Few families enjoy such a remarkable reputation for their contribution to the literature and intellectual life of Britain as the Godwins and the Shelleys. Yet this reputation was shaped in a subtle way by the selective release of literary manuscripts into the public realm and the suppression of others. This book explores the lives and posthumous reputations of Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary Shelley, and Mary's parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the story of how Mary Shelley, haunted by the past, directly sought to enhance the public's appreciation of her husband and parents by the selective publication of relevant manuscripts. It also explains how she passed on this legacy to her son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley and his wife, Jane, Lady Shelley. As guardian of the archive until giving part of it to the Bodleian in 1893-4, Lady Shelley too helped shape the posthumous reputations of these important writers. Drawing on the Bodleian Library's outstanding collections of letters, literary manuscripts, rare printed books and pamphlets, portraits and relics, including Shelley's working notebooks, a letter from Keats to Shelley, William Godwin's diary, and the original manuscripts of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Stephen Hebron charts the history of a family blessed with genius but marred by tragedy. The final chapter by Elizabeth C. Denlinger of the New York Public Library explores the material relating to the Shelley family that slipped beyond the family's control. Reproducing many of the archive documents and Shelley relics, this highly illustrated book accompanies an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Dove Cottage, Grasmere and the New York Public Library.


Film as one of the mass media have power and ability to reach most of the social segment. In this research, researcher interesting in ?Memoirs of A Geisha?, that is a film made by Rob Marshall. This film tells about the life of a geisha, with Chiyo as the main character, that sold by her father when she was young to one of OKIYA or geisha house, till she growth and became a truly geisha. From this interesting phenomena, the researcher want to know about the Representation of Ancient Japan Culture in Kimono, in the ?Memoirs of A Geisha? film. The scope of this research is the ?Memoirs of A Geisha? film that produce by Amblin Entertainment. For the analysis unit, there are some shot that can represent in that film. The research made a limitation and made a focus on all the sign that is in the Memoirs of A Geisha film, that represent the Japan culture in the kimono of a geisha. All the data that the researcher got, then described using semiotic theory by Roland Barthez. By using the semiotic, from the culture side and the norm, Japanese people is homogeny people that also have patrilinial social system, the existence of limitation for Japanese woman, that give priority to personal approach, the existence of the religious system that the Japanese people have, all of them really appreciate nature as the element that should be preserve for the harmonize. And Japan is the only one of non-west country that success to be the center of the world in every sector. All of that we can see from the Kimono that always used in the Memoirs of A Geisha film with semiotic analysis. Besides, also with the semiotic analysis. Kimono, also we can see as the media to express the person personality who wear it by the style and the way they wear it. A suggestion that the researcher get for this film are, first, the film maker should make a film, not only for the business but also as the media to convey the social messages. To all the people who loves to watch film, should watch much of the film that has cultural theme, to get the information about peoples who lives in different geographic, as the information for us to understand the cultures in the world. And the academic suggestion is, hopefully this research can be a literature for the next similar research that will explained more detail about the semiotic analysis. Keyword : Representasi; Film; Semiotik Link terkait : http://skripsi.umm.ac.id/files/disk1/324/jiptummpp-gdl-s1-2009-rrwindhypr-16185-PENDAHUL-N.pdf


The material covered in a typical Computer Engineering class tends to be heavily focused on a single subject area. Students often struggle to see how different subjects are interrelated or how they can be combined to address a wider range of problems. They generally have to wait until after they have completed subsequent related courses before they are able to put the previously material in context. For example, the concepts students learn in a typical digital logic course usually make more sense when one is taking computer architecture. A second issue is that students fail to grasp the richness and diversity of Computer Engineering until they have taken courses in hardware, software, networking and computer architecture. This may push students away from the field prematurely. To address these issues, we have designed a new class targeted at sophomores that covers a broad slice of Computer Engineering. The class teaches students many of the fundamental concepts of Computer Engineering. The course is required for students pursuing degrees in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northeastern University. It provides them with a hands-on experience and presents the basics of the Unix/Linux operating system, high level programming concepts, introductory digital design, computer organization and wireless networking. Students get the opportunity to directly apply the theory presented in the classroom as they build a working remote-controlled robotic arm. The class is taught in a colaboratory, an integrated laboratory-classroom environment. The room facilitates team-based design, active learning and exploration, while allowing the instructor to move seamlessly between lecturing and hands-on laboratory experiences. By the end of the course, the students acquire a general understanding of the different areas in Computer Engineering. They leave more prepared and more excited to tackle the more specialized courses that they will take later in the curriculum. They are also better prepared for their first cooperative education experience, which many of them will do immediately after taking this class.


The coronavirus COVID19 pandemic is an emerging biosafety threat to the nation and the world (1). There are no treatments approved for coronavirus infection in humans (2) and there is a lack of information available regarding the basic transcriptional behavior of human cells and mammalian tissues following coronavirus infection. We mined two independent datasets (3, 4), public (3) and published (4) containing transcriptome data from infection models of the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus and human coronavirus (HCoV) to discover genes that are differentially expressed in coronaviruses and identify potential therapeutic targets and host cell vulnerabilities. We identified the La ribonucleoprotein domain family member 6 (LARP6) as a conserved differentially expressed gene following coronavirus infection. LARP6 may be involved in the cellular response to COVID19 infection.


Charcot's osteoarthropathy is a devastating, chronic, progressive destruction of bone and joint integrity affecting one or more peripheral articulations. It is characterised by joint dislocation, subluxations and pathological fractures in patients with peripheral neuropathy and results in a debilitating deformity, possibly leading to ulceration and amputation.
Although the condition was first described in 1831 by the American physician John Mitchell, it bears the name of the 19th century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. The nomenclature of the condition in the literature bears more than 40 different names : Charcot's foot, Charcot's neuro-osteoarthropathy and diabetic neuroarthropathy, to name but a few. While there is no consensus on the most appropriate terminology, resulting in possible confusion in diagnosis and treatment, Charcot's osteoarthropathy appears to be the most acceptable.


Digital media are increasingly interwoven into how we understand society and ourselves today. From lines of code to evolving forms of online conduct, they have become an ever present layer of our age. The rethinking of education has now become the subject of intense global policy debates and academic research, paralleled by the invention and promotion of new learning identities, which are intended to incite teachers and students to think, feel, and act as social operators in schools and beyond.
Learning Identities in a Digital Age provides a critical exploration of how education has been reimagined for the digital future. It argues that education is now the subject of a'cybernetic' mode of thought: a contemporary style of thinking about society and identity that is saturated with metaphors of networks, flexibility, interactivity and connectedness.This book examines how shifts in thought have translated into fresh ideas about creative learning, interactive tools, curriculum reform, and teacher identity. The text identifies how learning identities have been promoted and how they position young people as networked learners, equipped for political, economic and cultural participation in the digital age. Included in the text:

* mapping the digital age
* reconstructing the future of education
* 'making up' digital learning identities
* assembling creative learning
* thinking with digital tools
* protoyping the curriculum of the future
* being a teacher in a digital age.
This book situates education and technology in an intergenerational and interdisciplinary conversation. It will be of interest to students, researchers and practising education professionals who want to understand the wider sociological and psychological significance of new technologies on education and learner identity.


Received: July 2015, Accepted: November 2015 Background: Ergonomics is a science that provides methods of creating reasonable adaption between occupation and worker by improving usability through consideration of job demands and human ability to satisfy them. A deep understanding of user's thoughts on and attitudes toward utilizing a tool could improve its design. In the present study, two cushions designed particularly for one of car industries , assembly line were tested considering usability. Materials and Methods: From among the 50 employees of the assembly line, 44 employees were selected randomly to participate in the study. The research tool consisted of a researcher-made questionnaire containing 29 questions in 5 subscales (usefulness, efficiency, effectiveness, satisfaction, and safety). The validity of the questionnaire was estimated by a specialist (CVI = 0.85) and its reliability was calculated using Cronbach's alpha (α = 0.87). Results: The mean scores of the 5 subscales of usefulness, efficiency, effectiveness, satisfaction, and safety were 6.5 ± 0.534, 6.5 ± 0.488, 5.3 ± 0.278, 6.4 ± 0.310, and 6.5 ± 0.534, respectively. Conclusions: Scores in all dimensions were above moderate and acceptable levels. Workers utilized them satisfactorily, and thus, producers can produce these cushions in large numbers without any problems. The performance of similar studies is recommended in designing other tools and instruments and the application of ergonomic principles in their design.


In recent decades historiography has moved decisively away from the highly personalized treatments of past events which were once favoured. Not 'great men' but 'labouring men', collective movements, political forces, social and economic development, women's and local history have been the focus of attention. Nowadays, the problem of political leadership is considered primarily in institutional terms, and the emphasis given to personality has correspondingly diminished. With very few exceptions, biography has been relegated to the level of popular narrative. To raise the question of charisma in these circumstances is almost to violate a taboo, to address an embarrassing topic unworthy of scholarly attention. With the exception of the mainly theoretical work of Luciano Cavalli on the origins and permutations of charisma, there have been no sustained attempts to examine comparatively the various cases of charismatic leadership that Italian political life has produced. Thus, partly because charisma has been abandoned as a scholarly topic, it can appear inexplicable, inaccessible to the historical methods used for the study of social and political structures.


