Objectives To develop an asthma-specific job-exposure matrix (JEM) optimised for the United States (US). Methods We started with the asthma-specific N-JEM that was developed for use in northern Europe, and adapted it to reflect workplace conditions in the US and function with the 2010 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC-2010) codes, which are used widely in the US. The N-JEM functions with the 1988 International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-88). Exposures assessed by the N-JEM for ISCO-88 codes were transferred to comparable SOC-2010 codes by using two cross-walks (ISCO-88 to ISCO-08 to SOC-2010). Three experts (two industrial hygienists, one epidemiologist) used the criterion of a high probability of relevant exposure for at least half the workers to delete or confirm exposure status assigned to SOC-2010 occupations, and to identify additional occupations as exposed. The experts worked independently, submitted initial decisions to the study coordinator, and discussed their decisions with the other experts before submitting final decisions. Exposure status in the JEM was based on a majority opinion of the three experts. The resulting alpha version of the new US Asthma-specific JEM (USA-JEM) was applied to current occupations in a cohort of working adults with asthma, exposures were compared to those assessed by the N-JEM, and disagreements were reviewed to consider further modifications to the USA-JEM. Results We made numerous changes to N-JEM exposures assigned to SOC-2010 occupations by cross-walking from the ISCO-88 codes. Comparing exposure assessments from the two JEMs in the same cohort yielded changes for only 15 SOC-2010 detailed occupations. A total of 399 (47.5%) of the 840 SOC-2010 detailed occupations were assessed by the USA-JEM as having probable exposure to at least one of 19 types of work-related asthma agents. Conclusions The new USA-JEM could be a useful research tool, but further evaluation of its performance is needed.


This study examines Turkish consumers' perceptions and knowledge of safe food handling practices. Their attitudes, opinions, and self-reported practices in the purchase, transportation, storage, preparation, and consumption of food were studied. Data was collected from a total of 440 consumers living in Istanbul, Turkey through the use of a self-administered, structured, and undisguised questionnaire. A combination of stratified and systematic random sampling was used based on the incidence of having or not having experienced food-related illness within the past year. Significant differences were found to exist in the perceptions, opinions, knowledge, and self-reported practices of those who had experienced food-borne illness in the past twelve months versus those who had not. Significant differences were also found with respect to various demographic variables, especially, with respect to age and education levels. Implications of the study for various parties, namely, consumers, producers, retailers, and the state together with further research are also presented in the paper. These implications may be applicable in different countries as well, since food-borne diseases experienced due to bad food-handling practices still present a major challenge to peoples' health, in both the developed and the developing world.


The paper extends the mathematical formalism of quantum physics to include economics. The novelty of the approach is based upon a human-factor-based behavioral model of an intelligent agent. The model is quantum inspired: it is represented by a modified Madelung equation in which the gradient of quantum potential is replaced by a specially chosen information force. It consists of motor dynamics simulating actual behavior of the agent, and mental dynamics representing evolution of the corresponding knowledge base and incorporating this knowledge in the form of information flows into the motor dynamics. Due to feedback from mental dynamics, the motor dynamics attains quantum-like properties: its trajectory splits into a family of different trajectories, and each of those trajectories can be chosen with the probability prescribed by the mental dynamics. All of these departures actually extend and complement the classical methods making them especially successful in analysis of communications of agents represented by new mathematical formalism.


Vaccines are on the front line-of-defense against infectious diseases, ranging from threats we are familiar with, including polio, tuberculosis, or HIV, to novel and emerging threats such as SARS-CoV-2. Successful development of new protein-based vaccines requires sophisticated and efficient development of storage and formulation conditions. Here we demonstrate the combined power of 2bind's sophisticated buffer matrix FORMOscreen® and NanoTemper Technologies' novel Prometheus Panta high-throughput Dynamic Light Scattering/Nano Differential Scanning Fluorimetry instrument. We show that this combination can comprehensively improve critical biophysical parameters for the HIV-1 vaccine BG505-SOSIP and find the optimal formulation condition with unmatched efficiency.


The theory of Inelastic Neutron Scattering (INS) Spectroscopy is outlined, and the spectrometers employed in the study of low frequency (< 1500cm(^-1)) vibrations of hydrogen-containing molecules described. Square planar platinum-ethylene complexes of the general form trans-PtCl(_2)(C(_2)H(_4)).L and cis-PtCl(_2)C(_2)H(_4)).L (where L is a Ligand) have been investigated by INS spectroscopy, and assignments made of their spectra below 850cm(^-1). In all cases, a frequency was found representing the torsion of the ethylene group about an axis projected from the platinum atom through the centre of the C=C band, and the barrier to this rotation calculated. INS active modes of Co(_2)(CO)(_6).C(_2)H(_2) (O-1450cm(_1)) have been tentatively, identified, and a value for the barrier to the rotation of the acetylene molecule about an axis running through the mid-points of the Co-Co and C=C bonds derived. INS spectra of C(_2)H(_4) and C(_2)D(_4), adsorbed at two overpressures onto silver exchanged type A (Ag(_12)A) zeolite have been measured. On this basis of deuteration shifts and relative intensities, all three torsional modesand two of the three translational modes expected for the ethylene moleculerelative to a silver ion have been assigned. In addition, several weak spectroscopic features appeared to indicate the presence of a secondless populated adsorption site. C(_2)H(_2) and C(_2)D(_2) adsorbed onto Ag(_12)A zeolite at one overpressure have been studied by INS spectroscopy. All six predicted acetylene-surface modes were observed, the presence of the torsional vibration of the acetylene molecule about an axis running parallel to the C=C bond indicating the adsorbed molecule to be non-linear. Finally , INS spectra of the complexes Cr(C(_6)H(_6))(_2), Cr(C(_6)H(_6)(_2)I, C(_6)H)(_6)Cr(CO)(_3) and C(_6)H(_6)Mn(CO)(_3) Br have been recorded in the region 0-900(^1). Assignments have been attempted and, wherever possible, the barrier to the rotation of the benzene ligand (s) about the six - fold axis calculated.


A Review of:
Murphy, S. A. & Black, E. L. (2013). Embedding guides where students learn: Do design choices and librarian behavior make a difference? The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 39(6), 528-534. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2013.06.007

Abstract

Objective – To determine whether library guides embedded in learning management systems (LMS) get used by students, and to identify best practices for the creation and promotion of these guides by librarians.

Design – Mixed methods combining quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis (survey, interviews, and statistical analysis).

Setting – A large public university in the United States of America.

Subjects – 100 undergraduate students and 14 librarians.

Methods – The researchers surveyed undergraduate students who were participating in a Project Information Literacy study about their use of library guides in the learning management system (LMS) for a given quarter. At that university, all course pages in the LMS are automatically assigned a library guide. In addition, web usage data about the course-embedded guides was analyzed and high use guides were identified, namely guides that received an average of at least two visits per student enrolled in a course. The researchers also conducted a qualitative analysis of the layout of the high use guides, including the number of widgets (or boxes) and links. Finally, librarians who created high use library guides were interviewed. These mixed methods were designed to address four research questions: 1) Were students finding the guides in the LMS, and did they find the guides useful? 2) Did high use guides differ in design and composition? 3) Were the guides designed for a specific course, or for an entire department or college? and, 4) How did the librarians promote use?

Main Results – Only 33% of the students said they noticed the library guide in the LMS course page, and 21% reported using the guide. Among those who used the guide, the majority were freshmen (possibly because embedding of library guides in the LMS had just started at the university). Library guides with high use in relation to class enrollment did not significantly differ from low use guides in terms of numbers of widgets and links, although high use guides tended to have slightly fewer widgets. Of those guides, 55% were assigned at the course level, 30% at the department level and 13% at the college level. Over half the librarians with at least one high use guide conducted a library instruction session in which they used or promoted that guide. For 39% of the courses with high-use guides, the librarian was actively engaged with the faculty and students via the LMS, but others reported no specific involvement in courses.

Conclusion – Those students who used library guides reported the guides helped them get started on their research paper or assignment and find research materials, two areas for which previous studies show students have great difficulty. Since the majority of students did not notice the link to the library guide in the LMS, librarians could emphasize it in the news section of the course, which gets much more attention. Within library guides, simpler groupings of links might be easier for students to use, but this conclusion would require further research to confirm. In any case, nearly half of all high use guides were not promoted in any way by librarians, but simply automatically embedded in the LMS, a sign that passive embedding may provide an easy way for the library to reach a large number of students early in their academic career. Since the automatic embedding of guides began, guides have seen a dramatic increase in usage.


The 1964 Civil Rights Act, in conjunction with the Voting Rights Act of the following year, totally transformed the shape of American race relations. Supporters of the Civil Rights Act sought, at minimum, the elimination of racial segregation in publicly supported schools, hospitals, public transport, and other public spaces, and an end to open and blatant racial discrimination in employment practices.Judged in those terms, the act is a remarkable success story. It has shown the power of the central government to change deeply entrenched patterns of behavior. In terms of the law, blacks are no longer second-class citizens. From other perspectives, however, the act is seen as a failure. Either it went too far, by institutionalizing race-specific forms of preferences, or it did not go far enough, leaving untouched the socioeconomic differences and lingering effects of past discrimination that perpetuate race-based inequities.Legacies of the 1964 Civil Rights Act brings together a distinguished group of political scientists, historians, lawyers, statisticians, and sociologists who have written extensively on civil rights issues. The editor, Bernard Grofman, has asked the contributors to stand back from the immediate controversies about civil rights reflected in today's news and to provide historical and comparative perspective about this important legislation. Organized into four sections, the book covers the origins of the act and its historical evolution, its consequences in several different policy domains, and the future of civil rights in the United States. An appendix contains two somewhat more technical essays on legal standards for statutory violations and statistical issues in measuring discrimination.Because the moral urgency of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was triggered by revulsion against racial segregation, the act's legacy is primarily seen in the life chances of African Americans. This volume provides a broad and detailed picture of the act's impact on African Americans' lives.


