Čančer, M. 2018. From Genes to Therapy. Modeling and Novel Therapeutic Strategies for Brain Tumors. Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Medicine 1409. 62 pp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-91-513-0183-9. Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant pediatric brain tumor and is molecularly divided into four subgroups – WNT, SHH, Group 3 and Group 4. Two thirds of medulloblastoma patients survive, but survivors often suffer from severe, lifelong side-effects. The MYCN oncogene is deregulated in many medulloblastoma patients. Glioblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in adults, with a median survival of about one year. Glioblastoma is a highly heterogeneous tumor where targeted therapy has, so far, not been successful and most glioblastoma patients unfortunately die. In our first study we developed three novel humanized models of MYCN-driven SHH medulloblastoma. Histologically and molecularly these models closely resembled the infant class of SHH tumors. Further, we identified a set of clinically relevant genes that had prognostic significance among patients. mTOR signaling pathway was identified as a major contributor to invasion and dissemination, and we showed that mTOR specific inhibition suppressed migration and viability in vitro. In the second study we performed a forward genetic screen of retrovirally-induced murine PDGFB-driven gliomas and identified more than fifty candidate cancer-causing genes, of which many were mutated or deregulated in glioblastoma. One of the genes identified in this screen was PPFIBP1, found to be differentially expressed from obstructive retroviral integrations in PDGFB-driven glioma clones. Lower PPFIBP1 expression significantly decreased survival of mice and was found to be suppressed in glioblastoma patients. We propose PPFIBP1 to be a novel tumor suppressor gene that contributes to glioblastoma development. In the last study we used a panel of 19 patient-derived glioblastoma cell lines and identified a characteristic expression signature that predicts sensitivity to BET inhibition. BET inhibition resulted in apoptosis and senescence, cell cycle arrest and modulation of DNA damage response. The inhibitory effects of BET inhibition were further enhanced in combination with temozolomide, suggesting a promising future therapy for distinct subgroups of glioblastoma patients. This thesis addresses novel molecular findings in medulloblastoma and glioblastoma development, presents clinically relevant brain tumor models, and promising therapeutic approaches that can be used in future clinical trials in malignant pediatric and adult brain tumors.


Objectives: The objective of the study was as follows: To determine impact of work duration on musculoskeletal disorders in sugarcane factory workers. Methods: Ethical clearance was obtained from the institutional ethical committee. A total of 74 sugarcane factory workers were assessed and all were included in this study based on inclusion criteria, Informed consent was taken and the workers were explained how their bad working conditions lead to musculoskeletal disorders and they were explained that this study helped us to find minimum duration which lead to musculoskeletal disorders and the data was collected using occupational health and safety standard questionnaire and Nordic musculoskeletal disorder questionnaire. Results: This study found that duration for development of minimum complaints is within 1-5 years. Conclusion: We found that average duration for development of minimum complaints start appearing within 1-5 years' work experience (1-1825 days) but maximum musculoskeletal disorders in sugarcane factory workers occur after a duration of 16-20 years (5476-7300 days) of work experience. The musculoskeletal disorders which appears with minimum duration of 1-5 years initiates with neck pain followed by low back pain. The musculoskeletal disorders which occurs after maximum duration of work are neck pain, low back pain which increases with increased duration of work and with increased duration it leads to gradually increased complaints like shoulder pain, elbow pain, upper back pain, hip pain, knee pain and ankle pain.


The development of nanoparticle-based dual-modality probes for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) or single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is increasingly growing in importance. One of the most commonly used radionuclides for clinical SPECT imaging is (99m)Tc and the labelling of Fe3O4 nanoparticles with (99m)Tc was shown to be a successful strategy to obtain dual-modality imaging agents. In this work, we focus on gold containing magnetic nanomaterials. The radiolabelling of magnetic Fe3O4-Au core-shell and Fe3O4-Au dumbbell-like nanoparticles with the [(99m)Tc(CO)3](+) fragment is described. The key elements for this (99m)Tc labelling approach are novel coating ligands, consisting of an anchor for the Au surface, a polyethylene glycol linker and a strong chelator for the [(99m)Tc(CO)3](+) moiety.


The article examines the entangled constitution of the child-bear figure through the analytics of late liberal colonial investments.  It maps three frictional child-bear encounters, both imaginary and real, in the context of early childhood classrooms: bears as unwelcome and (yet) original inhabitants that pose a threat to human safety, bears as endangered victims in need of human protection, and bears as cuddly and cute creatures in children's literature. Specifically, we explore bear-child entanglements in early childhood classrooms in British Columbia by grappling with the complexities and tensions that emerge in late liberal colonized and colonialist spaces where bears and human children "meet."


The sparsity problem in collaborative filtering (CF) is a major bottleneck for most CF methods. In this paper, we consider a novel approach for alleviating the sparsity problem in CF by transferring useritem rating patterns from a dense auxiliary rating matrix in other domains (e.g., a popular movie rating website) to a sparse rating matrix in a target domain (e.g., a new book rating website). We do not require that the users and items in the two domains be identical or even overlap. Based on the limited ratings in the target matrix, we establish a bridge between the two rating matrices at a cluster-level of user-item rating patterns in order to transfer more useful knowledge from the auxiliary task domain. We first compress the ratings in the auxiliary rating matrix into an informative and yet compact cluster-level rating pattern representation referred to as a codebook. Then, we propose an efficient algorithm for reconstructing the target rating matrix by expanding the codebook. We perform extensive empirical tests to show that our method is effective in addressing the data sparsity problem by transferring the useful knowledge from the auxiliary tasks, as compared to many state-of-the-art CF methods.


Evelyn Waugh at war is an irresistibly fascinating subject, as are his war novels and diaries. Drawn to units offering the greatest danger, but often frustrated in his search for action, Waugh served in multiple regiments, saw battle on Crete and worked behind the lines in occupied Croatia. In the Picture traces Waugh's experiences, both vivid and mundane, with a completeness never before attempted and shows how they come alive in Sword of Honour. It also illuminates the brief hints within the narrative of key events of the war, while highlighting its strategic direction. Waugh's individualistic relationships with superiors, subordinates and public opinion led to blame and controversy. Working mainly from archival sources, In the Picture examines Waugh's fitness to be an officer, his conduct on Crete, his being sacked from the Special Service Brigade, and his service in Croatia. New, very surprising discoveries dispel entrenched myths.


In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower charged an ad hoc advisory group with assessing the current U.S. Cold War effort and offering recommendations for an "unified and dynamic" way forward. This work investigates the case of Eisenhower's Presidential Committee on International Information Activities and its role in the United States' approach to the Cold War. Problematizing that which is often taken for granted, this empirical, interpretive study uncovers the discursive conditions of possibility for and the discursive activities taking place within Jackson Committee decision making processes. Employing a constructivist discursive framework, this project builds on an understanding of policy making as a process of argumentation in which actors intersubjectively define problems and delimit policy and strategy options. Revealing discursive conditions of possibility enables a deeper understanding of the substance, tensions and discursive maneuvers informing subsequent U.S. strategy and policy choices during the Cold War and may offer insights into understanding and addressing geopolitical challenges in the 21st century. The thick analytic narrative illuminates the "witcraft" involved in conceptualizing the unique threat posed by the Soviet Union whose practices challenged existing categories, and in extending wartime discourses to the post-war geopolitical environment. It examines discursive practices informing the nascent concepts of national strategy, psychological warfare, and political warfare, including arguments for constituent elements and relationships between them. In so doing, this dissertation conceptualizes national strategy as practices underpinning a prioritized drive for competitive advantage over adversaries. Additionally, political warfare represents practices intended to create and present alternatives to foreign actors that are in the U.S. interest through the integration and coordination of diplomatic, economic, military, and informational activities. Based on its conceptualization of a long-term adversarial competition with the Soviet Union, the committee recommended solutions for a sustainable national strategy of political warfare prioritizing the free world and liberal world order. Its recommendations sought to recast strategic panic into strategic patience. Recommending Political Warfare—The Role of Eisenhower's Presidential Committee on International Information Activities in the United States' Approach to the Cold War


Current radio propagation algorithms are very narrowly focused to specific types of input models and do not scale well to an increase in the number of receiver locations or the number of polygons in an input model. In this dissertation, we look at the problem of efficiently computing energy propagation at radio frequencies in a range of geometrically defined environments and for various transmitter and receiver characteristics. To achieve this goal, we propose a unified approach to radio propagation for different types of input models and their combinations as well, by representing the geometry as a binary space-partitioning tree and broadcasting energy from the source. The approach is both scalable to large input models as well as dynamically adapts to its scale without incurring unreasonable computational cost. The proposed approach is equally effective for acoustic modeling as well.
We present a new adaptive ray-beam tracing algorithm which initially tessellates the surface of a transmitter into four-sided polygons. Each polygon is cast as a beam which avoids arbitrarily large gaps or overlaps between adjacent beams. For fast intersection computation each beam carries information of its medial ray as well. As the computation proceeds a ray-beam is adaptively subdivided depending on various parameters. The proposed algorithm has sublinear-time complexity in terms of the number of receiver locations.
Modeling diffraction off an edge of a wedge is important to compute radio signal that reaches the shadow region of the wedge. Storing these edges explicitly in a data structure can be very expensive for large input models and especially for terrain-based models that have significant elevation variations. We present a new runtime edge-detection algorithm instead of storing the edges statically and its adaptation to binary space-partitioning tree represented environments.
We have developed a propagation prediction system called Propagate using these algorithms with good statistical correlation between predicted and measured results for a number of different input models. The proposed algorithms have been used to model several other important computations related to a cellular network of transmitters such as signal strength and path loss, delay spread, angular spread, carrier-to-interference ratio, and modeling of different antenna diversity schemes.


