant" (astacidean, anomuran, and brachyuran) decapods appeared along the northern branch of the Scotia Arc to South Georgia, where Subantarctic and Antarctic faunas were found overlapping. An impoverished caridean shrimp fauna was found along the islands of the southern branch, from the South Sandwich Islands to the Antarctic Peninsula. Differences in the reproductive traits of the two most abundant species were detected. The reproductive cycle of Notocrangon antarcticus at South Georgia was more advanced than that at the South Orkney Islands, probably due to temperature differences between the two locations. Although the oogenesis and the reproductive cycle of Munida subrugosa seem to be in phase at Burdwood Bank and in the Beagle Channel, the oocyte number is probably lower at the former location. A new index was used to measure the energy devoted to reproduction by relating the energy contents of the egg mass/ovary plus hepatopancreas and the energy content of the whole body. This index revealed that the energy investment in reproduction was (1) independent of the sampling location, (2) species-specific, and (3) larger in caridean shrimps than in galatheid crabs.


Spread of constructive teaching/learning theory results in a bigger research interest in knowledge and its acquisition, which is directly related with competence development. The focus is laid on the concept of knowledge, their links with sense and intertwining of knowledge and values (and especially moral ones). The research results revealed that educators' attitude to deepening of knowledge is based on the level of knowledge acquisition. The priority is laid on teaching to learn, development of thinking, spread of spiritual powers, new technologies of education, underlying ideas of general education programmes and standards and about 65.3–50.9 percent of teachers refer to them as very important. Whereas the least attention is paid to education management, understanding of feelings, imagination and partially to perception of volitional development, diagnostics and evaluation of progress and achievement and education planning. The statistical data analysis shows that all the identified knowledge priorities, with the exception of teaching to learn, have very weak links with spiritual values or such links are absent (with knowledge of education management, memory development, methods of pedagogical interaction, peculiarities of education and upbringing, new education technologies). Spiritual values are linked with knowledge of feelings, volition, imagination and partially with education planning. It was established that gender, qualification, working experience and workplace have insignificant effect on teachers' attitude and only on knowledge related with external elements of educational process (general programmes, education management, planning, teaching to learn).


The development of controlled biodegradable materials is of fundamental importance in immunodrug delivery to spatiotemporally controlled immune stimulation but avoid systemic inflammatory side effects. Based on this, polycarbonate nanogels are developed as degradable micellar carriers for transient immunoactivation of lymph nodes. An imidazoquinoline‐type TLR7/8 agonist is covalently conjugated via reactive ester chemistry to these nanocarriers. The nanogels not only provide access to complete disintegration by the hydrolysable polymer backbone, but also demonstrate a gradual disintegration within several days at physiological conditions (PBS, pH 6.4–7.4, 37 °C). These intrinsic properties limit the lifetime of the carriers but their payload can still be successfully leveraged for immunological studies in vitro on primary immune cells as well as in vivo. For the latter, a spatiotemporal control of immune cell activation in the draining lymph node is found after subcutaneous injection. Overall, these features render polycarbonate nanogels a promising delivery system for transient activation of the immune system in lymph nodes and may consequently become very attractive for further development toward vaccination or cancer immunotherapy. Due to the intrinsic biodegradability combined with the high chemical control during the manufacturing process, these polycarbonate‐based nanogels may also be of great importance for clinical translation.


Is your organization rapidly accumulating more information than you know how to manage? This book helps you create an enterprise search solution based on more than just technology. Author Martin White shows you how to plan and implement a managed search environment that meets the needs of your business and your employees. Learn why its vital to have a dedicated staff manage your search technology and support your users. In one survey, 93% of executives said their organization is losing revenue because theyre not fully able to use the information they collect. With this book, business managers, IT managers, and information professionals can maximize the value of corporate information and data assets. Use 12 critical factors to gauge your organizations search needs Learn how to make a business case for search Research your user requirements and evaluate your current search solution Create a support team with technical skills and organizational knowledge to manage your solution Set quality guidelines for organizational content and metadata Get an overview of open source and commercial search technology Choose an application based on your requirements, not for its features Make mobile and location-independent search part of your solution


Abstract For the four leading causes of death in the United States (heart disease, cancer, stroke and chronic respiratory disease), tobacco use is a common risk factor. Tobacco use is responsible for almost 450,000 deaths per year and impacts the health of every member of our society. Tobacco is a gateway drug for substance abuse. That role is critical to revisit and revalidate. From 490 schools, a total of 175,460 students in grades 6-12 participated in an alcohol, tobacco and other drug use survey, the descriptive analyses of the data being stated in a 2007 technical report. The secondary analyses of the data clearly demonstrated that a dose-response relationship pattern of association existed between increasing quantity of cigarette use and the use of alcohol and other drugs. Additionally, logit analysis revealed that selected demographic and other variables were statistically significant predictors of the past month's use of cigarettes. The secondary analyses were replicated for the 2008 survey, in which 152,732 students responded to the same questionnaire. Similar results were obtained. Smoking is a major risk factor to the leading causes of death and sufficient empirical evidence establishes that tobacco is a gateway drug. To combat tobacco use, a comprehensive ecological approach, including tobacco education and cessation, enacting and enforcing smoke-free policies, and increasing taxes on tobacco products, is recommended.


Our discussion of adenocarcinomas arising from the ciliary and iris epithelium, based upon a case report and a review of the literature, attempts summarize what little is known about these tumors. In most instances, the tumors arise from previously healthy eyes in middle-aged people. There appears to be no known way to make the diagnosis preoperatively. As long as the tumor has not extended outside the globe at the time of removal, the prognosis is excellent. The morphology of the tumors is virtually identical to those arising from the retinal pigment epithelium, with anaplastic epithelioid cells often forming tubes, cords, and acinuslike structures. In a few cases, tumors with these traits have extended from the globe and have eventually resulted in the death of the patients; one of these cases unquestionably arose from the iris and ciliary body epithelium. Knowledge of these tumors is in a primitive stage, and much clinical and pathological information is needed in order to determine their casue, diagnostic clinical features, and proper treatment.


Caffeine (1,3,7-trimethylxanthine) is the most consumed psychoactive substance in the world, acting by means of antagonism to adenosine receptors, mainly A1 and A2A. Coffee is the main natural source of the alkaloid which is quite soluble and well extracted during the brew's preparation. After consumption, caffeine is almost completely absorbed and extensively metabolized in the liver by phase I (cytochrome P450) enzymes, mainly CYP1A2, which appears to be polymorphically distributed in human populations. Paraxanthine is the major caffeine metabolite in plasma, while methylated xanthine and methyl uric acids are the main metabolites excreted in urine. In addition to stimulating the central nervous system, caffeine exerts positive effects in the body, often in association with other substances, contributing to prevention of several chronic diseases. The potential adverse effects of caffeine have also been extensively studied in animal species and in humans.

Chemical structure of caffeine molecule.


The amount of water flowing into the seas and oceans has slowly but steadily in- creased in recent years, signifying a possible speeding up of the water cycle due to climate change. The detection of the water outflows and the exploitation of them are very important to the rational water management. Remote sensing techniques has been proven a valuable tool for the detection and identification of submarine groundwater discharge-SGD (Submarine Groundwater Discharge). In this study the island of Cephalonia in Ionian sea, Greece is considered as a case study. A 6 Km sea buffer zone around the island is studied using Landsat images. Submarine groundwater discharge has been detected through remote sensing methods and the results have been combined with the tectonism and hydrogeological conditions of the island. A quantitative analysis of temperature in the buffer zone was carried out. The sea thermal anomalies in the same zone were also investigated.


This two-part essay offers a personal reflection on an emerging Feldenkrais-informed practice in dance
performance and pedagogy. As a post-positivist piece of writing from practice, the essay acknowledges
the first-hand experience of the researcher as documenter of embodied process. The essay makes
reference to the research of Sylvie Fortin and Warren Long (2000) who explore the potential of
Feldenkrais learning for the dancer. The writing of Moshe Feldenkrais (2010, 1990), Norman Doidge
(2015) and Guy Claxton (2016, 1997) illustrate notions of organic learning and knowing slowly.
In Part 1 of the essay I reflect upon the impact of the Feldenkrais Method on my dancing. I highlight how
the Feldenkrais Method offered me the opportunity to get to know the difference between the dancer that
moves and the dancer that knows they are moving. Part 2 directs the reflection towards the experience of
students I have been teaching at the University of Chichester, introducing an emerging practice,
Awareness in Motion (AIM) .