The new genus Jagora of the family Pachychilidae Troschel, 1857 is described for the type species Melania asperata Lamarck, 1822 from the Philippines. In addition to J. asperata, a second endemic species of the new genus, J. dactylus (I. Lea & H.C. Lea, 1850), is recognized on the basis of shell morphometry and molecular genetic data (cytochrome C oxidase I and 16S rRNA). The taxonomic history of J. asperata and J. dactylus is revised and the recent distribution documented on basis of available museum material and the authors' own field collections. J. asperata occurs on Luzon and its satellite islands Leyte and Samar, while J. dactylus is restricted to the Visayan islands Bohol, Cebu, and Guimeras. The morphology of the two species is presented and illustrated in detail, and compared to taxa of the closely related genus Brotia H. Adams, 1866 to which they were previously assigned. Among the South‐east Asian freshwater Cerithioidea of the family Pachychilidae, which were previously subsumed under Brotia for their more or less similar shell morphology and operculum, three distinct lineages can be distinguished, in particular by means of distinct reproductive anatomy: (1) the species of Brotia sensu stricto from mainland South‐east Asia, Sumatra, Borneo and Java, which all exhibit a subhaemocoelic brood pouch; (2) the pachychilid species endemic to Sulawesi, currently assigned to the genera Brotia and Tylomelania, as well as both species of Pseudopotamis endemic to the Torres Strait Islands, which possess a uterine brood pouch; (3) the females of the Philippine Jagora, which carry egg capsules, embryos and advanced juvenile stages within the mantle cavity — a unique reproductive feature. Associated with this mode of ovoviviparity, Jagora is characterized by additional unique properties of the reproductive system including a deeply incised and long sperm gutter in the medial lamina, a very short and posteriorly positioned spermatophore bursa formed by the medial lamina, and a prominent lateral ridge functioning as a seminal receptacle. These characteristics are exclusive to Jagora and are consequently considered to represent autapomorphies of this clade which is endemic only to the Philippines. The zoogeographical implications are discussed in connection with a recently developed palaeogeographical reconstruction.


This study highlights the problems of insecurity and safety threats and their environmental implications in Jimeta, Nigeria. The aim is to study the insecurity and safety threats in the slums in Jimeta, Adamawa State of Nigeria, establishing its nature, pattern and scale so that appropriate recommendations could be advanced to address the phenomenon. The study utilized multiple data sourcing method: Personal observation, oral interview, focus group discussion, questionnaires administration, security breach records study as well as Maps study of the study area. A total of 200 questionnaires were administered to residents of the four wards sampled for the study: Rumde, Luggere, Nassarawo and Jambutu. The data were analysed using both inferential and descriptive statistics. Although most of the findings were based on primary data, references were made to the Nigerian Police Force, Adamawa State Fire Service and the Federal Road Safety Corps whose records of security breach cases were utilised. The investigations revealed that there are high rates of crime in slum affected areas of Jimeta compared to non slum affected areas: Slum areas' crime figures are four times that of the non slum areas. The limited available police establishments and personnel were concentrated in non slum affected wards of Jimeta. The problems of the study area include limited vehicular access to many compounds, absence of designated waste collection point, absence of public conveniences, inadequate personnel for security and safety operatives, haphazard and unplanned physical development among many others. The study concludes that a significant relationship exists between slum characteristics and crime rates in Jimeta. It therefore recommends better accessibility, lighting, and better infrastructure facilities in the slums of Jimeta. Physical planning proposals were advanced for even spatial distribution of Police, Fire Service and Federal Road Safety Corps establishments.


Ugo Fano was a lively, challenging and creative physicist, known for his wide-ranging studies in atomic physics, radiological physics and radiation biology, and statistical physics and relaxation. He stimulated and guided a cadre of students, postdoctoral associates, and colleagues whose admiration and affection for him continued, as did their interactions with him, throughout his life.


Abstract This article describes the results of a study that investigated how to assess higher levels of online learning in post-secondary education. The results of a six item open-ended questionnaire indicated that traditional forms of assessment typically used (i.e., paper and pencil exams) has limited application in online learning environments, indicating a need for alternative assessment strategies. Alternative assessment strategies suggested in the results of this study include the use of negotiated contracting, embedded assessment, learning portfolios, presentations, and repertory grids. ********** Background: Why Alternative Assessment? To receive course credit in formal post-secondary learning environments, we must provide our learners with opportunities to demonstrate that they have acquired an understanding of the content presented. Yet most of us know from our own practices that assessing learning is a difficult process, especially higher levels of learning. How best to assess learning has been the topic of many papers and studies, with diverse outcomes and recommendations. For example, Reeves (2000) maintains that "traditional assessment (commonly called testing) is being challenged in many academic circles by those who favor alternative assessment approaches" (p. 103). Taylor, Marienau and Fiddler (2000) assert further that "many conventional assessment methods, including essays, unseen exams, and laboratory reports, allow students to take a surface approach or even implicitly encourage and reward such an approach" (p. 309). Based on this rationale, Renner (1997) maintains that assessment activities should be integrated into every learning activity, irrespective of intended learning outcomes. The assessment process is typically even more difficult in online learning environments, especially when we want to move beyond reward systems that encourage surface approaches. While more authentic assessment activities tend to be effective - most specifically at determining whether learners can apply their knowledge and skill to a real (or authentic) task - it is often unclear what kinds of assessment strategies effectively achieve this aim, and whether or not they can be facilitated in online learning. The purpose of this study was to extend our understanding about the use of alternative assessment approaches for assessing higher levels of online learning in postsecondary environments. This study was guided by the following question: What assessment activities can effectively assess higher levels of online learning? This study focused on student assessment in online learning environments within postsecondary institutions. Online learning is referred to as the use of asynchronous Internet integrated distributed learning environments (e.g., WebCT, FristClass, Virtual U, Top Class). Within the scope of student assessment, this study was further focused on formative assessment for higher levels of learning and was concerned with investigating higher levels of learning. This kind of learning has been referred to as higher order learning by Fabro and Garrison (1998) and Resnick (1987). Irrespective of whether it is referred to as higher ordered learning or higher levels of learning, the essence is on the construction of new knowledge. Method This study was built upon the results of a prior study (Kanuka, 2001), which identified six elements as evidence that higher levels of learning was occurring in online environments. The six elements included negotiable learning, instructional, performance-based, new and/or multiple perspectives, assumption identification, and an ability to use a variety of learning strategies. A survey was developed based on these elements and sent to a group of selected experts and scholars in the area of online learning from Canada and the United States. Experts and scholars were defined as those who had a PhD, scholarly publications, and experience using the Web to facilitate teaching and learning in post-secondary institutions. …


Chicago was justifiably proud when Boeing decided, this spring, to move its headquarters there from Seattle. The third-largest city in the United States, Chicago is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other metropolitan region except New York. This concentration helped the Windy City post the highest growth in personal income and the second-highest rate of growth in employment among the five largest US cities during the past decade. Even so, will Chicago be able to attract the important companies of the future? Today, more than go percent of all employees in the Chicago metropolitan area work for businesses in traditional sectors such as financial services, manufacturing, real estate, and retailing--industries that are expected to experience relatively low job growth nationally over the next few years. If Chicago is to go on growing, it must win its share of companies in newer, mushrooming sectors such as biotechnology and software. A study delivered to the mayor in March 2001 concluded that the city should think small and build a business environment attractive to startups as well as to giant Boeing. New businesses and "gazelles (companies that grow by more than 20 percent annually over a four-year period) accounted for 80 percent of US net employment growth from 1992 to 1996. Large cities such as New York (which since 1993 has been home to 10 percent of the nation's start-ups) and new-economy cities such as Austin, Texas, rode this wave by attracting and nurturing small companies (Exhibit 1). New York, for instance, invested public money in New York- centric venture funds, leased affordable space to new firms through a public-private partnership, and streamlined or eliminated 1,300 regulations for small businesses. In this way, the city revitalized the area now known as Silicon Alley, which bursts with small high-tech firms. If Chicago is to attract its share of start-ups, it will have to become more compelling to entrepreneurs. The study for the mayor recommended that the city work on three areas important to this group. Funding. Compared with other large states, Illinois has a relatively low level of seed capital investment, particularly on a per capita basis. One reason for this gap is the fact that Chicago is home to relatively few venture capital firms that provide seed or early-stage investment funds. To remedy this problem, Chicago could create a seed fund with public and private capital, develop a network of local early-stage investors, and woo leading investment firms to open offices in the city. Technology. New ideas and patents, often hatched at local universities and research centers, are the food and drink of technology start-ups. The many Boston-based ones that have sprung from technologies incubated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are prime examples. Chicago's top-ranked universities and research centers could yield an abundance of ideas, but the city and its universities need to remove barriers to commercializing them--by, for instance, making it easier for entrepreneurs to find and license new technologies bubbling up in the labs (Exhibit 2). A business community that supports start-ups. Short-term leases are too hard to find in Chicago, and security deposits are usually too big; venture capitalists don't want their investment dollars sitting in escrow instead of being at work developing the business. Finding out which buildings are "wired" can also be a problem, and so can finding lawyers and accountants who know how to work with start-ups and understand their needs. In addition to ameliorating these problems, the city could foster the development of a technology corridor, as other cities have done, to make it possible for the employees of start-ups to mingle, to swap ideas, and to support one another. In addition, the city should concentrate its business-building efforts on a handful of growth sectors. The study for the mayor highlighted four in which Chicago could realistically compete: the biomedical sector (including biotechnology, medical diagnostics, and medical devices), nanotechnology (the manipulation of structures at the atomic level), software development, and software for wireless devices. …


