In Cloud environment, Cloud Providers (CP) grant access to computing and storage resources through Web-portals. Resource virtualization is a key enabler for providing such services. Thanks to virtualization, multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) can be hosted by the same Physical Machine (PM). Existing CPs, such as Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure, offer pre-configured VMs with fixed-size computing, storage and network capacities. In this context, end-users can only choose from a set of predefined VM instances offered by the CPs. However, it is expected that, in the near-future, end-users will be able to access the Cloud without any restriction on the size of the required resources. They will be charged according to the amount of resources used. In such scenario, the major problem faced by a CP is to select the appropriate PM that will host a new VM while still satisfying the end-user requirements. This resource allocation problem is similar to the well-known online Bin Packing problem. In this paper, we investigate several algorithms that were proposed to solve the Bin Packing problem, and compare them in a Cloud environment in terms of resource utilization and percentage of dropped VMs. The novel concept of Resource Over-Reservation (ROR) is introduced as a mean to reduce the percentage of dropped VMs and to improve resource utilization.


The Gesture Recognition Toolkit is a cross-platform open-source C++ library designed to make real-time machine learning and gesture recognition more accessible for non-specialists. Emphasis is placed on ease of use, with a consistent, minimalist design that promotes accessibility while supporting flexibility and customization for advanced users. The toolkit features a broad range of classification and regression algorithms and has extensive support for building real-time systems. This includes algorithms for signal processing, feature extraction and automatic gesture spotting.


Development of databases has become a major activity in computer industry. Database
plays significant role in many fields which slowly has its impact on wildlife
management. With a reliable database, storage of information on wildlife is proper,
safe and well managed. The main objective of the study is to develop a computerized
database on wildlife in Malaysia. The database contained 966 species which included
320 species of mammals and 646 species of birds in Malaysia. Both primary data and
secondary data were compiled in the database. Important components used in the
database are such as scientific name, local name, common English name, order, family,
grouping, brief description, photo, status, protection feeding structures and habitat of
the wildlife.
Designing the database comprised of three major phases; data collection, data design
and system design. In data design, an Entity Relationship model was designed to describe entities, relationship and attributes of the 'Wildlife Database'. Four entities
were identified namely Wildlife, Habitat, Feeding Structure and Protection. In the
system design phase, major designing works were concentrated on data flow, menu
system, form design and graphical user interface. Selected software was Microsoft
Access 97 as the storage and application software. Upon completion, the database run
on PC with at least Pentium 100 Mhz, 64 MB RAM Memory, CD ROM 20 X and VGA
Card. It is necessary to have Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Access 97 to run the
application.
The need for researchers, students, lecturers or even normal user to retrieve valuable
information on wildlife quickly and accurately can be achieved through this project
Futhermore, with the development of the 'Wildlife Database of Malaysia', it is hoped
that it will facilitate the management of wildlife in Malaysia or even in neighbouring
countries.


Open access (OA) scholarship—generally, scholarship made freely available online with minimal copyright and licensing restrictions—is a major focus of many academic libraries. Academic libraries are perfectly situated to lead the discussion about open access and are natural partners in campus-wide open access initiatives. In April 2012, Rice University's Faculty Senate passed an Open Access Policy, directing faculty to place copies of their peer-reviewed journal articles in the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive. This paper discusses the successes and barriers to policy implementation, thus far. Despite some setbacks, the library's involvement with the policy has positioned it to engage in campus-wide conversations about open access and upcoming federal public access initiatives, and has invited further conversations about other scholarly communications issues.


We assist at a profound demographic change, which is the rapid aging of the society. Although some people reach a very old age completely free of physical ailments, most seniors are exposed to increasing frailty, disability and poor quality of life. More often than not, they have multiple concomitant diseases, which are more and more difficult to manage by the general practitioner alone.


The project, born from an idea of the Polo Museale dell'Abruzzo, in the person of the Director Dott.ssa Lucia Arbace, under the supervision of the RUP of the Project, Dr. Giulia Tortoriello, entrusted to ARCHIMETRIA Group, a team of professionals who work in the field of 3D documentation and technological innovation applied to cultural heritage, led by Arch. Danilo Prosperi, founder and CTO of the study, was born in July 2017 and ended in March 2018. The aim of the project is to enhance and disseminate on a global scale the knowledge of the major Abruzzo museums and the extraordinary masterpieces of art and archeology exhibited in it, through the use of 3D technologies (scans and digital 3D reproductions in HD, Virtual Immersive and interactive HD tours, use of 3D viewers for virtual reality, 3D printing, etc.) and through the publication of contents in all areas of the official website of the Abruzzo Museum Complex, SketchFab and Google Maps and Street View.


Henry Stephens (1795–1874) was a farmer and later a writer on agriculture. After attending lectures on chemistry and agriculture at the University of Edinburgh he boarded with a Berwickshire farmer, George Brown, and gained experience of agricultural work. In 1820 Stephens acquired his own farm, on which he used modern and experimental farming methods. In 1837 he sold the farm, and devoted the rest of his life to writing guides to farming for the use of inexperienced farmers. These influential volumes, first published in 1842, contain Stephens' detailed descriptions of contemporary farming practices. He describes in meticulous detail all aspects of farming, including livestock care and slaughter, dairying, irrigation practices and crop culture. Arranged by season and including copious high-quality illustrations of farming equipment, these extremely popular and fascinating volumes were considered the standard work on practical Victorian agriculture. Volume 3 describes tasks performed in summer and autumn.


Hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) were introduced in response to rising environmental challenges facing the automotive sector. HEVs combine the benefits of electric vehicles and conventional internal combustion engine vehicles, integrating an electrical system (a battery and an electric motor) with an engine to provide improved fuel economy and reduced emissions, while maintaining adequate driving range. By comparison with conventional HEVs, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) have larger battery storage systems and can be fully charged via an external electric power source such as the electrical grid. Of the three primary PHEV architectures, power-split architectures tend to provide greater efficiencies than parallel or series systems; however, they also demonstrate more complicated dynamics. Thus, in this research project, the problem of optimizing the component sizes of a power-split PHEV was addressed in an effort to exploit the flexibility of this powertrain system and further improve the vehicle's fuel economy, using a Toyota plug-in Prius as the baseline vehicle. Autonomie software was used to develop a vehicle model, which was then applied to formulate an optimization problem for which the main objective is to minimize fuel consumption over standard driving cycles. The design variables considered were: the engine's maximum power, the number of battery cells and the electric motor's maximum power. The genetic algorithm approach was employed to solve the optimization problem for various drive cycles and an acceptable reduction in fuel consumption was achieved thorough the sizing process. The model was validated against a MapleSim model. This research project successfully delivered a framework that integrates an Autonomie PHEV model and genetic algorithm optimization and can be used to address any HEV parameter optimization problem, with any objective, constraints, design variables and optimization parameters.


Distributed effects are present in almost all physical systems. In some cases these can be safely ignored but there are many interesting problems where these effects must be taken into account. Most infinite dimensional systems which are important in control theory are specifiable in terms of a finite number of parameters and hence are, in principle, amenable to identification. The state-space theory of infinite dimensional systems has advanced greatly in the last few years and is now at a point where real applications can be contemplated. The realizability criteria provided by this work can be employed effectively in the first step of the identification procedure, i.e., in the selection of an appropriate infinite dimensional model. We show that there exists a natural classification of nonrational transfer functions, which is based on the character of their singularities. This classification has important implications for the problem of finite dimensional approximations of infinite dimensional systems. In addition, it reveals the class of transfer functions for which there exist models with spectral properties closely reflecting the properties of the singularities of the transfer functions. The study of models with infinitesimal generators having a connected resolvent sheds light on some open problems in classical frequency response methods. Finally, the methods used here allow one to see the finite dimensional theory itself more clearly as the result of placing it in the context of a larger theory.


This study explores temporal variations in activity networks for four million passengers, differentiated as workers and non-workers, using public transport based on a large-scale smart card dataset generated over 105 days in Beijing. We aim to capture their day-to-day transition and cumulative temporal expansion in activity network using transit over days, weeks, and months. Particularly, workers and non-workers are automatically identified based on their different daily routines, whose activity networks are characterized by six features concerning space coverage, distance coverage, and frequency coverage in two ways, namely, on a per-day transition and with an accumulation of days. The transition features of the networks are statistically analyzed and compared by time, while how the expansion features evolve with time are modeled. Results show that, on weekdays, workers are more likely to travel longer (have larger distance coverage), but cover less area (have smaller space coverage) than nonworkers. While opposite patterns occur on weekends. Traveling in the 'North-South' direction is weakly correlated with traveling in the 'East-West' direction. Workers on weekdays, as well as non-workers on weekends, make longer 'North-South' trips. Manhattan distance, trip count, and perimeter present a ∩ shape in their probability density functions, while the remaining features decline dramatically, with probability 1 density functions fit by the exponential distribution. The distance coverage expands faster than that of space coverage. Most passengers increase coverage of space and distance when time expands (obviously no one decreases coverage over time, but some don't change). The research enables findings on temporal load-balancing, long-term cumulative expansion in travel demands of workers and non-workers, re-balancing the distribution of existing workplace and residential location opportunities, and constructing transit-oriented developments with mixed functions over time. keyword: Public transport; activity space; activity network; temporal variation; transition and expansion; smart card data


We introduce a new stochastic verification algorithm that formally quantifies the behavioral robustness of any time-continuous process formulated as a continuous-depth model. Our algorithm solves a set of global optimization (Go) problems over a given time horizon to construct a tight enclosure (Tube) of the set of all process executions starting from a ball of initial states. We call our algorithm GoTube. Through its construction, GoTube ensures that the bounding tube is conservative up to a desired probability and up to a desired tightness. GoTube is implemented in JAX and optimized to scale to complex continuous-depth neural network models. Compared to advanced reachability analysis tools for time-continuous neural networks, GoTube does not accumulate overapproximation errors between time steps and avoids the infamous wrapping effect inherent in symbolic techniques. We show that GoTube substantially outperforms state-of-the-art verification tools in terms of the size of the initial ball, speed, time-horizon, task completion, and scalability on a large set of experiments. GoTube is stable and sets the state-of-the-art in terms of its ability to scale to time horizons well beyond what has been previously possible.