Worldwide, smoking remains a threat to public health, causing preventable diseases and premature mortality. Cigarette smoke is a powerful inducer of DNA methylation and gene expression alterations, which have been associated with negative health consequences. Here, we review the current knowledge on smoking-related changes in DNA methylation and gene expression in human blood samples. We identified 30 studies focused on the association between active smoking, DNA methylation modifications, and gene expression alterations. Overall, we identified 1,758 genes with differentially methylated sites (DMS) and differentially expressed genes (DEG) between smokers and nonsmokers, of which 261 were detected in multiple studies (≥4). The most frequently (≥10 studies) reported genes were AHRR, GPR15, GFI1, and RARA. Functional enrichment analysis of the 261 genes identified the aryl hydrocarbon receptor repressor and T cell pathways (T helpers 1 and 2) as influenced by smoking status. These results highlight specific genes for future mechanistic and translational research that may be associated with cigarette smoke exposure and smoking-related diseases. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).


Traction Force Microscopy (TFM) is an inverse method that allows to obtain the stress field applied by a living cell on the environment on the basis of a pointwise knowledge of the displacement produced by the cell itself during its migration. This biophysical problem, usually addressed in terms of Green functions, can be alternatively tackled in a variational framework. In such a case, a suitable penalty functional has to be minimized. The resulting Euler-Lagrange equations include both the direct problem based on the linear elasticity operator as well as an equation built on its adjoint. Results from a two-dimensional model, i.e. where living cancer cells are migrating on a plane substrate, are briefly presented. While the mathematics is well established also in the three-dimensional case, i.e. where cells are completely embedded in the gel matrix, the experimental data needed are more difficult to obtain than the two-dimensional counterpart. First steps towards the complete three-dimensional traction reconstruction are reported.


Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) have shown tremendous successes on treatment of multiple tumor malignancies, offering a valuable but rare commodity to both patients and researchers (1-3). As an important part of tumor immunotherapies, ICIs inspire the once-questioned idea that although inhibited our immune system is able to eliminate tumor cells in a similar way that it does to infectious microorganisms. ICIs can release the brakes imposed by the tumor on this fabulous capability, which then heightens the immune response against tumor cells.


We demonstrate a high-efficiency optical modulator at ~1323 nm using the quantum Zeno effect in a ladder transition in a Rb vapor cell. The lower leg of the transitions represents the control beam while the upper leg of the transitions represents the signal beam. The cross-modulation of the signal beam transmission is observed as the control beam is intensity modulated, and is explained in terms of the quantum Zeno effect. We observe a modulation depth of near 100% at frequencies up to 1 MHz and demonstrate modulation at speeds up to 75 MHz, with a 3 dB bandwidth of about 5 MHz, limited by the homogeneous linewidth of the intermediate state. We also describe how much higher modulation speeds could be realized by using a buffer gas to broaden the transitions. We identify and explain the special conditions needed for optimizing the modulation efficiency. Numerical simulations of modulation at ~1 GHz are presented. The maximum modulation speed is found to scale with the pressure-broadened linewidth of the intermediate state, so that much higher speeds should be attainable.


When Paul Simon asked, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?," Mrs. Robinson replied, "Joltin' Joe has left and gone away." (1) But if Simon was a law professor (what a loss to music!), the lyric might have been "[w]here have you gone, the presumption against preemption? Federalists turn their lonely eyes to you." The Supreme Court regularly states that when Congress legislates "in a field which the States have traditionally occupied ... we start with the assumption that the historic police powers of the States were not to be superseded by the Federal Act unless that was the clear and manifest purpose of Congress." (2) But this declaration is devoid of force and no longer even hortatory. If the national motto "In God We Trust" is a "ceremonial deism," the presumption against preemption is a ceremonial federalism. (3) Consider Egelhoff v. Egelhoff, (4) in which the Court held that the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) (5) expressly preempted a Washington law providing that the designation of a spouse as the beneficiary of a non-probate asset is automatically revoked upon divorce. (6) While the majority acknowledged the applicability of the "presumption against preemption in areas of traditional state regulation such as family law," it summarily dismissed the presumption because "Congress ha[d] made clear its desire for pre-emption." (7) Thus, the Egelhoff majority proved that clarity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Any express preemption case must begin with a divination of what exactly Congress sought to preempt, in a word, the field that Congress sought to preempt. Surely, the Court could not have meant that ERISA expressly preempts the entire field of state inheritance law. While it might have meant that ERISA expressly preempts only those state laws that conflict with ERISA's objectives, the Egelhoff case was a poor vehicle for such an assertion insofar as the Washington statute reinforced ERISA's ultimate objective of fair protection of employee benefits. (8) The problem in Egelhoff was that Congress poorly expressed itself since it is clear that Congress intended ERISA to directly preempt state law, but what is not clear is the scope that Congress intended that preemption should have--enter the presumption that the preemption, like Joe DiMaggio, has "left and gone away." The presumption is against a broad reading of federal law that purports to preempt the state law and that expressly acts like other clear statement rules to ensure that the federal political process has focused upon the displacement of state authority. Without such a rule, there is no assurance that Congress has in fact attended the consequences of displacing state authority. This holds true whether one conceives of federalism as primarily enforceable by politics or by judges. Advocates of politically enforceable federalism should be willing to admit that upholding ambiguous congressional assertions of preemption undermines the very premise of politically enforceable federalism--that political process will carefully weigh the balance of federal and state interests before displacing state authority. Supporters of judicially enforceable federalism may wish that judges would examine the substance of federal law to determine if it is an improper invasion of state authority, but at the least, they will agree that a clear, unambiguous statement by Congress concerning the scope of its express preemption is a minimal safeguard. Consider Geier v. American Honda Motor Co., (9) in which the Court found implied "obstacle" conflict preemption (10) of ordinary state principles of tort when Congress authorized the Secretary of Transportation to promulgate minimum auto safety standards in order to reduce injuries and deaths resulting from traffic accidents, and further, the Secretary used that authority to issue regulations that required some autos, but not all, be equipped with air bags. …


Based on the results of statistical analysis we highlight the crisis financial condition and factors of negative trends in the activities of Ukrainian enterprises. The necessity, timeliness, and the problems of implementation of the new for Ukrainian enterprises paradigm of preventive financial management is substantiated. The author's view of the corporate finance, consequences of the crisis, the content of the crisis management and preventive financial management of enterprises is presented. The content and the role of the controlling as an innovative resource of the preventive financial management at an enterprise is determined.


People with schizophrenia (SZ) exhibit visual processing abnormalities that affect their daily functioning and remediating these deficits might help to improve functioning. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a potential tool for perceptual enhancement for this purpose, though there are no reports of tDCS applied to visual cortex in SZ. In a within-subject, crossover design, we evaluated the effects of tDCS on visual processing in 27 SZ. All patients received anodal, cathodal, or sham stimulation over the central occipital region in 3 visits separated by 1 week. In each visit, a backward masking task and an electroencephalography measure of visual neuroplasticity were administered after tDCS. Neuroplasticity was assessed with visual evoked potentials before and after tetanizing visual high-frequency stimulation. Masking performance was significantly poorer in the anodal and cathodal conditions compared with sham. Both anodal and cathodal stimulation increased the amplitude of P1 but did not change the plasticity index. We found significant plasticity effects of tDCS for only one waveform for one stimulation condition (P2 for anodal tDCS) which did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. The reason for the lack of tDCS stimulation effects on plasticity may be because tDCS was not delivered simultaneously with the tetanizing visual stimulus. The present findings emphasize the need for more research on the relevant parameters for stimulation of visual processing regions in clinical populations.


This special issue examines the linguistic production of youth identities under conditions of cultural mobility. Building on theories of migration, transnationalism, and globalization that have emerged in anthropology, cultural studies, and other fields, the contributions to the special issue investigate not simply the large-scale cultural and political processes that shape the lives of youth but equally how youth identities emerge through the fine-grained details of interactional work and local linguistic practice. The introduction lays out the major themes that run through the special issue: the importance of scholarly attentiveness to the diversity of youth identities; the recognition of youth as social agents moving across national boundaries both physically and symbolically; the role of local ethnographic practice in investigations of global and transnational phenomena and especially the centrality of interaction as the primary site of social life; and the significance of language as a key resource for the articulation and negotiation of social identities, relations, and processes.