With the advent of Web 2.0 and the Digital Age, we are witnessing an unprecedented increase in the amount of information collected, and in the number of users interested in different types of information. This growth means that traditional techniques, where users poll data sources for information of interest, are no longer sufficient. Polling too frequently does not scale, while polling less often may result in users missing important updates. The alternative push technology has long been the goal of publish/subscribe systems, which proactively push updates (events) to users with matching interests (expressed as subscriptions). The push model is better suited for ensuring scalability and timely delivery of updates, important in many application domains: personal (e.g., RSS feeds, online auctions), financial (e.g., portfolio monitoring), security (e.g., reporting network anomalies), etc.
Early publish/subscribe systems were based on predefined subjects ( channels), and were too coarse-grained to meet the specific interests of different subscribers. The second generation of content-based publish/subscribe systems offer greater flexibility by supporting subscriptions defined as predicates over message contents. However, subscriptions are still stateless filters over individual messages, so they cannot express queries across different messages or over the event history. The few systems that support more powerful database-style subscriptions do not address the problem of efficiently delivering updates to a large number of subscribers over a wide-area network. Thus, there is a need to develop next-generation publish/subscribe systems that unify the support for richer database-style subscription queries and flexible wide-area notification. This support needs to be complemented with robust processing and dissemination techniques that scale to high event rates and large databases, as well as to a large number of subscribers over the Internet.
The main contribution of our work is a collection of techniques to support efficient and scalable event processing and notification dissemination for an Internet-scale publish/subscribe system with a rich subscription model. We investigate the interface between event processing by a database server and notification delivery by a dissemination network. Previous research in publish/subscribe has largely been compartmentalized; database-centric and network-centric approaches each have their own limitations, and simply putting them together does not lead to an efficient solution. A closer examination of database/network interfaces yields a spectrum of new and interesting possibilities. In particular, we propose message and subscription reformulation as general techniques to support stateful subscriptions over existing content-driven networks, by converting them into equivalent but stateless forms. We show how reformulation can successfully be applied to various stateful subscriptions including range-aggregation, select-joins, and subscriptions with value-based notification conditions. These techniques often provide orders-of-magnitude improvement over simpler techniques adopted by current systems, and are shown to scale to millions of subscriptions. Further, the use of a standard off-the-shelf content-driven dissemination interface allows these techniques to be easily deployed, managed, and maintained in a large-scale system.
Based on our findings, we have built a high-performance publish/subscribe system named ProSem (to signify the inseparability of database processing and network dissemination). ProSem uses our novel techniques for group-processing many types of complex and expressive subscriptions, with a per-event optimization framework that chooses the best processing and dissemination strategy at runtime based on online statistics and system objectives.


Effective utilization of daylight is one of several design strategies that promise to provide substantial energy savings for commercial buildings. Despite the revived interest in the field, there are very few occupied buildings for which performance data verify the magnitude and cause of real savings. In order to optimize costs it is first necessary to understand building performance data in sufficient detail to assess the contradictory component impacts. This can be done most effectively using an hour-by-hour energy analysis model, in this case DOE-2.1B. This paper reports conclusions of an extensive series of computer analyses in two climates to determine the energy use and demand impacts of fenestration in commercial buildings. Particular attention is paid to the tradeoffs involved in using fenestration to daylight perimeter zones. The study includes the effects of climate, orientation, window area, U-value, shading coefficient, visible transmittance, lighting power density, and lighting control strategy.


Traditionally radiology produces a visual representation of medical images in film format for further clinical analysis. While some healthcare providers still used films to display scan results, others are embracing the advancing technology of digital medical images. In radiology, this medical imaging technique is generally equated to filmless radiology. However, modern technology has enabled other clinical areas beyond radiology to use digital imaging, including cardiology, pathology, obstetric and gynecology, orthopedic and dentistry. This widely implementation of filmless system in hospital is known as filmless hospital. This paper discusses filmless hospital using picture archiving and communication system (PACS) as workflow controller as a case study at National Hospital Surabaya.


In this paper, we propose and analyze a new momentum conservative mixed finite element method for the Navier–Stokes problem posed in nonstandard Banach spaces. Our approach is based on the introduction of a pseudostress tensor relating the velocity gradient with the convective term, leading to a mixed formulation where the aforementioned pseudostress tensor and the velocity are the main unknowns of the system. Then the associated Galerkin scheme can be defined by employing Raviart–Thomas elements of degree k for the pseudostress tensor and discontinuous piece–wise polynomial elements of degree k for the velocity. With this choice of spaces, the equilibrium equation is exactly satisfied if the external force belongs to the velocity discrete space, thus the method conserves momentum, which constitutes one of the main feature of our approach. For both, the continuous and discrete problems, the Banach–Nečas–Babuška and Banach's fixed‐point theorems are employed to prove unique solvability. We also provide the convergence analysis and particularly prove that the error decay with optimal rate of convergence. Further variables of interest, such as the fluid pressure, the fluid vorticity and the fluid velocity gradient, can be easily approximated as a simple postprocess of the finite element solutions with the same rate of convergence. Finally, several numerical results illustrating the performance of the method are provided.


Given the initial functional specifications for a product, a designer must create the description of a physical device that meets those requirements. The final design must simultaneously meet cost and quality requirements as well as meet the constraints imposed by activities such as manufacturing, assembly, and maintenance. Mechanical designs are often composed of highly-integrated, tightly-coupled components where the interactions are essential to the behavior and economic execution of the design. Therefore, concurrent rather than sequential consideration of requirements, such as structural, thermal, and manufacturing constraints, will result in superior designs. Our goal is to create a computer-based design system that will enabie a designer to concurrently consider the interactions and trade-offs among different, and even conflicting, requirements. We are creating a system that surrounds the designer with experts and advisors that provide continuous feedback based on incremental analysis of the design as it evolves. These experts and advisors, called perspectives, can generate comments on the design (e.g. comments on its manufacturability), information that becomes part of the design (e.g. stresses), and portions of the geometry (e.g. the shape of an airfoil). However, the perspectives are not just a sophisticated toolbox for the designer; rather they are a group of advisors who interact with one another and with the designer. This paper focuses on the motivation and integration of the research that has resulted from the multi-disciplinary group creating this design system, called Design Fusion. The research falls into broad areas: geometric modeling, features, constraints, and system architecture.


We fabricate a multilayer Fabry–Perot filter (FPF) on a GaN-on-silicon platform. Being significantly different from conventional thin film FPFs formed on smooth flat surfaces, this FPF is deposited in a micropit, and takes a suspended GaN membrane as its carrier, which makes the whole structure ultracompact. The reflection spectra of the FPF are characterized by using an angle-resolved microreflection measurement system. The experimental results show that its spectra generally have a considerable blue shift in comparison with that of its conventional counterpart formed on the smooth flat surface; moreover, its thickness is not uniform but varies along its lateral dimension, suggesting that its spectral properties are highly localized. Resonable explanations are provided to illuminate its particular spectral phenomena. Finally, the localized thicknesses of the thin films composing the FPF are obtained by fitting the measured reflection curves with the simulated ones. This kind of FPF may be integrated monolithically into a batch of suspended membrane devices to endow them with the desired wavelength selectivity.


Excess lipid availability causes insulin resistance. We examined the effect of acute exercise on lipid-induced insulin resistance and TBC1 domain family member 1/4 (TBCD1/4)-related signaling in skeletal muscle. In eight healthy young male subjects, 1 h of one-legged knee-extensor exercise was followed by 7 h of saline or intralipid infusion. During the last 2 h, a hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp was performed. Femoral catheterization and analysis of biopsy specimens enabled measurements of leg substrate balance and muscle signaling. Each subject underwent two experimental trials, differing only by saline or intralipid infusion. Glucose infusion rate and leg glucose uptake was decreased by intralipid. Insulin-stimulated glucose uptake was higher in the prior exercised leg in the saline and the lipid trials. In the lipid trial, prior exercise normalized insulin-stimulated glucose uptake to the level observed in the resting control leg in the saline trial. Insulin increased phosphorylation of TBC1D1/4. Whereas prior exercise enhanced TBC1D4 phosphorylation on all investigated sites compared with the rested leg, intralipid impaired TBC1D4 S341 phosphorylation compared with the control trial. Intralipid enhanced pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH) phosphorylation and lactate release. Prior exercise led to higher PDH phosphorylation and activation of glycogen synthase compared with resting control. In conclusion, lipid-induced insulin resistance in skeletal muscle was associated with impaired TBC1D4 S341 and elevated PDH phosphorylation. The prophylactic effect of exercise on lipid-induced insulin resistance may involve augmented TBC1D4 signaling and glycogen synthase activation.