In this article, we accomplish two things. First, we show that despite empirical psychologists' nominal endorsement of a low rate of false-positive findings (≤ .05), flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting dramatically increases actual false-positive rates. In many cases, a researcher is more likely to falsely find evidence that an effect exists than to correctly find evidence that it does not. We present computer simulations and a pair of actual experiments that demonstrate how unacceptably easy it is to accumulate (and report) statistically significant evidence for a false hypothesis. Second, we suggest a simple, low-cost, and straightforwardly effective disclosure-based solution to this problem. The solution involves six concrete requirements for authors and four guidelines for reviewers, all of which impose a minimal burden on the publication process.


This paper examines German Final Devoicing in OT and shows that a full account of the data requires not only an explanation for Final Devoicing itself, but also a model of the stratification of the lexicon. The point of departure of this study is the observation that although various recently proposed analyses of German Final Devoicing in OT seem to make equally good predictions for the voicing of obstruents in the word-final position, none of them makes the right predictions for all data when ambisyllabic obstruents are also considered. In the first part of the paper, the data for Final Devoicing in the word-final position are introduced, as well as the different optimality-theoretic analyses. In the second section, it is shown that additional data involving ambisyllabic obstruents in the native vocabulary cannot be accounted for by these analyses in a straightforward way. The third section introduces a model of the stratification of the lexicon, in which the phonological grammar of the language consists of the markedness constraints only. The faithfulness constraints can in principle appear between each markedness constraint. This implies that there can in principle exist as many lexical strata as there are markedness constraints. Finally, it is shown in the last section how an account involving two kinds of analyses for Final Devoicing plus the model for the stratification of the lexicon introduced in the preceding section can explain all the data.


Minimum volatility (min vol) strategies are smart beta strategies that are designed to minimize risk. In the past 12 months, ending June 30, 2016, there were $7.8 billion flows into a total of 17 U.S.-equity exchange-traded fund min vol strategies. This represents just 0.04% of total equity market capitalization of the underlying securities. Capacity in these strategies is large because traditional active mutual funds tend to overweight high-volatility stocks. Were these funds to move to a neutral position in high-volatility securities, a shift of roughly $600 billion to min vol would take place. Current valuations of min vol strategies are not high relative to historical norms and are consistent with the observed outperformance of these strategies during periods of high uncertainty.


The proapoptotic protein Bid promotes innate immune responses in the intestine independently of its role in apoptosis. The innate immune response depends on the recognition of pathogen-associated patterns by host factors such as Toll-like receptors and nucleotide-binding and oligomerization domain (NOD) proteins, which trigger inflammation. NOD1 and NOD2 recognize peptidoglycans from bacteria and induce antimicrobial and inflammatory responses in the intestine. Dysregulation of NOD signaling results in inflammatory bowel disease. Yeretssian et al. performed a small interfering RNA (siRNA) screen and network analysis so as to identify proteins that regulated the NOD1 pathway in HT29 cells, a human intestinal epithelial cell line. They identified BID, a BH3-only Bcl2 family member, which promotes apoptosis, as a positive regulator of NOD1 signaling. BID was required for the production of interleukin-8 (IL-8) by HT29 cells in response to the NOD1 agonist γTri-DAP. Deletion of Bid in mouse macrophages prevented the activation of extracellular signal–regulated kinase (ERK) and nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) and the production of proinflammatory cytokines by NOD1- and NOD2-specific agonists. These responses were restored by providing Bid–/– cells with exogenous full-length BID or a BID mutant that was unable to promote apoptosis. Coimmunoprecipitation experiments showed that BID physically interacted with NOD1 and NOD2, as well as with the inhibitor of NF-κB (IκB) kinase (IKK) complex. NOD agonists protected wild-type, but not Bid–/–, mice from experimentally induced colitis, and Bid–/– mice exhibited a muted inflammatory response as compared with that of wild-type mice. Together, these data suggest that BID mediates the effects of NOD signaling independently of its role in apoptosis, providing a potential therapeutic target in inflammatory bowel disease. G. Yeretssian, R. G. Correa, K. Doiron, P. Fitzgerald, C. P. Dillon, D. R. Green, J. C. Reed, M. Saleh, Non-apoptotic role of BID in inflammation and innate immunity. Nature 474, 96–99 (2011). [PubMed]


Accurate forecasting of energy requirement for future development of the country is
one of the most important factors of energy management. Adequacy of energy is the
main factor for the development of a country. Electricity producing natural resources
are depleting very fast, all over the world, since their quantity is limited and their use is
increasing very rapidly. But the pace of development can not be compromised.
Financial limitations do not permit to, increase the generation capacity to meet the peak
demand and produce surplus electricity after peak hours, and obtain new technologies
of electricity generation. For installation and maintenance of generation capacity,
transmission and distribution infrastructure long term forecasting is very important.
Energy requirement depends on number of variables, some of them which are cardinal
to the energy consumption and addressed here are population, number of electricity
consumers, per capita electricity consumption, peak electricity demand, gross domestic
product and annual electricity consumption of the country. Data for these variables are
available annually and have very firm relation with time. These data were analyzed in
this work. Annual electricity consumption has been taken as dependent and rest as
independent variables. All the variables have been evaluated for first, second and third
order polynomial with time and mathematical relation was found. This mathematical
relation was then extrapolated into future for next ten years, the forecast horizon. Out of
these, evaluated values of independent variables having minimum standard deviation
from the past data trend, were used in developing multi variable model. All the
evaluation work was performed on MATLAB software. The chance of error is low in
this model since it takes the variation of data into consideration and follows the
previous trend by checking standard deviation. Once the data are keyed in the program
it takes less than a minute in giving the forecasted values and its corresponding graph.
The achievement of this work is that by just updating the data of the variables for recent
year in the program the current updated forecast for next ten years can be obtained. This
forecast may be of great use for energy managers. Since it is sensitive to six
independent variables, it gives more reliable forecast. This program can be used for any
country for the same forecast horizon with the assumption that the previous trend will
persist.


Tristan da Cunha Island is one of the hot spots in the Atlantic Ocean. The discussion about its source have not reached consensus yet whether it is in shallow asthenosphere or deeper mantle, because of lack of the geophysical observations in the area. A marine magnetotelluric (MT) experiment was conducted together with seismological observations in the area in 2012–2013 by collaboration between Germany and Japan, in order to give further constraints on the physical state of the mantle beneath the area. A total of 26 seafloor stations were deployed around the Tristan da Cunha islands and available data were retrieved from 23 stations. The MT responses were estimated for those available sites. The detailed data processing will be presented by Chen et al. in this meeting. In this study, we report on the topographic effect on the observed MT responses. During the cruises for seafloor instruments deployment and recovery, detailed bathymetry data were collected around the stations by onboard multi-narrow beam echo sounding (MBES) system. We compiled the MBES data and ETOPO1 data to incorporate the local and regional topography. Then, we applied iterative topographic effect correction and one-dimensional (1-D) conductivity structure inversion. The MT responses of each station were simulated by three-dimensional (3-D) forward modeling. Preliminary results show the overall feature of the observed MT responses at some stations were qualitatively well explained by the seafloor topography included in the conductivity structure model over the 1-D mantle structure. An extreme example is the station near the Tristan da Cunha Island. The impedance phases varies ~300 degrees in shorter period range which is reconstructed by the 3-D forward modeling. Some implications on the lateral variation in the conductivity of the upper mantle will be discussed by demonstrating the residuals between the MT responses corrected for the topographic effect and the 1-D forward response.


The effective gas diffusivity in a porous medium decreases rapidly with increasing water content. Comparisons are made between experimental diffusivity data for different materials at various moisture contents, and estimation methods from the literature. The estimation methods proposed by R.J. Millington and R.C. Shearer in 1971 give the best predictions of the effective diffusivity. The methods are extended here to account for the contribution of diffusion in the water-filled pores. The method for aggregated media should be used for undisturbed clayey soils, and the method for nonaggregated media may be used for sandy soils and for other materials that are not aggregated, e.g. laboratory packed clayey soils. The experimental data show that very low effective diffusivities may be obtained in practice in soils with high moisture content


Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is used to produce high-resolution three-dimensional images of the retina, which permit the investigation of retinal irregularities. In dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a chronic eye disease that causes central vision loss, disruptions such as drusen and changes in retinal layer thicknesses occur which could be used as biomarkers for disease monitoring and diagnosis. Due to the topology disrupting pathology, existing segmentation methods often fail. Here, we present a solution for the segmentation of retinal layers in dry AMD subjects by extending our previously presented loosely coupled level sets framework which operates on attenuation coefficients. In eyes affected by AMD, Bruch's membrane becomes visible only below the drusen and our segmentation framework is adapted to delineate such a partially discernible interface. Furthermore, the initialization stage, which tentatively segments five interfaces, is modified to accommodate the appearance of drusen. This stage is based on Dijkstra's algorithm and combines prior knowledge on the shape of the interface, gradient and attenuation coefficient in the newly proposed cost function. This prior knowledge is incorporated by varying the weights for horizontal, diagonal and vertical edges. Finally, quantitative evaluation of the accuracy shows a good agreement between manual and automated segmentation.