When Hans Bethe, at the age of 97, asked his long-term collaborator, Gerry Brown, to explain his scientific work to the world, the latter knew that this was a steep task. As the late John Bahcall famously remarked: "If you know his (Bethe's) work, you might be inclined to think he is really several people, all of whom are engaged in a conspiracy to sign their work with the same name". Almost eight decades of original research, hundreds of scientific papers, numerous books, countless reports spanning the key areas of 20th century physics are the impressive record of Hans Bethe's academic work. In answering Bethe's request, the editors enlisted the help of experts in the different research fields, collaborators and friends of this "last giant" of 20th century physics. "Hans Bethe and His Physics" is the result. It contains discussions of Hans Bethe's work in solid state physics, nuclear physics and astrophysics; it explains his contributions as a science advisor and his stance on energy and nuclear weapons; and it demonstrates his impact as a teacher and mentor to generations of young scientists. While the book's primary aim is to explain the science behind the man, the different articles also allow the reader to take a glimpse at the man behind the science.


CONTEXT
The mechanisms by which Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery (GBP) results in sustained weight loss and remission of type 2 diabetes are not fully understood.

OBJECTIVE
We hypothesized that the anorexic hormone oxyntomodulin (OXM) might contribute to the marked weight reduction and the rapid improvement in glucose metabolism observed in morbidly obese diabetic patients after GBP.

METHODS
Twenty obese women with type 2 diabetes were studied before and 1 month after GBP (n=10) or after a diet-induced equivalent weight loss (n=10). Patients from both groups were matched for age, body weight, body mass index, and diabetes duration and control. OXM concentrations were measured during a 50-g oral glucose challenge before and after weight loss.

RESULTS
At baseline, OXM levels (fasting and stimulated values) were indistinguishable between the GBP and the diet group. However, OXM levels rose remarkably in response to an oral glucose load more than 2-fold (peak, 5.25+/-1.31 to13.8+/-16.2 pmol/liter; P=0.025) after GBP but not after diet. The peak of OXM after glucose was significantly correlated with glucagon-like peptide-1 and peptide YY3-36.

CONCLUSIONS
Our data suggest that the observed changes in OXM primarily occur in response to GBP and not as a consequence of weight loss. These changes were observed early after surgery and occurred in parallel with previously reported increases in incretins and peptide YY. We speculate that the combination of gut hormone changes is essential for the improved glucose homeostasis and may partially explain the success of this surgery on diabetes resolution and weight loss.


Debate about European labour market flexibility enhancing reforms and lack thereof has a tendency to be dominated by economics arguments. This thesis advances the debate by going beyond the economics arguments to ask the political science question: what explains the political ability (or inability) to enact flexibility enhancing reforms in European countries from the early 1980s to the global recession of 2008? Answering the question, this thesis argues that the ability to enact reforms is best explained by a combination of traditional political-economy pressures for reforms and political-electoral motivations of party leaders in government.
The argument is supported by a longitudinal analysis of European and country specific reforms using mixed-methods – i.e. quantitative and qualitative research – and employment protection legislation (EPL) as a proxy for reforms, the latter being warranted because of EPLs political salience as a reform target prior to 2008. First, a quantitative cross-country reform-hazard analysis arrives at significant economic and political explanations for reforms, which include a country's social model, unemployment rate and economic growth. Then, a qualitative analysis of the trajectory of EPL and functionally linked labour market reforms combines the quantitative results with a broader political understanding of reforms for Germany, the UK and Denmark as country cases where reforms were enacted, and France as a case where only limited or contradictory EPL reforms were put in place during the period covered by this thesis.
The thesis adds robustness to the literature showing most pre-2008 global recession reforms were at the margin, targeting non-regular employment parts of European labour markets. However, overall, the thesis provides a political understanding of the European reform trajectory, suggesting that economic arguments rarely on their own stand up as determinants of reforms. The implications for future research are that the enactment of flexibility enhancing reforms should be treated more explicitly as the outcomes of political decisions and less as reactive steps to economic predictions or political economy pressures for reforms, even if the latter continues to play a role in bringing reforms onto the political agenda.


ABSTRACT This paper examines insurgent citizenship practices employed by activists in the exiled Burmese women's movement from the 1990s and onwards. Consisting of political exiles, refugees and ethnic insurgents, this movement has successfully used the transnational, transitory space of the borderlands to constitute its participants as political subjects with legitimate claims to rights, citizenship and leadership. Drawing on interviews, this analysis interrogates women's activism through the lens of insurgent citizenship practices. Thus, how have Burmese women's activists claimed rights and lived citizenship in exile? Three main strategies are examined: firstly, women activists have positioned themselves as political actors and authorities through involvement in governance and humanitarian aid delivery in refugee camps. Secondly, they have claimed rights and political subjectivity through engagement with international norms, networks and arenas. Thirdly, they have claimed citizenship and political influence in oppositional nation-making projects through engaging with and negotiating ethno-nationalist armed struggles. The analysis highlights the multifaceted nature of women's insurgent citizenship practices, showing how they navigate multiple marginalized subject positions, direct their rights claims towards multiple governing authorities, and enact multiple political communities.


A sparsifier of a graph G (Benczúr and Karger; Spielman and Teng) is a sparse weighted subgraph G that approximately retains the same cut structure of G. For general graphs, non-trivial sparsification is possible only by using weighted graphs in which different edges have different weights. Even for graphs that admit unweighted sparsifiers (that is, sparsifiers in which all the edge weights are equal to the same scaling factor), there are no known polynomial time algorithms that find such unweighted sparsifiers. We study a weaker notion of sparsification suggested by Oveis Gharan, in which the number of cut edges in each cut (S, S) is not approximated within a multiplicative factor (1+ε), but is, instead, approximated up to an additive term bounded by ε times d⋅|S| + vol (S), where d is the average degree of the graph and vol (S) is the sum of the degrees of the vertices in S. We provide a probabilistic polynomial time construction of such sparsifiers for every graph, and our sparsifiers have a near-optimal number of edges O(ε^-2 npolylog (1/ε)). We also provide a deterministic polynomial time construction that constructs sparsifiers with a weaker property having the optimal number of edges O(ε^-2 n). Our constructions also satisfy a spectral version of the "additive sparsification'' property. Notions of sparsification have also been studied for hypergraphs. Our construction of "additive sparsifiers'' with O_ε (n) edges also works for hypergraphs, and provides the first non-trivial notion of sparsification for hypergraphs achievable with O(n) hyperedges when ε and the rank r of the hyperedges are constant. Finally, we provide a new construction of spectral hypergraph sparsifiers, according to the standard definition, with poly (ε^-1, r) n log n hyperedges, improving over the previous spectral construction (Soma and Yoshida) that used Õ(n^3) hyperedges even for constant r and ε.


In contrast to conventional multi-page Web applications, an Ajax application is often developed as a single-page application in which content and structure are changed at runtime according to user interactions, asynchronous messages received from the server and the current state of the application. These features make Ajax applications quite hard to understand for programmers. The authors propose to support Ajax comprehension through reverse engineering. In this study, the authors propose a reverse-engineering tool, ReAjax, to build GUI-based state models from Ajax applications. ReAjax applies dynamic analysis and uses execution traces to generate a finite state machine of the target application GUI. They show that GUI-based state models obtained semi-automatically are similar to those obtained manually and they can be used for program understanding purposes. Finally, the authors summarise a case study and some usage scenarios in which ReAjax has been applied to five real Ajax applications with the purpose of evaluating its viability and effectiveness in recovering models.


Summary Closo-dodecaborate dianion is a three-dimensional aromatic inorganic molecule, which can be easily halogenated forming a stable halogen-boron bond. Derivatives of closo-dodecaborate were considered as a convenient chemical form of delivery of enriched 10B to malignant tumors for boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT). Some properties of closo-dodecaborate (hydrophilicity, strength of halogen-boron bond, charge at lysosomal pH) make it attractive as a potential prosthetic group for attachment of radioactive halogens to tumor-targeting proteins. Bromine radioisotopes possess a variety of useful nuclear characteristics, and can be used in different areas of clinical diagnostics and therapy. In this work, a basic chemistry of closo-dodecaborate radiobromination was studied. It was found, that di(triethylamonium) dodecahydro-closo-dodecaborate can be labelled in high yield, more then 90%, in a wide pH range. By decreasing the pH, the bromination can be directed to closo-dodecaborate in the presence of phenolic compounds. The results of the study indicate a possibility of using the radioactive bromine label for investigation of pharmacokinetics of boronated compounds for BNCT.