This article aims to shed some light on the concepts embedded in the expressions 'services of general interest' ('SGI'), 'services of general economic interest' ('SGEI'), 'non-economic services of general interest' ('NSGI') and 'social services of general interest' ('SSGI'). It is submitted that the expression 'SGI' conveys a general concept which comprises both SGEI and NSGI. SGEI may be distinguished from NSGI in that only the former involve an economic activity. In contrast to SGI, SGEI and NSGI, the expression 'SSGI' is nowhere to be found in primary EU law. This means that it is for the EU legislator and, as the case may be, for the Member States to define such expression. Furthermore, this article supports the contention that a definition of the principles and conditions underpinning the operation of SGI must be capable of adapting to changing times and social perceptions, whilst being respectful of the vertical and horizontal allocation of powers set out in the Treaties. Vertically, a definition of SGI must not impinge upon the powers retained by the Member States. In the absence of harmonisation, it is for the Member States to define the services they consider to be of general interest, unless they commit a manifest error of assessment. In the presence of EU harmonising measures, the margin of discretion enjoyed by the Member States is, if still existent, narrowed down, given that national authorities are required to comply with the objectives pursued by the EU legislator. Horizontally, a definition of SGI must not encroach upon the prerogatives of the Commission in the realm of competition law. Moreover, in light of Article 9 TFEU and secondary EU legislation, the specific features of SSGI must be taken into consideration when determining the compatibility with EU State aid rules of public service compensation awarded to the providers of those services. An EU conceptual framework for the SGI must thus be the result of a constructive dialogue between the different levels of governance, as well as of a balanced solution among different policy areas in relation to which the EU enjoys competences.


Annette Vande Gorne, renowned composer of electroacoustic music, discusses her multi-faceted career in a two-part interview. In this second part of the interview, Vande Gorne reveals her compositional strategy for her current project (her acousmatic opera Yawar Fiesta) as well as for other electroacoustic genres–notably, acousmatic works, mixed works, and sound installations. Vande Gorne also discusses the fundamental importance of the art of interpreting sound in space, and explains the instrument of interpretation (the acousmonium) and her use of it. Additionally, Vande Gorne reflects on her teaching, most recently at the Conservatoire Royal de Mons, Belgium, where she conceived a section of electroacoustic studies. During her tenure as professor of acousmatic composition, she has conveyed her personal artistic aesthetic alongside the French electroacoustic aesthetic to several generations of composers in Europe and beyond. Other topics in this part of the interview include Musiques & Recherches (Vande Gorne's center for electroacoustic music) and her well-known acousmatic festival L'Espace du Son.


Knowledge management involves both the elicitation/creation of knowledge, and the storage/retrieval of meaningful knowledge in future states. In ill-defined, emerging situations, team members grope to make sense of the situation, react to stimuli from the external environment, and interact with each other and human artifacts to develop an interpretation of the environment. A general model of the group knowledge elicitation and creation process is presented and lessons derived from experiences in supporting this process are offered.


Online search and retrieval systems are important resources for medical literature research. Progressive Web 2.0 technologies provide opportunities to improve search strategies and user experience. Using PHP, Document Object Model (DOM) manipulation and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), PubMed Interact allows greater functionality so users can refine search parameters with ease and interact with the search results to retrieve and display relevant information and related articles.


Background: The refining process generates large volumes of wastewater containing a variety of chemical contaminants. The use of natural substitutes in treating wastewater which have fewer harmful effects is considered an effective step towards protecting the environment and sustaining the development of these industries. This study focused on the use of Moringa oleifera and alum at the Wastewater Unit at Bandar Abbas Refinery. Methods: This study was performed in 2014 in a laboratory using jar apparatus. These experiments were conducted in batch system and effective parameters including pH, coagulant dose and contact time were investigated on the wastewater obtained from Bandar Abbas Oil Refinery. Results: The jar test experiment showed that M. oleifera at 70 mg/L, optimum temperature, pH, and mixing speed could remove 38.60% of chemical oxygen demand (COD), 63.70% of turbidity, and 62.05% of total suspended solids (TSS). Also, alum at 40 mg/L removed COD, turbidity, and TSS by 51.72%, 92.16%, and 85.26% respectively from the refinery wastewater. Moreover, when M. oleifera and alum was used together with a 2:1 dosage ratio (alum at 80 mg/L and M. oleifera at 70 mg/L), they will remove COD, turbidity, and TSS by up to 50.41%, 86.14%, and 81.52% respectively. Conclusion: The use of M. oleifera as a natural coagulant is important in treating refinery wastewater not only from an environmental but also an economic point of view.


Fine-scale water column structure was mimicked in a laboratory plane jet flume to examine responses of the calanoid copepods Temora longicornis and Acartia tonsa to layers consist- ing of a velocity gradient, density gradient, phytoplankton exudates and food (phytoplankton). Cope- pods were exposed to isolated layers and combinations of cues as defined by in situ conditions. Behaviors elicited by the velocity gradient and chemical exudate layers included increased swim- ming speed and turn frequency consistent with excited area-restricted search behavior, which led to increased proportional residence time in the layers. Both species had significant responses to isolated layers of velocity gradients and chemical exudates, with T. longicornis responding more intensely to chemical cues than velocity gradients and A. tonsa responding equally to both. Combined fluid mechanical and chemical cues elicited species-specific responses. For T. longicornis, chemical pres- ence induced responses that strengthened or cancelled initial reactions to the velocity gradient. These results suggest a cue hierarchy where a velocity gradient acts as an initial cue for narrowing search regions, and chemical cues and food presence determine consequent responses. For A. tonsa, combining velocity gradient and chemical cues had the same effect on copepod behavior as the indi- vidual cues, which suggests both cues are equal sources of information but are not closely associated. In both species, physical contact with particles or cells initiated feeding behavior, resulting in lower swimming speeds. Fluid density had a potentially aversive effect, as neither species responded with an area-restricted search response and individuals rarely crossed a strong density gradient. Observed behaviors may lead to aggregation, especially when superimposed on rhythmic move- ments such as diel vertical migration.


The nanoporous free-standing graphene membrane is of great interest in high performance separation technology. In particular, the separation of biological molecules with similar sizes is one of the key challenges in the purification of biomaterials. Here, we report a reliable, cost-effective, and facile method for the fabrication of a graphene-based nanosieve and its application in the separation of similar-size proteins. A suspended reduced graphene oxide (rGO) nanosieve with ultra-thin, large-area, well-ordered, and dense 15 nm-sized pores was fabricated using block copolymer (BCP) lithography. The fabricated 5 nm-ultrathin nanosieve with an area of 200 μm × 200 μm (an ultra-high aspect ratio of ∼40 000) endured pressure up to 1 atm, and effectively separated hemoglobin (Hb) from a mixture of hemoglobin and immunoglobulin G (IgG), the common proteins in human blood, in a highly selective and rapid manner. The use of the suspended rGO nanosieve is expected to provide a simple and manufacturable platform for practical biomolecule separation offering high selectivity and a large throughput.


The Internet of Things (IoT) concept promises a world of networked and interconnected devices that provides relevant content to users. Recommender systems can find relevant content for users in IoT environments, offering a user-adapted personalized experience. Collaboration-based recommenders in IoT environments rely on user-to-object, space-time interaction patterns. This extension of that idea takes into account user location and interaction time to recommend scattered, pervasive context-embedded networked objects. The authors compare their proposed system to memory-based collaborative methods in which user similarity is based on the ratings of previously rated items. Their proof-of-concept implementation was used in a real-world scenario involving 15 students interacting with 75 objects at Carlos III University of Madrid.


The discovery of carbon nanotubes and C60 fullerenes has created an enormous impact on possible new nanomechanical devices. Owing to their unique mechanical and electronic properties, such as low weight, high strength, flexibility and thermal stability, carbon nanotubes and C60 fullerenes are of considerable interest to researchers from many scientific areas. One aspect that has attracted much attention is the creation of high-frequency nanoscale oscillators, or the so-called gigahertz oscillators, for applications such as ultrafast optical filters and nano-antennae. While there are difficulties for micromechanical oscillators, or resonators, to reach a frequency in the gigahertz range, it is possible for nanomechanical systems to achieve this. This study focuses on C60–single-walled carbon nanotube oscillators, which generate high frequencies owing to the oscillatory motion of the C60 molecule inside the single-walled carbon nanotube. Using the Lennard-Jones potential, the interaction energy of an offset C60 molecule inside a carbon nanotube is determined, so as to predict its position with reference to the cross-section of the carbon nanotube. By considering the interaction force between the C60 fullerene and the carbon nanotube, this paper provides a simple mathematical model, involving two Dirac delta functions, which can be used to capture the essential mechanisms underlying such gigahertz oscillators. As a preliminary to the calculation, the oscillatory behaviour of an isolated atom is examined. The new element of this study is the use of elementary mechanics and applied mathematical modelling in a scientific context previously dominated by molecular dynamical simulation.


One of the greatest challenges that parents face in child protection mediation (CPM) is to voice their concerns and negotiate on a relatively equal basis with the other mediation participants. This article considers how imbalances of power, limited confidentiality protection, and the personal problems that bring parents into the child protection process can limit a parent's ability to exercise self-determination in mediation and offers guidance for mediators seeking to conduct CPM in a manner that effectively empowers parents to meaningfully and collaboratively participate in mediation.