Proponents have touted the ability of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the TCJA) — enacted in the twilight of 2017 — to help American working families. But while the TCJA expanded some benefits available to parents with dependent children, these parental tax benefits may be claimed regardless of whether or to what extent childcare costs are incurred to work outside the home. To help working parents with these costs (which are often their largest expense), Congress might have turned to two other mechanisms in the tax law — the "child and dependent care credit" and the "dependent care exclusion." While these childcare tax benefits are only available to working parents that pay for childcare, stringent limitations have kept many from recovering anything near their actual costs, particularly in the critical years before children reach school-age. As a result, the Code has been taxing families with different childcare needs inequitably. But the TCJA left these childcare tax laws untouched and thus did nothing to address this problem. By exploring critical junctures in their development, this Article seeks to understand how America's tax laws have (d)evolved in this manner and, in doing so, situates some of TCJA's alleged reforms into their historical context.
America's childcare tax laws have not always been so limiting. In the seventies and eighties, the Code evolved significantly to allow working parents to claim relief for a relatively substantial portion of their childcare costs, resulting in more equitable taxation of family models. But in the decades following this evolution, Congress generally failed to adjust childcare tax benefits — even for inflation — allowing them to devolve in real value as childcare costs rose. Meanwhile, Congress created new and expanded existing tax benefits available to all parents even if they did not need childcare. Thus, over the past several decades, Congress not only restored but also perpetuated the inequitable taxation of different family models remedied by earlier reforms. The changes made in TCJA are, therefore, just the latest iteration of a decades-old trend.
In addition to revealing that the TCJA was a tepid if not specious attempt to address the working family's plight, this history raises broader questions of political feasibility. This Article identifies several factors such as increased legal complexity, sophistic political rhetoric and, perhaps most significantly, changed normative expectations to explain the electorate's seeming apathy to our childcare tax laws' (d)evolution. Using this historical context, this Article argues that even modest changes to our childcare tax laws, while incapable of enacting systemic changes on their own, could nevertheless enact historically significant reform and perhaps revive dormant debates about the role the American government should play in the lives of parents.


We report the effect of native cyclodextrins (α, β, and γ) and selected derivatives in modulating the self-assembly of the nonionic surfactant polyoxyethylene cholesteryl ether (ChEO10) and its mixtures with triethylene glycol monododecyl ether (C12EO3), which form wormlike micelles. Cyclodextrins (CDs) generally induce micellar breakup through a host-guest interaction with surfactants; instead, we show that a constructive effect, leading to gel formation, is obtained with specific CDs and that the widely invoked host-guest interaction may not be the only key to the association. When added to wormlike micelles of ChEO10 and C12EO3, native β-CD, 2-hydroxyethyl-β-CD (HEBCD), and a sulfated sodium salt of β-CD (SULFBCD) induce a substantial increase of the viscoelasticity, while methylated CDs rupture the micelles, leading to a loss of the viscosity, and the other CDs studied (native α- and γ- and hydroxypropylated CDs) show a weak interaction. Most remarkably, the addition of HEBCD or SULFBCD to pure ChEO10 solutions (which are low-viscosity, Newtonian fluids of small, ellipsoidal micelles) induces the formation of transparent gels. The combination of small-angle neutron scattering, dynamic light scattering, and cryo-TEM reveals that both CDs drive the elongation of ChEO10 aggregates into an entangled network of wormlike micelles. (1)H NMR and fluorescence spectroscopy demonstrate the formation of inclusion complexes between ChEO10 and methylated CDs, consistent with the demicellization observed. Instead, HEBCD forms a weak complex with ChEO10, while no complex is detected with SULFBCD. This shows that inclusion complex formation is not the determinant event leading to micellar growth. HEBCD:ChEO10 complex, which coexists with the aggregated surfactant, could act as a cosurfactant with a different headgroup area. For SULFBCD, intermolecular interactions via the external surface of the CD may be more relevant.


The debate about animal emotions relies heavily on empirical evidence, which is often open to multiple interpretations. This ambiguity allows researchers at either end of the spectrum to perceive support for their positions in study results. Thus, evidence reported by Cook and colleagues (2018) – that dogs' trait aggression is associated with their amygdala activation when watching their caregivers feed a fake dog – may be interpreted by some as neural evidence for jealousy in dogs and by others as an artefact of the study design. I argue that the discussion should be complemented with a greater consideration of theoretical arguments about the (social) functions of emotions. Theory and research on the intrapersonal and interpersonal effects of emotions are consistent with the hypothesis that various non-human social animals can experience and communicate emotions, although the labeling of these emotions is not self-evident.


The goals of reparative surgical therapy for any disease are to restore function and life expectancy to normal. The development of cardiopulmonary bypass and the implementation of techniques of reparative surgery for patients with congenital cardiovascular malformations in the 1950s and 1960s introduced the reality of reparative surgery in patients with otherwise fatal cardiovascular disease. Attention was initially focused on ensuring survival through the surgical procedure and in the early postoperative period. As the number of patients with "repaired" congenital cardiovascular disease increased, long-term follow-up of these patients became possible. The report by Morris and Menashe 1 in the Journal of the American Medical Association analyzes long-term survival and the cause of late death after repair of eight common congenital cardiovascular malformations. This cohort of patients included all children from the state of Oregon who underwent reparative surgery for one of these congenital cardiac defects before age 18 years. The


Available methods to determine the sensible and latent heat fluxes from the Earth's land surfaces are still relatively imprecise; this is due primarily to the inherent irregularity of the turbulent transport mechanisms and also to the pronounced variability of most natural land surfaces. While great progress has been made in the study of turbulence, until recently, surface variability has received relatively little attention in this context. Some thoughts are provided on approaching this issue by focusing on the stochastic structure of the land surface within the framework of homogeneous, i.e., stationary, random functions. In addition, suggestions are made regarding the likely applicability of classical concepts by relating the relevant scales of surface variability structure to those characterizing turbulent transport in the atmospheric boundary layer.


Forage sorghum could be an efective alternative crop for energy purposes in areas where water irrigation are limited. The ability of regrowth after cutting of this crop can enhance biomass production. The sorghum stems sugar content could be an added value for bioethanol production. Trial was carried out in a greenhouse with forage sorghum ( Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) cv . Digestivo. Two sorghum plants (plant V and plant A) were cultivated per pot. The aim in this work was to study the effect of two fertilizer treatments: straw broiler litter (STBL) and sawdust broiler litter (SBL) at rates: 0, 1 and 2 and a mineral fertilizer treatment (M) N-P-K, 15-15-15, equivalent in N at rate 1. The variables studied were: total plant biomass V (green cutting plant + regrowth) (biomass V), total biomass plant A (mature plant + tillering) (biomass A) and in order to evaluate the sugar content of sorghum stalks we studied the variable percent (%) degree Brix (oBx): in green plant V (oBx V) and in mature plant A (oBx A). We made a two-way analysis of variance (treatment and rate) for STBL and SBL. Treatment and rate were significant in biomass V and only rate for oBx V. Treatment x rates were not significant in the variables studied: biomass V, biomass A, oBx V and oBx A. In this trial the highest dry matter (d.m.) biomass A were obtained with rate 1 for STBL and SBL but in case of d.m. biomass V were obtained with rate 0, control (C). The highest oBx values were obtained with C in both plants; the oBx V were double than the oBx A. Sorghum had a positive response to fertilization with poultry manure with rate 1 to d.m. of plant biomass (A) but in d.m. green plant biomass (V) better results were obtained with C. The sugar content in juice stems (oBxV and oBxA) was in all cases highest in control with rate 0.


We conducted a 9-ha field experiment near Boone, IA, to test the hypothesis that yield, weed suppression, and profit characteristics of low-external-input (LEI) cropping systems can match or exceed those of conventional systems. Over a 4-yr period, we compared a conventionally managed 2-yr rotation system {corn (Zea mays L.)/soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.]} with two LEI systems: a 3-yr corn/soybean/small grain + red clover [Trifolium pratense L.) rotation, and a 4-yr corn/soybean/small grain + alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.)/alfalfa rotation. Synthetic N fertilizer use was 59 and 74% lower in the 3- and 4-yr systems, respectively, than in the 2-yr system; similarly, herbicide use was reduced 76 and 82% in the 3- and 4-yr systems. Corn and soybean yields were as high or higher in the LEI systems as in the conventional system, and weed biomass in corn and soybean was low (≤4.2 g m -2 ) in all systems. Experimentally supplemented giant foxtail (Setaria faberi Herrm.) seed densities in the surface 20 cm of soil declined in all systems; supplemented velvetleaf (Atbutilon theophrasti Medik.) seed densities declined in the 2- and 4-yr systems and remained unchanged in the 3-yr system. Without subsidy payments, net returns were highest for the 4-yr system ($540 ha -1 yr -1 ), lowest for the 3-yr system ($475 ha -1 yr -1 ), and intermediate for the 2-yr system ($504 ha -1 yr -1 ). With subsidies, differences among systems in net returns were smaller, as subsidies favored the 2-yr system, but rank order of the systems was maintained.