The idea that prisons are particularly masculine environments is solidly grounded in current sociological literature. However, limited literature exists regarding the ways masculinity is negotiated within prison settings. Using James W. Messerschmidt's (1993) structured action theory, the current examination explores how male prison inmates situationally negotiate masculinity within these institutional milieus. Three research questions are posed. First, how does masculinity negotiation differ in maximum vs. minimum-security institutions and by race within and across these institutional settings? In addition, is prison violence used as a resource to negotiate masculinity within the prison setting and, if so, to what extent? Lastly, how do male inmates in single sex, long-term correctional facilities negotiate masculinity in the absence of women? Based on in-depth interviews conducted with fourteen male prison inmates in two North Carolina prisons, security level has a greater impact than race on the differential ways masculinity is negotiated in prison. However, when race does impact the ways masculinity is accomplished, it does so in significant and interesting ways.


In cross-cultural communication and adjunct disciplines such as cross-cultural management and international business, there is a negativity bias of seeing cultural differences as a source of potential issues. The emergence of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) questions this problem-focused approach. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion from neuroscience's perspectives in several ways. Firstly, it provides a neurological look at this bias. Secondly, it proposes that the problem-focused approach may (1) give us a biased outlook of cross-cultural encounters rather than a reality, (2) hinder creativity, (3) lead to the rebound effect, and (4) turn belief into reality. Finally, based on insight from neuroscience and adopting the POS lens with the connection between POS and creativity, it's recommended that future research takes three directions: (1) Using similarity as the starting point; (2) strategize body language, context and theories; and (3) develop a multicultural mind. In essence, the paper contributes to existing knowledge of the field by employing an interdisciplinary approach, aiming to gain a more holistic view, provoke thoughts, and trigger future empirical studies.


Abstract This article examines how frontier zone expansion and the migration of Asian professionals reinforced each other in complex and indirect ways. It focuses on Hawaii as a microcosm of transnationalism in medicine, analyzing its role as a host for licensed physicians from Japan, the United States, and other countries from 1868 to 1924. Looking beyond the context of a single East Asian country and East Asia as a region, or the East-West dichotomy, this study places all involved territories within the broader trans-Pacific arena to convey the sense of interconnectivity that human resources brought about between all the involved territories. The confluence of (geo)politics in Japan, East Asia, the Pacific, the United States, and the rest of the world molded intellectual migration in medicine from Japan to Hawaii, migration that served as an economically viable, diplomatically peaceful, and socially benign form of expansion.


Draco [4] is a sketch-based interface that allows artists and casual users alike to add a rich set of animation effects to their drawings, seemingly bringing illustrations to life. While previous systems have introduced sketch-based animations for individual objects, our contribution is a unified framework of motion controls that allows users to seamlessly add coordinated motions to object collections. We propose a framework built around kinetic textures, which provide continuous animation effects while preserving the unique timeless nature of still illustrations. This enables many dynamic effects difficult or not possible with previous sketch-based tools, such as a school of fish swimming, tree leaves blowing in the wind, or water rippling in a pond. A user study with professional animators and casual users demonstrates the variety of animations, applications and creative possibilities our tool provides.


This article studies how portable skills accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data on tasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task‐specific human capital to measure empirically the transferability of skills across occupations. Our results on occupational mobility and wages show that labor market skills are more portable than previously considered. We find that individuals move to occupations with similar task requirements and that the distance of moves declines with experience. We also show that task‐specific human capital is an important source of individual wage growth, accounting for up to 52% of overall wage growth.


The aim of the present study is to detect abrupt trend changes in the mean of a multidimensional sequential signal. Directly inspired by papers of Fernhead and Liu ([4] and [5]), this work describes the signal in a hierarchical manner : the change dates of a time segmentation process trigger the renewal of a piece-wise constant emission law. Bayesian posterior information on the change dates and emission parameters is obtained. These estimations can be revised online, i.e. as new data arrive. This paper proposes explicit formulations corresponding to various emission laws, as well as a generalization to the case where only partially observed data are available. Practical applications include the returns of partially observed multi-asset investment strategies, when only scant prior knowledge of the movers of the returns is at hand, limited to some statistical assumptions. This situation is different from the study of trend changes in the returns of individual assets, where fundamental exogenous information (news, earnings announcements, controversies, etc.) can be used.


"The big picture of U.S. performance on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is straightforward and stark: It is a picture of educational stagnation. ... Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. today are average in science and reading literacy, and below average in mathematics, compared to their counterparts in [other industrialized] countries." U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan spoke these grim words on the bleak December day in late 2013 when the international tests in math, science, and literacy were released. No less disconcerting was the secretary's warning that the nation's educational problems are not limited to certain groups or specific places. The "educational challenge in America is not just about poor kids in poor neighborhoods," he said. "It's about many kids in many neighborhoods. The [test] results underscore that educational shortcomings in the United States are not just the problems of other people's children." It's not just about kids in poor neighborhoods In making his comments, Secretary Duncan challenged those who cling to an old belief that the nation's educational challenges are confined to its inner cities. Most affluent Americans remain optimistic about the schools in their local community. In 2011, Education Next asked a representative sample to evaluate both the nation's schools and those in their own community. The affluent were especially dubious about the nation's schools--only 15 percent conceded them an A or a B. Yet 54 percent gave their local schools one of the two top ratings. Public opinion is split on how well the nation's schools educate students of different abilities. In 2013 Education Next asked the public whether local schools did a good job of teaching talented students. Seventy-three percent said the local schools did "somewhat" or "extremely" well at the task, as compared to only 45 percent who thought that was true of their capacity to teach the less-talented. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] To see whether this optimistic assessment of the nation's ability to teach the more able student is correct, we draw upon the latest tests of student achievement and find that, as Secretary Duncan has said, the nation's "educational shortcomings" are not just the problems of the other person's child. We have given special attention to math performance because math appears to be the subject in which accomplishment is particularly significant for both an individual's and a country s economic well-being. When viewed from a global perspective, U.S. schools seem to do as badly teaching those from better-educated families as they do teaching those from less well educated families. Overall, the U.S. proficiency rate in math (35 percent) places the country at the 27th rank among the 34 OECD countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). That ranking is somewhat lower for students from advantaged backgrounds (28th) than for those from disadvantaged ones (20th). There are examples of excellence. The six states with high proficiency rates (58 to 62 percent) among students from families with high levels of parental education rank among the OECD top 13 on this measure. But students from these states are a small portion of the U.S. student population, and other states rank much lower down the international list. In many places, students from highly educated families are performing well below the OECD average for similarly advantaged students. There can be little doubt that education shortcomings in the United States spread well beyond the corridors of the inner city or the confines of low-income neighborhoods where many parents lack a high school diploma. While bright spots can be identified--particularly in some states along the country's northern tier--the overall picture is distressing to those concerned about the potential evolution of economic well-being of the United States in the 21st century. …


Dental amalgam is a reliable and effective restorative material with a well-established role in modern dentistry. Throughout the years its mercury content and the risks posed to human health were main topics of interest for many scientists. This paper offers a review of the scientific literature on the health and environmental impact of mercury in dentistry published over the last decade. A variety of peer-reviewed, epidemiological and large-scale clinical studies on dental amalgam, as well as published reports of professional and governmental bodies, were organised thematically and analysed. The most relevant findings of the aforementioned literature are reported. No reliance has been placed on unpublished work or publicly available opinions that are not scientifically based. In order to offer an appropriate view on the topic the toxicology, health impacts and possible environmental threats are briefly presented in relation to the relevant literature published in the last ten years. It is almost unanimously accepted that dental amalgam is a safe material, with little or insignificant adverse effect on general health. However, current and mostly unfounded environmental concerns may result in the implementation of new across the board legislation that could lead to a global dental amalgam "phase out".


Making a precise annotation in a large dataset is crucial to the performance of object detection. While the object detection task requires a huge number of annotated samples to guarantee its performance, placing bounding boxes for every object in each sample is time-consuming and costs a lot. To alleviate this problem, we propose a Consistency-based Semi-supervised learning method for object Detection (CSD), which is a way of using consistency constraints as a tool for enhancing detection performance by making full use of available unlabeled data. Specifically, the consistency constraint is applied not only for object classification but also for the localization. We also proposed Background Elimination (BE) to avoid the negative effect of the predominant backgrounds on the detection performance. We have evaluated the proposed CSD both in single-stage and two-stage detectors and the results show the effectiveness of our method.


COSA NOSTRA is the compelling story of the Sicilian mafia, the world`s most famous, most secretive and most misunderstood criminal fraternity.

The mafia has been given many names since it was founded one hundred and forty years ago: the Sect, the Brotherhood, the Honoured Society, and now Cosa Nostra. Yet as times have changed, the mafia`s subtle and bloody methods have remained the same. Now, for the first time, COSA NOSTRA reconstructs the complete history of the Sicilian mafia from its origins to the present day, from the lemon groves and sulphur mines of Sicily, to the streets of Manhattan.

COSA NOSTRA is a definitive history, rich in atmosphere, and with the narrative pace of the best detective fiction.

The mob genre has finally grown up.