Motion pictures are made , not mass produced, requiring a remarkable collection of skills, self-discipline, and sociality—all of which are sources of enormous pride among Hollywood's craft and creative workers. The interviews collected here showcase the pleasures that attract people to careers in film and television. They also reflect critically on changes in the workplace brought about by corporate conglomeration and globalization. Rather than offer publicity-friendly anecdotes by marquee celebrities, Voices of Labor presents off-screen observations about the everyday realities of Global Hollywood. Ranging across job categories—from showrunner to make-up artist to location manager—this collection features voices of labor from Los Angeles, Atlanta, Prague, and Vancouver. Together they show how abstract concepts like conglomeration, financialization, and globalization are crucial tools for understanding contemporary Hollywood and for reflecting more generally on changes and challenges in the screen media workplace and our culture at large. "Essential reading for anyone interested in how Hollywood actually works." RAMON LOBATO, author of Shadow Economies of Cinema "Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson craft a powerful elegy for organized labor, demonstrating how critical theory is sung to the everyday rhythms of the workplace." VICKI MAYER, author of Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans: The Lure of the Local Film Economy "A star-studded cast with diverse talents, backgrounds, and perspectives tells a varied but consistent tale of the importance of organized labor and the challenges it faces when pitted against the forces of media consolidation and globalization, all set in that magical company town known as Hollywood." PATRIC M. VERRONE, writer and producer, former president, Writers Guild of America, West MICHAEL CURTIN is Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professor of Film and Media Studies and director of the Global Dynamics Initiative at University of California, Santa Barbara. KEVIN SANSON is a senior lecturer in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology and managing editor of Media Industries.


At the heart of the War on Terror lie governments' struggles to reduce the risk of future catastrophes. Effective risk management that is also respectful of human rights must take into account the probability that the catastrophe will strike again. However, in times of emergency governments tend to set aside questions of probability and resort instead to drastic measures that often adversely affect human rights. Evidently, courts themselves are not immune from the same probability neglect that might also result in a constitutional analysis that can adversely affect human rights. For those who believe in the fundamental deontological insight that rights should have a priority over the good, this is a worrying state of affair. In this article we draw from the psychological research on the cognitive bias of "probability neglect" and call for the (re)-introduction of probability tests, such as the abandoned American "clear and present danger" test or the Israeli "near certainty" test, and for their integration into contemporary models of rights adjudications in global constitutionalism. We find that both the American strict scrutiny test that focuses on a rigorous means-ends analysis, and the highly influential German proportionality test, that centers on the balancing of rights and interests, fail to properly ensure the priority of rights. It is our contention that the imposition of the judicial requirement that the government meet a certain pre-defined probability threshold after engaging in means-ends analysis and prior to engaging in balancing - serves as a useful and important deontological constraint that secures the priority of rights.


With the rise of indie cinema in the Philippines, many say that another golden age is again in the making, and, like its predecessor, the films are being produced in the midst of widespread poverty and political instability. Understandably, a significant number of indie films has consciously returned to and explored the limits of the urban realist film of the 'golden age' (1975-1984), revisioning city spaces and signifying patterns in Philippine and global film cultures. The essay has three intricately connected sections. On the one hand, it delineates the shifting contexts of Philippine and global film cultures and situates current indie cinema in these contexts. On the other hand, by considering several key films, it traces the development and revisions of urban realism from its birth until today and reflexively problematizes the critical discourses that define and are defined by such realism.


Our cyber defenses are static and are governed by lengthy processes, e.g., for testing and security patch deployment. Adversaries could plan their attacks carefully over time and launch attacks at cyber speeds at any given moment. We need a new class of defensive strategies that would force adversaries to continually engage in reconnaissance and re-planning of their cyber operations. One such strategy is to present adversaries with a moving target where the attack surface of a system keeps changing. Moving Target Defense II: Application of Game Theory and Adversarial Modeling includes contributions from world experts in the cyber security field. In the first volume of MTD, we presented MTD approaches based on software transformations, and MTD approaches based on network and software stack configurations. In thissecond volume of MTD, a group of leading researchers describe game theoretic, cyber maneuver, and software transformation approaches for constructing and analyzing MTD systems. Designed as a professional book for practitioners and researchers working in the cyber security field, advanced -level students and researchers focused on computer science will also find this book valuable as a secondary text book or reference.


Color images acquired through single chip digital cameras using a color filter array (CFA) contain a mixture of luminance and opponent chromatic information that share their representation in the spatial Fourier spectrum. This mixture could result in aliasing if the bandwidths of these signals are too wide and their spectra overlap. In such a case, reconstructing three-color per pixel images without error is impossible. One way to improve the reconstruction is to have sensitivity functions that are highly correlated, reducing the bandwidth of the opponent chromatic components. However, this diminishes the ability to reproduce colors accurately as noise is amplified when converting an image to the final color encoding. In this paper, we are looking for an optimum between accurate image reconstruction through demosaicing and accurate color rendering. We design a camera simulation, first using a hyperspectral model of random color images and a demosaicing algorithm based on frequency selection. We find that there is an optimum and confirm our results using a natural hyperspectral image.


Stream runtime verification (SRV), pioneered by the tool LOLA, is a declarative approach to specify synchronous monitors. In SRV, monitors are described by specifying dependencies between output streams of values and input streams of values. The declarative nature of SRV enables a separation between (1) the evaluation algorithms, and (2) the monitor storage and its individual updates. This separation allows SRV to be lifted from conventional failure monitors into richer domains to collect statistics of traces. Moreover, SRV allows to easily identify specifications that can be efficiently monitored online, and to generate efficient schedules for offline monitors. In spite of these attractive features, many important theoretical problems about SRV are still open. In this paper, we address complexity, expressiveness, succinctness, and closure issues for the subclass of Boolean SRV (BSRV) specifications. Additionally, we show that for this subclass, offline monitoring can be performed with only two passes (one forward and one backward) over the input trace in spite of the alternation of past and future references in the BSRV specification.


The design of more sustainable products can be best accomplished in a tradeoff-based design process that methodically handles conflicting objectives. Such conflicts are often seen between, environmental impact, cost, and product performance. To support such a process, we propose the development of an environment where sustainability considerations are explicitly introduced early into the design process. This explicitness is provided by integrating the requirements information of sustainability standards and regulations directly into the design process. The emergence of the semantic web provides an interoperable environment in which the context and meaning of knowledge about the relationships among various domains can be shared. This work presents an ontological framework designed to represent both the objectives that pertain to sustainable design and the applicable sustainability standards and regulations. This integrated approach not only can ease the adoption of the standards and regulations during a design process but can also influence a design toward sustainability considerations. The usefulness of this model integration is demonstrated by an illustrative brake disk rotor and pads case study. The results show that both the standards and criteria may be considered at early design stages by using this methodology. Furthermore, it can be used to capture, reveal, and propagate the design intent transparently to all design participants.


Abstract. We present occurrence rate statistics for nighttime medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances (MSTIDs) in the Central Pacific and South American sectors using data collected by 630.0 nm filtered CCD imaging systems. The data were collected from September 2006 through December 2012. In general, the statistics are in good agreement with the basic linear theory of MSTIDs, with observations coinciding with low F10.7A values, representative of solar minimum. Overall, MSTIDs are observed in approximately 68% of the usable nights near the solstices at mid-latitudes and approximately 20% of the usable nights for equinox periods. Observations closer to the geomagnetic equator yielded a maximum occurrence rate of about 10–20% during the solstices and about 0–3% during the equinoxes. The lower number of MSTID observations near the low latitudes is attributed to limitations of MSTID growth rate, propagation, and/or geometrical observational effects. The relatively large number of MSTID occurrences during the solstices can be accounted for by the neutral wind contribution to the MSTID growth rate either at the local or magnetic conjugate point.


Abstract Monitoring deformation of man-made structures is very important to prevent them from a risk of collapse and save lives. Such a process is also used for monitoring change in historical objects, which are deforming continuously with time. An example of this is the Vasa warship, which was under water for about 300 years. The ship was raised from the bottom of the sea and is kept in the Vasa museum in Stockholm. A geodetic network with points on the museum building and the ship's body has been established and measured for 12 years for monitoring the ship's deformation. The coordinate time series of each point on the ship and their uncertainties have been estimated epoch-wisely. In this paper, our goal is to statistically analyse the ship's hull movements. By fitting a quadratic polynomial to the coordinate time series of each point of the hull, its acceleration and velocity are estimated. In addition, their significance is tested by comparing them with their respective estimated errors after the fitting. Our numerical investigations show that the backside of the ship, having highest elevation and slope, has moved vertically faster than the other places by a velocity and an acceleration of about 2 mm/year and 0.1 mm/year2, respectively and this part of the ship is the weakest with a higher risk of collapse. The central parts of the ship are more stable as the ship hull is almost vertical and closer to the floor. Generally, the hull is moving towards its port and downwards


The use of reverse time chaos allows the realization of hardware chaotic systems that can operate at speeds equivalent to existing state of the art while requiring significantly less complex circuitry. Unlike traditional chaotic systems, which require significant analog hardware that is difficult to realize at high speed, the reverse time system can be realized with only a FPGA calculating a digital iterated map that drives a simple series RLC filter. Because the dynamics of this system are determined by an iterated map, both Lorenz-like and Rössler-like dynamics can be implemented without requiring any hardware adjustments. Precise control of this system can also be maintained by adjusting the initial condition of the iterated map. Matched filter decoding is also possible for the reverse time system due to its possession of a closed form solution formed partially by a linear basis pulse. Coefficients have been calculated to realize the matched filter digitally as a FIR filter. Numerical simulations confirm that this correctly implements a matched filter that can be used for detection of the chaotic signal. In addition, the direct form of the FIR filter has been implemented in HDL with demonstrated performance in agreement with numerical results.