The yield stress and flow stress increase significantly with strain rate. High speed Forming and Machining operation gives rise to strain rates varying from 10 to 10^ per second. A number of research work have been reported in which various techniques have been described for strain rates sensitivity. One of the reported technique 1 was based on high speed compression of small cylindrical specimens with tool steel projectile. The deformation was recorded with a high speed camera operating at 500,000 frames per second. The equipment is very expensive and the processing of the picture for data is very tedious and subjected to human error.

The present study was aimed at using a similar technique of high speed compression without having to use any high speed photographs. From known initial and final dimension of the specimen together with the mass and the impact speed of the projectile, the deformation is simulated using a finite-difference technique based on an assumed dynamic constitutive equations. By iterative computation the constants of the constitutive equations are established and give close agreement between the experimental and simulated results in terms of the final dimensions of the cylindrical test specimens.

Finally the principal aim of this investigation was to establish high strain rate constitutive equations for commercially pure Copper, Mild steel and Stainless steel, and compare the results with those obtained using more sophisticated and expensive equipment.This principal objective has been achieved and high strain rate constitutive equations have been determined for strain rates ranging between 103 to 10^ per second.


In this study, the role of the ash content in recovered carbon blacks (rCB) on the in-rubber performance was investigated. Material characterization was performed to evaluate the amount of ash, the elemental composition, the BET surface area of the rCB including ash and the organic impurities in the latter. Elemental mapping was performed using Energy Dispersive Transmission Electron Microscopy to locate the ash components in the rCB. Furthermore, the in-rubber performance of rCb was tested. This study revealed the presence of active sulfur in rCBs originating from the ash content. Additionally, strong evidences were obtained from elemental analysis, cure characteristics and Payne effect measurements regarding the dependency of the amount of the active sulfur on the silica content present in the ash. Finally, elemental mapping showed a high concentration of sulfur deposited on the silica surface present in the rCB.


The physical mechanisms and timescales that determine the morphological signatures and the quenching of star formation of typical (∼L*) elliptical galaxies are not well understood. To address this issue, we have simulated the formation of a group of galaxies with sufficient resolution to track the evolution of gas and stars inside about a dozen galaxy group members over cosmic history. Galaxy groups, which harbor many elliptical galaxies in the universe, are a particularly promising environment to investigate morphological transformation and star formation quenching, due to their high galaxy density, their relatively low velocity dispersion, and the presence of a hot intragroup medium. Our simulation reproduces galaxies with different Hubble morphologies and, consequently, enables us to study when and where the morphological transformation of galaxies takes place. The simulation does not include feedback from active galactic nuclei showing that it is not an essential ingredient for producing quiescent, red elliptical galaxies in galaxy groups. Ellipticals form, as suspected, through galaxy mergers. In contrast with what has often been speculated, however, these mergers occur at z > 1, before the merging progenitors enter the virial radius of the group and before the group is fully assembled. The simulation also shows that quenching of star formation in the still star-forming elliptical galaxies lags behind their morphological transformation, but, once started, takes less than a billion years to complete. As long envisaged the star formation quenching happens as the galaxies approach and enter the finally assembled group, due to quenching of gas accretion and (to a lesser degree) stripping. A similar sort is followed by unmerged, disk galaxies, which, as they join the group, are turned into the red-and-dead disks that abound in these environments.


The coordination chemistry of uranium is not well understood. This fact is at the crux of all issues in modern synthetic uranium chemistry. Imposing simple design principles including steric pressure and coordinative saturation have proven most effective for the rational synthesis of uranium complexes. In this work, the effect of minor perturbations to the electronic structure on the gross molecular structure is investigated. Intramolecular non-covalent interactions are shown to influence the primary and secondary coordination sphere at uranium ions. Forces common in supramolecular assembly similarly control the orientation of ligands about the metal center. Insight is provided into the inverse trans influence, a thermodynamic phenomenon that preferentially stabilizes reactive uranium-ligand bonds in a preferred axial bonding orientation. Leveraging the inverse trans influence allowed for the first reported synthesis of uranium(VI)alkyl and -acetylide complexes, and the establishment of an inverse trans influence ligand series. The role of covalency in stabilizing uranium-ligand bonds is explored. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Chemistry First Advisor Eric J. Schelter


IGF receptor (IGF-1R) inhibition delays repair of radiation-induced DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs), prompting us to investigate whether IGF-1R influences endogenous DNA damage. We demonstrate that IGF-1R inhibition generates endogenous DNA lesions protected by 53BP1 bodies, indicating under-replicated DNA. We detect delayed replication fork progression in IGF-inhibited or IGF-1R depleted cancer cells, with activation of ATR-CHK1 signaling and the intra-S-phase checkpoint. This phenotype reflects unanticipated regulation of global replication by IGF-1, mediated via AKT, MEK/ERK and JUN to influence expression of ribonucleotide reductase (RNR) subunit RRM2. IGF-1R inhibition or depletion downregulate RRM2, compromising RNR function and dNTP supply. The resulting delay in fork progression and hallmarks of replication stress are rescued by RRM2 overexpression, confirming RRM2 as the critical factor through which IGF-1 regulates replication. Following targeted compound screens, we identify synergy between IGF inhibition and ATM loss, with evidence that IGF inhibition compromises growth of ATM null cells and xenografts. This synthetic lethal effect reflects conversion of single-stranded lesions in IGF-inhibited cells into toxic DSBs upon ATM inhibition. These data implicate IGF-1R in alleviating replication stress, and the identified reciprocal IGF:ATM co-dependence provides an approach to exploit this effect in ATM-deficient cancers.


Stratigraphy, a branch of geology, is the science of describing the vertical and lateral relationships of different rock formations formed through time to understand the earth history. These relationships may be based on lithologic properties (named lithostratigraphy), fossil content (labeled biostratigraphy), magnetic properties (called magnetostratigraphy), chemical features (named chemostratigraphy), reflection seismology (named seismic stratigraphy), age relations (called chronostratigraphy). Also, it refers to archaeological deposits called archaeological stratigraphy. Stratigraphy is built on the concept "the present is the key to the past" which was first outlined by James Hutton in the late 1700s and developed by Charles Lyell in the early 1800s. This book focuses particularly on application of geophysical methods in stratigraphic investigations and stratigraphic analysis of layered basin deposits from different geologic settings and present continental areas extending from Mexico region (north America) through Alpine belt including Italy, Greece, Iraq to Russia (northern Asia).


Abstract. Ice-rich yedoma-dominated landscapes store considerable amounts of organic carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) and are vulnerable to degradation under climate warming. We investigate the C and N pools in two thermokarst-affected yedoma landscapes – on Sobo-Sise Island and on Bykovsky Peninsula in the north of eastern Siberia. Soil cores up to 3 m depth were collected along geomorphic gradients and analysed for organic C and N contents. A high vertical sampling density in the profiles allowed the calculation of C and N stocks for short soil column intervals and enhanced understanding of within-core parameter variability. Profile-level C and N stocks were scaled to the landscape level based on landform classifications from 5 m resolution, multispectral RapidEye satellite imagery. Mean landscape C and N storage in the first metre of soil for Sobo-Sise Island is estimated to be 20.2 kg C m−2 and 1.8 kg N m−2 and for Bykovsky Peninsula 25.9 kg C m−2 and 2.2 kg N m−2. Radiocarbon dating demonstrates the Holocene age of thermokarst basin deposits but also suggests the presence of thick Holocene-age cover layers which can reach up to 2 m on top of intact yedoma landforms. Reconstructed sedimentation rates of 0.10–0.57 mm yr−1 suggest sustained mineral soil accumulation across all investigated landforms. Both yedoma and thermokarst landforms are characterized by limited accumulation of organic soil layers (peat). We further estimate that an active layer deepening of about 100 cm will increase organic C availability in a seasonally thawed state in the two study areas by  ∼  5.8 Tg (13.2 kg C m−2). Our study demonstrates the importance of increasing the number of C and N storage inventories in ice-rich yedoma and thermokarst environments in order to account for high variability of permafrost and thermokarst environments in pan-permafrost soil C and N pool estimates.


The need for effective and efficient information security solutions is steadily increasing in the software industry. Software and system developers require practical and systematic approaches to obtain sufficient and credible evidence of the security level in the system under development in order to guide their efforts and ensure the efficient use of resources. We present experiences of developing and using hierarchical security metrics and measurements in an industrial pilot study at Ericsson Finland. The pilot focused on risk-driven security design and implementation in the context of an Agile software development process. The pilot target was a well-established telecommunications product of Ericsson and a core component in modern mobile networks. The results of the study demonstrate the practical potential of risk-driven security metrics, particularly in offering some early visibility of security effectiveness and efficiency. Hierarchical metrics models enable the linking of security objectives with detailed measurements. Security metrics visualization was found to play a crucial role in increasing the manageability of metrics. We also found that the practical means of managing larger collections of metrics and measurements are more essential than individual security metrics. A major challenge in the use of risk-driven security metrics is the lack of evidence for security effectiveness evidence in the early phases of product development and Risk Analysis, when the needs for it are at their greatest.