Web archives preserve the fast changing Web, yet are highly incomplete due to crawling restrictions, crawling depth and frequency, or restrictive selection policies-most of the Web is unarchived and therefore lost to posterity. In this paper, we propose an approach to recover significant parts of the unarchived Web, by reconstructing descriptions of these pages based on links and anchors in the set of crawled pages, and experiment with this approach on the DutchWeb archive. Our main findings are threefold. First, the crawled Web contains evidence of a remarkable number of unarchived pages and websites, potentially dramatically increasing the coverage of the Web archive. Second, the link and anchor descriptions have a highly skewed distribution: popular pages such as home pages have more terms, but the richness tapers off quickly. Third, the succinct representation is generally rich enough to uniquely identify pages on the unarchived Web: in a known-item search setting we can retrieve these pages within the first ranks on average.


Objectives: Osteoarthritis (OA) has a dramatic impact on patients' health related quality of life (HRQoL). Chronic use of analgesics and anti-inflammatory medications for pain management may improve symptoms but on long term may affect HRQoL negatively. The objective of the present study was to compare the impact of two different classes of analgesics, traditional non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and selective cyclo-oxygenase-2 (COX-2) inhibitors on HRQoL among osteoarthritis patients using the SF-36 questionnaire. Methods: Clinic based cross-sectional study conducted at Al-Qassimi Hospital, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (UAE), over a period of six months. Ethical Approval was obtained from the ethics committee at Al-Qassimi Clinical Research Center. Total of 200 osteoarthritis patients fulfilling the inclusion and exclusion criteria were involved in the study. Patients' demographics were collected from their medical records. The Medical Outcome Study Short-Form 36 (SF-36) questionnaire was used to measure patients' HRQoL. SF-36 data were scored using health outcomes scoring software 4.5. Results: Mean age of the subjects was 62.19 ± 9.81 years with females constituting 151 (75.5%) of the patients. In general, females scored lower in most of the HRQoL domains compared to males and there was significant difference between the two groups in the mental health (p = 0.005) & mental component (p = 0.042) domains. Compared to selective COX-2 inhibitors, patients on NSAIDs scored higher on all domains of SF-36 except physical functioning. There was significant difference in mental health domain for patients treated with NSAIDs (p = 0.02). Celecoxib was only better than NSAIDs in osteoarthritis patients with more than one musculoskeletal disorders in the domain of bodily pain (p = 0.009). Conclusion: NSAIDs-treated patients did not differ significantly from celecoxib-treated patients in all domains of the SF-36 except for the mental health domain.


In the vicinity of Gobabeb both north and south of the Kuiseb River, well developed vegetation polygons have been noted. Previous workers have concentrated their efforts on the patterned ground features in the interdune valleys south of the Kuiseb. Two other areas of patterned ground development are descriptionbed and it is proposed that all three types are genetically similar. Desiccation of gypsum rich sediments in the soil horizons and / or the partially weathered bedrock horizon appears to have produced the polygonal fissure networks.


Collecting fully annotated image datasets is challenging and expensive. Many types of weak supervision have been explored: weak manual annotations, web search results, temporal continuity, ambient sound and others. We focus on one particular unexplored mode: visual questions that are asked about images. The key observation that inspires our work is that the question itself provides useful information about the image (even without the answer being available). For instance, the question what is the breed of the dog? informs the AI that the animal in the scene is a dog and that there is only one dog present. We make three contributions: (1) providing an extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis of the information contained in human visual questions, (2) proposing two simple but surprisingly effective modifications to the standard visual question answering models that allow them to make use of weak supervision in the form of unanswered questions associated with images and (3) demonstrating that a simple data augmentation strategy inspired by our insights results in a 7.1% improvement on the standard VQA benchmark.


OBJECTIVEThe challenging nature of neurosurgical residency necessitates that appropriate measures are taken by training programs to ensure that residents are properly progressing through their education. Residents who display a pattern of performance deficiencies must be identified and promptly addressed by faculty and program directors to ensure that resident training and patient care are not affected. While studies have been conducted to characterize these so-called "problem residents" in other specialties, no current data regarding the prevalence and management of such residents in neurosurgery exist. The purpose of this study was to determine the rate and the outcome of problem residents in US neurosurgical residency programs and identify predictive risk factors that portend a resident's departure from the program.METHODSAn anonymous nationwide survey was sent to all 108 neurosurgical training programs in the US to assess a 20-year history of overall attrition as well as the management course of problem residents, including the specific deficiencies of the resident, management strategies used by faculty, and the eventual outcome of each resident's training.RESULTSResponses were received from 36 centers covering a total of 1573 residents, with the programs providing a mean 17.4 years' worth of data (95% CI 15.3-19.4 years). The mean prevalence of problem residents among training programs was 18.1% (95% CI 14.7%-21.6%). The most common deficiencies recognized by program directors were poor communication skills (59.9%), inefficiency in tasks (40.1%), and poor fund of medical knowledge (39.1%). The most common forms of program intervention were additional meetings to provide detailed feedback (93.9%), verbal warnings (78.7%), and formal written remediation plans (61.4%). Of the identified problem residents whose training status is known, 50% graduated or are on track to graduate, while the remaining 50% ultimately left their residency program for other endeavors. Of the 97 residents who departed their programs, 65% left voluntarily (most commonly for another specialty), and 35% were terminated (often ultimately training in another neurosurgery program). On multivariable logistic regression analysis, the following 3 factors were independently associated with departure of a problem resident from their residency program: dishonesty (OR 3.23, 95% CI 1.67-6.253), poor fund of medical knowledge (OR 2.54, 95% CI 1.47-4.40), and poor technical skill (OR 2.37, 95% CI 1.37-4.12).CONCLUSIONSThe authors' findings represent the first study to characterize the nature of problem residents within neurosurgery. Identification of predictive risk factors, such as dishonesty, poor medical knowledge, and/or technical skill, may enable program directors to preemptively act and address such deficiencies in residents before departure from the program occurs. As half of the problem residents departed their programs, there remains an unmet need for further research regarding effective remediation strategies.


Richly fossiliferous deposits have been found in the Ischigualasto region of Argentina in the last few years. The only known dicynodont from this area is the new genus Ischigualastia, of which a diagnosis and fully illustrated description are given. A specimen from Brazil, which had earlier been referred to the genus Stahleckeria as S. lenzii, is shown to be very similar to Ischigualastia, but not generically identical with it; this specimen is therefore placed in the new genus Barysoma. The only South American dicynodont which had previously been fully described is Stahleckeria, from Brazil. A diagnosis and fully illustrated description are now given of the complete skeleton of the genus Dinodontosaurus, also from Brazil. Earlier Brazilian material which had been referred to the African genus Dicynodon is shown to belong to Dinodontosaurus. A very large skull from the same deposits is identical with Dinodontosaurus, except that it has a much more massive snout and tusks, and a wider occiput. The dicynodonts are herbivorous, and may well have lived in herds; it is suggested that the massive skull may belong to the old male of such a herd of Dinodontosaurus, and it is therefore not given separate taxonomic status. The skull of Placerias, the only dicynodont known from North America, had previously been restored by Camp & Welles (1956) from the broken remains of about forty individuals. Comparison of the restored skull with that of Ischigualastia has suggested various modifications in the reconstruction, and illustrations of the new reconstruction are given. The relationships of the Triassic dicynodonts are discussed. It is suggested that, excluding the specialized genus Lystrosaurus, they show two main divergent adaptations, which are probably related to their mode of feeding. A pointed snout and high occiput is thought to characterize the family Kannemeyeriidae (which includes the forms Kannemeyeria, 'Kannemeyeria' vanhoepeni, Sinokannemeyeria, Parakannemeyeria, Ischigualastia, Barysoma and Placerias). A blunt snout and wide occiput is thought to characterize the family Stahleckeriidae (which includes the genera Stahleckeria and Dinodontosaurus). A similar distinction is found today between the browsing black rhinoceros and the grazing white rhinoceros. The most primitive kannemeyeriids are found in the Lower Triassic of China, and these forms may also be ancestral to the stahleckeriids. The only other Triassic dicynodonts, Shansiodon and 'Dicynodon' njalilus, may be placed in a separate family, the Shansiodontidae. All these Triassic genera have two features in common: the presence of a separately ossified olecranon process on the ulna, and a shortened interpterygoid vacuity. It is possible that this may indicate a common ancestry for them all, but no Upper Permian or Basal Triassic genera now known appear to be possible ancestors for them. The lack of any Middle Triassic vertebrate fauna in the northern hemisphere makes it very difficult to date the Argentinian and Brazilian faunas, which include gomphodont cynodonts, dicynodonts, rhynchosaurs, pseudosuchians and a few saurischians. It is not felt that the presence of rhynchosaurs necessarily indicates a Middle Triassic age, as the group is known from the mid-Norian of India. It is possible that the presence of several saurischians and of a pseudosuchian closely related to the German Norian genus Aëtosaurus, may indicate a Carnian age for the Argentine fauna. The Brazilian fauna is somewhat dissimilar to that of Argentina and contains no genera in common with it; it may therefore be of earlier, Ladinian, age. The fauna of the Manda Beds of East Africa is similar in composition to that of Brazil, but contains no genera in common with it. It also lacks saurischians and includes a dicynodont, Kannemeyeria, that is otherwise typical of the Lower Triassic Cynognathus zone of South Africa. It may therefore be Anisian in age.