This paper reports follow-up photometric and spectroscopic observations, including warm Spitzer IRAC photometry of seven white dwarfs from the SDSS with apparent excess flux in UKIDSS K-band observations. Six of the science targets were selected from 16785 DA star candidates identified either spectroscopically or photometrically within SDSS DR7, spatially cross-correlated with HK detections in UKIDSS DR8. Thus, the selection criteria are completely independent of stellar mass, effective temperature above 8000K and the presence (or absence) of atmospheric metals. The infrared fluxes of one target are compatible with a spatially unresolved late M or early L-type companion, while three stars exhibit excess emissions consistent with warm circumstellar dust. These latter targets have spectral energy distributions similar to known dusty white dwarfs with high fractional infrared luminosities (thus the K-band excesses). Optical spectroscopy reveals the stars with disc-like excesses are polluted with heavy elements, denoting the ongoing accretion of circumstellar material. One of the discs exhibits a gaseous component - the fourth reported to date - and orbits a relatively cool star, indicating the gas is produced via collisions as opposed to sublimation, supporting the picture of a recent event. The resulting statistics yield a lower limit of 0.8 per cent for the fraction dust discs at DA-type white dwarfs with cooling ages less than 1Gyr. Two overall results are noteworthy: (i) all stars whose excess infrared emission is consistent with dust are metal rich and (ii) no stars warmer than 25000K are found to have this type of excess, despite sufficient sensitivity. © 2012 The Authors Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2012 RAS.


The goal of this dissertation is to provide detection and estimation techniques in order to ensure the safety and security of modern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) even in the presence of arbitrary sensors faults and attacks. We leverage the fact that modern CPS are equipped with various sensors that provide redundant information about the system's state. In such a setting, the system can limit its dependence on any individual sensor, thereby providing guarantees about its safety even in the presence of arbitrary faults and attacks. In order to address the problem of safety detection, we develop sensor fusion techniques that make use of the sensor redundancy available in modern CPS. First of all, we develop a multidimensional sensor fusion algorithm that outputs a bounded fusion set which is guaranteed to contain the true state even in the presence of attacks and faults. Furthermore, we provide two approaches for strengthening sensor fusion's worst-case guarantees: 1) incorporating historical measurements as well as 2) analyzing sensor transmission schedules (e.g., in a time-triggered system using a shared bus) in order to minimize the attacker's available information and impact on the system. In addition, we modify the sensor fusion algorithm in order to provide guarantees even when sensors might experience transient faults in addition to attacks. Finally, we develop an attack detection technique (also in the presence of transient faults) in order to discard attacked sensors. In addition to standard plant sensors, we note that modern CPS also have access to multiple environment sensors that provide information about the system's context (e.g., a camera recognizing a nearby building). Since these context measurements are related to the system's state, they can be used for estimation and detection purposes, similar to standard measurements. In this dissertation, we first develop a nominal contextaware filter (i.e., with no faults or attacks) for binary context measurements (e.g., a building detection). Finally, we develop a technique for incorporating context measurements into sensor fusion, thus providing guarantees about system safety even in cases where more than half of standard sensors might be under attack. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Computer and Information Science First Advisor Insup Lee Second Advisor James Weimer


Why are some people more optimistic about their life than others? Literature on locus of control suggests that optimism is associated with the belief that one's life outcomes are controlled by internal factors, such as ability, instead of external factors, such as powerful others or chance. Furthermore, some authors suggest that internal control beliefs interact with self-efficacy beliefs regarding their effects on outcome expectancies and thus optimism. We argue that it is not only selfefficacy that interacts, but efficacy beliefs about external factors, too. We further hypothesize that the effect of perceiving internal rather than external control on dispositional optimism depends on the difference between efficacy beliefs regarding internal and external factors. Since people can influence other people to be helpful, i.e., take proxy control, but are unlikely to influence chance, we extend this internal-versus-external view and suggest that the difference between perceived control by others and perceived control by chance affect dispositional optimism. In fact, we hypothesize that the effect of perceiving that it is other people who are in control, rather than chance, depends on the difference between efficacy beliefs regarding others and chance. A first empirical survey-based test produces substantial support for our theory. This is the first time control-efficacy interaction effects are shown for dispositional variables and for the threedimensional construct of locus of control. We replicate a gender effect on correlations of dispositional optimism with self-reported risk taking and observe a gender effect for one of our new hypotheses.


There are many sources of inflation forecasts for Latin America. The International Monetary Fund, Latin Focus, the Economist Intelligence Unit and other consulting companies all offer inflation forecasts. However, these sources do not provide any probability measures regarding the risk of inflation. In some cases, Central Banks offer forecast and probability analyses but typically their models are not fully transparent. This technical note attempts to develop a relatively homogeneous set of methodologies and employs them to estimate inflation forecasts, probability distributions for those forecasts and hence probability measures of high inflation. The methodologies are based on both parametric and non-parametric estimation. Results are given for five countries in the region that have inflation targeting regimes.


We generalize the concept of Tully-Preston surface hopping to include larger jumps in the case that the surfaces do not cross. Instead of identifying a complex hopping point, we specify a jump between two locales in phasespace. This concept is used here to find propensity rules for the accepting vibrational mode(s) in a radiationless vibronic relaxation transition. A model inspired by the S 2 → S 0 vibronic relaxation transition of the benzene molecule in which 30 modes of vibration compete for the electronic energy is studied within this approach. For this model, we show that almost all of the energy must go to a single C-H local stretching. The initial conditions for vibrations of this mode are a coordinate jump of the hydrogen atom toward the ring. All of the other modes undergo an almost vertical transition, in which the energy that they take is determined by their equilibrium displacement between the two surfaces. We observe that for a large energy gap the masses and frequencies become the defining parameters for choosing the accepting mode. Anharmonicities are very important when a competition between degenerate modes occurs. These conclusions are demonstrated by the specific model considered here but apply in general to any weak internal conversion process.


© Nigerian Annals of Pure and Applied Sciences Vol 2 June, 2020, NAPAS re a u n P d f A o p s p l l a ie n d n S A c n ie ai n r c e e gi s N


YAP has a nontranscriptional role in the separation of daughter cells during mitosis. Separating dividing cells into two By activating genes involved in cell growth and proliferation, the transcriptional coactivator YAP can act as a tumor promoter. In some contexts, however, YAP can instead act as a tumor suppressor. Bui et al. found that in mitotic cells, a kinase that promotes cell cycle progression phosphorylated YAP, and YAP was localized to subcellular structures involved in dividing cells into two, a process called cytokinesis. Furthermore, localization of YAP at these structures ensured the proper localization of other proteins necessary for cytokinesis. Cells deficient in YAP or that expressed a nonphosphorylatable form of YAP were more likely to have an abnormal number of chromosomes, a condition that can give rise to tumors. These results provide a potential mechanism to explain the tumor-suppressive activity of YAP (see also Pfeifer). YAP is a transcriptional coactivator that controls organ expansion and differentiation and is inhibited by the Hippo pathway in cells in interphase. Here, we demonstrated that, during mitosis, YAP localized to the midbody and spindle, subcellular structures that are involved in cytokinesis, the process by which contraction of the cytoskeleton produces two daughter cells. Furthermore, YAP was phosphorylated by CDK1, a kinase that promotes cell cycle progression. Knockdown of YAP by shRNA or expression of a nonphosphorylatable form of YAP delayed the separation of daughter cells (called abscission) and induced a cytokinesis phenotype associated with increased contractile force, membrane blebbing and bulges, and abnormal spindle orientation. Consequently, these defects led to an increased frequency of multinucleation, micronuclei, and aneuploidy. YAP was required for proper localization of proteins that regulate contraction during cytokinesis, including ECT2, MgcRacGap, Anillin, and RHOA. In addition, depletion of YAP increased the phosphorylation of myosin light chain, which would be expected to activate the contractile activity of myosin II, the molecular motor involved in cytokinesis. The polarity scaffold protein PATJ coprecipitated with YAP and colocalized with YAP at the cytokinesis midbody, and knockdown of PATJ phenocopied the cytokinetic defects and spindle orientation alterations induced by either YAP depletion or expression of a nonphosphorylatable YAP mutant. Together, these results reveal an unanticipated role for YAP in the proper organization of the cytokinesis machinery during mitosis through interaction with the polarity protein PATJ.