At low frequencies, standing waves within the room cause large frequency-response variations in the listening environment, such as audio rooms or recording studios. This unwanted phenomenon has a significant impact on the sound quality of an audio system. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art soundproofing solutions cannot efficiently handle such low-frequency sound energy. To alleviate this problem, electroacoustic resonators can be used to damp room modes. This concept is based on the connection of direct-radiator loudspeakers to synthetic electrical loads allowing the passive dissipation of a certain part of the incoming acoustic energy of the sound field. Through judicious control of acoustic impedance depending of the placement of the electroacoustic resonators in the room, a significant damping of the dominant natural resonances can be achieved in order to meet the specifications of audio reproduction. This paper investigates the optimization and the spatial arrangement of electroacoustic resonators with a view to damp the low-frequency acoustic resonances in enclosed spaces.


Multi-dataset training provides a viable solution for exploiting heterogeneous large-scale datasets without extra annotation cost. In this work, we propose a scalable multi-dataset detector (ScaleDet) that can scale up its generalization across datasets when increasing the number of training datasets. Unlike existing multi-dataset learners that mostly rely on manual relabelling efforts or sophisticated optimizations to unify labels across datasets, we introduce a simple yet scalable formulation to derive a unified semantic label space for multi-dataset training. ScaleDet is trained by visual-textual alignment to learn the label assignment with label semantic similarities across datasets. Once trained, ScaleDet can generalize well on any given upstream and downstream datasets with seen and unseen classes. We conduct extensive experiments using LVIS, COCO, Objects365, OpenImages as upstream datasets, and 13 datasets from Object Detection in the Wild (ODinW) as downstream datasets. Our results show that ScaleDet achieves compelling strong model performance with an mAP of 50.7 on LVIS, 58.8 on COCO, 46.8 on Objects365, 76.2 on OpenImages, and 71.8 on ODinW, surpassing state-of-the-art detectors with the same backbone.


Introduction The population in rural Alaska experiences a disproprionately high burden of infection-mediated hearing loss. While the state mandates school hearing screening, many children with hearing loss are not identified or are lost to follow-up before ever receiving treatment. A robust, tribally owned healthcare system exists in Alaska, but children with hearing loss must first be identified and referred for existing infrastructure to be used. This trial will evaluate a new school hearing screening and referral process in rural Alaska, with the goal of improving timely identification and treatment of childhood hearing loss. Methods and analysis Comparative effectiveness community randomised trial testing digital innovations to improve school hearing screening and referral in 15 communities in the Norton Sound region of northwest Alaska, with data collection from October 2017 to February 2020. All children (K-12) attending school in Bering Strait School District with parental informed consent and child assent will be eligible (target recruitment n=1500). Participating children will undergo both the current school hearing screen and new mobile health (mHealth) screen, with screening test validity evaluated against an audiometric assessment. Communities will be cluster randomised to continue the current primary care referral process or receive telemedicine referral for follow-up diagnosis and treatment. The primary outcome will be time to International Statistical Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, ear/hearing diagnosis from screening date, measured in days. Secondary outcomes will include: sensitivity and specificity of current school and mHealth screening protocols measured against a benchmark audiometric assessment (air and bone conduction audiometry, tympanometry and digital otoscopy); hearing loss prevalence; hearing-related quality of life; and school performance (AIMSweb). Intention-to-treat analysis will be used. Ethics and dissemination This study has been approved by the Institutional Review Boards of Alaska Area, Norton Sound and Duke University and is registered on clinicaltrials.gov. Results will be distributed with equal emphasis on scientific and community dissemination. Trial registration number NCT03309553; Pre-results.


Reconfigurable antennas (RA) offer an emerging technology that allows wireless devices to alter their antenna states determined by different radiation patterns to maximize received signal strength. In this paper, we consider multiuser orthogonal frequency-division multiple access cognitive heterogeneous networks (HetNets) and we study the potential benefits of employing RA in terms of improving the overall network capacity. In cognitive HetNets, a secondary network is allowed to share the spectrum with the primary network under the condition that the interference level experienced by the primary network is below a predetermined threshold. To satisfy this interference constraint, a secondary user (SU) employs a power control mechanism, which typically limits its transmission power and thus reduces substantially its performance. Moreover, the large number of users expected for next-generation networks brings dense interference to the secondary network and, as such, even efficient interference mitigation and resource allocation techniques can fail in maintaining an acceptable performance level for the network. In this work, we consider utilizing RA technology at SUs to act as an additional resource in terms of selecting antenna radiation patterns that improve received signal strength among SUs. This also limits the mutual interference between the secondary and primary networks. We propose a game theoretical framework for jointly selecting the subcarriers as well as the RA antenna state at each SU that maximizes the overall capacity of the network while meeting the interference target in the primary network. Using potential games that guarantee the existence of a Nash equilibrium, our results show that, by selecting the best RA state and subcarriers for each SU, the capacity of the secondary network increases substantially compared to a scenario with conventional omni-directional antennas.


Through an analysis of focus group discussion data, we examine Kenyan traditional birth attendants' (TBAs) accounts of the persistence of homebirths and the key challenges they present. TBAs associated the continued demand for homebirths with the wide-ranging character and quality of their services. They did not consider their lack of formal training on matters of pregnancy and birthing to be a particular challenge to their work. Rather, they identified the non-cooperative and disrespectful attitudes of their counterparts in hospital settings as the most important issue. Further efforts are needed to make TBAs realize how much better their services could become if they adopted more modern ways of assisting in deliveries, unlearnt their belief in the superiority of their particular type of practice, and understood how their lack of formal training is a key issue.


List of Figures. Preface. Chapter 1. Strategy for the Global Marketplace. Strategy in Action. Globalization. Strategic Management. The Strategy Process. The Structure of the Book. Key Points in the Chapter. Chapter 2. Global Strategy as a Resource-based Strategy. Strategy in Action. The Objectives of Business Strategies. The Objectives of Multinational Business Strategies. Leveraging Resources and Capabilities: The Search of International Markets. Building Resources and Capabilities: the International Search for Innovation. Protecting Resources and Capabilities - International Risk Reduction Objectives. Summary. Key Points in the Chapter. Chapter 3. the Global Strategy Environment. Strategy in Action. International Economics and Trade Theory. Absolute Advantage and The Wealth of Nations. David Ricardo and Comparative Advantage. The Factor Availability Model of Comparative Advantage. The International Product Life Cycle and Shifting Comparative Advantage. Constructed Comparative Advantage and Porter's Diamond Model. Industry Clusters - Comparative Advantage on the Local Level. Comparative Advantage and Competitive Advantage Country Risk Issues and the GBE. Political Differences and International Strategies Legal Structures and Property Rights. Cultural Heritage and Business. Emerging Markets and the Bottom of the Pyramid. Summary. Key Points in the Chapter. Chapter 4. Global Competitive Analysis. Strategy in Action. Industry Analysis and the Global Marketplace. The Five Forces Model in the Global Setting. International and Global Industries. Global Integration and National Responsiveness. Configuration and Coordination. The Forces Driving Global Competition. Life Cycles, Local Markets, and Outsourcing. Global Services Industries and E-Commerce. Summary. Key Points in the Chapter. Chapter 5. Firm-Specific Resources and Capabilities in the Global Setting. Strategy in Action. Firm-specific resources and Capabilities. Resources, Capabilities, and Competitive Advantage. Identifying Strengths - Firm-specific Resources and Capabilities to exploit. Supporting Strengths - Complementary and Co-specialized resources. Home Country Advantage and the Origins of FSRCs. Clusters, City Regions, and FSRCs. Capability Leverage Strategies and the Multinational Firm. Resources, Capabilities, and Multinational Strategies. Capability Leverage and Internationalization. Capability Leverage and Integration. Capability-building Strategies and the Multinational Firm. Capability-building and internationalization. Capability-building and Globalization. Summary. Key Points in the Chapter. Chapter 6. Integrating Global Strategy. Strategy in Action. Making Strategy. Strategies of Fit and the Industry Context. Global Integration vs. National Responsiveness. Markets, Alliances, and Hierarchies - How best to Access Markets. Strategies of Fit to the Capabilities of the Firm. Pursuing Strategies in the International Marketplace. Acquisition in International Expansion. Strategic Alliances and Multinational Strategy. The Strategic Roles of Subsidiaries. Summary. Key Points in the Chapter. Chapter 7. Global Strategy, Global Structure. Strategy in Action. Strategies and Structures - Building the Transnational Markets and Hierarchies. Cooperative Forms - Alliances and Joint Ventures. The Role of the Center and the De-Integration of HQ. Activities. Summary. Key Points of the Chapter. Chapter 8. Entry Strategies for Global Companies. Strategy in Action. Entry Drivers. The Influence of Global Strategy - Why Are We Doing This? The Boundary Effects of Corporate Norms, Values, and Policies - That's Just the Way It is. That Just can't be done - The Limits of Corporate. Resources. Local Conditions - What are We getting Into? Entry Strategies. Cooperative Entry Strategies. Entry through Acquisition. Entry by Startup. Summary. Key Points in the Chapter. Chapter 9. Global Strategy in a Time of Troubles. Strategy in Action. The Global Business Environment. Competitive Analysis. Resource Strategies. Integrating Global Strategy. Structuring for Tough Times. New Market Entry Strategies. Summary. Key Points in the Chapter. Index.


INFUS (http://infus.itu.edu.tr) is an acronym for Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems. It is an international research forum to advance the foundations and applications of intelligent and fuzzy systems, computational intelligence, and soft computing for applied research in general and for complex engineering and decision support systems. The principal mission of INFUS is bridging the gap between fuzzy and intelligence systems and real complex systems via joint research between universities and international research institutions, encouraging interdisciplinary research and bringing multidiscipline researchers together.