The predictive validity of early literacy skills of children among preschool is relatively unknown. The purpose of this longitudinal study was to provide this examination. From a sample of preschoolers, longitudinal data were available for 143 of the children in kindergarten and for 116 of them through the end of first grade. Preschool children were assessed in the fall, winter, and spring with Early Literacy Individual Growth and Development Indicators (EL-IGDIs). In the fall, winter, and spring of kindergarten, literacy skills were assessed and curriculum-based measurement data in reading were collected in the spring of kindergarten and first grade. Results showed significant increases in mean ELIGDI scores. In most instances, preschool administrations of the EL-IGDIs were moderately correlated with kindergarten measures of alphabetic principle and phonological awareness. Preschool EL-IGDIs were found to be significantly predictive of later outcomes in oral reading fluency both at the end of kindergarten and at the end of first grade. The diagnostic utility of these measures was found to be strong. Implications for practice are discussed.


When Leona Helmsley, the New York hotel and real estate heiress, died in August 2007, she left a will naming both human and canine beneficiaries. However, one of the unnamed beneficiaries of this estate plan is surely the body of scholars interested in studying the role of philanthropy in the United States. By directing that an estimated $8 billion be used for the benefit of dogs, Mrs. Helmsley brought into high relief policy issues regarding the appropriateness of the unlimited charitable deduction, particularly as it applies to perpetual private foundations.


Ceropegia bulbosa Roxb. is a narrow endemic, tuberous twiner of Asclepiadaceae family. It is medicinally important: tubers are nutritive and edible, leaves are digestive and a cure for dysentery and diarrhea. Exploitation for its tubers and poor regeneration of this species has shrunk its distribution. In order to know its present status, we report here the results of its appraisal in Rajasthan, using remote sensing and ground truthing in the past five years (2009-14). A base map of C. bulbosa was prepared using Geographical Information System (GIS), open source software Quantum GIS, SAGA. The Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM) +Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM) Satellite Data were used in this study. ASTER and GDEM Data was clipped with district boundary and provided color range to get elevation information. A digital elevation model of Rajasthan physiography was developed from ASTER GDEM of 30-m resolution. GIS layers of Area of occurrences for C. bulbosa plant and elevation were created. This map along with topographic sheets of 1:50000 were used for field traversing and ground truthing as per GPS location inferred from map. Its geographic distribution was assessed using MaxEnt distribution modelling algorithm that employed 12 presence locality data, 19 bioclimatic variables, and elevation data. Results of this modelling predicted occurrence of C. bulbosa in the districts of Sirohi, Jalore, Barmer, Pali, Ajmer, Jhalawar, Dungarpur, Banswara, Baran, Kota, Bundi and Chittorgarh. Ground validation in these districts revealed its presence only at four places in three districts confirming its rarity. Analysis of dominance at their sites of occurrence revealed their poor populations and sub dominant status (RIV= 20-32) and very low density (2-12 plants per tenth ha). *Corresponding author


Inspired by recent experiments and theoretical work on vanadium spinels, the least investigated vanadium spinel i.e. NiV2O4 has been explored theoretically in this work. The systems is found to have an optimized vanadiumvanadium distance of 2.94 Å , which is the same as the limit of itinerancy in vanadium spinels. This indicates that the system is sitting exactly at the border between metallic and insulating phase. The calculations show that there is no tetragonal distortion present in it and it would prefer normal spinel structure. The DFT calculations have been performed using GGA approximation.


Positron emission tomography (PET) was used to locate an area in human extrastriate cortex that subserves a specific component process of visual object recognition. Regional blood flow increased in a bilateral extrastriate area on the inferolateral surface of the brain near the border between the occipital and temporal lobes (and a smaller area in the right fusiform gyms) when subjects viewed line drawings of 3-dimensional objects compared to viewing scrambled drawings with no clear shape interpretation. Responses were Seen for both novel and familiar objects, implicating this area in the bottom-up (i.e., memory-independent) analysis of visual shape.


Backcasting approach is implemented through imagination and analysis of sustainable futures, and subsequently developing strategies for participation in competitive markets. It is a novel approach which is employed by only a few countries. Diversity of trends and lack of a reference model on the one hand, and its application for solving complex problems on the other hand, were the motivation to conduct the present study. In this study, 11 frameworks and some experiences of it's application have been reviewed and the reference model was proposed through a meta-synthesis method. The results led to a two-dimensional model and indicated that backcasting approach can be followed in 6 stages and 4 scientific dimensions for achieving a sustainable development.


Abstract The current case definition of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) was developed by consensus rather than empirical methods. From a practice point of view, if the case definition is not empirically-based, it is possible that some individuals with this illness might not be diagnosed, and others who do not have the disorder might be diagnosed. In the present study, 114 individuals with CFS were provided a theoretically driven questionnaire that featured neuropsychiatric, vascular, inflammatory, muscle/joint, infectious, and other symptoms. When symptoms using this classification were factor analyzed, a more interpretable factor structure was identified than when using symptoms from traditional case definition criteria. Factor scores from the new classification system were cluster analyzed, and four types of patient groups were identified. The field of CFS studies needs to be grounded in empirical methods for determining a case definition versus more consensus-based efforts. Such efforts will ultimately help social service providers better diagnose and provide services to those with this chronic illness.


OBJECTIVES
Aerobic exercise can improve the levels of leptin and ghrelin in healthy people, but the effect of aerobic exercise on these proteins in colorectal cancer patients is not well known. The purpose of this study was to investigate plasma leptin and ghrelin concentrations in male patients with colorectal cancer after 8 weeks aerobic exercise and after a week of detraining.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Thirty men with colorectal cancer (aged: 51.56 ± 11.28 years; ± standard deviation ( SD)) were randomly assigned to training group (n = 15) or control group (n = 15). Before the experiment, Rockport walking test was conducted in order to measure peak aerobic capacity (VO2peak) of all subjects. Exercise training program consisted of 8 weeks walking and three 45-min sessions in each week with 50-60% of target heart rate. After 8 weeks of training, subjects underwent a week of detraining. A repeated measure analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to evaluate time-course change in variables.

RESULTS
The results showed that body fat percentage was decreased and VO2peak was increased in the training group compared to the control group (P < 0.05). Ghrelin concentration was increased significantly in the training group compared to the control group (P < 0.05), while plasma leptin concentration and insulin resistance did not change significantly. After a week of detraining, the variables did not change significantly in the training group.

CONCLUSION
VO2peak and ghrelin levels increased after 8 weeks aerobic exercise; however, plasma leptin and insulin resistance were not affected by this protocol in male patients with colorectal cancer.


PURPOSE
This systematic review aimed to determine the effects of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention on speech production in children with autism or pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified.

METHOD
A systematic review methodology was utilized to limit bias in searching, selecting, coding, and synthesizing relevant treatment studies. This involved a multifaceted search for studies written between 1975 and May 2007 using various bibliographic databases, dissertation databases, hand searches of selected journals and published compilations of AAC theses and dissertations, and ancestry searches. To be included, studies had to meet stringent criteria. A coding manual and form facilitated data extraction in terms of participant characteristics, treatment characteristics, design and measurement, and outcomes.

RESULTS
Nine single-subject experimental design (27 participants) and 2 group studies (98 participants) were included. Results indicated that AAC interventions do not impede speech production. In fact, most studies reported an increase in speech production. However, in-depth analyses revealed that the gains were rather modest.

CONCLUSIONS
Although AAC interventions do not appear to impede speech production and may result in increased speech production, the modest gains observed require realistic expectations among clinicians and other stakeholders. Future research should be more hypothesis driven and aim to identify predictive child characteristics, such as prior speech imitation and object exploration skills.


This qualitative research seeks to understand how students' experiences in service-learning contribute to their understanding of and commitment to social justice. Sensemaking theory is applied to unpack how students make sense of social justice—expressly, how the service-learning experiences (both community and classroom processes) provide students the opportunity to consider and conceptualize issues of justice. The findings demonstrate that students' experiences in service-learning facilitated a more complex understanding of and expressed commitment to social justice. Key to this process of social justice sensemaking were six properties: students' developing understandings of themselves and their role (identity); revisiting and reconsidering their positions (retrospect); connecting to new concepts and understandings that they wished to integrate into their own (referencing); recognizing conflicts between what was expected and what was experienced (contradiction); interacting with others (social); and developing confidence in their understandings, even if they were unsure about the accuracy of meaning (plausibility). These properties also reveal the aspects of a service-learning experience that provide the needed environment to enact social justice sensemaking.