In this work, a methodology, based on a self-organization process, to form gold nanoclusters on the 6H-SiC surface, is illustrated. By scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy the gold self-organization induced by annealing processes was studied and modelled by classical limited surface diffusion ripening theories. These studies allowed us to fabricate Au nanoclusres/SiC nanostructured materials with tunable structural properties. The local electrical properties of such a nanostructured material were probed, by conductive atomic force microscopy collecting high statistics of I-V curves. The main observed result was the Schottky barrier height (SBH) dependence on the cluster size. This behaviour is interpreted considering the physics of few electron quantum dots merged with the ballistic transport. A quite satisfying agreement between the theoretical forecast behaviour and the experimental data has been found.


Wandering spleen is a rare clinical entity in which the spleen is attached by a long vascular pedicle and can be found in any part of the abdomen or pelvis. It can be complicated by torsion leading to a surgical abdominal emergency. A case of a patient with wandering spleen is reported here that presented with chronic abdominal pain.


Introduction Organ transplantation is the treatment of choice for some diseases. However, the need for cadaveric organ donation has either plateaued or is on a decreasing trend in some countries, especially in developed ones. In this study, we aimed to identify the barriers to organ donation in brain dead patients, who were referred to the organ procurement organizations (OPO) in northeast Iran. Methods In this cross-sectional study during 2006 to 2013, data were collected from medical records of brain dead patients. Demographic information, cause of brain death, the process of obtaining informed consent, and the reasons for declining organ donation were obtained from the OPO records. The data were analyzed using chi-square test by SPSS 13 software. Results Of 1034 brain dead patients, 751 cases (72.6%) were eligible for organ donation, and, ultimately, 344 cases underwent organ donation. The rate of organ donation increased during the course of the study; medical and legal reasons as well as family refusal to authorize donation were the main barriers to the process. Conclusion Based on the pattern of mortality, the need for living donors in developing countries, such as Iran and other countries in the Mediterranean region, can be reduced by improving the quality of healthcare, efficient identification of brain death, and obtaining consent with appropriate strategies.


'This text should not be viewed as a comprehensive history of algebra before 1600, but as a basic introduction to the types of problems that illustrate the earliest forms of algebra. It would be particularly useful for an instructor who is looking for examples to help enliven a course on elementary algebra with problems drawn from actual historical texts' - Warren Van Egmond about the French edition for ""MathSciNet"". This book does not aim to give an exhaustive survey of the history of algebra up to early modern times but merely to present some significant steps in solving equations and, wherever applicable, to link these developments to the extension of the number system. Various examples of problems, with their typical solution methods, are analyzed, and sometimes translated completely. Indeed, it is another aim of this book to ease the reader's access to modern editions of old mathematical texts, or even to the original texts; to this end, some of the problems discussed in the text have been reproduced in the appendices in their original language (Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, French, German, Provencal, and Italian) with explicative notes.


The support vector machine (SVM) is a powerful method for statistical classification of data used in a number of different applications. However, the usefulness of the method in a commercial available system is very much dependent on whether the SVM classifier can be pretrained from a factory since it is not realistic that the SVM classifier must be trained by the customers themselves before it can be used. This paper proposes a novel SVM classification system for voltage disturbances. The performance of the proposed SVM classifier is investigated when the voltage disturbance data used for training and testing originated from different sources. The data used in the experiments were obtained from both real disturbances recorded in two different power networks and from synthetic data. The experimental results shown high accuracy in classification with training data from one power network and unseen testing data from another. High accuracy was also achieved when the SVM classifier was trained on data from a real power network and test data originated from synthetic data. A lower accuracy resulted when the SVM classifier was trained on synthetic data and test data originated from the power network.


This paper is part of a series of papers exploring various facets of the constitutional foundations of intellectual property law. In American constitutionalism the Antebellum era is important not for staking out new principles, but for developing and applying those principles already established in the written Constitution. Generally considered the period from before the Civil War back to the War of 1812, the Antebellum era saw the furtherance and consolidation of the Founding era's solicitude for protection of individual private property rights. Constitutionalism in the Antebellum era is particularly important for building upon the Constitution's foundational concepts of copyright and patent. In the time between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, the importance of protecting intellectual property (IP) rights was widely perceived and appreciated. As a result, the Antebellum era was a period of advancement for the protection of IP rights. By the early 1800s, protection of copyright and patent rights had become established concepts within the American constitutional order. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution included the IP Clause, empowering Congress to guarantee to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to the proceeds of their writings and inventions for limited periods. The First Congress enacted the Copyright and Patent Acts of 1790. Subsequent Congresses made minor amendments to the federal patent registration process and expanded copyright protection to historical prints, etchings, and engravings in 1793 and 1802, respectively. Authors and inventors began registering their writings and inventions under the new laws. And courts of law opened their doors to the first copyright and patent infringement lawsuits. Over the next half-century, American constitutional concepts of copyright and patent protection were reinforced and expanded. Following in the thought paths of Founding era predecessors, prominent Antebellum era thinkers overwhelmingly regarded copyrights and patents in light of natural rights and property rights principles. According to this view, persons are by nature entitled to the fruits of their labor – that is, to their property. Government exists to safeguard individual rights to acquire, use, and transfer property according to just and equal laws.


In this research an approach for bias reduction, while still maintaining usability of the classifier, is proposed.

The approach for bias reduction requires all preprocessing to be done, include one-hot encoding and making the training and test set split.
The approach then requires a banned feature, a feature that has for example been deemed morally irrelevant for the classification purpose.
For the bias reduction, the proposal is to use the KS-score obtained from the two sample KS-test to determine how well a feature contributes to classification and how well it contributes to the bias of the banned feature.
So that means that all features present in the dataset that are not the label(L) or the banned feature(B), that the following holds for feature X to be safe to use in the training dataset:

KS-score(X|L=1,X|L=0) > KS-score(X|B=1,X|B=0)

After all features are checked, the unsafe (or flagged) features need to be removed from both the training and the test set in order to make the classifier as fair as possible.

The datasets that have been used are the Titanic dataset, with as banned feature the passenger class and a Financial survey, with as banned feature the race.
The results have shown that the overall bias has been reduced for both the Titanic dataset and the Financial survey.
However in terms of relative fairness, the Financial survey is the only one that became less fair for a certain banned feature value (Race = White).
All other values became fairer for both the Financial survey and the Titanic dataset.


This comment on Micah Jost's Note, 'Independent Contractors, Employees, and Entrepreneurialism Under the National Labor Relations Act: A Worker-by-Worker Approach,' was part of the Washington and Lee Law Alumni Association Student Notes Colloquium. In his Note, Jost addresses an increasingly problematic aspect of NLRA law: The ability and willingness of employers to exclude workers from coverage under the statute by classifying them as independent contractors. This problem has existed since the early days of the NLRA, but is worsening as a result of changes in the modern workplace. Adding fuel to this fire, and creating the impetus for Jost's Note, is the D.C. Circuit's new test that makes mere entrepreneurial opportunity the cornerstone of the employee/independent contractor analysis. This test defies both well-established precedent and the policies of the NLRA. Moreover, as Jost demonstrates, the common-law analysis - although superior to the D.C. Circuit's formulation - is in dire need of reform itself. Ideally, this reform would be substantial, either through legislation or a new willingness by the Supreme Court to abandon a strict compliance with the common-law analysis. The result would hopefully produce a more flexible, policy- oriented definition of employee that - especially in combination with increased audits and penalties for misclassification, as well as more attempts to provide workers with the information and tools needed to challenge misclassifications - would better capture the type of employees that the NLRA was intended to cover. Only through such a change will the NLRA maintain relevance for a growing number of workers who look like employees but are now treated as independent contractors by their employers.


To the Editor,

Apparent comorbidity between bipolar disorder (BD) and anxiety disorders is a common condition in psychiatry with higher prevalence rates for generalised anxiety disorder, social phobia, panic disorder.1

Overlapping clinical criteria for many diagnoses, especially mood and anxiety disorders, produced by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) might lay behind these high prevalence rates.2 Using DSM, it is unclear whether concomitant diagnoses actually reflect the presence of distinct clinical entities or refer to multiple manifestations of a single clinical entity.

With regard to anxiety disorders, one of the most difficult additional psychiatric diagnosis to manage in BD patients is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).3,4 In our recent meta-analysis, the pooled prevalence of OCD in BD was 17.0%, which was comparable to the results reported by the pooled prevalence of BD in OCD (18.35%).5 In line with previous studies,6 OCD prevalence rate was higher among BD children and adolescents (24.2%, compared to 13.5% in adults).

The co-occurrence of symptoms of BD and OCD was noted 150 years ago by Morel,7 but the topic is insufficiently studied and the relationship between BD and OCD remains unclear.

In agreement with Kraepelin's thought a psychiatric diagnosis is best established by its longitudinal course of illness, the evidence so far supports the view that, especially among patients with a primary diagnosis of BD, the majority of comorbid OCD cases appeared to be related to mood episodes.8 OC symptoms in comorbid patients appeared more often-and sometimes exclusively-during depressive episodes, and comorbid BD and OCD cycled together, with OC symptoms often remitting during manic/hypomanic episodes.