The interest in green processes and products has increased, in order to reduce the negative impact of many industrial processes on the environment. Solvents, which play a crucial role in the fabrication of membranes, need to be replaced by sustainable and less toxic solvent alternatives for commonly used polymers. The purpose of this study is the fabrication of greener hollow fiber membranes based on polyacrylonitrile (PAN), substituting dimethylformamide (DMF) by less toxic mixtures of ionic liquids (IL) and dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO). A thermodynamic analysis was conducted, estimating the Gibbs free energy of mixing to find the most convenient solution compositions. Hollow fiber membranes were manufactured and optimized. As a result, a uniform pattern and high porosity were observed in the inner surface of the membranes prepared from the ionic liquid solutions. The membranes were coated with a polyamide layer by interfacial polymerization. The hollow fiber membranes were applied in forward osmosis experiments by using sucrose solutions as draw solution.


In this article, we present an assessment framework for assessing information and communication technologies literacy (ICT literacy) in the context of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). NEPS is the fi rst study aiming to examine ICT literacy longitudinally across the lifespan using objective paper-pencil test instruments. To do so, it is necessary to develop reliable and valid test instruments that are capable of assessing ICT literacy longitudinally. On the basis of an assessment framework, we developed in an initial step an item pool for assessing the ICT literacy of secondary school students and tested the item pool in three pilot studies (Grade 5, 7 and 9). The item and scale analyses provided satisfying results and the item pool proved to be suitable for assessing ICT literacy longitudinally. In addition, validity analyses showed a satisfactory content validity and a high test fairness with regard to gender and school type. Concerning criterion validity, there were expected correlations with variables of computer familiarity.


ABSTRACT The growth and essential oil (EO) production of parsley were evaluated in response to salinity and nutrient solution concentrations in a soilless culture. Parsley plants that were 60 days old were potted in a coconut fiber and peat moss medium and were treated with four different nutrient solutions, including T1, T2, T3 and T4. The T1 nutrient solution was the standard, the T2 and T3 solutions contained incremental macronutrient concentrations with an electrical conductivity (EC) of up to 2.2 and 3.2 dS m−1, respectively, and the T4 solution was the same as T2 but with sodium chloride (NaCl) and an incremental macronutrient concentration with an EC of 3.2 dS m−1. Next, these plants were grown for 90 days in a greenhouse with natural daylight in Nador, Morocco. Shoot and root growth significant decreased with increasing EC. However, the salinity that resulted from the addition of NaCl did not affect plant growth in the nutrient solutions. The optimum obtained growth and EO production were 1.2 and 2.2 dS m−1, respectively. Consequently, the optimum EC value (based on the EO production) of parsley in the soilless culture was 1.2–2.2 dS m−1.


Many of us enjoy music. We listen to it while we study, practice, run, or just while relaxing. However, we may not realize the impact of the music on us, both physically and emotionally. I hypothesize that sedative music will calm and relax, exciting music will bring excitement, and neutral music will bring emotional equilibrium. I also hypothesize that the heart rates of subjects will match the tempo of the song they are listening to. A survey that asked questions about the subject's emotional state and heart rate was conducted before and after the subjects listened to sedative, exciting, and neutral music. The types of music were chosen because of their predicted effects and because of their differences in tempo. Some of the results were surprising concerning heart rate, while the emotional states aligned better with the hypothesis. For heart rate when listening to sedative music, the heart rates were very similar between subjects. When listening to exciting and neutral music, the heart rates were closer to half of the tempo of the music. Understanding the impacts of music on human beings allows us to use music for the greater good. One example of this could be through the use of music therapy to help everyone but specifically those that are emotionally unstable.


UNLABELLED
It is well established that Visual Working Memory is capacity limited. Recent behavioral research has demonstrated that perceptual grouping can facilitate the retrieval of items stored in working memory. At what stage and by what mechanism are these grouping effects manifesting? In order to answer this question we used high-density electroencephalography (hdEEG) to examine neural correlates of perceptual grouping during the encoding phase of a standard change detection working memory recognition task. Specifically, we used an EEG technique, known as frequency tagging. This technique takes advantage of the fact that flickering stimuli will elicit a steady-state oscillation at a corresponding frequency in the EEG data. Using this technique we designed an experiment in which participants were presented with sets of four novel shapes, each flickering at one of four chosen frequencies: 3Hz, 5Hz, 12Hz and 20Hz, between black and a randomly chosen color on a grey background. The experiment consisted of two conditions: grouped and non-grouped. In the grouped condition two of the four shapes were the same, had the same color and were always presented on the same side of the screen. In the non-grouped condition, all shapes and colors were different. Behaviorally, we found that participants were significantly more accurate in performing the task in the grouping condition. This grouping benefit was accompanied by a significant increase in two non-linear harmonics of the grouped items.

CONCLUSION
our data demonstrate that the grouping benefit observed in visual working memory tasks arises in part at the time of encoding from a non-linear neural interaction between the items comprising the group. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


Abstract. Simulated primary organic aerosols (POA), as well as other particulates and trace gases, in the vicinity of Mexico City are evaluated using measurements collected during the 2006 Megacity Initiative: Local and Global Research Observations (MILAGRO) field campaigns. Since the emission inventories, transport, and turbulent mixing will directly affect predictions of total organic matter and consequently total particulate matter, our objective is to assess the uncertainties in predicted POA before testing and evaluating the performance of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) treatments. Carbon monoxide (CO) is well simulated on most days both over the city and downwind, indicating that transport and mixing processes were usually consistent with the meteorological conditions observed during MILAGRO. Predicted and observed elemental carbon (EC) in the city was similar, but larger errors occurred at remote locations since the overall CO/EC emission ratios in the national emission inventory were lower than in the metropolitan emission inventory. Components of organic aerosols derived from Positive Matrix Factorization of data from several Aerodyne Aerosol Mass Spectrometer instruments deployed both at ground sites and on research aircraft are used to evaluate the model. Modeled POA was consistently lower than the measured organic matter at the ground sites, which is consistent with the expectation that SOA should be a large fraction of the total organic matter mass. A much better agreement was found when modeled POA was compared with the sum of "primary anthropogenic" and "biomass burning" components derived from Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) on most days, especially at the surface sites, suggesting that the overall magnitude of primary organic particulates released was reasonable. However, simulated POA from anthropogenic sources was often lower than "primary anthropogenic" components derived from PMF, consistent with two recent reports that these emissions are underestimated. The modeled POA was greater than the total observed organic matter when the aircraft flew directly downwind of large fires, suggesting that biomass burning emission estimates from some large fires may be too high.


Abstract The Wood River sculpin Cottus leiopomus is endemic to the Wood River Basin in central Idaho and is a nongame species of concern because of its limited distribution. However, status and genetic population structure, 2 factors often central to the conservation and management of species of concern, have not been assessed for this species. We used backpack electrofishers to survey streams that were small enough (i.e., <10 m wide) to collect quantitative distribution and abundance data for Wood River sculpin, and we used mitochondrial DNA control region sequencing to investigate the distribution of genetic variation across the species' range. Of the 102 study sites surveyed, 20 sites (20%) had Wood River sculpin present, including 50%, 15%, and 0% of the sites predicted a priori to contain, possibly contain, or not contain the sculpin, respectively. Native redband trout Oncorhynchus mykiss gairdneri were present at 21 study sites, including 18 of the 20 sites that contained Wood River sculpin. Sixty-one study sites (60%) were dry or had too little water to contain any fish. We estimated that a minimum of 1.36 million Wood River sculpin (≥20 mm total length) currently reside in the basin. The presence of Wood River sculpin was positively associated with stream width:depth ratio and percent cobble/boulder substrate and negatively associated with stream gradient. Mitochondrial DNA haplotype differences were observed between and within the 3 major river subbasins supporting sculpin, with the most striking differences observed between populations in the Camas Creek subbasin and the other 2 subbasins, among which no haplotypes were shared, suggesting relatively long-term isolation. Our results suggest that the Wood River sculpin remains relatively widespread and abundant within its endemic range, despite obvious changes in historical stream connectivity caused by irrigation diversions and other chronic habitat alterations.