For more than 30 years, I have taught elementary courses in acoustics to students in the liberal arts. Although these courses were designed especially for music students, the subject of musical acoustics has broad appeal to students with a wide variety of backgrounds and with a broad spectrum of professional and vocational plans. One can easily argue that musical acoustics is ''good physics,'' in that it applies the principles of mechanics, wave motion, thermodynamics, optics, and electricity and magnetism to understanding musical instruments and the way in which musical sound is recorded and reproduced. I have written two textbooks, two reprint books, a book of acoustics laboratory experiments, a book of demonstration experiments, and other suggestions for teaching the science of sound. Some of my experiences and ideas for teaching physics through musical acoustics will be shared.


AIM
To examine the effect of intramuscular barium selenate on the blood selenium concentration of horses with marginal selenium status.

METHODS
Eighteen mares were assigned to one of six groups. The mares in groups 1-4 received barium selenate at 0.5, 0.75, 1.0 and 1.5 mg Se/kg, respectively, injected into the right pectoral muscle mass. The mares in group 5 received sodium selenate at 0.05 mg Se/kg orally at 8-week intervals. The mares in group 6 were left untreated. Blood samples were collected at 0, 1, 2, 5, 10, 30, 60, 90, 120, 180, 240, 300 and 360 days after the initial treatment for assay of whole blood and plasma selenium. Injection site reactions were recorded on each sampling date.

RESULTS
Treatment with barium selenate at each dose rate significantly increased whole blood, plasma and blood cell selenium concentrations when compared to no treatment or oral treatment with sodium selenate, and maintained group mean whole blood selenium concentrations in the adequate range (>1600 nmol/l) until the end of the experimental period of 1 year. The severity of injection site reactions increased with dose rate but was considered acceptable alt the lower dose rates used.

CONCLUSION
The injection of barium selenate placed aseptically at a deep intramuscular site was efficacious in correcting the selenium status of mares grazing pasture with a selenium content of 0.01-0.07 mg/kg DM. However, some swelling and fibrosis at the injection site was apparent at all dose rates used.

CLINICAL RELEVANCE
There is currently no long-acting selenium supplementation product licensed in New Zealand for use in horses. Barium selenate promises to provide a useful method for selenium supplementation for horses, with an effective duration of at least 1 year following a single injection.


Concerned about redressing negative impacts on their communities, many people are seeking improved social, environmental and ethical outcomes from organisations. Social values and beliefs systems are playing an increasingly influential role in shaping the attitudes and behaviour of individuals and organizations towards the employment relationship. Many individuals seek a broader meaning in their work that will let them feel that they are contributing to the broader community. For many organisations, a willingness to behave ethically, and assume responsibility for social and environmental consequences of their activities, has become essential to maintaining their 'licence to operate'. The appearance of these trends in individual and organizational behaviour towards outcomes that are more explicitly congruent with ethical and social values has significant implications for understanding the psychological contracts being created today. In this paper, we propose and discuss a model of the role of ethical values as an influence on the psychological contract.


'The Colonisation of Utopia' is a long essay published in the catalogue accompanying an exhibition dedicated to the work of William Morris at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester in 2004. The exhibition was curated by David Mabb and the catalogue was edited by Jennifer Harris, Deputy Director of the Gallery.
Beginning with a reading of Georges Perec's novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, published 1965, I examine the travails of the utopian imagination. Identifying three central themes in utopian thought – sexual liberty, material abundance and a life of ease – I argue that capitalism has succeeded in colonising Utopia. Despite this, I suggest that that the idea of utopia remains a crucial resource for thinking about the future and reject both the fashionable injunctions on utopian thought and Fredric Jameson's attempt to repackage the concept.
'The Colonisation of Utopia' explores the work of two very different thinkers – William Morris and Guy Debord. In spite of the obvious differences between the English exponent of medievalism and the decorative arts and the French poet and theorist of the Situationist International, I argue that these thinkers share a productive critique of the colonisation of material abundance. I also claim that contrary to the usual estimation of the S.I., Debord has to be seen as a utopian thinker. Morris and Debord bring very different contributions to this critique: Debord's avant-gardism is more productive than Morris's neo-medieval organicism, while the latter's account of work is infinitely superior to the S.I.'s ideology of 'slacking'. Not least of all, because work is the category that will forever elude the capitalist utopia, I argue that we must return to work and Morris must be central to this project.
It has recently been republished in The First Condition No.5, 2007 with a 9 page commentary by Dave Beech and Mark Hutchinson.


The Rocky Mountain Front (RMF) trends north-south near long 105°W for ∼1500 km from near the U.S.-Mexico border to southern Wyoming. This long, straight, persistent structural boundary originated between 1.4 and 1.1 Ga in the Mesoproterozoic. It cuts the 1.4 Ga Granite-Rhyolite Province and was intruded by the shallow-level alkaline granitic batholith of Pikes Peak (1.09 Ga) in central Colorado. The RMF began as a boundary between thick cratonic lithosphere to the east (modern coordinates) and an orogenic plateau to the west and remains so today. It was reactivated during the 1.1 to 0.6 Ga breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia and during deformation associated with formation of both the Ancestral and Laramide Rocky Mountains. Its persistence as a cratonic boundary is also indicated by emplacement of alkalic igneous rocks, gold-telluride deposits, and other features that point to thick lithosphere, low heat flow, and episodic mantle magmatism from 1.1 Ga to the Neogene. Both rollback of the Farallon flat slab ca. 37 Ma and initiation of the Rio Grande Rift shortly thereafter began near the RMF. Geomorphic expression of the RMF was enhanced during the late Miocene to Holocene (ca. 6–0 Ma) by tectonic uplift and increased monsoonal precipitation that caused differential erosion along the mountain front, exhuming an imposing 0.5–1.2 km escarpment, bordered by hogbacks of Phanerozoic strata and incised by major river canyons.

Here we investigate four right-stepping deflections of the RMF that developed during the Laramide orogeny and may reveal timing and structural style. The Sangre de Cristo Range to Wet Mountains and Wet Mountains to Front Range steps are related to reactivation of the eroded stumps of Ancestral Rocky Mountain uplifts. In northern Colorado, the Colorado Mineral Belt (CMB) ends at the RMF; no significant northeast-trending faults cross the Front Range–Denver Basin boundary. However, several features changed from south to north across the CMB. (1) The axis of the Denver Basin was deflected ∼60 km to the northeast. (2) The trend of the RMF changed from north–northwest to north. (3) Structural style of the Front Range–Denver Basin margin changed from northeast-vergent thrusts to northeast-dipping, high-angle reverse faults. (4) Early Laramide uplift north of the CMB was accompanied by southeastward slumping and decollement faulting of upper Cretaceous sedimentary units. (5) The Boulder-Weld coal field developed within the zone of decollement faulting. (6) The huge Wattenberg gas field formed over a paleogeothermal anomaly. (7) Apatite fission track (AFT) cooling ages in the Front Range north of the CMB are almost all associated with Laramide deformation (ca. 80–40 Ma), whereas south of the CMB, AFT ages in the Front Range and Wet Mountains vary widely (ca. 449–30 Ma). Proterozoic rocks still retain pre-Laramide AFT ages in a zone as much 1200 m thick south of the CMB, revealing comparatively modest uplift and erosion. A fourth step is a ∼250 km deflection of the RMF from the Laramie Range to the Black Hills of South Dakota along the southeastern boundary of the Wyoming Archean province.

Laramide synorogenic sedimentation occurred mainly in Paleocene and early Eocene time on both sides of the Front Range in Colorado, but the timing and style of basin-margin thrusting differed markedly. Moderate- to high-angle thrusts and reverse faults characterized the east side beginning in the Maastrichtian (ca. 68 Ma). On the west side, low-angle thrusts overrode the Middle Park and South Park basins by 10–15 km beginning in the latest Paleocene–early Eocene. This later contraction correlates temporally with the third major episode of shortening in the Sevier fold and thrust belt, when the Hogsback thrust added ∼21 km of shortening to become the easternmost major thrust in southwest Wyoming and northern Utah. A remarkable attribute of the RMF is that it maintained its position through multiple orogenies and changes in orientation and strength of tectonic stresses. During the Laramide orogeny, the RMF marked a tectonic boundary beyond which major contractional partitioning of the Cordilleran foreland was unable to penetrate. However, the nature of the lithospheric flaw that underlies the RMF is an unanswered question.