Therefore, only a substantial minority of comorbid BD-OCD may represent "true" OCD independent of BD with OC symptoms that improve or worsen during mood episodes without being related to these.

These findings are in line with Feinstein"s definition of comorbidity, as "any distinct additional entity that has existed or may occur during the clinical course of a patient who has the index disease under study".2 "True" OCD comorbid with BD would represent the random co-occurrence of two independent diseases, estimated by multiplication of prevalence rates, which are about 1% for each condition, and producing a very low expected true comorbidity of 0.1% in the general population.

The treatment of BD-OCD patients remains a great challenge, since the gold standard for one disease (serotonin reuptake inhibitors for OCD) can worsen the other (antidepressants can cause mania and/or more mood episodes in BD).

The clinical features of comorbid BD-OCD patients would explain why OCD and BD symptoms respond to adequate mood stabilizer treatment.3 Only in a minority of comorbid patients with persistent OCD, despite improvement in mood episodes, addition of low doses of antidepressants could be considered while strictly monitoring emerging symptoms of mania or mixed states. Benefit with antipsychotics was also seen, although a few reports also exist of exacerbation of OC symptoms with neuroleptic agents.

Considering the growing interest over the last decades into shared pathophysiologies across psychiatric disorders, studies addressing neurobiological substrates are essential to illuminate pathogenetic mechanisms that underlie comorbid BD-OCD.


BACKGROUND
For people with limitations due to neurological conditions such as stroke, the routine practice of oral care may become a challenge. Evidence-based supported oral care intervention is essential for this patient group.

OBJECTIVES
To compare the effectiveness of staff-led oral care interventions with standard care for ensuring oral hygiene for individuals after a stroke.

SEARCH STRATEGY
We searched the trials registers of the Cochrane Stroke Group and Oral Health Group (August 2005), the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library Issue 1, 2006), MEDLINE (1966 to February 2006), CINAHL (1982 to February 2006), Research Findings Electronic Register (February 2006), National Research Register (Issue 1, 2006), ISI Science and Technology Proceedings (August 2005), Dissertation Abstracts and Conference Papers Index (August 2005). We scanned reference lists from relevant papers and contacted authors and researchers in the field.

SELECTION CRITERIA
We identified randomised controlled trials that evaluated one or more interventions designed to improve oral hygiene. Trials based on a mixed population were included, provided it was possible to extract the data specific to the individuals post stroke.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Two review authors independently classified identified trials according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, assessed the trial quality and extracted data. Clarification was sought from study authors when required.

MAIN RESULTS
Eight eligible randomised controlled trials were identified but only one provided stroke-specific information. It compared an oral health care education training programme (OHCE) delivered to nursing home care assistants to delayed training intervention in the control group. Comparisons were made at one and six months after the intervention, using the primary outcome measures dental plaque and denture plaque, and three secondary outcomes. The data available for the 67 individuals with a stroke (obtained from the larger cluster randomised controlled trial) showed that denture plaque scores were significantly reduced up to six months (p < 0.00001) after the intervention. Staff knowledge (P = 0.0008) and attitudes (P = 0.0001) towards oral care also improved significantly.

AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS
Based on one study with a small number of stroke survivors, providing oral care training for carers in a nursing home setting improves their knowledge of and attitudes towards the provision of oral care. In turn, residents' dentures were cleaner, though other oral hygiene measures did not change. Further evidence relating to oral care interventions is severely lacking, in particular with reference to care in hospital for those following stroke.


Rural land, exchanged for its productive or consumptive value, is considered to be a differentiated product with varying characteristics. Multivariate procedures and hedonic price analysis were used to evaluate the impact o f rural land characteristics on rural land prices across homogeneous rural land market areas in Louisiana. Multivariate methods of principal component analysis and cluster analysis were used to group 59 Louisiana parishes into eight rural land submarkets based on 13 physical and socio-economic variables. Using a mail survey technique, 948 Louisiana rural land sales were collected. A geographic information system (GIS) analysis of these 948 sales indicated that sales were dispersed throughout the state. Geo-referencing the location of each reported sale allowed the examination of location and soil attributes that were expected to influence rural land values. A two-stage hedonic pricing approach was used to analyze the relationship between rural land characteristics and per acre land prices within the rural land submarkets identified. Results presented in this study suggest that Louisiana rural land submarkets are well-formed, non-overlapping entities made up of parishes that are primarily contiguous. The collection of 948 sales of rural land in Louisiana indicated that substantial variation in rural real estate prices exists across the state. A large portion of this variation is attributed to the types of commodities produced, locational factors, and other tract characteristics. Results from first-stage hedonic models indicated that percent of cropland, percent pastureland, value of improvements, amount o f road frontage, percent of mineral rights, paved access road, presence of government program crop base acreage, and general soil type all had statistically significant and positive influences on per acre land values. Other variables, such as size of tract, percent timberland, and distance to the largest town in the parish, were found to have a statistically significant inverse relationship with per acre land values. CHAPTER


Since the late 1950s, the idea that hidden, imperceptible messages could influence mass behavior has been debated, feared, and ridiculed. In Swift Viewing , Charles R. Acland reveals the secret story of subliminal influence, showing how an obscure concept from experimental psychology became a mainstream belief about our vulnerability to manipulation in an age of media clutter. He chronicles the enduring popularity of the dubious claims about subliminal influence, tracking their migration from nineteenth-century hypnotism to twentieth-century front-page news. His expansive history of popular concern about subliminal messages shows how the notion of "hidden persuaders" became a vernacular media critique, one reflecting anxiety about a rapidly expanding media environment. Through a deep archive of eclectic examples, including educational technology in the American classroom, mind-control tropes in science fiction, Marshall McLuhan's media theories, and sensational claims in the late 1950s about subliminal advertising, Acland establishes the subliminal as both a product of and a balm for information overload.


BACKGROUND
Women with breast cancer who are treated with adjuvant radiation have a decreased risk of local recurrence but an increased risk of mortality from ischemic heart disease. Patients with left-sided breast tumors receive a higher dose of radiation to the heart than patients with right-sided tumors. Because radiation techniques have improved over time, we investigated whether the risk of death from ischemic heart disease after adjuvant breast radiotherapy decreased over time.

METHODS
We used the 12-registry 1973-2000 dataset from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program. Women (n = 27,283) treated with adjuvant radiation for breast cancer diagnosed in 1973-1989 were included in the study. Ischemic heart disease mortality was calculated at 15 years and compared for women diagnosed during 1973-1979, 1980-1984, and 1985-1989. Cox proportional hazards models were used to calculate the hazard of death from ischemic heart disease for women diagnosed 1973-1988 and censored at 12 years. All statistical tests were two-sided.

RESULTS
There were no differences in age, race/ethnicity, disease stage, or follow-up time between the 13 998 women with left-sided and 13 285 with right-sided cancer. For women diagnosed in 1973-1979, there was a statistically significant difference in 15-year mortality from ischemic heart disease between patients with left-sided (13.1%, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 11.6 to 14.6) and those with right-sided (10.2%, 95% CI = 8.9 to 11.5) breast cancer (P = .02); no such difference was found for women diagnosed in 1980-1984 (9.4%, [95% CI = 8.1 to 10.6] versus 8.7% [95% CI = 7.4 to 10.0], respectively, P = .64) or 1985-1989 (5.8% [95% CI = 4.8 to 6.8] versus 5.2% [95% CI = 4.4 to 5.9], respectively, P = .98). In the Cox model, the hazard ratio [HR] for ischemic heart disease mortality for women with left-sided versus women with right-sided disease was 1.50 (95% CI = 1.19 to 1.87) in 1979. With each succeeding year after 1979, the hazard of death from ischemic heart disease for women with left-sided versus those with right-sided disease declined by 6% (HR = 0.94, 95% CI = 0.91 to 0.98).

CONCLUSIONS
Risk of death from ischemic heart disease associated with radiation for breast cancer has substantially decreased over time.


Summary The power output and propulsive efficiency of swimming bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) were determined from a hydromechanica l model. The propulsive movements were filmed as dolphins swam in large pools. Dolphins swam at velocities of 1.2‐6.0ms21. Propulsion was provided by dorsoventral oscillations of the posterior body and flukes. The maximum angle of attack of the flukes showed a linear decrease with velocity, whereas the frequency of the propulsive cycle increased linearly with increasing velocity. Amplitude was 20% of body length and remained constant with velocity. Propulsive efficiency was 0.81. The thrust power computed was within physiological limits. After correction for effects due to swimming depth, the coefficient of drag was found to be 3.2 times higher than the theoretical minimum assuming turbulent boundary conditions. The motions of the body and flukes are primarily responsible for the increased drag. This analysis supports other studies that indicate that bottlenose dolphins, although well adapted for efficient high-performance swimming, show no unusual hydrodynamic performance.