Hypoxia alters microRNA biogenesis in glioma cells to promote adaptation in the tumor microenvironment. Glioblastoma (GBM) is an aggressive brain cancer that is often characterized by a hypoxic microenvironment. Hypoxia-inducible factors (HIFs) transcriptionally promote multiple processes associated with GBM progression. Hu et al. found that hypoxia-induced HIF1α in GBM increased the production of a microRNA (miRNA) that drove the proliferation of glioma-initiating cells (GICs), a subpopulation of cells that may promote the growth and recurrence of GBM. The abundance of various miRNAs was increased by hypoxia, but only the functional blocking of miR-215 decreased the proliferation of cultured patient tumor–derived GICs in intracranial xenografts in mice. The amount of mature miR-215 and pre-miR-215, but not that of pri-miR-215, was increased in GICs cultured under hypoxic conditions, suggesting that the production of miR-215 was enhanced at a posttranscriptional step in the miRNA biogenesis pathway. However, the abundance of the Drosha and Dicer complexes that mediate this step was not increased by hypoxia. HIF1α, the abundance of which was increased in hypoxic GICs, interacted with the Drosha complex on pri-miR-215, and silencing HIF1α prevented the hypoxia-induced increase in the amount of miR-215 in GICs. Microarray and reporter analyses in GICs revealed that miR-215 targets and silences the mRNA encoding the histone demethylase KDM1B. Knocking down KDM1B in GICs increased neurosphere formation and the expression of genes associated with glucose metabolism in GIC cultures, and endothelial cells cultured in medium conditioned by KDM1B-deficient GICs exhibited increased migration. Decreased abundance of KDM1B in GBM patient tumors correlated with increased expression of HIF1A and miR-215 and with poor patient survival. The findings identify a miRNA biogenesis-targeted pathway through which hypoxia promotes GBM growth. J. Hu, T. Sun, H. Wang, Z. Chen, S. Wang, L. Yuan, T. Liu, H.-R. Li, P. Wang, Y. Feng, Q. Wang, R. E. McLendon, A. H. Friedman, S. T. Keir, D. D. Bigner, J. Rathmell, X.-d. Fu, Q.-J. Li, H. Wang, X.-F. Wang, MiR-215 is induced post-transcriptionally via HIF-Drosha complex and mediates glioma-initiating cell adaptation to hypoxia by targeting KDM1B. Cancer Cell 29, 49–60 (2016). [PubMed]


The 'globalisation' of Council of Europe data protection Convention 108 beyond its European origins has been underway since the start of this decade, when the first non-European accession (by Uruguay) was assessed and approved. The global nature of this process was demonstrated by the completion of the second non-European accession with Mauritius' deposit of its instrument of accession in a ceremony at today's Conference. Four other non-European countries are now at various stages of the accession process, and there is increasing interest from other countries (by both governments and NGOs), exemplified by participants in today's conference from 16 countries outside the Council of Europe, and from many international organisations.This presentation first sets the global context of Convention 108's 'globalisation: 111 countries now with data privacy laws, and the majority (57/54) from outside Europe. By 2011 the data privacy Acts outside Europe included on average about 7/10 of the higher 'European standards', and this has continued in the last five years. The number of potential Convention 108 'candidates' for accession has yet to be assessed, but the potential for greater 'globalisation' is clear.The presentation then sets out 13 benefits that countries outside Europe can obtain from accession to Convention 108: (i) realistic prospects; (ii) no realistic alternative; (iii) voluntary obligations; (iv) international 'best practice' recognition; (v) reciprocal data exports; (vi) moderate standards; (vii) minimum standards; (viii) a 'whitelist' substitute; (ix) 'adequacy' assistance; (x) development assistance; (xi) business benefits with exports and imports; (xii) individual benefits from minimum protections; and (xiii) assistance to international organisations. The significance of these potential benefits, or potential disadvantages, will vary between countries. For each country, they require a balanced assessment of the interests of that country and its government, of businesses operating within it, and of its citizens and residents.The 'Convention bodies' (Consultative Committee (T-PD), Secretariat and Committee of Ministers) have significant responsibilities to help ensure that Parties are only required to export their citizens' data to other countries which have sufficiently high standards of data protection, and their enforcement. However, the current Convention 108 does not explicitly recognise these responsibilities, and the current practice of the 'Convention bodies' does not make it transparent enough that they are being carried out. This should be improved.Compared with Europeans, citizens of non-European states that accede to the Convention are at a disadvantage in lacking means under international law to enforce the Convention. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy may be able to help make UN instruments relevant to privacy more able to be used for this purpose.The presentation concludes that the expansion of Convention 108 has implications for every country, and it is good policy for each country to be well-informed and consider carefully the potential benefits of accession.


Semisynthetic aminoglycoside derivatives may provide a means to selectively target viral RNA sites, including the HIV-1 Rev response element (RRE). The design, synthesis, and evaluation of derivatives based upon neomycin B, kanamycin A, and tobramycin conjugates of 9-aminoacridine are presented. To evaluate the importance of the acridine moiety, a series of dimeric aminoglycosides as well as unmodified "monomeric" aminoglycosides have also been evaluated for their nucleic acid affinity and specificity. Fluorescence-based binding assays that use ethidium bromide or Rev peptide displacement are used to quantify the affinities of these compounds to various nucleic acids, including the RRE, tRNA, and duplex DNA. All the modified aminoglycosides exhibit a high affinity for the Rev binding site on the RRE (K(d) <or= 10 nM), but few compounds have a high specificity for the RRE. Compared to the acridine conjugates, the dimeric and unmodified aminoglycosides exhibit good RNA over DNA selectivity, but show little differentiation between different RNA molecules. Neomycin-based derivatives consistently have the highest RNA and DNA affinities, but the lowest RRE specificity. To optimize these derivatives for RRE specificity, a series of neomycin-acridine conjugates with variable linker lengths were synthesized and evaluated. The neo-acridine conjugate with the shortest linker length has the optimal RRE specificity. Duplex DNA, on the other hand, prefers the acridine conjugate with the longest linker length, and duplex RNA (poly r[A]-r[U]) has the highest affinity for the conjugate with an intermediate linker length. Compared to neomycin B, the derivatives based upon tobramycin and kanamycin A have slightly lower RRE affinities, but better RRE specificities. These results illustrate how the binding affinity and specificity of aminoglycoside intercalator conjugates can be tuned by optimizing the linker length and by changing the identity of the aminoglycoside moiety. These results also indicate that many aminoglycoside-based ligands are capable of high-affinity binding of RNA, but achieving high site specificity remains a challenging objective.


The calling of Katie Makanya is one of the most engrossing and heart-rendering books I have had the privilege of reading. It is the life story of Katie Makanya from her youth in the eastern Cape to her death at the age of 83 in 1955. It is based on interviews she had with Margaret McCord for whose father, Dr. James McCord, Katie had worked for 35 years as interpreter, dispenser and assistant in Natal.


Background and purpose: Brucellosis is a zoonotic disease. Given that serologic test has some specific characteristics such as difficult growth, problems associated with culture, and cross-reactions with otherbacteria, in this study multiplex real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method was used to detect the most common species of Brucella spp. Materials and methods: This experimental study was performed in Hamedan University of Medical Sciences, Hamedan, Iran, 2015, in two bioinformatical and analytical stages. A universal primer was designed to detect Brucella genus and two primers were prepared for B. melitensis and B. abortus, which are the most common species. The target genes for universal Brucella, B. melitensis, and B. abortus primers were ITS, BMEII-0466, and BruAB2-0168, respectively. In the analytical stage, specificity and sensitivity of the primers were evaluated. Results: In this study, the universal primer of Brucella was detected in 83 bp at melt temperature of 82∘C. Moreover, B. melitensis and B. abortus primers were specifically identified in 121 bp and 285 bp at melt tempretures of 84∘C and 87∘C, respectively. The sensitivity for the universal Brucella primer and B. abortus was 50 fg, while it was 100 fg for the B. melitensis primer. Conclusion: The identified primers revealed high levels of sensitivity and specificity. Therefore, they can be considered along with culture in clinical trials.


Valeriya N-Georg is an artist inspired by neuroscience, psychology and consciousness studies, who works with a range of media: drawing, printmaking, sculpture, digital and mixed media. She is interested in exploring the boundaries between the inner and outer body; between the physical and metaphysical; tangible and intangible. N-Georg combines digital production with making by hand and has developed experimental new techniques for making monotype prints, based on layered acrylic gel on boards and light box installations ( Figure 1 ), which she scans, collages and manipulates digitally to create large scale digital prints. Her work is deeply influenced by sources such as Antonio Damasio's research on the relationship between the brain and the consciousness, the role of emotions and feelings for our life-regulating processes and mental representations of our body states, or Dr. Bruce Lipton's ideas about interactions between mind and body and the processes by which cells receive information.


Drawing on the fields of organisational theory, information systems and human-computer interaction, this paper proposes a novel perspective for studying information systems usage by individuals in organisations – in this case, in the back office of a major US-based accounting firm. By conceptualising usage as a holistic user experience – a situated and temporally emergent inseparable mesh of behaviour, bodily movements, perception, cognition and affect – the researcher can avoid misleading reductionism and the overly simplistic reasoning of technological or social determinism. To demonstrate empirically the value of this perspective, the paper focuses on the intertwining of two aspects commonly ignored in prior information systems literature – the affective and the material. Building on Pickering's (1993) "mangle of practice", and on the literatures on moods (Bless and Fiedler, 2006), identity (Ashforth and Mael, 1989) and sociomateriality (Orlikowski, 2010), the entanglement of human identity, affective states and enterprise systems materiality is examined, based on observational and interview data. The findings suggest that adopting this theoretical perspective facilitates understanding of the complex, situated nature of enterprise systems usage.


This Article argues, from the standpoint of democratic legitimacy, that supranational institutions are best understood as administrative in character, and then explores the implications of this argument by looking at the European Community. The author concludes that the Community's democratic deficit flows primarily from an inability to establish democratically legitimate hierarchical supervision over supranational technocrats -- a problem bound up with the historical relationship between demos, democracy and national political institutions as cultural symbols of popular sovereignty. The author examines aspects of Community law designed to maintain forms of national control, as well as two alternative strategies -- democratization through the European Parliament, and non-hierarchical legitimation through transparency and participation rights in the Community regulatory process. Finding these strategies ultimately inadequate, in themselves, to the needs of democratic legitimation, the author turns to judicial review, critically analyzing the deference shown by the European Court of Justice to Community legislative decisions relative to the more democratically-legitimate Member States. Finding this broad deference inconsistent with the Community's administrative character, the author outlines an alternative approach -- a substantive presumption against supranational legislative autonomy -- as well as a new procedure -- a European Conflicts Tribunal -- to resolve conflicts over the scope of the relative legislative authority of the Member States and the Community. The purpose of these reforms would be to mediate between the legitimate needs of legislative harmonization at the Community level, on the one hand, and the persistence of the nation-state as the historically legitimate symbol of democratic sovereignty, on the other -- a tension that arguably exists in any supranational body.