Xeroderma pigmentosum (XP) is one of a number of autosomal recessive syndromes in humans characterized by a marked predisposition to cancer. Fibroblasts from these patients show a defect in DNA repair. The XP heterozygotes also show elevated skin cancer incidence, but reports concerning their DNA repair capacity are conflicting. In this study, the DNA repair capacity of four XP heterozygotes was examined using a sensitive host cell reactivation technique. Unirradiated and irradiated suspensions of adenovirus type 2 (Ad 2) were assayed for their ability to form viral structural antigens in fibroblasts from XP heterozygotes, XP homozygotes, and normals. A reduced host cell reactivation (of viral structural antigen production) for both ultraviolet- and gamma-irradiated Ad 2 was detected in four XP heterozygotes representing three different complementation groups as well as their XP homozygous children. The doses necessary to reduce the survival of viral structural antigen production by irradiated AD 2 to 37% in the XP heterozygous strains were expressed as a percentage of that obtained in normal strains and ranged from 55 to 82% for ultraviolet-irradiated Ad 2 and 71 to 79% for gamma-irradiated Ad 2. These results add further support to a direct relationship between cancer proneness and DNA repair defects and show the merits of this host cell reactivation technique in identifying XP heterozygotes. Identification of XP heterozygotes is of considerable public health interest not only in genetic counseling but also in the prevention of cancer.


. Direct numerical simulation of internal gravity waves focusing and developement of a wave attractor was performed with the help of two different numerical approaches. Mathematical formulation corresponds to experiments on exitations of inner waves in a trapezoidal container with salt solutions through forced oscillations of the left boundary. It was shown that numerical simulations reproduce the experiments after taking into account ther imperfection of linear salinity profile near the upper boundary. The amplitudes of resulting oscillations in both numerical simulations are increased as compared to the experiments due to loss of energy of the 3D wave generator in the experiments. Despite the fact that the general shape of the attractor is reproduced by both method, there are differences in velocity profiles near the left boundary. This fact requires further investigations since this discrepancy may in influence nonlinear dynamics of developing instabilities.


The story, told in alternating time narratives, begins in 1831 when Sally is aproximately sixty years old and is visited by a census taker called Nathan Langdon. With encouragement, Sally recounts her past to him. A past that begins when she passes into the ownership of her half-sister Martha Wyles who marries Thomas Jefferson. After Martha dies, Jefferson goes to Paris where he is joined by his two daughters. Elizabeth Hemings volunteers Sally as their maid, seeing it as Sally's chance for freedom as slavery has been abolished in France. Jefferson and Sally fall in love and she returns to America with him, on the promises that they will go back to France someday and that she will be the only mistress of his estate in Monticello. Both promises are broken when Jefferson accepts political office and allows his daughter to live at Monticello after her marriage breaks down. Sally realises that nothing has or ever will change for her. A fact borne out when Jefferson dies and his will does not free her, only her last two sons, from bondage. She has not only been held in bondage by the fact of slavery, but by love as well. She has been a possession of both and only she can free herself.


The telescopic conversion of glucose to fructose and then 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (5-HMF), the latter a potential, bio-derived platform chemical feedstock, has been explored over a family of bifunctional sulfated zirconia catalysts possessing tuneable acid–base properties. Characterisation by acid–base titration, XPS, XRD and Raman reveal that submonolayer SO4 coverages offer the ideal balance of basic and Lewis–Bronsted acid sites required to respectively isomerise glucose to fructose, and subsequently dehydrate fructose to 5-HMF. A constant acid site normalised turnover frequency is observed for fructose dehydration to 5-HMF, confirming a common Bronsted acid site is responsible for this transformation.


Ovarian maturation, artificial incubation of eggs and larval
rearing of M. rosenbergii ( De Man ) were studied . Female prawns
were categorised into seven arbitrary develop mental states based
on the morphology of the gonads namely immatured females, matured
females, pre-mating moult females , newly spawned females, females
with orange colour eggs, females with grey colour eggs and post
hatching females .The morphology and histology of the ovary for
each developmental state was then studied . The mean oocyte size
in the immature state was 47.0 + 1.3 urn and the oocyte size
increased to a maximum o f 402.0 + 3.5 urn a t the pre-mating moult state . After oviposition , the oocyte size dimini shed to 49. 0+
1.4 urn and then progressively increased Two series o f
experiments were done to determine the optimum salinity and
stocking density for artificial incubation of M. rosenbergii eggs .
Newly laid eggs and 9 day old eggs were stocked at a density of
500/1 and incubated at 0 ppt , 6 ppt and 12 ppt salinity
respectively .The mean percentage of hatching after 18 days of
incubation for the newly fertilised eggs were 0% , 3% and 40% as
compared to 2 % , 23% a n d 65% for 9 day old eggs .In the stocking
density experiments , newly laid eggs were stocked at the rate of
1000/1 ,1 500/1 and 2000 / 1 at 1 2 ppt and their mean percentage of hatching were 37% , 33 % and 16% respectively. Comparative dietary
studies of larval culture were done using the closed recirculating
system and the modified green water system .The larval diets
tested were Diet 1 : microcapsules , Diet 2 : egg custard and
Artemia and Diet 3 : microcapsules and Artemia . Larvae fed
exclusively microcapsules did not survive beyond six days of
larval culture in both the systems .CONTOH There was no significant
different ( P> 0 . 05 ) in t he production of juveniles between the
two systems though higher production was obtained in the
green water system . The mean number of juveniles obtained by Diet
2 using the green water system was 5 . 0/1 . When Diet 3 was used and
larval culture was done using the green water system , the mean
number of juveniles obtained was 2 . 5 /1 . The product ion of
juveniles using Diet 2 was significantly higher ( P<0 . 05 ) than
that o f Diet 3 .


In an age when pundits constantly decry overt political bias in the media, we have naturally become skeptical of the news. But the bluntness of such critiques masks the highly sophisticated ways in which the media frame important stories. In Front Page Economics , Gerald Suttles delves deep into the archives to examine coverage of two major economic crashes—in 1929 and 1987—in order to systematically break down the way newspapers normalize crises. Poring over the articles generated by the crashes—as well as the people in them, the writers who wrote them, and the cartoons that ran alongside them—Suttles uncovers dramatic changes between the ways the first and second crashes were reported. In the intervening half-century, an entire new economic language had arisen and the practice of business journalism had been completely altered. Both of these transformations, Suttles demonstrates, allowed journalists to describe the 1987 crash in a vocabulary that was normal and familiar to readers, rendering it routine. A subtle and probing look at how ideologies are packaged and transmitted to the casual newspaper reader, Front Page Economics brims with important insights that shed light on our own economically tumultuous times.


Abstract Until the late 1990s, inspection and enforcement practices at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) were minimally influenced by probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) results. In the late 1990s, the NRC noted various shortcomings of the licensee assessment process [commonly known as the systematic assessment of licensee performance (SALP)] established in 1980. For example, the SALP process was found to lack focus on the most safety important issues and was subjective. The resulting new reactor oversight process is a risk-informed performance-based framework that uses PRA insights. Consequently, the NRC set up a significance determination process (SDP) that would rely on the risk significance of performance deficiencies of the licensees. The SDP assesses contributions from both internal events and external events using the best available information. Over the last two to three decades, the NRC has completed the development of high-quality PRA models that are capable of assessing risks due to internal events. Several recent regulatory actions, some of which were prompted by the events at Fukushima, have provided the impetus for the NRC and the licensees to enhance the methods and information related to assessing risks associated with external events such as earthquakes and floods. This paper describes the current status on how the NRC staff uses the best available information to assess risk associated with external events and notes a plethora of regulatory actions that may provide inertia for the development of high-quality models for external events. The paper then points to past trends on how the regulatory actions in the fire PRA area contributed to significant advancements in fire PRA technology and points to tangible evidence on how the same trend has begun in the area of seismic- and flood-related risk assessments.


The thesis focuses on the making of spending cuts in local government in the mid-1980s. It examines how four English local authorities - Bedfordshire County Council, Kent County Council, Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council, and Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council - made spending cuts in the financial year, 1984/85. The research is based on a comprehensive set of interviews of the significant actors in each of the four local authorities and an examination of the relevant documents produced by the local authorities, plus an extensive literature survey. After exploring the significant methodological problems in defining and measuring local authority spending, the thesis examines to what extent the four local authorities cut their spending, why they curbed their spending, and how they made spending cuts. Furthermore, it looks at specific case studies where local authorities cut their spending, including, for example, decisions to contract-out school cleaning, to terminate grant funding of sheltered housing, and to work with a voluntary organisation in providing day care for the elderly. The thesis outlines the major findings of the research, compares the research findings with those of other research projects, and constructs a theory of cutback management in local government. This theory challenges many of the conventional wisdoms surrounding cutback management. Both the dominant rationalist and incremental models of cutback management are explored and tested in light of the research evidence. The thesis finds that both models provide only limited explanations of cutback management in local government. As a result of their theoretical shortcomings a refined model is formulated, which provides a far more plausible basis upon which to understand cutback management in local government. The thesis offers both new empirical and theoretical analysis of the making of spending cuts in local government.