Background: In developed economies, less than 1% of all cancers occur in children younger than 15 years. Less is known about the distribution of childhood cancers in Africa due to a lack of comprehensive data on pediatric oncology needs and burdens. Methods: We searched EMBASE, Medline and Global Health to identify population- or hospital-based registry studies on childhood haematological cancers in Africa, with publication date set from January 1980 to December 2016. We applied a Bayesian network meta-analysis modelling approach on individual national or subnational estimates to arrive at a standardized estimate for Africa and African sub-regions. Results: Our search identified 2717 studies, 35 of which met the inclusion criteria. Most studies were from the Southern and West African countries, and the majority (90%) of the cancer registries were population-based. Fifteen (43%) out of the 35 included studies were of high quality, while the remaining 20 (57%) included studies were of moderate quality. Most of the assessed studies (80%) were considered representative of their target/subnational population, with only 5 (14%) studies representative of their national population. From all sites, the pooled incidence of childhood leukemia in Africa was highest at 16.9 (95% CI: 14.1-19.7) per 1,000,000 child years (cy), with higher incidence in North Africa compared to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This was closely followed by non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) at 16.8 (95% CI: 13.6-19.3) and Burkitts lymphoma (BL) at 16.8 (95% CI: 12.7-20.2) per 1,000,000 cy, with higher incidence rates of both cancer types significantly higher in SSA compared to North Africa. The overall pooled incidence of childhood Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) in Africa was the lowest at 15.0 (95% CI: 12.7-17.8) per 100,000 cy. Across all sub-regions, the incidence rates of the four cancer types were highest in East Africa, and consistently increased between 1980 and 2015. Conclusion: Describing the epidemiology of childhood cancers remains difficult owing to few and limited capacities of cancer registration systems in Africa. Available evidence suggests an increasing incidence, with the East African region contributing highest to the burden of childhood hematological cancers on the continent. To provide evidence-based summaries on paediatric malignancies and guide appropriate response on the continent, there is need to re-organize existing registries and incorporate upcoming registries to comprehensively account for incidence, mortality, survival and relevant details on environmental, genetic and molecular characteristics of childhood cancers across different population groups. Citation Format: Davies Adeloye, Asa Auta, Jhonathan P. Dos Santos, Michael O. Harhay. Epidemiology of childhood hematologic cancers in Africa: A systematic review of the evidence [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2018; 2018 Apr 14-18; Chicago, IL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2018;78(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 1196.


We carried out density functional theory calculations with on-site Coulomb repulsion U terms to study the interaction of water with the (110) surface of the spinel cobalt oxide, Co3O4, a widely used oxidation catalyst. This surface has two different terminations, one positively (A) and the other negatively charged (B). Dissociative water adsorption is preferred from low up to one monolayer coverage on the A termination and up to half monolayer on the B termination. On the latter, a mixed molecular and dissociated monolayer is more stable at full coverage. The computed structures are used to investigate the free-energy changes during water oxidation on both surface terminations. We find that the most difficult step of the oxygen evolution reaction is the second deprotonation to form an adsorbed O species (O*). Moreover, the A-terminated surface is more active than the B-terminated surface. Analysis of the surface electronic structure shows a larger density of cobalt states near the Fermi energy on the A te...


Objective: To determine whether prolonged labour increased the rate of exposure of the newborn eyes to maternal vaginal fl ora, and whether this exposure led to higher risk of developing neonatal conjunctivitis. Study design: cohort study Settings: Kenyatta National hospital and Pumwani Maternity Hospital in Kenya between August 2000 and March 2001. Subjects: Fifty four cases of prolonged labour (PL) and 55 cases of controls were studied. Conjunctival swabs were taken from all the newborns and high vaginal swabs taken from every second mother. A case pair consisted of such a pair where samples were taken from both the mother and her baby. 23 case pairs of PL and 19 of controls were studied. This was done on average 24hrs after delivery. Results: Conjunctival swabs were positive in 63% of the prolonged labour (PL) group compared to 51% of the control group (odds ratio 1.9; p-value 0.09). The rate of transmission of vaginal fl ora to the eyes of the newborns was 57% in the PL group compared to 40% in the controls (odds ratio 1.95; p value 0.27). The longer, from birth, it took before taking the conjunctival swabs from the baby, the higher was the likelihood of obtaining a positive culture (p-value 0.017 MW test). The longer the duration of labour in the PL group, the higher the rate of development of conjunctivitis (p-value 0.029 MW test). Staphylococcal aureus, Staphylococcal epidermidis and E.coli were the three most common organisms isolated in both groups. Conclusion: Prolonged labour increased the rate of transmission of maternal vaginal flora to the eyes of the newborns and to subsequent development of neonatal conjunctivitis.


New radio (MeerKAT and Parkes) and X-ray (XMM-Newton, Swift, Chandra, and NuSTAR) observations of PSR J1622–4950 indicate that the magnetar, in a quiescent state since at least early 2015, reactivated between 2017 March 19 and April 5. The radio flux density, while variable, is approximately 100× larger than during its dormant state. The X-ray flux one month after reactivation was at least 800× larger than during quiescence, and has been decaying exponentially on a 111 ± 19 day timescale. This high-flux state, together with a radio-derived rotational ephemeris, enabled for the first time the detection of X-ray pulsations for this magnetar. At 5%, the 0.3–6 keV pulsed fraction is comparable to the smallest observed for magnetars. The overall pulsar geometry inferred from polarized radio emission appears to be broadly consistent with that determined 6–8 years earlier. However, rotating vector model fits suggest that we are now seeing radio emission from a different location in the magnetosphere than previously. This indicates a novel way in which radio emission from magnetars can differ from that of ordinary pulsars. The torque on the neutron star is varying rapidly and unsteadily, as is common for magnetars following outburst, having changed by a factor of 7 within six months of reactivation.


Background Currently, there is sparse data available on the relationship between coronary heart disease (CHD) and its risk factors estimated by the Framingham Risk Score (FRS) in Korea. This is particularly true when looking at risk factors of CHD associated with the FRS after adjustment for other covariates especially in healthy subjects. Methodology/Principal Findings We conducted a prospective cohort study to examine the association between the risk factors of CHD and the risk for CHD estimated by FRS in 15,239 men in 2005 and 2010. The FRS is based on six coronary risk factors: gender, age, total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol, systolic blood pressure (BP), and smoking habit. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to analyze the relationships between the FRS and risk factors for CHD. This study reported that apolipoproetein B (apoB), apoA-I, apoB/apoA-I, alcohol intake, log-transformed TG, log-transformed hsCRP, LDL-cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes, regular exercise, and BMI were significantly associated with the FRS. Above all, the partial R-square of apoB was 14.77%, which was overwhelmingly bigger than that of other variables in model V. This indicated that apoB accounted for 14.77% of the variance in FRS. Conclusion/Significance In this study, apoB was found to be the most important determinant for the future development of CHD during a 5-year follow-up in healthy Korean men.


Free and fair elections are cornerstones of democracy. In India, electronic voting machines (EVMs) were introduced with the objective of reducing electoral fraud. We exploit the phased roll-out of the EVMs in state assembly elections to study its impact on electoral fraud, democracy, and development.
Our main findings are:
(i) Introductions of EVMs led to a significant decline in electoral frauds, particularly in politically sensitive states which were subjected to frequent re-polls due to electoral rigging.
(ii) It strengthened the weaker and the vulnerable sections of the society (women and the scheduled castes and tribe) who were now more likely to cast their vote.
(iii) It made the electoral process more competitive whereby the winning margin and the vote share of the winning party declined.
(iv) Using the luminosity data, we find that EVMs led to an increase in the provision of electricity. (v) Lastly, we find evidence that EVMs resulted in significant decline in crimes, such as murder and rape (violence against women).


The purpose of this research study was to understand how acculturation affects TibetanAmerican high school students' ability to develop a new identity considering many variables and how that identity relates to different parts of their life and issues related to that both at home with parents and other significant relationships in life. The aspects explored are the rate of acculturation, age of arrival, familial relationship, community involvement, and level of cultural practice at home. This research paper will integrate past studies about different Asian American communities and specific issues affecting youth in an attempt to understand the current group of Tibetan American high school student's experience with acculturation. Factors such as cultural integration, defining Tibetan cultural identity, managing family roles and expectations, and managing two identities emerged from the data as primary themes. These findings support some of the past research studies about Asian American youths, yet it also shows the differences in cultural specific issues affecting immigrants and refugee populations within same racial background. The major findings indicate the need for further research to assess and understand the needs of cultural specific communities in order to provide effective assessment, service delivery, treatment planning, interventions and resources.


The four principles approach (principlism) is widely implemented in medical curricula. However, there is ongoing debate about the "universality" of this approach. A frequent criticism is that principlism reflects Western ideals such as the importance of individual rights. Some Asian scholars have argued that Asian bioethics is essentially different from Western approaches. This paper reports on a qualitative study investigating the impact of "Western-developed" medical ethics teaching on clinical experiences of 40 medical students in Malaysia. Our data suggest the possibility of shared understandings of ethical issues across different cultures. Our research also demonstrates that ethics education can be enhanced by tailoring the content to specific cultural contexts. The debate over the application of the four principles approach is frequently couched as a tension between the acceptance of either universal values or cultural norms. However, student responses suggest that it is possible to mediate between "the universal" and "the particular."


Sharing responsibility in social decision-making helps individuals use the flexibility of the collective context to benefit themselves by claiming credit for good outcomes or avoiding the blame for bad outcomes. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we examined the neuronal basis of the impact that social context has on this flexible sense of responsibility. Participants performed a gambling task in various social contexts and reported feeling less responsibility when playing as a member of a team. A reduced MEG outcome processing effect was observed as a function of decreasing responsibility at 200 ms post outcome onset and was centred over parietal and pre-central brain regions. Prior to outcome revelation in socially made decisions, an attenuated motor preparation signature at 500 ms after stimulus onset was found. A boost in reported responsibility for positive outcomes in social contexts was associated with increased activity in regions related to social and reward processing. Together, these results show that sharing responsibility with others reduces agency, influencing pre-outcome motor preparation and post-outcome processing, and provides opportunities to flexibly claim credit for positive outcomes.