Cancer cells can acquire profound alterations to the structure of their genomes, including rearrangements that fuse distant DNA breakpoints. We analyze the distribution of somatic rearrangements across the cancer genome, using whole-genome sequencing data from 2,693 tumor-normal pairs. We observe substantial variation in the density of rearrangement breakpoints, with enrichment in open chromatin and sites with high densities of repetitive elements. After accounting for these patterns, we identify significantly recurrent breakpoints (SRBs) at 52 loci, including novel SRBs near BRD4 and AKR1C3. Taking into account both loci fused by a rearrangement, we observe different signatures resembling either single breaks followed by strand invasion or two separate breaks that become joined. Accounting for these signatures, we identify 90 pairs of loci that are significantly recurrently juxtaposed (SRJs). SRJs are primarily tumor-type specific and tend to involve genes with tissue-specific expression. SRJs were frequently associated with disruption of topology-associated domains, juxtaposition of enhancer elements, and increased expression of neighboring genes. Lastly, we find that the power to detect SRJs decreases for short rearrangements, and that reliable detection of all driver SRJs will require whole-genome sequencing data from an order of magnitude more cancer samples than currently available.


Within the context of modern sustainable development, there is a movement of human sustainability, which focuses on the value of human life and the problems that threaten that life. One problem found in Honolulu, Hawai'i is a large homeless population. Mobile architecture—understood in this case as single-family homes on non-permanent foundations—presents opportunities to draw distinct connections to the issues that cause this homelessness problem. Static tiny homes—understood here as single-family homes on permanent foundations with an area of 500 square feet or less—presents a different set of strengths when addressing the same problem. This analysis weighs the use and stability of static tiny homes against the cost and mobility of mobile tiny homes, concluding that static tiny homes better solve the issue of homelessness in Honolulu, Hawai'i.


Abstract. Beijing is a megacity situated in the rapidly developing Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region of northern China. In this study, we analyze data on ozone and nitrogen oxide levels obtained at six urban sites in Beijing between the months of July and September. Our goal is to investigate average trends and interpretations over the 2001–2006 period. Average concentrations of NOx (NOx=NO+NO2), O3, and Ox (Ox=O3+NO2) were 49.2±5.9 ppbv, 26.6±2.8 ppbv, and 60.3±1.9 ppbv, respectively. NOx concentrations decreased linearly at a rate of 3.9±0.5 ppbv/yr after 2002, while ozone concentrations increased at a rate of 1.1±0.5 ppbv/yr during 2001–2006, and Ox concentrations remained nearly constant. The reduction of NOx emissions and elevated non-methane hydrocarbon (NMHCs) emissions may have contributed to the increased O3 concentrations in Beijing. When the contributions from Beijing's urban and surrounding areas were disaggregated via trajectory cluster analysis, daily maximum and average Ox concentrations attributable to Beijing's local emissions increased linearly at rates of 1.3±0.6 ppbv/yr and 0.8±0.6 ppbv/yr, while the Ox concentrations attributable to regional areas decreased linearly at rates of 0.6±0.3 ppbv/yr and 0.5±0.3 ppbv/yr, respectively. The decrease in Ox concentrations of the surrounding areas was found to counteract increasing Beijing urban Ox production, leading to nearly constant Ox concentrations in the Beijing region over the study period. Our results may be helpful for redefining government strategies to control the photochemical formation of air pollutants in the Beijing region. Our conclusions have relevance for developing megacities worldwide.


Considering the relationship between erosion rate and the relief structure of a landscape within a non-dimensional framework facilitates the comparison of landscapes undergoing forcing at a range of scales, and allows broad scale patterns of landscape evolution to be observed. We present software which automates the extraction and processing of relevant topographic parameters to rapidly generate non-dimensional erosion rate and relief data for any landscape where high resolu5 tion topographic data are available. Individual hillslopes are identified using a connected components technique which allows spatial averaging to be performed over geomorphologically meaningful spatial units, without the need for manual identification of hillslopes. The software is evaluated on four landscapes across the continental United States, three of which have been studied previously using this technique. We show that it is possible to identify whether 10 landscapes are in topographic steady state. In locations such as Cascade Ridge, CA a clear signal of an erosional gradient can be observed. In the Southern Appalachians, non-dimensional erosion rate and relief data are interpreted as evidence for a landscape decaying following uplift during the Miocene. An analysis of the sensitivity of this method to free parameters used in the data smoothing routines is presented which allows users to make an informed choice of parameters when interro15 gating new topographic data using this method. A method to constrain the critical gradient of the nonlinear sediment flux law is also presented which provides an independent constraint on this parameter for three of the four study landscapes.


The purpose of this paper is to describe how some students reconcile school with paid employment. Previous studies have found that students who work a moderate number of hours while in school actually maintain better academic performance than students who do not work at all. (They also perform better than students who work long hours.) Brief essays written by a sample of US high school students as part of a longitudinal study reflect a continuum of opinions regarding the relative value of school and work. One common opinion is that both school and work have value because they both prepare young people for the future in similar ways. The prevalence of this view suggests one reason why working appears not to detract from school performance for some students. Creating more explicit connections between school and paid employment might further enhance their mutual complementarity.


This is the story of a strange and disturbing friendship seen through the eyes of Natalie as she gets to know Tulip Pierce, a delinquent girl most others go out of their way to avoid. Nobody wants Tulip in their gang. She bunks off school, is rude to the teachers and makes herself unpopular with her classmates by telling awful lies. But none of this matters to Natalie who finds Tulip's behaviour exciting and dangerous. At first she doesn't care that other people are upset by Tulip's bizarre games but as the games become increasingly dangerous and sinister, Natalie realises that Tulip is going too far. Way too far...Tulip becomes even more destructive and after a row with Natalie she commits a terrible crime. This is a compelling story in which Anne Fine explores the dark side of a friendship bordering on obsession, and sensitively depicts one girl's gradual decline into hostility and violence.


PURPOSE
To compare two sclera decontamination methods: treatment with glycerin versus treatment with gamma irradiation, alkali and glycerin, aiming to detect the clinical and histological alterations in rabbit anophthalmic sockets reconstructed with sclera-involved polymethylmethacrylate spheres.

METHODS
Thirty-nine New Zealand-breed rabbits were divided into two groups: group I, whose animals were submitted to enucleation of one eye and reconstruction with a polymethylmethacrylate sphere involved in glycerin-treated sclera; group II, where there was enucleation, and reconstruction performed with a polymethylmethacrylate sphere involved in sclera treated with gamma irradiation, alkali and glycerin. The two groups were observed at four moments, at 7, 21, 42 and 84 days after surgery. Preset times elapsed, the rabbits were euthanized, sockets were exenterated, the material was processed for embedment in paraffin, cut into 5 microm sections thick and stained with hematoxylin-eosin and Masson's trichrome techniques. The scleras were submitted to morphometric and semiquantitative analysis. Results were compared by Mann-Whitney's non-parametric test.

RESULTS
Comparative analysis of vascularization of the surgical interface pointed out a significative difference in the evaluation done 21 days after the implant (P<0.001), with group II showing greater neovascularization. Comparison of the fibrous capsule thickness displayed a significative difference at moments corresponding to 21 days (P<0.001) and 42 days (P<0.001). At both moments, group II presented a thicker fibrous capsule than group I. Likewise, there was variation in sclera thickness, being thicker in group II, at the 21-day post-implant (P=0.003) moment, and at the 42-day moment (P=0.024), as well. Along the experimental period, when groups were analyzed we could observe statistically significative diminution of vascularization in the surgical interface, in group I, as well as in group II, at the moment of 7, 21, 42 and 84 days.

CONCLUSION
When used as coating on the polymethylmethacrylate implant for the reconstruction of rabbit anophthalmic socket, the sclera treated with gamma irradiation, alkali and glycerin reacted similarly to the traditionally used glycerin-treated sclera. The two treatments induced a similar inflammatory response. The formation of neovessels, thickness of fibrous capsule and of sclera developed differently in the two groups. Nevertheless, they presented similar results at the end of the 84-day observation period. There was no significant difference between the two groups, with regard to sclera preservation.


OBJECTIVE: To examine the association between maternal prepregnancy BMI and cognitive performance in children at 5 and 7 years of age. METHODS: This is a secondary analysis of data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a prospective population based cohort of 19 517 children in the United Kingdom. Standardized cognitive assessments of children, involving components of the British Ability Scales, second edition and a number skills test, were performed at 5 and 7 years of age. Principal components analysis was used to identify a general cognitive ability factor (g) from individual test scores. Maternal prepregnancy BMI was retrospectively self-reported when children were 9 months old. Mixed-effects linear regression models were fitted, controlling for multiple socio-demographic factors, child's birth weight, child's BMI, maternal smoking, and maternal diabetes. Complete data were available for 11 025 children at 5 years, and 9882 children at 7 years. RESULTS: Maternal prepregnancy BMI was negatively associated with children's cognitive performance (g) at age 5 (P = .0069) and age 7 (P < .0001). The overall effect size was modest: a 10-point increase in maternal BMI was associated with a decrease in cognitive performance of ∼1/10th of an SD at age 7. CONCLUSIONS: Maternal prepregnancy BMI is negatively associated with children's cognitive performance, even after adjusting for multiple socio-demographic confounders and children's BMI. The relationship appears to become stronger as children get older, although the overall effect size is modest. In utero fetal programming or residual confounding may explain these findings.