Based on a review of the literatures pertaining to leadership, affect, and creative performance, the studies conducted as part of this thesis aim at testing a research model that examines how and under which conditions leader emotional inconsistency between happiness and anger is related to follower creative performance. For an experimental test of the proposed research model I collected data from 94 followers for whom a leader-follower interaction was simulated using a video manipulation. Moderated mediation analyses revealed that leader emotional inconsistency was positively associated with follower creative performance via increases in creative process engagement, but only for followers with high levels of epistemic motivation, which sheds light on the importance of follower's information processing capabilities when faced with complex emotional leadership. I replicated the results of the first study in a second experiment where a leader-follower interaction was simulated using a scenario manipulation. Using data collected from 81 followers, moderated mediation analyses showed that leader displays of emotional inconsistency were positively related to creative performance via increases in creative process engagement for followers with high levels of epistemic motivation. Both experimental studies provide evidence towards the directionality of the examined interrelationships across different types of experimental manipulations employed. Finally, I replicated the research model of this thesis in a field setting using a measurement scale of leader emotional inconsistency specifically developed for this study. Week-level data was collected from 60 leader-follower dyads working in two organisations and providing a total of 253 matched weekly leader and follower responses. Multilevel moderated mediation analyses showed that follower weekly creative performance follows from weekly leader displays of emotional inconsistency via increases in weekly creative process engagement for followers with high epistemic motivation. Taken together, the studies conducted provide both internal and external validity to the theoretically derived research model of this thesis.


This one-day workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to share knowledge and practices on how people can connect and interact with the Internet of Things in a playful way. Open to participants with a diverse range of interests and expertise, and by exploring novel ways to playfully connect people through their everyday objects and activities, the workshop will facilitate discussion across a range of HCI discipline areas. The outcomes from the workshop will include an archive of participants' initial position papers along with the materials created during the workshop. The result will be a road map to support the development of a Model of Playful Connectedness, focusing on how best to design and make playful networks of things, identifying the challenges that need to be addressed in order to do so.


Widespread reference to the real exchange rate stems from the belief that it is a useful summary indicator of key economic information. There exist, however, two forms of the real exchange rate: one form is based on deviations from purchasing power parity, while the other is based on the ratio of domestic prices of non-tradeables to tradeables. In this paper, an attempt is made to reconcile the two forms of the real exchange rate, both in theory and in practice. It is shown analytically that under certain restrictive conditions they will be equivalent. These conditions are, however, not always met so that in practice the two forms of the real exchange rate diverge. Changes in the productivity of the traded goods sector and the terms of trade are shown to be the principal sources of divergence. Identification of such economic fundamentals is central to the proper interpretation of movements in real exchange rates and, therefore, the efficacy of any attempt by policy makers to effect changes in them.


There is widespread agreement that geothermal springs in extensional geothermal systems are concentrated at fault tips and in fault interaction zones where porosity and permeability are dynamically maintained (Curewitz and Karson, 1997; Faulds et al., 2010). Making these spatial correlations typically involves geological and geophysical studies in order to map structures and their relationship to springs at the surface. Geophysical studies include gravity and magnetic surveys, which are useful for identifying buried, intra-basin structures, especially in areas where highly magnetic, dense mafic volcanic rocks are interbedded with, and faulted against less magnetic, less dense sedimentary rock. High-resolution magnetic data can also be collected from the air in order to provide continuous coverage. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are well-suited for conducting these surveys as they can provide uniform, low-altitude, high-resolution coverage of an area without endangering crew. In addition, they are more easily adaptable to changes in flight plans as data are collected, and improve efficiency. We have developed and tested a new system to collect magnetic data using small-platform UAS. We deployed this new system in Surprise Valley, CA, in September, 2012, on NASA's SIERRA UAS to perform a reconnaissance survey of the entire valley as well as detailed surveys in key transition zones. This survey has enabled us to trace magnetic anomalies seen in ground-based profiles along their length. Most prominent of these is an intra-basin magnetic high that we interpret as a buried, faulted mafic dike that runs a significant length of the valley. Though this feature lacks surface expression, it appears to control the location of geothermal springs. All of the major hot springs on the east side of the valley lie along the edge of the high, and more specifically, at structural transitions where the high undergoes steps, bends, or breaks. The close relationship between the springs and structure terminations revealed by this study is unprecedented. Collecting magnetic data via UAS represents a new capability in geothermal exploration of remote and dangerous areas that significantly enhances our ability to map the subsurface.


Background: This article provides an overview of deaf education efforts in Ghana over the past 60 years (1957–2018). It describes the field's pioneering history from a global perspective to the local content (in Ghana) after national independence in 1957 led by the efforts of Dr Andrew Foster between the 1950s and the 1960s. It also provides an overview of the significant issues that negatively impact deaf education in Ghana, such as political turnover, limited political will, funding issues, and limited research and awareness of the needs of deaf children within the broader population of deaf students.

Methodology: This article uses published articles, books, reports, and the author's personal experiences and knowledge of deaf education to document the deaf education issues in Ghana. The articles, books, and reports that formed the core of this write-up were selected from published books, journals, and peer-reviewed articles authored between 1970 and 2018.

Results: The review provides important literature on the deaf education efforts in Ghana. It also documents facts and information about the deaf education system in Ghana that can be used by students, academicians, practitioners, and researchers in Ghana and the diaspora.

Conclusion: Good governance, relevant education policies, and a continuation in national policy that needs to exist despite changes in political administrations are important to help to improve the deaf education system in Ghana.


Phishing attacks still pose a significant problem and purely technical solutions cannot solve this problem. While research literature in general shows that educating users in security is hard, the Anti-Phishing Landing Page proposed by CMU researchers seems promising as it appears in the most teachable moment -- namely once someone clicked on a link and was very likely to fall for phishing. While this page is already in use and exists in many languages we show that it is not effective in Germany as most users leave the page immediately without having read any advice. We therefore explore options to adopt their ideas for Germany. We focus on which are the trustworthy institutes that could provide such a landing page on their web pages and what is an appropriate headline and design.


The paper discusses the design of the current controllers for the induction motor (IM) drive where field oriented control is done in the rotor flux synchronous reference frame. The most common current control method is to use PI controllers alone – this is easy to implement and works well in most cases. A better scheme is to use decoupling compensation voltages in addition to the PIs, however, this is more difficult to implement and the decoupling voltages are often omitted. The paper compares the two current control schemes. The influence of the feed-forward decoupling voltages on the performance of the current loops is investigated in torque control mode and speed control mode. The theoretical findings are validated by simulations and experimental results.


From the 1918 influenza pandemic (H1N1) until the recent 2019 severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, no efficient diagnostic tools have been developed for sensitive identification of viral pathogens. Rigorous, early, and accurate detection of viral pathogens is not only linked to preventing transmission but also to timely treatment and monitoring of drug resistance. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), the gold standard method for microbiology and virology testing, suffers from both false-negative and false-positive results arising from the detection limit, contamination of samples/templates, exponential DNA amplification, and variation of viral ribonucleic acid sequences within a single individual during the course of the infection. Rapid, sensitive, and label-free detection of SARS-CoV-2 can provide a first line of defense against the current pandemic. A promising technique is non-linear coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microscopy, which has the ability to capture rich spatiotemporal structural and functional information at a high acquisition speed in a label-free manner from a biological system. Raman scattering is a process in which the distinctive spectral signatures associated with light-sample interaction provide information on the chemical composition of the sample. In this prospective, we briefly discuss the development and future prospects of CARS for real-time multiplexed label-free detection of SARS-CoV-2 pathogens.


This article examines the Anti-Extradition Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement and uses claim making and claim transformation as a window to look at ideological struggle in Hong Kong. The analysis recounts the emergence of a specific configuration of movement claims: the supplementation of the moderate "Five Demands" with the abstract slogan "Revolution of Our Times" and other, more radical demands. The development of the configuration is explained by the strategic interactions among movement actors, the state, and perceived political opportunities. The configuration is also treated as symptomatic of the situation in which "One Country, Two Systems" has lost its legitimacy and independence remains a perceived impossibility.


In the last several years both the UK and China have experienced housing booms that result in substantial price inflation and threaten the financial stability and economic sustainability in the both countries. This paper compares the causes of the housing boom in both countries and the macro and micro control measures adopted by the central and local governments to achieve a soft landing of the housing market, using Greater London and Greater Shanghai as case studies. It examines the differences in the operational mechanisms of the housing market, defined here as the set of institutional arrangements that guide policy formulation and market operation, and the impact of such differences in institutional arrangements in property rights protection, planning control, financing, agency, and specific government policies towards the housing market. The paper then examines the recent housing market trends in Greater London and Greater Shanghai and government policies to contain the overheating. It argues that macro economic control measures are more mature in the UK, whose property market has long been a free market, and are often complicated by the coordination of economic policies and political needs in China, which result in heavy government interventions. The paper explores the recent measures taken by the Shanghai government to mitigate the price inflation. Finally, the paper evaluates the effectiveness of the measures to avoid the negative fallout of the housing boom and the control measures in the two cities.