Founded in 1994 as a family endeavour, the Zabludowicz Collection has rapidly become one of the world's leading independent contemporary art collections. Comprising over 3,000 works by more than 500 artists, it continues to grow and evolve each day.

Zabludowicz Collection: 20 Years presents work by 32 leading international artists acquired over this period. Profiling practices linked by an attitude of material and conceptual experimentation, it highlights the diversity within the Collection and the energy that defines the process of collecting. Four themes operate as a framework within the exhibition: body, objects, abstraction and display. These ideas often intersect within individual works, as well as connecting across the different gallery spaces.

Highlights include a room tracing the roots of the Collection in 1990s London, featuring artists who altered the landscape of contemporary art in the city and the UK, including Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin. Rarely seen works by pioneering and influential international artists such as Sigmar Polke, Isa Genzken and Christopher Wool also feature, along with dramatic transformations of the gallery's church architecture, such as Jim Lambie's colourful floor intervention Zobop (Fluorescent), 2006. In addition there are newly reworked single-room installations by Samara Golden, Elizabeth Price, and a collaborative piece, Stage Fright, by Laura Buckley, Haroon Mirza and Dave Maclean. This exhibition is a celebration of just some of the many incredible artists, both emerging and established, who have been influential in shaping the identity of the Collection and of art today.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full programme of events and a new publication.

The publication will feature three specially commissioned texts by critic JJ Charlesworth, independent writer, curator Ellen Mara De Wachter and cultural historian Timotheus Vermeulen, alongside an interview between Anita Zabludowicz and Gregor Muir, Executive Director of the ICA.

The essays are being made available to download during the course of the exhibition. 'How to thrive' by Ellen Mara De Wachter, Dr. Timotheus Vermeulen's 'Snap!' and 'What Does the Emerging?' by JJ Charlesworths are all available online.

Curated by Elizabeth Neilson and Paul Luckraft.


We report the electric field induced thickness variations of homeotropically oriented free standing films of a smectic (C* or A*) FLCE prepared from cross - linkable ferroelectric polysiloxanes. The changes in optical path length in free standing ferroelectric liquid crystal elastomer films have been detected by means of interferometric measurements at both the first and second harmonic of the exciting electric field (ω=33 Hz). The measured electrostrictive strain is above 2.7% (in the thickness direction) at a electric field around 1.5 MV /m. Our experiment reveal that the inverse piezoelectric and electrostrictive response increases sharply near the Sm-C* - Sm-A* phase transition temperature. Also X-ray reflection measurements on a spin cast FLCE film reveal the constriction of smectic layers.


In Benin, as in many low‐income countries, private commercial providers play an important role in
the treatment of malaria.  To design effective interventions for improved access to accurate
diagnosis and effective malaria treatment, there is a need to understand retailer behaviour and
identify the factors that influence their stocking and pricing decisions.  Private commercial retailers
are the last link in a chain of manufacturers, importers and wholesalers and their supply sources are
likely to have an important influence on the price and quality of malaria treatment that consumers
can access.  However, there is limited rigorous evidence on the structure and operation of the
distribution chain for antimalarial drugs that serves the retail sector.
The ACTwatch Supply Chain Study, one of the ACTwatch project components, aims to address this
gap by conducting quantitative and qualitative studies on distribution chains for antimalarials in the
ACTwatch countries (Benin, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Madagascar,
Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia).  Other elements of ACTwatch include Retail Outlet and Household
Surveys led by Population Services International (PSI).  This report presents the results of a cross‐
sectional survey of antimalarial drug wholesalers conducted in Benin in June 2009.


The route choice system and the traffic control system (TCS) constitute two major approaches to mitigating congestion in urban road networks. The interaction between signal control and route choice is considered from a narrower route choice system perspective, with the focus on route choice models for operational purposes. The goal is to analyze the relative performance of alternative route choice models as different assumptions are made about the type of TCS in use. To this end, an agent-based framework for formulating different route choice models is defined, and this framework is integrated with a microscopic traffic simulation environment. Within the framework, each agent's memory is updated repeatedly (daily) to reflect available prior individual and social experience, and then a route is chosen by a probabilistic sequential decision-making process. Several previously developed route choice models from the literature are implemented with the framework, and their performance, along with some additional hybrid models that are suggested by the modeling framework, is evaluated on two simulated real-world systems: a 32-intersection road network in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, running with a SYNCHRO-generated coordinated timing plan and the same road network running with the scalable urban traffic control (SURTRAC) adaptive TCS. The results show that specific route choice models perform differentially when applied in conventional and adaptive traffic control settings and that better overall network performance for all route choice models is achieved in the adaptive control setting. This unified framework also makes it possible to analyze the performance impact of route choice model components and to formulate better-performing hybrid models.


Urban plazas as public spaces occur in every town and city around the world; however, some plazas are more user-friendly and successful than others. This study examined that "aesthetics" also have a significant impact to determine the extent of success of urban plazas and urban open spaces in combination with other quantitative factors, such as centrality of location, provision of services, and amenities. In addition, this research sought to focus on the relationship between visual characteristics and aesthetic response to urban plazas. Photo elicitation and focus interviews were conducted to identify key visual characteristics as well as to examine aesthetic responses to those characteristics. Eight plazas and designed urban open spaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh, featured in the main study, and research methods included a structured questionnaire to collect data and used semantic differential rating scales as a measuring instrument. Outcomes from this research indicate that a positive aesthetic response was linked to specific visual characteristics of urban plazas, suggesting that this information could be used to more effectively refurbish existing and design new urban plazas as public spaces.


We examined the feeding habits, ontogenetic and seasonal diet variations, and predator size–prey size relationships of common snook, Centropomus undecimalis, in Charlotte Harbor, Florida, through stomach contents analysis. A total of 694 stomachs were extracted from common snook (300–882 mm standard length [SL]) during a 24-month period (March 2000–February 2002); 432 stomachs contained prey items. At least 37 prey taxa were identified, including 19 that had not been previously reported. Fishes made up 71% of the prey by number and 90% by weight. Three prey items made up almost 50% of the diet numerically—Lagodon rhomboides, Anchoa spp., and Farfantepenaeus duorarum. Seven species made up more than 60% of the diet by weight—L. rhomboides, Cynoscion nebulosus, Mugil gyrans, Bairdiella chrysoura, Synodus foetens, Orthopristis chrysoptera, and Mugil cephalus. An ontogenetic shift in prey preference was identified in adult common snook at around 550 mm SL. Smaller individuals (300–549 mm SL) ate more F. duorarum, palaemonid shrimp, cyprinodontids, and Eucinostomus spp. than did larger individuals (550–882 mm SL), which ate more S. foetens, ariids, and sciaenids. Significant, positive relationships between predator size and prey size were observed between common snook and L. rhomboides, O. chrysoptera, portunid crabs, and all fish prey combined. Prey size selection contributed to some seasonal differences in their diet. For example, in winter when L. rhomboides are abundant in the estuary and small in size (mean = 23 mm SL), common snook ate few individuals, but they consumed many during summer when larger L. rhomboides (mean = 51 mm SL) were available. In summary, common snook are opportunistic predators that feed on a wide variety of prey and exploit specific-sized prey that are abundant in their environment.


This article reviews the authoritarian regimes, and the subsequent transitions to democracy, that existed in Latin America in the last third of the 20th Century. It is argued that, unlike in other cases, the political science account of such changes, usually selfdescribed as "transitology", does indeed fit the evidence fairly well. On the other hand, such an account demonstrably fails to illuminate very important features of the experience, notably the relative lack of change in the ownership, structure and practices of the mass media, which is very strongly marked in television. The same large companies that collaborated with, and benefited from, the authoritarian regimes, are still in a dominant position. At the same time, many of the extreme social inequalities that characterise the continent have either hardly been addressed or have actually been exacerbated. It is therefore concluded that these examples are equally well or better explained by a theory that stresses the degree of social continuity between the different political orders.


In this fascinating book, celebrated author Judith Sumner rescues from the pages of history the practical experience and botanical wisdom of generations of Americans. Crossing the disciplines of history, ethnobotany, and horticulture --- and with a flair for the colorful anecdote --- Sumner underlines a part of the American story often ignored or forgotten: how European settlers and their descendents made use of the "strange" new plants they found, as well as the select varieties of foods and medicines they brought with them from other continents. From "turkie wheat" (corn) to "tuckahoe" (a Native American source of starch), Sumner describes the transition from wonderment to daily use, as homesteads were built upon and prospered from the plants of the New World. It is a remarkable story of the interdependence of plants and the American home. Historians, herbalists, home gardeners, and ethnobotanists will find American Household Botany a treasure trove of original research and insight.