State laws regulating abortion have proliferated dramatically in recent years. Twenty-two states adopted seventy different restrictions in 2013 alone. Between 2011 and 2013, state legislatures passed 205 abortion restrictions, exceeding the 189 enacted during the entire prior decade. The constitutionality of several such restrictions — parts of Texas H.B. 2 — was recently litigated in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Planned Parenthood of Texas v. Abbott. The Abbott court upheld a requirement that doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges at a hospital within thirty miles of the abortion clinic, and it also upheld a limitation on the use of medication-induced abortions. The constitutionality of a third restriction in H.B. 2, which required abortion providers to meet the requirements of ambulatory surgical centers (ASC), was struck down by a federal district court in Texas in August 2014, in Whole Women's Health v. Lakey. The Fifth Circuit reversed that holding a few weeks later, permitting the ASC requirement to enter into effect. That decision was trumped a few days later, however, by a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that stayed enforcement of the Texas law until the Fifth Circuit considers the merits of the case, presumably in early 2015. Meanwhile, other federal courts have recently considered the constitutionality of Mississippi, Alabama, and Wisconsin laws which, like H.B. 2, require abortion providers to have hospital-admitting privileges within thirty miles of a clinic. Most of those courts have enjoined the laws because they are presumptively unconstitutional, though the rationales for striking the laws vary. In part because of their differing outcomes and rationales, these cases raise issues likely to be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court. Rarely acknowledged in this litigation or commentary about it — at least until the Lakey case — is the fact that these regulations have the greatest impact on women who live farthest from the major metropolitan areas where abortion providers tend to be located. Indeed, these laws appear to exact the greatest toll on women who are both rural and poor. We argue that, contrary to the Fifth Circuit's decisions in Abbott and Lakey, these laws place undue burdens on the abortion rights of a significant number of women and that they should be declared unconstitutional. In addition to these normative claims, we draw on three complementary critical frames — legal geography, the concept of privilege, and rural studies' concept of urbanormativity — to articulate new ways of thinking about the recent spate of so-called incremental abortion regulations and federal courts' adjudication of the constitutionality of these laws. First, legal geography provides a frame for theorizing the relationship between the abortion regulations and spatiality, revealing how law is variegated and variable and how material space dictates different outcomes from place to place. Second, we deploy the concept of privilege in arguing that many federal judges are spatially privileged but blind to that privilege. In our increasingly metro-centric nation, where rural populations are dwindling and marginalized both literally and symbolically, most federal appellate judges appear to have little experience with, or understanding of, typical socio-spatial features of rurality: transportation challenges, a dearth of services, lack of anonymity, and — frequently — extreme socioeconomic disadvantage. Yet those same spatially privileged judges are applying the undue burden standard to laws that require women to travel hundreds of miles, sometimes on multiple occasions, to access abortion services. Those judges are also typically upholding laws that burden women's access to medication-induced abortions, which have the potential to ameliorate spatiality's burden on rural women. Such spatial privilege and judges' obliviousness to it are most evident among U.S. Courts of Appeal judges and U.S. Supreme Court justices who construe the "undue burden" standard, while these tend to be less prominent among federal district judges applying the same standard. The judicial blind spot associated with metropolitan spatial privilege was evident most recently in Abbott and Lakey, in which the Fifth Circuit minimized the burden of traveling more than 150 miles each way to reach an abortion provider. Such privilege was also on display more than two decades ago in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood and in many U.S. Courts of Appeals decisions in Casey's wake. The spatial privilege phenomenon is closely linked to the third frame: critical rural studies' concept of urbanormativity. By treating urban life as a benchmark for what is normal and, as in Abbott and Lakey, dismissing as constitutionally insignificant the seventeen percent of Texas women who live more than 150 miles from an abortion provider (some as far as 250 miles away), federal appellate judges increasingly articulate an urbanormative jurisprudence. Such decisions have dramatic real-life consequences for rural and other women who live far from the few major metropolitan areas where clinics are able to remain open. But these decisions also marginalize rural people symbolically, and we provide illustrations of judicial urbanormativity in other constitutional contexts — from voting rights to the establishment clause — to further highlight the problem. We close with some suggestions for how reproductive rights advocates could better represent to courts the lived realities of rural women seeking abortion services.


Background: The family caregivers of patients undergoing hemodialysis have a major role in the care of patients at home. The study results indicate that these caregivers face with multiple problems regarding responsibilities and issues arising from the care and treatment of the patients. These issues decrease their quality of lives. However, these caregivers are mostly neglected and no studies are available on the effectiveness of educational program on their quality of lives. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the effects of educational program on the quality of life of family caregivers of patients undergoing hemodialysis. Methods: This research was a randomized controlled clinical trial, conducted on 76 family caregivers of patients undergoing hemodialysis referred to Shahid Hasheminejad, a medical and educational center in Tehran, Iran. The subjects were equally allocated into 2 groups of 38 patients. The caregivers of the patients who referred in even or odd days of the week were randomly assigned into the intervention and control groups, respectively. The intervention group received 4 training sessions on home care training program during 2 weeks, but the control group just received the routine training at the center. Both groups answered demographic information and "quality of life" (SF-36) questionnaires before and 6 weeks after the intervention. Then, the obtained data were analyzed in SPSS, 21. Descriptive statistics, the Chi-square and Fisher exact tests, as well as independent samples t-test, t-couple, and Mann-Whitney U test were used to analyze the data. Results: The majority of caregivers (54%) were in the age range of 35-55 years. About 68.4% were female and 70% were married. No significant difference was found between the baseline mean scores of "quality of life" of the intervention and the control groups (45.95±14.94 vs. 45.08±11.02, P=0.775). However, the mean scores of quality of life of the intervention group increased at the end of the study and the 2 groups were significantly different in this regard (63.51±11.55 vs. 41.74±10.51, P<0.001). Conclusion: The current study showed that home care training program can be effective in improving the quality of life and compatibility with the responsibilities of caregivers and change their lifestyle. Therefore, we suggest that managers of educational and medical center encourage their staffs to use such programs for improving the caregivers' health. A B S T R A C T


Professor Barry Barnes is a major contributor to the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK). He is well known for his ground-breaking study on collective action, self-referring knowledge, and systems of power. His enormous influence helps transform the discipline of Science, Technology and Society (STS). This interview started from his naturalistic commitment, insisting that science should be studied in the same way as any other human activities. We then move onto the basic relation between knowledge and society. According to him, problems to do with knowledge and those to do with power are in fact two sides of one coin. His work on agency, collective action, power or even finitism can all be understood as analyzing different forms of the same awareness, rather than as a change of subject. At the end of this interview, we asked Professor Barnes's suggestions toward the budding East-Asian STS research. He encouraged scholars in East-Asia to combine the Western resources with their own ones, and advised them not to simply follow a "Programme" as it constrains their vision.


Abstract. This research identifies the information seeking behavior of women who reside in the slum area of Kampung Poncol, Jakarta, Indonesia in the fulfillment of the triple role; those are reproductive, productive, and social. A qualitative approach with phenomenology method is used in this research while the data are collected by non-participant observation and in-depth interview with six participants. The results of this research show that the steps of information seeking behavior of those women are the initiation, selection, formulation, collection, and presentation; while the exploration step does not appear at all. Based on the role of reproduction needed by the informants in relation to their role as housewives, the information needed by the women are about the price of basic commodities, family healthcare and well-being, children education, as well as information about the flood. On the productive role, the information needed are vary among the informants depends on their occupations. While for the social role, the information needed by the informants are related to personal health, fashion, entertainment, and politics. The primary source of information is informal source those are relatives and neighbors.


In The Prehistory of the Balto-Slavic Accent Jay Jasanoff offers a much-needed guide to the accentual changes that set Baltic and Slavic apart from the rest of the Indo-European family.


We address the problem of recognizing the so-called image spam, which consists in embedding the spam message into attached images to defeat techniques based on the analysis of e-mails' body text, and in using content obscuring techniques to defeat OCR tools. We propose an approach to recognize image spam based on detecting the presence of content obscuring techniques, and describe a possible implementation based on two low-level image features aimed at detecting obscuring techniques whose consequence is to compromise the OCR effectiveness resulting in character breaking or merging, or in the presence of noise interfering with characters in the binarized image. A preliminary experimental investigation of this approach is reported on a personal data set of spam images.


After a catastrophic 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck the east coast of Japan in April 2011, a chain of events was set in motion leading to the release of several volatile radionuclides of Cs and I into the atmosphere due to explosions in three of the six reactor cores at the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP). This study shows the enrichment of stable Cs relative to other alkali metals at the surface soil samples collected from a 1m thick andisol at Mt. Daisen, Japan, roughly 700 Km SW from the FDNPP. Cs is not enriched in three surface soils collected from the Fukushima Prefecture outside the restricted area. The relative enrichment of Cs compared to other alkali metals show the potential of long-term fixation of radiocesium in these Mt. Daisen soils. INDEX WORDS: Fukushima, Radiocesium, Andisols, Vermiculite THE GEOCHEMICAL TRENDS OF MAJOR AND SELECT TRACE ELEMENTS THROUGH A SOIL PROFILE NEAR MT. DAISEN, JAPAN


In this paper we develop an improvement on one of the more popular methods for Value-at-Risk measurement, the historical simulation approach. The procedure we employ is the following: First, the density of the return on a portfolio is estimated using a non-parametric method, called a Gaussian kernel. Second, we derive an expression for the density of any order statistic of the return distribution. Finally, because the density is not analytic, we employ Gauss-Legendre integration to obtain the moments of the density of the order statistic, the mean being our Value-at-Risk estimate, and the standard deviation providing us with the ability to construct a confidence interval around the estimate. We apply this method to trading portfolios provided by a financial institution.


Plea-bargaining has been the norm in criminal adjudication for over a century. Prosecutors, once the architects of trials, now design the negotiation process with a particular eye towards sentencing. Such sentences visibly include direct consequences, but perhaps more significantly, collateral consequences that result automatically from conviction and that hamper reentry by ex-offenders. These penalties, often invisible at the time of plea negotiations, are punishment-like in effect and have penalogical justifications that resemble traditional methods of punishment. While the Supreme Court has required disclosure and notice of consequences by defense counsel in recent years, the time is right to contemplate imposing disclosure obligations on prosecutors as well. The values underlying prosecutorial disclosure of exculpatory evidence translate to the plea bargaining context with respect to information regarding sentencing. Those values, the Court's recent jurisprudence of "notice," and the need to heighten systemic literacy regarding collateral consequences, support imposing a requirement that prosecutors disclose serious, automatic collateral consequences because prosecutors enforce those consequences when they construct plea deals. While some commentators have called for shared participation by prosecutors in alleviating such consequences, none have conducted a searching analysis regarding a possible formal, legal basis. This Article begins that task by surveying current constitutional doctrine regarding disclosure and notice, as well as existing standards of professional responsibility for prosecutors involved in plea deals. It concludes that, while fertile ground for a constitutional obligation exists through fusion of the Court's plea-bargaining jurisprudence with justifications for prosecutorial disclosure of exculpatory evidence, it may be more prudent to impose obligations as a matter of professional responsibility, building on the unique role of the prosecutor as a minister of justice within the plea-bargaining norm.