South Hercules is a newly delineated, disseminated to semimassive base metal sulfide deposit with significant gold and silver grades. The deposit lies a kilometer along strike south from the Hercules mine, a 2.0-Mt, polymetallic massive sulfide deposit in the Mount Read Volcanics belt, western Tasmania. The mineralization and alteration at the South Hercules deposit has been divided into two major facies: the mineralized sulfide facies and the carbonate facies. The carbonate facies interfingers with and surrounds the upper part of the sulfide facies. The mineralized sulfide facies includes three zones: a massive pyrite + or - barite zone, a siliceous + or - stringer sulfide zone, and a sphalerite-galena + or - pyrite zone. The carbonate facies also consists of three zones: a blebby carbonate-chlorite zone, a massive carbonate zone, and a cherty carbonate zone.The massive pyrite + or - barite zone contains significant gold grades and occurs mostly at the top of the sulfide facies. This zone is characterized by colloform aggregates of pyrite and compact massive pyrite in chert. The siliceous + or - stringer sulfide zone is a silicified and sericitized, tuffaceous shale with disseminated to stringer Pb-Zn mineralization. The massive sphalerite-galena + or - pyrite zone contains subordinate gold and silver and occurs as thin lenses toward the base of the sulfide facies. Significant zinc and lead values occur throughout the mineralized sulfide facies, with the highest values occurring along stratigraphically controlled layers. Copper values are conspicuously low throughout the South Hercules deposit, rarely exceeding 0.5 percent. The carbonate facies is conspicuous by its lack of significant precious metal and base metal grades.Mineragraphic investigations indicate that electrum occurs in two general associations: with pyrite, and with other sulfides such as sphalerite, galena, and tetrahedrite. The electrum locked in the pyrite euhedra is generally fine grained (<5-40 mu m), whereas the electrum associated with other sulfides displays a range between 5 and 200 mu m. Microprobe analysis indicates that the fineness (1,000 Au/Au + Ag wt %) for gold in the deposit ranges from 427 to 965.The delta 18 O isotope composition of the carbonate varies from 9.8 to 16.7 per mil, and the delta 13 C values range from -3.5 to +0.6 per mil. The calculated isotopic composition of the ore fluid at 150 degrees and 250 degrees C is consistent with derivation from evolved seawater. Sulfur isotope analyses of selected samples from the mineralized facies give delta 34 S values of 8.2 to 14.1 per mil; which is in the same range as values from the Rosebery deposit and consistent with values of sulfur derived from Cambrian seawater.The form, texture, mineralogy, stable isotopes, and fluid inclusion data for the South Hercules deposit suggest that it was formed largely by a subsea-floor replacement process from relatively low-temperature (150 degrees -250 degrees C), near-neutral fluids. The very low copper content and relatively high (Au + Ag)/(Pb + Zn) ratio of the ores support a low-temperature environment in which gold was transported as the Au(HS) 2 (super -) complex and Pb and Zn were transported as chloride complexes.


Aim Neural plastic changes are experience and learning dependent, yet exploiting this knowledge to enhance clinical outcomes after stroke is in its infancy. Our aim was to search the available evidence for the core concepts of neuroplasticity, stroke recovery, and learning; identify links between these concepts; and identify and review the themes that best characterise the intersection of these three concepts. Methods We developed a novel approach to identify the common research topics among the three areas: neuroplasticity, stroke recovery, and learning. A concept map was created a priori, and separate searches were conducted for each concept. The methodology involved three main phases: data collection and filtering, development of a clinical vocabulary, and the development of an automatic clinical text processing engine to aid the process and identify the unique and common topics. The common themes from the intersection of the three concepts were identified. These were then reviewed, with particular reference to the top 30 articles identified as intersecting these concepts. Results The search of the three concepts separately yielded 405,636 publications. Publications were filtered to include only human studies, generating 263,751 publications related to the concepts of neuroplasticity (n = 6,498), stroke recovery (n = 79,060), and learning (n = 178,193). A cluster concept map (network graph) was generated from the results; indicating the concept nodes, strength of link between nodes, and the intersection between all three concepts. We identified 23 common themes (topics) and the top 30 articles that best represent the intersecting themes. A time-linked pattern emerged. Discussion and Conclusions Our novel approach developed for this review allowed the identification of the common themes/topics that intersect the concepts of neuroplasticity, stroke recovery, and learning. These may be synthesised to advance a neuroscience-informed approach to stroke rehabilitation. We also identified gaps in available literature using this approach. These may help guide future targeted research.


A phenotype describes the outcome of the interacting development between the genotype of an individual and its specific environment throughout life. Animal breeding currently exploits large data sets of phenotypic and pedigree information to estimate the genetic merit of animals. Here we describe rapid, low-cost phenomic tools for dairy cattle. We give particular emphasis to infrared spectroscopy of milk because the necessary spectral data are already routinely available on milk samples from individual cows and herds, and therefore the operational cost of implementing such a phenotyping strategy is minimal. The accuracy of predicting milk quality traits from mid-infrared spectroscopy (MIR) analysis of milk, although dependent on the trait under investigation, is particularly promising for differentiating between good and poor-quality dairy products. Many fatty acid concentrations in milk, and in particular saturated fatty acid content, can be very accurately predicted from milk MIR. These results have been confirmed in many international populations. Albeit from only two studied populations investigated in the RobustMilk project, milk MIR analysis also appears to be a reasonable predictor of cow energy balance, a measure of animal robustness; high accuracy of prediction was not expected as the gold standard method of measuring energy balance in those populations was likely to contain error. Because phenotypes predicted from milk MIR are available routinely from milk testing, longitudinal data analyses could be useful to identify animals of superior genetic merit for milk quality and robustness, as well as for monitoring changes in milk quality and robustness because of management, while simultaneously accounting for the genetic merit of the animals. These sources of information can be very valuable input parameters in decision-support tools for both milk producers and processors.


PURPOSE
To investigate, through an immunohistochemical method, whether there is deposition of plasma proteins in the wall of lenticulostriate, cortical and leptomeningeal arteries of hypertensive patients, with and without lipohyalinosis.

METHOD
Forty patients with essential hypertension were selected at random, 20 with lipohyalinosis in the lenticulostriate arteries (HH group) and 20 without lipohyalinosis (H group), matched with 20 normotensive controls (C group).

RESULTS
Plasma protein deposits were identified in eight patients (40%) in the C group, in 15 patients (75%) in the H group, and in all 20 patients (100%) in the HH group, the difference being significant for the H group and highly significant for the HH group, as compared with the C group. In all groups, the distribution of plasma protein deposits, subendothelial in normal arteries, and diffuse, irregular in the wall of arteries with lipohyalinosis, was more frequent in the lenticulostriate arteries of the putamen.

CONCLUSION
Deposition of plasma proteins in the lenticulostriate arteries seems to be relatively frequent in normotensive individuals, starting in middle age. Such process appears to be intensified by hypertension, especially in individuals with lipohyalinosis.


In vivo 32P-labeled yeast proteins from wild type and ppz1 ppz2 phosphatase mutants were resolved by bidimensional electrophoresis. A prominent phosphoprotein, which in ppz mutants showed a marked shift to acidic regions, was identified by mixed peptide sequencing as the translation elongation factor 1Bα (formerly eEF1β). An equivalent shift was detected in cells overexpressing HAL3, a inhibitory regulatory subunit of Ppz1. Subsequent analysis identified the conserved Ser-86 as the in vivo phosphorylatable residue and showed that its phosphorylation was increased inppz cells. Pull-down experiments using a glutathioneS-transferase (GST)-EF1Bα fusion version allowed to identify Ppz1 as an in vivo interacting protein. Cells lacking Ppz display a higher tolerance to known translation inhibitors, such as hygromycin and paromomycin, and enhanced readthrough at all three nonsense codons, suggesting that translational fidelity might be affected. Overexpression of a GST-EF1Bα fusion counteracted the growth defect associated to high levels of Ppz1 and this effect was essentially lost when the phosphorylatable Ser-86 is replaced by Ala. Therefore, the Ppz phosphatases appear to regulate the phosphorylation state of EF1Bα in yeast, and this may result in modification of the translational accuracy.


The Theory of Contexts is a type-theoretic axiomatization aiming to give a metalogical account of the fundamental notions of variable and context as they appear in Higher Order Abstract Syntax. In this paper, we prove that this theory is consistent by building a model based on functor categories. By means of a suitable notion of forcing, we prove that this model validates Classical Higher Order Logic, the Theory of Contexts, and also (parametrised) structural induction and recursion principles over contexts. Our approach, which we present in full detail, should also be useful for reasoning on other models based on functor categories. Moreover, the construction could also be adopted, and possibly generalized, for validating other theories of names and binders.


It remains unclear which kinds of nanoproducts are available on the European market, although this information is a prerequisite for any kind of exposure and risk assessment. In order to address this lack of information, we have established The Nanodatabase (http://www.nanodb.dk), which is an online inventory of products claimed by manufacturers to contain nanomaterials (NMs) or be based on nanotechnology. The database currently entails 2231 products. The database is unique and includes basic information about the product (name, NM used, location of NM, product category, etc.) as well as a safety evaluation of each individual product according to the NanoRiskCat-framework. Our analysis of products that are currently present in the database shows that most products fall into "personal care" and "clothing" categories (≥300), followed by "sporting goods" and "cleaning" (>200). Silver and titanium dioxide are the most used NMs, but it is not possible to identify the NMs used for almost 60% of the products in the database. The data analysis shows that for most product categories the dominant route of exposure is dermal, and that the exposure potential as well as human and environmental hazard potential of most products is either "high" or "unknown". In order to address the current lack of reporting by manufacturers when it comes to nanoproducts, we recommend that it is made mandatory to disclose and report any nanomaterials used in a consumer product and it becomes illegal to advertise and market products as "nano" when they have no content of nanomaterials.