Background: Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common type of leukemia among children. Immunoglobulin A is the most numerous immunoglobulin isotype in mucosal secretion. Immunoglobulin A (IgA) deficiency can increase risk of cancer in patients. Since few studies have been done on relation between serum IgA and ALL, this study was attempted to evaluate serum IgA in ALL patients. Materials and Methods: In this descriptive analytical study, 28 pediatric patients diagnosed with ALL with mean age of 6.75± 3.29 ranged from 1 to11 years old and 28 controls with mean age of 7.31± 4.12 ranged from 2 to 12 years old were chosen from Shahid Sadoughi Hospital. Serum IgA was measured by immunotorbidometric method (Pars Azmoon Kit, Iran). Pearson and Independent t test were used for the analysis of data. Results: In this study, the mean level of IgA was lower in patients with ALL (82.5± 21.3 mg/dl) in comparison to control group (113.2± 26.62 mg/dl). Moreover, there was significant difference between two groups (P<0.01). Regarding patients age, no significant difference was seen either (P>0.05). Conclusion: According to the results of the present study, the serum level of IgA was significantly lower in ALL pediatric patients than the control group; however, it was in normal range in both groups. More studies are needed to strongly conclude IgA deficiency as a new risk factor or as a new marker of ALL in children. Other immunoglobulins are recommended to be considered in patients with ALL in further studies.


This paper contributes to the limited research on roles ICT can play in impression-management strategies and is based on case studies done in the Swedish Police. It also gives a theoretical contribution by adopting a holistic approach to explain how ICT can contribute to giving a misleading picture of conditions. Output generated by ICT has nowadays a central role in follow-up activities and decision-making. Even if this type of output, often in colourful, presentable, graphical arrangements, gives the impression of being accurate and reliable there is a risk of defective data quality. The phenomena can be described as a process divided into five steps. The first step is about how the data is generated and/or collected. The second step is linked to how the data is registered. The third step is about the output generated from the ICT-systems. The fourth step is how the output of ICT is selected for presentation. The fifth step concerns how output generated by ICT is interpreted. This paper shows that ICT can easily be used in impression-management strategies. For example, that personnel take shortcuts to affect the statistics rather than applying methods that may give the desired effects.


This chapter presents an analytical pathological appraisal of elite thinking and mobilization in Mexico after the Trump administration withdrew from TPP and forced Mexico to engage in NAFTA renegotiations. It examines the strategies developed by political and economic elites in response to the threat of trade war coming from Mexico's most important trade partner. This analysis shows that, although Mexican elites developed sophisticated heuristics in order to confront the immediate challenge from the government in Washington DC, they did not engage in what should be a very important debate about Mexico's role in the reconfigurations of global trade and order. This is a missed opportunity for Mexico which could affect its role in the ongoing reconfigurations of global trade and law, and thus its future stature in world politics.


A series of adducts of o-hexyl dithiocarbonate of nickel(II) [(C6H13OCS2)2 Ni] have been synthesized in 1:2 molar ratio by the reaction of aqueous solution of NiCl2.6H2O with aqueous solution of potassium salt of o-hexyl dithiocarbonate. These complexes were further reacted with nitrogen donor ligands to obtain donor stabilized complex of the type [(C6H13OCS2)2 Ni.nL], (L=2-,3-,4cyanopyridines and 2-,3-,4-aminopyridines, n=2). These adducts were characterized by elemental analysis, molar conductance, magnetic susceptibility measurements, IR and electronic spectral studies. The spectral studies revealed the trans octahedral geometry of the adducts around the Ni(II) metal ion. All the adducts were paramagnetic and non-electrolytic in nature. These complexes have also depicted the potential antifungal activity against the fungus Curvularia lunata.


Smart tourism, which provides rich tourism support to tourists, is becoming increasingly common, but does not reflect the experiences of individual tourists. To provide richer tourism support, we have to recognize the psychological state of each tourist, such as emotions and satisfaction level. We previously reported that we could estimate the psychological states of tourists by measuring and analyzing their unconscious behaviors (head movements, body movements, facial expressions, and vocal expressions) during sightseeing. In this paper, we propose a new method using principal component analysis and support vector machine, which achieves higher performance than the previous method in estimating emotion and satisfaction. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method using the data of 46 participants. The result of the emotion estimation showed that the proposed method achieved unweighted average recall (UAR) of 69% compared to 51.3% for the previous method for the three-class classification task. The satisfaction level estimation achieved mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.008 for the proposed method compared to 1.033 for the previous method for a seven-level regression task. In addition, we developed a new model for estimating emotion and satisfaction considering weather conditions during sightseeing, assuming that the emotions and satisfaction of tourists are affected by the weather conditions. For the emotion estimation, UAR increased from 53.8% to 58.0% and for the satisfaction levels estimation, MAE decreased from 1.244 to 1.238 compared to the previous model for the data of 24 participants. We believe that considering weather conditions is effective in estimating tourists' emotion and satisfaction.


Just as semantic hashing [Salakhutdinov and Hinton2009] can accelerate information retrieval, binary valued embeddings can significantly reduce latency in the retrieval of graphical data. We introduce a simple but effective model for learning such binary vectors for nodes in a graph. By imagining the embeddings as independent coin flips of varying bias, continuous optimization techniques can be applied to the approximate expected loss. Embeddings optimized in this fashion consistently outperform the quantization of both spectral graph embeddings and various learned real-valued embeddings, on both ranking and pre-ranking tasks for a variety of datasets.


Poplar short rotation coppice (SRC) plays an important role in biomass production because they are largely employed both in industry or used as solid fuel [1]. Recently there is a great interest in the below-ground biomass recovery (stump-root system) of poplar SRC because: a) it accounts for about 20% of the total plant dry weight [2] and the average poplar chips can yield 18 ton/ha of root biomass; b) it is easily accessible and harvested (sand-loamy soils); c) the root wood often has higher heating values than tops and branches, and may prove to be a better fuel [3]. Furthermore, the removal of the stump-roots systems does not require the payment of a concession, and using efficient recovery systems, the delivered cost might range from 28 to 66 €/ton [4]. The most common method to dispose waste from forestry biomass is combustion, which is an environmentally unfriendly process. Recently a remarkable interest has been focused on microwave assisted pyrolysis (MAP) of biomass due to the fast and efficient heating and the appealing characteristics of the products obtained [5]. Biomass are able to absorb microwave (MW) and even if a MW absorber is not strictly necessary, it may have some positive effects on the quality of products and pyrolysis time [6]. In this work MAP of residues from SRC of different poplar clones have been studied in a multimode batch oven.. MAP of stumproots and leaves residues from different poplar clones were thoroughly investigated to produce high quantity and quality of bio-oils. They were obtained with high yield (up to 32.0%) and small water percentage (up to 17.5 %)and showed low density and viscosity and they were fluid at room temperature. Among bio-oils a sample with high acetic acid concentration (543.3 mg/mL) was obtained. Bio-oils were characterized with several analytical techniques: 1H-NMR, IR-ATR, density and viscosity measurements, and an original and innovative quatitative GC-MS method[7, 8]. These techniques let to make possible a detailed study on the bio-oils to define a correlation between their chemical and rheological properties with the parameters of the process.


The Family of Integrated Rapid Response Equipment (FIRRE) is an advanced technology demonstration program intended to develop a family of affordable, scalable, modular, and logistically supportable unmanned systems to meet urgent operational force-protection needs and requirements worldwide. The near-term goal is to provide the best available unmanned ground systems to the warfighter in Iraq and Afghanistan. The overarching long-term goal is to develop a fully-integrated, layered force-protection system of systems for our forward deployed forces that is networked with the future force C4ISR systems architecture. The intent of the FIRRE program is to reduce manpower requirements, enhance force-protection capabilities, and reduce casualties through the use of unmanned systems. FIRRE is sponsored by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Acquisitions, Technology and Logistics (OUSD AT&L), and is managed by the Product Manager, Force Protection Systems (PM-FPS), Fort Belvior, VA. The command-and-control element of FIRRE is the Joint Battlespace Command and Control System (JBC2S) for manned and unmanned assets, which is based upon the Mobile Detection Assessment Response System (MDARS) Multiple Resource Host Architecture (MRHA), modified to operate as a single application program using standard DoD mapping and data distribution services. JBC2S is an evolution of the MRHA that leverages over 10 years of development in unmanned systems command-and-control. It implements the functionality of the MRHA under the dynamically configurable and highly modular architecture of the Multi-Robot Operator Control Unit (MOCU). JBC2S is a network-centric, geospatial command and control system that allows the field commander and above to plan and execute missions utilizing multiple and disparate manned and unmanned assets. It utilizes standard map formats (GeoTIFF, DNC, CADRG) for displaying map data and for tracking asset placement and movement.


Many real-world domains contain multiple agents that play distinct roles in achieving an overall mission. For instance, in tactical battle scenarios, a tank fulfills a much different role than a foot soldier. When learning an overall multi-agent strategy, it is clearly advantageous to have knowledge of the agent roles and the typical behavioral characteristics associated with each role. The goal of this paper is to learn and transfer information about agent role structure in the setting of multi-task reinforcement learning. We present a hierarchical Bayesian framework for representing and learning a distribution over the unknown set of agent roles and policies from a sequence of related multi-agent RL problems. This knowledge is then transferred to new problems by treating the distribution as an informative prior over the roles and policies of individual agents. In particular, in this work, the prior is used to initialize policy-gradient search. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this role transfer method on a real-time strategy game in the context of a sequence of tactical battles, each involving different numbers and types of individual units. The results show that our approach is able to find a set of underlying roles and use them to significantly speed up learning on novel problems.


We calculate the demand for heating at the household level by integrating the technological data on the heating needs of different types of buildings with the information available in Istat's Household Budget Survey. This new dataset is used to estimate a measure of energy poverty (EP) that is not conditioned by household preferences. The new measure identifies households suffering from EP as those that become "poor" – according to Istat's relative poverty measure – after purchasing a minimum basket of energy services. Given the high granularity of the information used, the proposed threshold could be used as part of Istat's revised absolute poverty measure. This also contributes to the monitoring and implementation of the policies that each EU member state should set up against EP as required under the Energy Union.