Palm wine and pasteurised palm sap volatiles were collected, concentrated on a Tenax GC and analysed by gas chromatography and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Eighty-two components were identified: 47 esters, 9 alcohols, 5 acids, 6 carbonyls, 2 acetals, 4 terpenes and 9 hydrocarbons. These had all been found previously in conventional wines. Odour evaluation of the separated palm wine components as they eluted suggested that no one compound is responsible for the characteristic palm wine odour. The acetates of higher alcohols and the ethyl esters of straight-chain aliphatic C6-C10 acids seemed to be important and may play a big role in imparting the fruity nuances of characteristic palm wine odour. Their association with alcohols seemed also to be necessary for the expression of typical palm wine odour. The qualitative difference between palm sap aroma and palm wine aroma appeared to be due mainly to the presence of these esters and alcohols in palm wine and their apparent absence from palm sap, as well as to the presence of some low-boiling esters and alcohols in palm sap and their apparent absence from palm wine.


#MLA15 is the hashtag which corresponded to the 2015 Modern Language Association Annual Convention. The Convention was held in Vancouver from Thursday 8 to Sunday 11 January 2015. This dataset is a .xlsx file including data from Tweets publicly published with #mla15 as harvested by Ernesto Priego (City University London) and Chris Zarate (MLA). This dataset includes Tweets posted during the actual convention with #mla15: the set starts with a Tweet from Thursday 08/01/2015 00:02:53 Pacific Time and ends with a Tweet from Sunday 11/01/2015 23:59:58 Pacific Time. The total number of Tweets in this dataset sums 23,609 Tweets. Only Tweets from users with at least two followers were collected. A combination of Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheets (Martin Hawksey's TAGS 6.0; available at https://tags.hawksey.info/ ) was used to harvest this collection. OpenRefine (http://openrefine.org/) was used for deduplicating the data. Please note that both research and experience show that the Twitter search API isn't 100% reliable. Large tweet volumes affect the search collection process. The API might "over-represent the more central users", not offering "an accurate picture of peripheral activity" (Gonzalez-Bailon, Sandra, et al. 2012). It is therefore not guaranteed this file contains each and every Tweet tagged with the archived hashtag during the indicated period, and is shared for comparative and indicative educational and research purposes only. Please note the data in this file is likely to require further refining and even deduplication. The data is shared as is. This dataset is shared to encourage open research into scholarly activity on Twitter. If you use or refer to this data in any way please cite and link back using the citation information above. For the #MLA14 datasets, please go toPriego, Ernesto; Zarate, Chris (2014): #MLA14 Twitter Archive, 9-12 January 2014. figshare.http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.924801 --- NB. The previous version of this dataset accidentally contained a typo in the title that has been corrected. Please use the most recent version.


Educational researchers have paid considerable attention to the use of virtual world platforms in order to support English learning process. The use of Virtual World has become increasingly popular compared to conventional methods. Second life is an example of a typical virtual phenomenon that has raised interest among educators around the world. Many educational institutions have turned to SL due to its immersive and interactive environment and offering classes to enhance their students' proficiency skills. This study is intended to elicit Iraqi students' perception of SL's potential as a virtual platform to improve English language learning. A qualitative case study was conducted. Data was collected through interviews. The research findings show that the learners were in favour of SL's potential in improving English language proficiency. SL is fun to use, and most important of all, the learners feel that it is a new alternative to English language learning and needs to be explored. Keywords: Second Life, English Learning, Students' Perception, Social Constructivism JEL Classifications: I210, Z00


Adiponectin is rapidly approaching its 20th anniversary, but it is still unclear how this apparently potent adipokine exerts its actions. The link to obesity and insulin resistance is obvious; the negative associations between plasma adiponectin concentrations and increasing fat mass or insulin sensitivity are reproducible and strong. The high abundance of adiponectin in plasma also implies a biological purpose. Adiponectin deficiency in mice gives rise to a reasonably mild insulin resistance upon high-fat feeding in most (1–3) but not all (4) models. Obviously, this fits well with the relative absence of adiponectin seen in insulin-resistant obese humans, but human monogenic causes of adiponectin deficiency are yet to be described. To further explore potential mechanisms of insulin resistance in response to adiponectin deficiency, Sweeney and colleagues (5) have used the most classic of endocrine approaches, i.e., to supplement a missing hormone or signal and observe the metabolic effect. The focus is on skeletal muscle and in particular the metabolomic patterns emerging in skeletal muscle after high-fat feeding and controlled adiponectin replenishment. Mice deficient for adiponectin were given a chow or high-fat diet …


Relatively little is known about interactions between the airway microbiome and airway host transcriptome in asthma. Since asthma affects and is affected by the entire airway, studying the upper (e.g., nasal) and lower (e.g., bronchial) airways together represents a powerful approach to understanding asthma. Here, we performed a systematic, integrative study of the nasal and bronchial microbiomes and nasal and bronchial host transcriptomes of children with severe persistent asthma and healthy controls. We found that (a) the microbiomes and host transcriptomes of asthmatic children are each distinct by site (nasal versus bronchial); (b) among asthmatic children, Moraxella and Alloiococcus are hub genera in the nasal microbiome, while there are no hubs among bronchial genera; (c) bronchial Actinomyces is negatively associated with bronchial genes for inflammation, suggesting Actinomyces may be protective; (d) compared with healthy children, asthmatic children express more nasal genes for ciliary function and harbor more nasal Streptococcus; and (e) nasal genera such as Corynebacterium are negatively associated with significantly more nasal genes for inflammation in healthy versus asthmatic children, suggesting a potentially stronger protective role for such nasal genera in healthy versus asthmatic children. Our systematic, integrative study provides a window into host-microbiome associations in asthma.


This article analyzes the causal impact of advanced broadband accessibility on firm performance. We exploit a unique local policy intervention of a staged broadband infrastructure installation across rural municipalities in the Province of Trento (Italy), generating a source of exogenous (spatial and temporal) variation in the provision of next-generation broadband technology (ADSL2+). Employing a difference-in-differences strategy and using longitudinal firm-level data on annual balance sheet information of corporate enterprises, we show that ADSL2+ availability is associated with a significant increase in annual sales turnover of about 40 percent and an increase in value added of roughly 25 percent over the period of two years. The positive effect is found to be rather stable for different lengths of treatment exposure and across industrial sectors. However, no significant effects are found with respect to number of employees. Placebo estimations support a causal interpretation of our results. Overall, established corporate enterprises in 'underserved' rural and remote areas appear to profit considerably from enhanced broadband delivery programs in terms of economic performance.


The constraint of temperature evolution in coastal environments is an important factor in deciphering the Earth's global climatic history. In this study, we reconstruct the evolution of sea-surface palaeotemperatures from the oxygen stable isotope compositions in four marine molluscs families in the Paris Basin during the Palaeogene. The combination of several taxa living in different environments is used to limit uncertainties related to the influence of salinity variations on palaeotemperature estimations. One family of bivalves (oysters) and three families of gastropods (Volutidae, Cerithiidae and Turritellidae) were sampled in the French part of the Paris Basin, in Belgium and in the Isle of Wight (southern England). Maximum seawater temperatures were observed during the Early Eocene (c. 30°C), which correspond to the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum, and temperatures then decreased until the Lutetian (c. 20°C). A transient warming, identified as the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum, occurred during the Bartonian, when temperatures reached 32°C. Temperatures decreased through the Eocene–Oligocene boundary, the coolest interval of the Palaeogene (c. 12°C). A final warming period occurred throughout the Early Oligocene, with temperatures reaching 24°C. The fossils analysed thus record the global climatic intervals of the Palaeogene. Supplementary materials: Localities, formations, isotopic data, salinities and temperatures evolutions for all fossils analyzed in this study are available at http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/SUP18839.


Mobilized peripheral blood (PB) is widely used as source of stem cells (PBSCs) for autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT). The use of cytokines, alone or in combination with chemotherapy (chemomobilization), is the most common strategy applied to mobilize and collect PBSCs. However, a significant proportion of cancer patients fail to mobilize enough PBSCs to proceed to ASCT. Plerixafor is a small molecule that reversibly and transiently disrupts the interaction between the chemokine receptor CXCR4 and its ligand CXCL12 (formerly known as stroma derived factor 1, SDF-1) leading to the rapid release of CD34+ hematopoietic stem cells from the bone marrow (BM) to PB. Plerixafor has been recently approved to enhance PBSC mobilization in adult patients with multiple myeloma or non-Hodgkin lymphoma and has been shown to be more effective than G-CSF alone. There is limited experience on combining plerixafor with chemotherapy plus G-CSF in patients who mobilize poorly. Current evidence suggests that the addition of plerixafor is safe and effective in the large majority of the patients with low blood CD34+ cell count after mobilization and/or poor yield after the first collection(s). Circulating CD34+ cells can be increased by several folds with plerixafor and the majority of the patients considered "poor mobilizers" can be successfully collected. Overall, its mechanism of action inducing the rapid release of CD34+ cells from the BM to the circulation makes plerixafor suitable for the 'preemptive' use in patients who are hard-to-mobilize.