OBJECTIVE: The goal of this study was to assess the efficacy of an after-school, peer-led, healthy living program on adiposity, self-efficacy, and knowledge of healthy living behaviors in children living in a remote isolated First Nation. METHODS: A quasi-experimental trial with a parallel nonequivalent control arm was performed with 151 children in Garden Hill First Nation during the 2010–2011 and 2011–2012 school years. Fourth grade students were offered a 5-month, peer-led intervention facilitated by high school mentors between January and May of each school year; students in the control arm received standard curriculum. The main outcome measures were waist circumference (WC) and BMI z score. Secondary outcome measures included healthy living knowledge and self-efficacy. RESULTS: Fifty-one children (mean ± SD age: 9.7 ± 0.4 years; BMI z score: 1.46 ± 0.84) received the intervention, and 100 children were in the control arm. At baseline, WC (79.8 vs 83.9 cm), BMI z score (1.46 vs 1.48), and rates of overweight/obesity (75% vs 72%) did not differ between arms. After the intervention, the change in WC (adjusted treatment effect: –2.5 cm [95% confidence interval (CI): –4.1 to –0.90]; P = .002) and BMI z score (adjusted treatment effect: –0.09 [95% CI: –0.16 to –0.03]; P = .007) were significantly lower in the intervention arm compared to the control arm. The intervention arm also experienced improvements in knowledge of healthy dietary choices (2.25% [95% CI: –0.01 to 6.25]; P = .02). Self-efficacy was associated with the change in WC after the intervention (β = –7.9, P = .03). CONCLUSIONS: An after-school, peer-led, healthy living program attenuated weight gain and improved healthy living knowledge in children living in a remote isolated First Nation.


The Kashmir case is a conundrum in the study of women's roles in religio-political militancy. While traditional social structure and gendered hierarchies have been retained, public spaces have also been available to women to don more political and militant roles. This article looks at the multiple roles of women in the militancy in Kashmir and the discourses around them. Women's participation in the militancy has not found any mention in the nationalist narratives and Kashmiri women struggle to claim their share in the contemporary political discourse. Ambiguities remain about how the male-dominated Kashmiri nationalist and conflict discourse may have influenced inclusions and exclusions. Through a case study based on interviews conducted in Kashmir, this article argues that women's violent activities or their support to the militancy is altogether excluded or maneuvered to preserve existing gender norms and patriarchal traditions. This has dangerous implications as it tends to exclude women's voices in the peace processes.


Individuals' labour market status and health are known to be highly correlated. To investigate this association beyond prime working ages, we study how all-cause mortality at ages 65–70 relates to different labour market positions at ages 50–64. The data stem from random samples of the Finnish population, which make it possible to follow 33,000 individuals in the period 1987–2011. Hazard models are estimated to quantify the associations. For both men and women, disability pensioners have a hazard of dying at age 65+ that is approximately twice that of persons who were employed, and this ratio still exceeds 1.5 when socioeconomic and demographic variables are included. Also male unemployment, but not female, is associated with an elevated mortality risk, but this interrelation depends greatly on socioeconomic position.


Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) has typically been used in neuroimaging to draw inferences from a single modality, e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or electroencephalography (EEG). As simultaneous acquisition of different neuroimaging modalities becomes more common, one consideration is how to apply MVPA methods to analyze the resulting multimodal dataspaces. We present a multi-modal fusion technique that seeks to simultaneously train a multivariate classifier and identify correlated components across the two modalities. We validate our approach on a real simultaneous EEG-fMRI dataset.


Background subtraction is a vital step in many computer vision systems. In background subtraction, one is given two (or more) frames of a video sequence taken with a still camera. Due to the stationarity of the camera, any color change in the scene is mainly due to the presence of moving objects. The goal of background subtraction is to separate the moving objects (also called the foreground) from the stationary background. Many background subtraction approaches have been proposed over the years. They are usually composed of two distinct stages, background modeling and foreground detection. Most of the standard background subtraction techniques focus on the background modeling. In the thesis, we focus on the improvement of foreground detection performance. We formulate the background subtraction as a pixel labeling problem, where the goal is to assign each image pixel either a foreground or background labels. We solve the pixel labeling problem using a principled energy minimization framework. We design an energy function composed of three terms: the data, smoothness, and color separation terms. The data term is based on motion information between image frames. The smoothness term encourages the foreground and background regions to have spatially coherent boundaries. These two terms have been used for background subtraction before. The main contribution of this thesis is the introduction of a new color separation term into the energy function for background subtraction. This term models the fact that the foreground and background regions tend to have different colors. Thus, introducing a color separation term encourages foreground and background regions not to share the same colors. Color separation term can help to correct the mistakes made due to the data term when the motion information is not entirely reliable. We model color separation term with L1 distance, using the technique developed by Tang et.al. Color clustering is used to efficiently model the color space. Our energy function can be globally and efficiently optimized with graph cuts, which is a very effective method for solving binary energy minimization problems arising in computer vision. To prove the effectiveness of including the color separation term into the energy function for background subtraction, we conduct experiments on standard datasets. Our model depends on color clustering and background modeling. There are many possible ways to perform color clustering and background modeling. We evaluate several different combinations of popular color clustering and background modeling approaches. We find that incorporating spatial and motion information as part of the color clustering process can further improve the results. The best performance of our approach is 97% compared to the approach without color separation that achieves 90%.


Reclamation of biosolids through land application generally meets 2 key components of Sustainable Development: environment and economics. Unfortunately, societal acceptance is the weakest part of it, despite the scientific evidence that risks with biosolids are low or lower than with farm manures. Beside unacceptable odor problems in some areas - that have to be dealt with - there is a general pre-conception that biosolids are at risk. This pre-conception has to deal with modern urban culture, beliefs, values and taboos. Communication must therefore be an important part of every biosolids strategy. However, since some actors of the private and public sectors are not always trustworthy in the minds of the general public, it is necessary to have some kind of independent organization that states that a given biosolids is safe. Therefore, third-party standardization and certifications of biosolids appear to be a key component to Sustainable Development. However, it is important that the certification label is well known and trustworthy by stakeholders. Pro's and con's of the Canadian voluntary certification of biosolids will be presented. Keywords Biosolids, certification, public perceptions, Sludge Diet, trust


The propagation of acoustic waves in the ocean strongly depends on the temperature. Lowfrequency acoustic waves can penetrate the ocean down to depths where few in situ measurements are available. It is therefore attractive to obtain a measure of the deep ocean temperature from acoustic waves. The latter is especially true if the ambient acoustic noise field can be used instead of deterministic transient signals. In this study the acoustic velocity, and hence the temperature, is derived in an interferometric approach from hydrophone array recordings. The arrays were separated by over 125 km, near Ascension Island in the Atlantic Ocean, at a depth of 850 m. Furthermore, the dispersive characteristics of the deep ocean sound channel are resolved based on the retrieved lag times for different modes. In addition, it is shown how the resolution of the interferometric approach can be increased by cross correlating array beams rather than recordings from single-sensor pairs. The observed acoustic lag times between the arrays corresponds well to modelled values, based on full-wave modelling through best-known oceanic models.


Work environments are complex and interrelated systems of people, processes and places, where there are no ione size fits alliu -solutions. In office context the workplace and facilities managers face this complexity when they try to optimize the environments to meet the needs of the organization, employees and the work processes. Technical modifications in the physical environment are one option when developing the open plan office. However, these technical solutions can be expensive and they still do not guarantee a better user experience. A psychosocial approach to open plan offices provides development by focusing on the use of the environment. The aim of this paper is to approach open plan office improvements from a psychosocial perspective and to identify what kind of solutions can be offered by changing the way the environment is used. The research is conducted as a case study in one organization that had gone through an extensive workplace change project two years earlier when the organization moved from a space with private rooms to an open plan office solution. The new work environment was, however, perceived as problematic by the employees. In order to understand the user experiences and to find solutions to the problems, data was collected through both objective technical measurements and a walkthrough audit that was carried out together with users of the open-plan office. The research revealed that the problems could be tackled not only by expensive technical renovations but also by making some spatial modifications and changing the way the environment was used. This indicates that, when aiming for satisfied users, it is important to balance technical solutions and the ways the space is used. The workplace change process is not finished when the new office has been accommodated; adaptation of new ways to use the office is essential and both the physical and psychosocial work environments have to be taken care of. This paper is provides a framework, which incorporates both technical aspects and the use of the space, for understanding the end-user experience in the work environment.