Objective: To present a case of a rodeo cowboy who suffered a seemingly routine 1st degree acromioclavicular (AC) sprain. The AC sprain was exacerbated by an elevated 1st rib. Background: Saddle bronc riding is one of three rough stock events in North American rodeo and the least common event for injury relative to bull riding and bareback riding. Shoulder injury in rodeo rough stock events make up 9.3% of all injuries. Approximately 28% of injuries in rodeo are considered minor sprains. The professional cowboy was thrown from his horse landing on the tip of his shoulder. The cowboy presented with a routine 1st degree AC sprain based on the Tossey and Rockwood definitions. Differential Diagnosis: Due to the mechanism of injury and forces produced with the cowboy being thrown to the ground, elimination of serious neck injury was critical. A scanning examination revealed some neck dysfunction. A cervical rotation, lateral flexion special test confirmed the additional elevated 1st rib in addition to the 1st degree AC sprain. Treatment: A chiropractic adjustment of the 1st rib reduced pain in the AC joint from a 6/10 to 1/10 immediately. Subsequently, the patient iced and was treated with one other 1st rib adjustment at a later date. Uniqueness: There were no cases of 1st degree AC sprains with an associated elevated first rib in the literature. It was very unique to relieve to the patient's shoulder symptoms so dramatically in a short period of time with manual therapy to the first rib. Conclusions: It is important to follow a thorough history and physical examination of patients who suffer from a 1st degree AC sprain. The use of a scanning examination will help identify the primary source of pain (i.e. neck and/or shoulder). Manual therapy of the 1st rib may be useful in the treatment.


BACKGROUND: The tissue damage resulting from myocardial ischaemia/reperfusion (I/R) leads to a large proportion of the deaths in the developed world. Even if patients
survive a myocardial infarction, I/R injury is associated with decreased cardiac function and a higher incidence of morbidity, and consequently, a reduced quality of life. Leptin is a cytokine produced by white adipose tissue that has been shown to activate the PI3K-Akt and p44/42 MAPK signalling cascades and protect the murine myocardium. The studies described in this thesis focused on the molecular mechanisms underlying leptin-induced cardioprotection with
particular reference to cell signalling.
METHODS & RESULTS: Using an isolated rat heart model of I/R injury, it was confirmed that leptin given at reperfusion protects the myocardium. This protection was abolished by the administration of specific blockers of the survival kinases PI3K, JAK and p44/42 MAPK. The time-points at which maximal phosphorylation of Akt, p44/42 MAPK and STAT3 occur in response to leptin given at reperfusion were identified. The key role played by the leptin receptor in leptin-induced cardioprotection was established by employing the Zucker obese rat (fa/fa), which has a mutation in the leptin receptor, and its Zucker lean (fa/+) counterpart that possesses a functional OB-R. It was found that the Zucker fatty rats were non-responsive to leptin-induced cardioprotection. Furthermore, it was shown that whilst leptin inhibited mitochondrial permeability transition pore (MPTP) opening in cardiomyocytes from Wistar and Zucker lean rats, MPTP opening in OB-R deficient Zucker fatty rats was unaffected. Finally, leptin was shown to protect
against ischaemia-reperfusion injury in an in vivo rat model of I/R injury.
CONCLUSION: The present study has yielded information concerning the mechanisms underlying the cardioprotective actions of leptin; including the importance of the OB-R. Extending the studies employing in vivo models of I/R injury will assist in establishing the potential of leptin as a therapeutic agent.


Research has been performed for the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario (WSIB) to characterize the capabilities of innovative mining support agents, designated as spray-on lining materials (TSL's), as well as combinations of TSL's and conventional spray supports, for mitigating dynamic failure effects created by simulated rockbursts. The assessment of support capabilities of TSLs and ultra-thin hybrid liner supports (superliners) is novel and constitutes work that is unique in the field of underground excavation support design. This study has been performed to assess the capabilities of TSL and conventional spray-on support systems for preventing rock and support material damage that often results due to rockbursting. In this research, TSL products and superliner combinations of each with ultra-thin shotcrete or fibrecrete layers (at 5 and 3 cm thicknesses, respectively) have been tested. Support performance was studied using field scale explosive detonation trials to simulate dynamic failure effects that are known to develop during typical rockburst events. Multiple seismic and high speed photographic monitoring techniques were used to provide detailed information concerning rock motion, surface fracturing, ejected fragment motion and support liner survivability characteristics. The results of this study have validated that thin, spray-on linings (TSL's) and variant layer combinations may be as effective as or better than conventional support materials for mitigating rockburst or like damage in highly stressed mine environments.


This paper reports the gas-permeation properties of poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) poly(butylene terephthalate) (PBT) segmented multiblock copolymers. These block copolymers allow a precise structural modification by the amount of PBT and the PEO segment length, enabling a systematic study of the relationship between polymer composition and morphology and gas-transport properties. The CO2 and N2 permeability strongly varies with the amount of PEO and the PEO segment length. The permeabilities are compared to predictions of the Maxwell model, which considers the PBT phase as impermeable. The difference between the experimental values and the Maxwell model are interpreted on the basis of chain flexibility of the PEO phase. The chain flexibility decreases with increasing amounts of PBT due to a less pronounced phase separation between the PEO and PBT phase. This is reflected in an increasing glass-transition temperature of the amorphous PEO phase. The increase of the permeability with an increasing PEO block length, at the same ratio PEO-PBT, can therefore be related to a larger chain flexibility for longer PEO segments. The permeability also depends on the degree of crystallinity and the melting temperature of the PEO phase, which increases with the amount and the PEO segment length. PEO-PBT block copolymers exhibit a high CO2/N2selectivity ( 60 at T = 35 C) due to the high solubility of CO2 in the PEO phase. However, this selectivity is structure-dependent and is higher for block copolymers with larger amounts of PBT. The CO2/He selectivity shows a different structure dependency since the permeation of CO2 occurs primarily through the PEO phase and the He permeation occurs through both the PEO and mixed PEO-PBT interphase. Therefore, block copolymers with a better phase separation between the PEO phase and the PBT phase show a higher CO2/He selectivity.


Organizational commitment is recognised as having a positive relationship with employee retention and performance, yet the nature of commitment in a project-orientated organization is unknown. Project orientated organizations are complicated by temporary teams, varying workloads and inability to guarantee future projects. To date, research in project orientated organizations treats employees as an homogenous body. Adopting a case study methodology, this research explored organizational commitment within a project organization, comparing staff within the organization. Employees were asked to complete an online instrument measuring affective, normative and continuance commitment. Analysis compared results from project managers, project staff and support staff. The research found that project managers reported stronger affective commitment; support staff reported the strongest normative and continuance commitment. The concept of self-investment by employees in the organization is explored as a possible cause of high continuance commitment amongst support staff. Project organizations can use this information to enhance their management of employees. It is important for an organization with project and non-project employees to understand and meet the needs of different roles. The research concludes that the projectification of organizations has wider human resource management and productivity implications and requires further investigation.


This research aims to develop honey loaded chitosan composite film based dressing for wound care application. The composite films have been prepared with different combination of chitosan, honey and cross-linking agent as per box and benhken design. The result analyses the effect of process parameters like chitosan percentage, crosslinking agent and honey percentage on the physical properties of the developed film. The findings indicate that increment in crosslinking agent percentage increases the brittleness of the film, the increment in honey and chitosan percentage helps to improve the important parameters like fluid absorption capacity, folding endurance and degradation of the film. The numerical optimization result shows that 1.5% of chitosan, 1.2% of acetic acid and 7.9% of honey as best combination for film development with respect to the selected responses. The developed wound dressing are characterised for their physical properties and also the biological evaluation. The antibacterial test and liquid culture test results confirm that the developed film dressing possess higher resistant against gram positive and negative bacterial strains.


Intercellular communication was long thought to be regulated exclusively through direct contact between cells or via release of soluble molecules that transmit the signal by binding to a suitable receptor on the target cell, and/or via uptake into that cell. With the discovery of small secreted vesicular structures that contain complex cargo, both in their lumen and the lipid membrane that surrounds them, a new frontier of signal transduction was discovered. These "extracellular vesicles" (EV) were initially thought to be garbage bags through which the cell ejected its waste. Whilst this is a major function of one type of EV, i.e., apoptotic bodies, many EVs have intricate functions in intercellular communication and compound exchange; although their physiological roles are still ill-defined. Additionally, it is now becoming increasingly clear that EVs mediate disease progression and therefore studying EVs has ignited significant interests among researchers from various fields of life sciences. Consequently, the research effort into the pathogenic roles of EVs is significantly higher even though their protective roles are not well established. The "Focus on extracellular vesicles" series of reviews highlights the current state of the art regarding various topics in EV research, whilst this review serves as an introductory overview of EVs, their biogenesis and molecular composition.