Since the advent of computer-based geometric modeling, designers have tried to develop modeling and deformation tools that allow users to emulate the ease with which sculptors work with clay. T.W. Sederberg and S.R. Parry (1986) demonstrated the application of free-form deformations. FFDs let the user conceptually embed an object in a clear pliable solid and apply deformations to the solid, which then carry through to the encased object. We describe a technique that logically extends current FFDs by basing them on nonuniform rational B-splines. The resulting NURBS-based FFDs (NFFDs) offer flexibility and control not achieved in prior implementations. We conclude by describing a straightforward combination of this technique with global and local deformations of solid primitives used to animate a lifelike surface model of the human leg.<<ETX>>


The structure and properties of vacancy loops (VIs) and stacking-fault tetrahedra (SFTs) in copper have been studied by computer simulation using a long-range pair interatomic potential (LRPP), obtained from the generalized pseudopotential theory, and a many-body potential (MBP) of Finnis-Sinclair type. The results obtained for these different potentials are qualitatively different. Thus, for the LRPP, significant atomic relaxation is observed for all defects. Triangular vacancy platelets relax into regular SFTs, and small hexagonal clusters form Frank loops, whereas large hexagonal clusters (containing more than 37 vacancies) can dissociate into six truncated SFTs with the side equal to the [110] side of the hexagon. Similar features are observed after the relaxation of circular loops. For the MBP, on the other hand, none of the hexagonal, circular and triangular planar vacancy platelets relax into a VL or SFT but remain almost unrelaxed 'holes', with a relative stability which is weakly dependent on the shape. The results obtained are compared with experiment and the results of other computer simulations, and the differences stemming from the use of different interatomic potentials and different simulation methods are discussed.


Recent experimental work on locally gated graphene layers resulting in p-n junctions has revealed the quantum Hall effect in their transport behavior. We explain the observed conductance quantization, which is fractional in the bipolar regime and an integer in the unipolar regime, in terms of quantum Hall edge modes propagating along and across the p-n interface. In the bipolar regime, the electron and hole modes can mix at the p-n boundary, leading to current partition and quantized shot-noise plateaus similar to those of conductance, whereas in the unipolar regime transport is noiseless. These quantum Hall phenomena reflect the massless Dirac character of charge carriers in graphene, with particle/hole interplay manifest in mode mixing and noise in the bipolar regime.


One of the enduring lessons of the global financial crisis is that regulatory laxity heightens systemic risk. This paper examines the political sources of regulatory laxity, highlighting the influence of interest groups on governments' commitments to competition (antitrust) regulation in democracies. I argue that competition policy enforcement reflects the relative political strength of two contending groups. A rent-preserving alliance of incumbent producers and affiliated labor ("insiders") opposes competition policies that erode its market dominance. A pro-competition coalition of consumers, unorganized workers, and entrepreneurs ("outsiders") favors regulatory oversight. A simple model illustrates that policymakers' commitments to competition policy vary according to the distributive effects of reform. Where insiders are concentrated and encompassing, commitments to antitrust regulatory reform are weakened. To test the propositions, I create an original dataset measuring competition agency design over the period 1975-2007. The results, which are robust to multiple specifications and instrumental variables, suggest that anticompetitive interest groups slow the reform process and weaken governments' commitments to a robust regulatory regime.


Pre-school growth requires environmental stimulation that is indispensable for the realization of the child's inherent potential in the case of a child who has a disability such stimulation is even more important and necessary. This fact is amply demonstrated not only in literature but also in everyday experience. Many researchers have found that training plays significant role in many functions in which maturation of the child is of primary importance. This paper supplies some of the environmental nurture (which are both affective and cognitive) believed to lay the foundation for more formal learning at primary, secondary and higher level of education. It discusses the rationale and the need for intervention programmes for handicapped children. The paper deal specifically with the role of nursery education strategies involving professionals, parents and children in the areas of motor training and timing of intervention. It ended with provision of a number of helpful recommendations.


This article examines the tremendous growth of federal circuit court rules and the implications both for federal appellate practice and for the intergrity of the federal appellate system. In the waning years of the twentieth century, the leading story of federal procedure is one of growing disunity in practice and fragmentation in rules. A little more than half a century after federal procedure was unified in 1938 with the adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the federal judicial system appears to be de-evolving into a collection of largely autonomous court units with separate procedural regimes. Instead of a unitary court system, joined together in a common procedural enterprise, each district and each circuit has become its own fiefdom with its own rules governing the progress and disposition of litigation. The federal courts of appeals have not been immune from this centrifugal procedural tendency. The proliferation of conflicting circuit rules has impaired the uniformity of federal appellate procedure and unnecessarily complicated appellate practice, while destroying the unity of the appellate system. In addition to standing as an obstacle to the efficient representation of clients and denying justice in individual cases, the growth of local circuit rules conveys an unmistakable symbolic message of disunity among the federal appellate courts. The article concludes that the Supreme Court, the Judicial Conference, the individual circuits, and if necessary, Congress, should reaffirm the primacy of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure and bring local circuit rules into harmony with its objectives.


The Ghanaian philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu described contemporary Africans as living 'in a cultural flux characterized by a confused interplay between an indigenous cultural heritage and a foreign cultural legacy of a colonial origin.'1 In South Africa the situation is even more complex (as indeed is the meaning of 'indigenous'). The self-styled 'Rainbow Nation' has a lengthy history of contestation and occupation that began around 500CE with the displacement of indigenous San peoples (formerly known as 'bushmen') by Bantu tribes from the north. A thousand years later landings by Portuguese navigators, such as Bartolomeu Diaz led to the establishment of coastal supply depots. Portuguese traders were followed by Protestant refugees from the Netherlands, France and Germany, who eventually became the ethno-linguistic group known as Afrikaners. In the late seventeen hundreds Britain annexed the Cape of Good Hope and extended the colony into what is now the Eastern Cape, acts which over the next century initiated ten Frontier Wars and two Anglo-Boer Wars. British rule ended in 1947 and the Afrikaner Nationalist Party introduced the Apartheid policy of separate racial development, which lasted until 1994 when South Africans elected their first non-white government.
Elsewhere in the world the nineteenth (and later) architectural history of zoological gardens contains much that might be uncritically described as the construction of whimsical display spaces for animals, but in South Africa it reflects shifting narratives of power that illustrate the strong relationship between post-colonial theory and the emergent field of critical animal studies. The following account will draw on both disciplines to demonstrate how South Africa's contested histories are evidenced in the architectural rhetoric of its zoos.


The growing usage of heat pumps increases the global electricity demand. During winter, the external temperature peak is at noon whereas electricity peak is at the end of the afternoon. Latent heat storage can be used to benefit from the time lag between these two periods. In this application phase change material (PCM) is integrated in the condenser of an air-to-air heat pump. The condensing temperature is used to melt down the PCM at noon. Then, during electricity peak load, the compressor is turned off and the indoor air of the house can be heated by exchanging heat with the melted PCM through the condenser. The condenser design is important to fulfill heating requirements since PCMs have in general low thermal conductivity. A dynamic model using Dymola is applied to size and simulate a prototype. Results show that a well sized heat exchanger can fulfill any heating requirements, however it is voluminous compared to an equal capacity regular condenser.


The small mammal community of Tumasberg, an inselburg on the gravel plains of the Namib Desert, was studied by mark-release-recapture methods. The principal small mammals present on a 6 hectare livetrapping grid were: Petromyscus collinus (rock mouse), Aethomys namaquensis (rock rat), Petromus typicus (dassie rat) and Elephantulus rupestris (rock elephant-shrew). This study summarises climatic and microclimatic data for Ganab, 3 km from Tumasberg, and the following ecological and demographic information for the small mammal community; abundance and distribution, home range, activity patterns, recruitment and mortality rates, diet, and reproductive cycles of the small mammals. These data are used to analyse the community structure and ecological interactions of the species.


The higher switching frequency in combination with di/dt loops and dv/dt nodes in the power stages of high frequency power converters generates higher order harmonics which cause Electro Magnetic Interference (EMI). It is commonly perceived that high frequency converters are more vulnerable to radiated EMI, thus, it is very important to analyze the radiated emission of these converters. According to the author's knowledge, the analysis of the radiated emission of power converters switching in the MHz frequency region has not been presented until now. Therefore, in this paper, the measurements, and analysis of the near field radiated emissions of these emerging power converters is presented. These measurements are beneficial in the early design stage of power converters. Both E-field and H-field and captured and analyzed for a half bridge converter switching at 3 MHz and at the output power level of 25 W. The effects of the magnetic and electric field emissions with the addition of a Y-capacitor and secondary side common mode choke are analyzed.