Three-dimensional and time-dependent simulations of viscoelastic Taylor–Couette flow of dilute polymer solutions are performed using a fully implicit parallel spectral time-splitting algorithm to discover flow patterns with various spatio-temporal symmetries, namely rotating standing waves (RSWs), disordered oscillations (DOs) and solitary vortex structures referred to as oscillatory strips (OSs) and diwhirls (DWs). A detailed account of the impact of flow transitions on molecular conformation and viscoelastic stress, velocity profiles, hydrodynamic drag force and energy spectra of time-dependent flow states is presented. Overall, predicted pattern selection and flow features compare very favourably with experimental observations. For elasticity number E, that signifies the ratio of elastic to viscous forces, >0.1, and when the shear rate (cylinder rotation speed) is increased above the linear stability threshold, the circular Couette flow (CCF) becomes unstable to RSWs which are characterized by a checkerboard-like pattern in the space–time plot of radial velocity, implying symmetry between inflow/outflow (I/O) regions. As the shear rate is further increased, perturbations that break the I/O symmetry are amplified leading to DOs and/or flame-like patterns with spectral mechanical energy transfer reminiscent of elastically induced low-Reynolds-number turbulence. However, when the shear rate is decreased from those at which such chaotic states are observed, the radially inward acting polymer body force created by flow-induced molecular stretching causes the development of narrow inflow regions surrounded by much broader weak outflow domains. This promotes the formation of solitary vortex structures, which can be stationary and axisymmetric (DWs) or time-dependent (OSs). The dynamics of the formation of these structures by merging and coalescence of vortex pairs and the implication of such events on instantaneous hydrodynamic force are studied. For O(1) values of E, OSs and DWs appear approximately at constant values of the We, defined as the ratio of polymer relaxation time to the inverse shear rate in the gap. As shear rate is decreased further, DWs decay to CCF although at We values less than the linear stability threshold. The flow transitions are hysteretic with respect to We, as evidenced by a plot of drag force versus We.


Abstract We present a novel approach for estimating the proportional distributions of function types (i.e. functional distributions) in an urban area through learning semantics preserved embeddings of points-of-interest (POIs). Specifically, we represent POIs as low-dimensional vectors to capture (1) the spatial co-occurrence patterns of POIs and (2) the semantics conveyed by the POI hierarchical categories (i.e. categorical semantics). The proposed approach utilizes spatially explicit random walks in a POI network to learn spatial co-occurrence patterns, and a manifold learning algorithm to capture categorical semantics. The learned POI vector embeddings are then aggregated to generate regional embeddings with long short-term memory (LSTM) and attention mechanisms, to take account of the different levels of importance among the POIs in a region. Finally, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) maps regional embeddings to functional distributions. A case study in Xiamen Island, China implements and evaluates the proposed approach. The results indicate that our approach outperforms several competitive baseline models in all evaluation measures, and yields a relatively high consistency between the estimation and ground truth. In addition, a comprehensive error analysis unveils several intrinsic limitations of POI data for this task, e.g. ambiguous linkage between POIs and functions.


Vehicular exhaust emissions are one of major sources of anthropogenic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in urban areas of Pearl River Delta Region (PRDR). Six types of vehicle emission (VE)-dominated samples were collected at representative locations in Hong Kong in the winter of 2003. A total of 111 VOC species were quantified in the samples collected. n-Butane (31%) was the most abundant species in liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)-fueled VE-dominated samples, followed by propane (26%) and i-butane (25%). Toluene was the most abundant species in gasoline-fueled VE-dominated samples (16%), comprising about half of the quantified aromatic content. While ethene and ethyne have the greatest abundance in all diesel-fueled VE-dominated VOCs profiles (except at Tuen Mun Bus Depot). VOCs were also quantified at three roadside locations in Hong Kong. And ethene was the most abundant VOCs at roadside locations which accounted for 9.5 to 29% of the total quantified VOCs, except at Hong Kong Polytechnic University roadside monitoring station (PUX). Moreover, several VOCs were clearly in abundances in the roadside samples, namely toluene, ethyne, propane, ibutane, n-butane and i-pentane. Generally, strong and fair correlations were determined from the marker species of fuel vapor (i.e., LPG, gasoline, and diesel), which show significant fuel evaporation from vehicles in roadside environment of Hong Kong. Maximum incremental reactivity (MIR) was also calculated to evaluate the contributions of individual VOCs to ozone (O3) formation potential. The largest contributors to O3 production at Mong Kok roadside station (MKX) and Lok Ma Chau roadside station (LMX) were toluene (17 and 15% of the measured VOC reactivity, respectively), ethene (14 and 17% of the measured VOC reactivity, respectively), and propene (7 and 8% of the measured VOC reactivity, respectively), indicating the important roles of alkenes and aromatics in the ambient O3 formation.


Educational inequities persist in England today. Initial teacher educators are therefore charged with facilitating student teachers' understanding of the issues pertaining to such inequities so they may work to disrupt them. Two lecturers at opposite ends of England, both with overwhelmingly White student cohorts, have approached this undertaking through the teaching of critical whiteness studies. This article exposes and explains the very different reactions of White student teachers to this approach given that one of the lecturers is Black and the other White. Explanations are viewed through a sociological framework which seeks to deconstruct normalized practices; in tandem with understandings of how whiteness operates to reinforce such normalization in order that inequitable power relations are reified. This revealed that student reactions were underpinned by racialised assumptions of teacher ability and motives, leading to collusion in whiteness for the White teacher and, for the Black teacher, a collision between her teaching and student perceptions of her role and values.


In a context where fashion design and retail activities are increasingly transferring to the digital environment, mediating touch has become a matter of concern for the field. However, as literature shows, articulating our sensory experiences with materials is a challenging task. This position paper explores the experiential knowledge observed through embodied design processes. This is done by analysing our diverse approaches to introduce tools that help designers to understand people's perceptual experience with textile materials. We build on our previous research that identified relevant embodied processes to textile selection, and reflect on how we have explored how sensing technology can augment and empower each of these processes, thereby supporting design. We conclude by discussing the learning outcomes of analysing such tools, in order to reflect on the future of our research applied to the digital realm.


A program to analyse the length and frequency distribution of specific base tracts in genomic sequences is described. The frequency of oligopurine.oligopyrimidine tracts (R.Y. tracts) in a data base of 163 transcribed genes is analysed and compared. The complete genomes of SV40 virus, N. tobacum chloroplast, yeast 2 micron plasmid, bacteriophage lambda, plasmid pBR322 and the E. coli lac operon are also analyzed. A highly significant overrepresentation of oligopurine and oligopyrimidine tracts is observed in all eukaryotic genes examined, as well as in the chloroplast genome. The overrepresentation is evident in all gene subregions of the chloroplast, in the following order: intergenic regions, 3' downstream and 5' upstream (promoter), 5' and 3' untranslated, introns and coding regions. In genes coding for basic proteins, oligopurine rather than oligopyrimidine tracts are found on the coding stand. In prokaryotic genes only the longest R.Y. tracts (greater than or equal to 12) are found in excess, and are concentrated near regulatory regions. While a structural role for R.Y. tracts is most likely in intergenic regions, a functional role, as initiation sites for strand separation, is proposed for regulatory gene regions.


This paper uses the Current Population Survey (CPS) data to show that changes in family policy implemented in the 1990s led to a substantial increase in the number of young women who report work limitations. These changes also affected measures of socioeconomic outcomes for young women who report limitations. The findings emphasize the importance of disability to family policy issues, and suggest that past underreporting of disability by young mothers might well have disguised its importance. They also suggest that the impacts of family policy on mothers with disabilities have been quite different than the impacts on other mothers. An important effect of family policy changes may have been to segregate low-income mothers with disabilities from other low-income mothers, continuing to relegate them, and possibly their children, to lives of poverty and dependency.


Considering that network overprovisioning by itself is not always an attainable and everlasting solution, admission control (AC) mechanisms are recommended to keep network load controlled and assure the required service quality levels. This article debates the role of AC in multiservice IP networks, providing an overview and discussion of current and representative AC approaches, highlighting their main characteristics, pros and cons regarding the management of network services quality. In this debate, particular emphasis is given to an enhanced monitoring-based AC proposal for assuring multiple service levels in multiclass networks