Summary
Predicting how increasing rates of global trade will result in new establishments of potentially damaging invasive species is a question of critical importance to the development of national and international policies aimed at minimizing future invasions. Centuries of historical movement and establishment of invading species may have depleted the supply of species available for future invasions, and it has been suggested that the problem of invasions will diminish as a result of this. However, the extent to which source pool depletion affects future invasions remains unclear.
Here we describe a mechanistic model that captures the simultaneous effects of depletion of source species pools along with increases in pathway rates (e.g. imports) to predict future numbers of new invasions. We assume that the distribution of species abundance within invasion pathways is positively skewed, which is modelled using a log-normal distribution. Given their high propagule pressure, the most abundant species are likely to invade first, while the many rare species are likely to invade only under high pathway volumes. We apply this model to the case study of bark beetle, Scolytinae, invasions in the USA.
Source species pools in Europe and Asia (225 and 655 species of Scolytinae, respectively) are much larger than numbers that have historically established (16 and 32). Parameterization of the model indicates a highly skewed species abundance distribution in the pathway and this is confirmed by species frequencies in port inspection records, thus explaining why only a small fraction of species has historically invaded.
Forecasts from the model indicate that with increasing rates of imports, more species from these regions are likely to invade in the future despite the depletion of the most abundant species from source species pools. Previous statistical models tend to underestimate future establishments in the presence of increasing import rates due to their failure to account for key underlying mechanisms.
Policy implications. The mechanistic model developed here is widely applicable for predicting future invasions of all taxa and provides insights into how increases in rates of imports counteract the species pool depletion effect, resulting in the continued establishment of new species.


The National Science Foundation-Census Bureau Research Network (NCRN) was established in 2011 to create interdisciplinary research nodes on methodological questions of interest and significance to the broader research community and to the Federal Statistical System (FSS), particularly to the Census Bureau. The activities to date have covered both fundamental and applied statistical research and have focused at least in part on the training of current and future generations of researchers in skills of relevance to surveys and alternative measurement of economic units, households, and persons. This article focuses on some of the key research findings of the eight nodes, organized into six topics: (1) improving census and survey data-quality and data collection methods; (2) using alternative sources of data; (3) protecting privacy and confidentiality by improving disclosure avoidance; (4) using spatial and spatio-temporal statistical modeling to improve estimates; (5) assessing data cost and data-quality tradeoffs; and (6) combining information from multiple sources. The article concludes with an evaluation of the ability of the FSS to apply the NCRN's research outcomes, suggests some next steps, and discusses the implications of this research-network model for future federal government research initiatives.


In this paper, we propose Nesterov Accelerated Shuffling Gradient (NASG), a new algorithm for the convex finite-sum minimization problems. Our method integrates the traditional Nesterov's acceleration momentum with different shuffling sampling schemes. We show that our algorithm has an improved rate of O (1 /T ) using unified shuffling schemes, where T is the number of epochs. This rate is better than that of any other shuffling gradient methods in convex regime. Our convergence analysis does not require an assumption on bounded domain or a bounded gradient condition. For randomized shuffling schemes, we improve the convergence bound further. When employing some initial condition, we show that our method converges faster near the small neighborhood of the solution. Numerical simulations demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm.


Abstract Purpose in life is beneficial for adolescents and their communities. However, less is known about supports for purpose development during adolescence, particularly in the school setting. The study described here drew from theories about teacher beliefs and knowledge, and a multidimensional definition of purpose in life, in order to learn from practising teachers about the ways in which supporting adolescent purpose may fit within their existing beliefs about their work with students. The specific aims were to explore alignment between teachers' educational purposes and their own definitions of purpose in life with the 'personal meaning' and 'beyond-the-self' dimensions of purpose in life. Nine secondary school teachers from the United States who taught in a variety of academic content areas were interviewed using a semi-structured protocol. Transcripts were coded according to two dimensions of purpose: personal meaning and beyond-the-self consequences. Teacher responses revealed alignment between their educational purposes and the dimensions of 'personal meaning' and 'beyond-the-self consequences'. At the same time, teacher definitions of the unified construct of purpose in life did not reflect this same integration of the dimensions of purpose. Implications for teacher education and future research are discussed.


Working with the theoretical notions of "homonationalism" (Puar 2013) and "pinkwashing" (Schulman 2011, 2012, Spade 2013) and using as a case study two photographic series by contemporary Spanish gay photographer David Trullo, I illuminate the complex situation in which contemporary queer Spanish visual artists must produce their work: they resist homonationalism and homonormativity at the same time that they must work within the very frames of homonationalism and homonormativity to fund, produce, and disseminate their particularly subversive queer politics. In analyzing Trullo's series, Alterhistory: Una historia verdadera (2010) — a gay and lesbian, homonormative rewriting of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photographic couple portraiture — I argue that he simultaneously makes visible and performatively embodies new LGBTQ visibilities and histories in Spain where they were previously erased through a queer manipulation of photographic language, specifically by altering what Roland Barthes has called photography's "connotation procedures." Also, I analyze Trullo's Inca: 20 perfiles peruanos sin filtro (2009), a critique of neo-colonial Spanish enterprises in Latin America and Peru's racism towards its queer indigenous population, which the artist produced while accompanying an exhibition promoting same-sex marriage funded by the AECID (Agencia Espanola de Cooperacion Internacional para el Desarrollo). I conclude that Trullo intervenes in and complicates public debates about LGBTQ rights, visibility, embodiment, and the politics of neo-liberal commodification of progressive rights


Giannoni et al. present evidence for a new layer of regulation of the tyrosine kinase Src in adherent cells. The activity of Src is controlled by phosphorylation events, but Giannoni et al. suggest that oxidation may also have an important role. They used the reagent BIAM, N-(biotinoyl)-N′-(iodoacetyl)ethylenediamine, to detect oxidized proteins in cells undergoing oxidative stress from exposure to glucose oxidase. Binding of integrins to fibronectin in the extracellular matrix causes generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in cells. The authors used the above technique and others to also show oxidation of cysteine residues on Src in 3T3 cells plated on fibronectin. The oxidation correlated with activation of the kinase (as monitored by autophosphorylation), and treatment of cells with nordihydroguaiaretic acid (NDGA) to prevent generation of ROS inhibited the increase in kinase activity. They used mutagenesis of conserved cysteine residues to identify the particular cysteines that were modified and showed that mutants lacking the two key cysteines were not oxidized and were not activated in cells adhering to fibronectin. Src is a protooncogene, and overexpression of an oncogenic mutant of Src in cultured cells caused transformation. However, the addition of the cysteine mutants to prevent oxidation inhibited the capacity of the oncogenic protein to transform cells in culture. The authors propose that redox regulation of Src, along with its better known regulation by phosphorylation, may modulate the many effects of the kinase in normal and cancerous cells. E. Giannoni, F. Buricchi, G. Raugei, G. Ramponi, P. Chiarugi, Intracellular reactive oxygen species activate Src tyrosine kinase during cell adhesion and anchorage-dependent cell growth. Mol. Cell. Biol. 25, 6391-6403 (2005). [Abstract] [Full Text]


This article outlines a method we call Queer Walking Tours as site-specific research-creation events. It gives a brief overview of the Queer Walking Tours as method and then describes one specific tour that explored the concepts 'Migration, Militarisms, and Speculative Geology'. Queer Walking Tours offer cultural geography and a range of other disciplines and fields a form of place-based research that draws on Indigenous, anti-racist, feminist, and queer frameworks to open up different conversations around the notion of place.


In sixty-four bite-sized pieces of advice, Michael Pollan's "Food Rules" tells you everything you need to know to eat healthily, dine happily and live well. Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much. Using those seven simple words as his guide, internationally-acclaimed food journalist Michael Pollan offers this indispensable handbook for anyone concerned about health and food. Sensible, easy to use and written in plain English, "Food Rules" is a set of memorable adages designed to help you eat real food in reasonable amounts, gathered from a wide variety of sources: nutritionists, anthropologists, ancient cultures - and grandmothers. Whether at the supermarket, a restaurant or an all-you-can-eat buffet, this handy, pocket-size resource is the perfect manual for anyone who would like to become more mindful of the food we eat. "In more than four decades I have come across nothing more intelligent, sensible and simple to follow than these principles". ("The New York Times"). "Instantly makes redundant all diet books and 99 per cent of discussions around healthy eating...Sense, at last". ("Daily Mail" praise for "In Defence of Food"). "Pollan invites us to grab our pots and pans and cook some real food for dinner". ("Time Out", praise for "In Defence of Food"). "Read this witty book for a healthier life and diet". ("The Times", praise for "In Defence of Food"). Michael Pollan has been writing for over twenty years about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: food, agriculture, gardens, drugs, and architecture. "The Omnivore's Dilemma", about the ethics and ecology of eating, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the "New York Times" and the "Washington Post". He is also the author of "The Botany of Desire", "A Place of My Own" and "Second Nature" and, most recently, "In Defence of Food".


The human respiratory system is the gateway of entry for inhaled detritus from anthropogenic (e.g. combustion-derived (CD) particulate matter (PM; e.g. diesel exhaust and wood-burning PM). Adult humans inhale 20m3 of air and suspended debris (gases and particles) into the airways daily. Inhalation exposure to CDPM (Figure 1) is known to increase the risk of morbidity and mortality of lung and heart diseases in all exposed individuals.
 The physicochemical properties of size, surface area and presence of transition metals have been implicated as drivers of the oxidative capacity of CDPM. However, the precise role of reactive organic compounds (ROC) in ambient aerosols, present either in the gas or particle phase has not been fully-investigated for their relevance in the induction of the observed adverse health effects.
When addressing the toxicity of inhalation hazards such as wood smoke CDPM, a model that resembles the human lung responding to toxic challenges is required. In our in vitro exposure studies, we utilised normal human bronchial epithelial (NHBE) cells grown at the air-liquid interface (ALI) using filter-well technology (Prytherch et al 2011), to create an in vivo-like 3-dimensional lung model.
This model is a fully-differentiated, pseudo-stratified, muco-ciliary epithelium containing basal, serous, Clara, goblet and ciliated cells. NHBE cells were exposed to wood smoke derived from Spruce, Beech and Birch at a dose of 152µg/cm2: carbon black (CB; negative control; Monarch 120, Cabot UK; DQ12 quartz (positive control). Following exposure (24 hours), tissue integrity (i.e. transepithelial electrical resistance (TEER) was measured to reveal minor disruption to bronchial tissue integrity (Figure 2). However, changes in cellular energy levels (i.e. ATP) between the types of wood smokes (Figure 3), could infer the smoke acted as an irritant to the lung environment. Wood smoke exposure can depress the immune system and damage the layer of cells in the lungs that protect and cleanse the airways.
 Further work on the biological and histological impacts of wood smoke will allow us to reveal mechanisms behind the changes observed, as well identifying biomarkers of cell damage by specific CDPM ROCs. For vulnerable populations, such as people with asthma, chronic respiratory disease and those with cardiovascular disease, wood smoke is particularly harmful, even at short exposures it can prove dangerous. Wood smoke interferes with normal lung development in infants and children. It also increases children's risk of lower respiratory infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia.

Prytherch, Z., Job, C., Marshall, H., Oreffo, V., Foster, M. and BeruBe, K.A. (2011) Macro. Bios. 11, 1467–77.

This work was supported by HICE (www.hice-vi.eu).


Multi-party business applications are distributed computer programs implementing collaborative business functions. These applications are one of the main target of attackers who exploit vulnerabilities in order to perform malicious activities. The most prevalent classes of vulnerabilities are the consequence of insufficient validation of the user-provided input. However, the less-known class of logic vulnerabilities recently attracted the attention of researcher. According to the availability of software documentation, two testing techniques can be used: design verification via model checking, and black-box security testing. However, the former offers no support to test real implementations and the latter lacks the sophistication to detect logic flaws. In this thesis, we present two novel security testing techniques to detect logic flaws in multi-party business applicatons that tackle the shortcomings of the existing techniques. First, we present the verification via model checking of two security protocols. We then address the challenge of extending the results of the model checker to automatically test protocol implementations. Second, we present a novel black-box security testing technique that combines model inference, extraction of workflow and data flow patterns, and an attack pattern-based test case generation algorithm. Finally, we discuss the application of the technique developed in this thesis in an industrial setting. We used these techniques to discover previously-unknown design errors in SAML SSO and OpenID protocols, and ten logic vulnerabilities in eCommerce applications allowing an attacker to pay less or shop for free.


BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: DSC perfusion has been increasingly used in conjunction with other contrast-enhanced MR applications and therefore there is need for contrast-dose reduction when feasible. The purpose of this study was to establish the feasibility of reduced-contrast-dose brain DSC perfusion by using a probabilistic Bayesian method and to compare the results with the commonly used singular value decomposition technique. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Half-dose (0.05-mmol/kg) and full-dose (0.1-mmol/kg) DSC perfusion studies were prospectively performed in 20 patients (12 men; 34–70 years of age) by using a 3T MR imaging scanner and a gradient-EPI sequence (TR/TE, 1450/22 ms; flip angle, 90°). All DSC scans were processed with block circulant singular value decomposition and Bayesian probabilistic methods. SNR analysis was performed in both half-dose and full-dose groups. The CBF, CBV, and MTT maps from both full-dose and half-dose scans were evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively in both WM and GM on coregistered perfusion maps. Statistical analysis was performed by using a t test, regression, and Bland-Altman analysis. RESULTS: The SNR was significantly (P < .0001) lower in the half-dose group with 32% and 40% reduction in GM and WM, respectively. In the half-dose group, the image-quality scores were significantly higher in Bayesian-derived CBV (P = .02) and MTT (P = .004) maps in comparison with block circulant singular value decomposition. Quantitative values of CBF, CBV, and MTT in Bayesian-processed data were comparable and without a statistically significant difference between the half-dose and full-dose groups. The block circulant singular value decomposition–derived half-dose perfusion values were significantly different from those of the full-dose group both in GM (CBF, P < .001; CBV, P = .02; MTT, P = .02) and WM (CBF, P < .001; CBV, P = .003; MTT, P = .01). CONCLUSIONS: Reduced-contrast-dose (0.05-mmol/kg) DSC perfusion of the brain is feasible at 3T by using the Bayesian probabilistic method with quantitative results comparable with those of the full-dose protocol.


This paper undertakes a direct, comprehensive assessment of the long-term sustainability of desertification rehabilitation in China under a plausible but worst case scenario where governmental interventions, in the form of payments for environmental services (PES), will cease. The analysis is based on household behavior as well as experimental data. Our econometric results highlight the main obstacles to the sustainability of rehabilitation programs subsequent to cessation of government intervention, including specific shortfalls in households' preference for a free ride, budget constraints, attitudes, tolerance of and responsibility for desertification, and dissatisfaction with governmental actions. We conclude that desertification rehabilitation is not sustainable in China without continued governmental intervention. The results of this study are intended to support policy makers as they consider future directions for rehabilitation sustainability.


Hash tables are fundamental data structures that optimally answer membership queries. Suppose a client stores n elements in a hash table that is outsourced at a remote server so that the client can save space or achieve load balancing. Authenticating the hash table functionality, i.e., verifying the correctness of queries answered by the server and ensuring the integrity of the stored data, is crucial because the server, lying outside the administrative control of the client, can be malicious. We design efficient and secure protocols for optimally authenticating membership queries on hash tables: for any fixed constants 0 < ε < 1 and κ > 1/ε, the server can provide a proof of integrity of the answer to a (non-)membership query in constant time, requiring O(nε/logκε--1 n) time to treat updates, yet keeping the communication and verification costs constant. This is the first construction for authenticating a hash table with constant query cost and sublinear update cost. Our solution employs the RSA accumulator in a nested way over the stored data, strictly improving upon previous accumulator-based solutions. Our construction applies to two concrete data authentication models and lends itself to a scheme that achieves different trade-offs---namely, constant update time and O(nε/logκε n) query time for fixed ε > 0 and κ > 0. An experimental evaluation of our solution shows very good scalability.


Abstract Over the past decade, many skeletal matrix proteins that are possibly related to calcification have been reported in various calcifying animals. Molluscs are among the most diverse calcifying animals and some gastropods have adapted to terrestrial ecological niches. Although many shell matrix proteins (SMPs) have already been reported in molluscs, most reports have focused on marine molluscs, and the SMPs of terrestrial snails remain unclear. In addition, some terrestrial stylommatophoran snails have evolved an additional unique calcified character, called a "love dart," used for mating behavior. We identified 54 SMPs in the terrestrial snail Euhadra quaesita, and found that they contain specific domains that are widely conserved in molluscan SMPs. However, our results also suggest that some of them possibly have evolved independently by domain shuffling, domain recruitment, or gene co-option. We then identified four dart matrix proteins, and found that two of them are the same proteins as those identified as SMPs. Our results suggest that some dart matrix proteins possibly have evolved by independent gene co-option from SMPs during dart evolution events. These results provide a new perspective on the evolution of SMPs and "love darts" in land snails.


BACKGROUND AND STUDY AIMS
Reliable closure of the transluminal incision is the crucial step for natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES) procedures. The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of transgastric access closure with a flexible stapling device in a porcine survival model.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
We carried out four experiments (two sterile and two nonsterile) on 50 kg pigs. The endoscope was passed through a gastrotomy made with a needle knife and an 18-mm controlled radial expansion dilating balloon. After peritoneoscopy, a flexible linear stapling device (NOLC60, Power Medical Interventions, Langhorne, Pennsylvania, USA) was perorally advanced over a guide wire into the stomach, positioned under endoscopic guidance, and opened to include the site of gastrotomy between its two arms; four rows of staples were fired. One animal was sacrificed 24 hours after the procedure (progression of pre-existing pneumonia). The remaining animals were survived for 1 week and then underwent repeat endoscopy and postmortem examination.

RESULTS
Peroral delivery and positioning of the stapling device involved some technical difficulties, mostly due to the short length (60 cm) of the stapling device. The stapler provided complete leak-resistant gastric closure in all pigs. None of the surviving animals had any clinical signs of infection. Necropsy demonstrated an intact staple line with full-thickness healing of the gastrotomy in all animals. Histologic examination confirmed healing, but also revealed intramural micro-abscesses within the gastric wall after nonsterile procedure.

CONCLUSIONS
Gastrotomy closure with a perorally delivered flexible stapling device created a leak-resistant transmural line of staples followed by full-thickness healing of the gastric wall incision. Increasing the length of the instrument and adding device articulation will further facilitate its use for NOTES procedures.