Examining uptakes of the "homeless blog" (a weblog written by a person who is experiencing or has experienced homelessness), this essay investigates constraints facing marginalized rhetors in their attempts to address rhetorical exigencies in innovative ways via "online genres." Such rhetors face an environment of public meta-discourse in which readers may mischaracterize their texts according to analogous or "antecedent" (Jamieson 1975) genres. This essay proposes that to understand how rhetors negotiate constraints on their social action and build consensus about their discourse in such conditions, it is useful to consider public meta-genre as informed by "face-work," Erving Goffman's (1955; 1959) theory of how subjects engaged in self-presentation negotiate "working consensus" (Goffman 1959), provisionally-agreed-upon understanding of situations and participants. Five months ago, Barbieux, started a Web log about his life (TheHomelessGuy.net). His goals for the " blog " were modest. Mainly, he wanted to show people a different side to homelessness. … The blog started as a whim. He'd heard about blogging, the diarist-style writing that has swept the Web , through friends. (emphasis mine) (Luo 2003, Mar. 17) A few weeks ago, Anya Peters was homeless and living in a car, …. Her contact with the outside world was through an online diary . But this blog , published under the name of Wandering Scribe, was picked up by readers around the world and has provided a remarkable way out of her homelessness. She has written her own escape story . The story of her homelessness and her previous life is going to be turned into a book, with a publishing deal signed and the hardback scheduled to reach the bookshops next Spring. (emphasis mine) (Coughlan 2006, May 31) [Gary] Trudeau draws a street person going to collect his e-mail at the public library, where addresses had been handed out free to the homeless. Looking for potential employers' responses to his job resume, he posts an address that puts the hype about the universal democracy built into the technoscientific information system into perspective: lunatic@street_level. (Haraway 1997: 6)


EGE features standard measuring elements for temperature in a robust and easy-to-install design which is best suitable for the respective industrial application or automation task available for ATEX Zone 22 or with GL certificates as well. Examples are the TGM 025-03 for monitoring of hot gases up to 1000 °C (available with evaluation unit as an option) or the TGM 050-TS for monitoring of threshold temperatures for overheat protection. Our temperature sensors TGB in standard enclosures with resistanceor analog signal exit complement our range of products.


'(From) A to B (and back)' is an article published in Printed Project (issue 13, July 2010). The issue theme was 'Virtual Fictional' and O'Riley's contribution is a reflection on narrative, reading, uncertainty and de-familiarization, and how these ideas have been explored in some of his art works. This article focuses on the notion of a 'distributed' work, a work that can be made up from a number of elements where the viewer is free to draw associations or connections. It explores writings by Sterne, Shklovsky, Flusser and Todorov and considers syntactical terms such as hypotaxis and parataxis as ways of generating, thinking about or looking at artworks. Hypotaxis is often used to establish a narrative sequence or the progression of an argument. Its forms can lead to determined meanings. In paratactical forms, on the contrary, connections are left open. These terms were seen as useful ways to reflect on the lateral, open-endedness of forms of art practice. The article features text and images of O'Riley's work as well as images from Sterne's novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1762), and from the NASA/Hubble Ultra Deep Field astronomical observation (2004). The latter shows a long-exposure view of the cosmos teeming with galaxies in what was previously considered a vacant or empty portion of space. The article's significance can be seen in the way it brings together seemingly disparate images and ideas to reflect on the sense in which narrative and the construction of interpretation are active elements within one's response to a work, and to lay bare some of the thinking behind a work's making.

These ideas were also explored in an artist's book published the following year. Conceived as a kind of calendar, the book - A Farmer's Almanac - is structured around ancient/antique names for the full moon, often derived from Native American appellations. Each page has associated names for each month's moon. The names have appeared in various North American farmers' almanacs although there is some correspondence with British usage. The bookwork also features a constructed image of the full moon generated by Dr Tony Cook of Aberystwyth University from the database sent back from the moon by the Clementine spacecraft in 1994. (http://www.ponsonbypress.net; London: Ponsonby Press, October 2011; pp32; ISBN 9780956228697)


Summary HNF4A gene mutations have been reported in cases of transient and persistent hyperinsulinaemic hypoglycaemia of infancy (HHI), particularly in families with adulthood diabetes. The case of a patient with HHI, liver impairment and renal tubulopathy due to a mutation in HNF4A is reported. Learning points: Urine specimen study in cases of HHI with diazoxide response is necessary to rule out specific metabolic conditions (l-3-hydroxyacyl-coenzyme A dehydrogenase deficiency) or tubular renal involvement. Hyperinsulinaemic hypoglycaemia due to the heterozygous mutation (p.Arg63Trp, c. 187C > T) in the HNF4A gene is associated with renal tubulopathy and liver involvement. Follow-up of patients diagnosed of HHI is mandatory to detect associated conditions.


The genus Hygrohypnum Lindb. is studied for the Iberian Peninsula, based mainly on herbarium specimens kept in BM, PC, S and the main Iberian herbaria. Eight species of Hygrohypnum occur in the Iberian Peninsula: Hygrohypnum cochlearifolium, H. duriusculum, H. eugyrium, H. luridum, H. molle, H. ochraceum, H. smithii and H. styria-cum. Of these, H. eugyrium and H. cochlearifolium are considered to be extinct in the Iberian Peninsula. Hygrohypnum alpestre and H. polare are definitively excluded from the Iberian bryophyte flora, since its occurrence at present or in the past could not be confirmed. Only the occurrence of Hygrohypnum ochraceum has been confirmed for Portugal. Keys, descriptions, illustrations, SEM photographs and distribution maps of the species of Hygrohypnum in the Iberian Peninsula are provided.


This paper shows that subjective survey information on survival expectations can be used to improve the out-of-sample predictions of a dynamic structural model of labor supply, benefit claiming and saving. We consider three approaches to model survival: life tables, average subjective expectations and individual-specific estimates based on reported survival probabilities. The models are estimated on Dutch data from the 1990s, a period during which workers could retire from age 59 at no actuarial penalty to pension benefits. Such actuarial adjustments were introduced in the early 2000s and we use data from the period 2006-2016 to evaluate the accuracy of the counterfactual predictions. While the three models yield different preference estimates, their withinsample fit is similar. Out-of-sample forecasts do differ markedly. Both models based on fixed expectations anticipate a 5-year increase in the average retirement age in the new regime, compared with an observed increase of 2.6 years. The model with heterogenous expectations, on the other hand, predicts a more realistic increase of 2.5 years. We conclude that expectations matter when it comes to counterfactual predictions, even if different combinations of preferences and expectations appear equivalent within a given institutional setting.


'Signal to Noise does not entertain. It scratches, it provokes, it frightens. It tells you things you don't want to know but then twists you inside out by saying, look harder and see the poignance, the beauty of light dancing on life's edge, truth that is as simple and direct as death' Jonathan Carroll, from his introduction. Originally commissioned and serialised in The Face, the comic strip Signal to Noise was then expanded and revised for its launch on the VG Graphics list in 1992 with an introduction by Jonathan Caroll. It tells the story of a film director, somewhere in London, dying of cancer. His life's crowning achievement, his greatest film, would have told the story of a European village as the last hour of AD 999 approached - the midnight which the villagers were convinced would bring with it Armageddon. Now that story will never be told. But he still pointlessly works it out in his head, making a film that no one will ever see. No one but the reader.


Computers have the potential to significantly extend the practice of popular music based on steady tempo and mostly determined form. There are significant challenges to overcome, however, due to constraints including accurate timing based on beats and adherence to a form or structure despite possible changes that may occur, possibly even during performance. We describe an approach to synchronization across media that takes into account latency due to communication delays and audio buffering. We also address the problem of mapping from a conventional score with repeats and other structures to an actual performance, which can involve both "flattening" the score and rearranging it, as is common in popular music. Finally, we illustrate the possibilities of the score as a bidirectional user interface in a real-time system for music performance, allowing the user to direct the computer through a digitally displayed score, and allowing the computer to indicate score position back to human performers.


Arlene A. Paris COGNITIVE WRITING STRATEGIES 2002/2003 Dr. Stanley Urban Master of Arts in Learning Disabilities The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of cognitive strategy instruction in teaching writing. Writing is a process that results in a product. The learning that takes place will be continually developing and changing. Our goal as teachers of writing is to have our students produce quality written products. How does one accomplish this? Strategy instruction which includes metacognition and self-regulation can empower the writer. Students develop as writers when cognitive strategy instruction is used in the classroom. It requires knowledge, strategies, motivation, and practice with constructive feedback. (Harris & Graham, 1996) The individuals who participated in this study are 20 students from this researcher's elementary classroom. The 9 males and 11 females, ranging in age from 8 years 4 months to 9 years 8 months have been selected as a convenience group (N=20) of third grade students. They have been in this researcher's classroom since September, 2002. The participants were selected because they are readily available to this examiner. The accessible population of interest is all third grade classes in this examiner's school. Generalization of results will be to this population. The spontaneous writing sample entitled "My Secret Place" was utilized as both the pre-test and post-test writing activity. The participants as members of this examiner's class were assessed on October 14, 2002. Self-regulated strategy instruction was subsequently implemented in this researcher's classroom. The six basic stages of instruction which are: (1) Develop and activate background knowledge, (2) Discuss it, (3) Model it, (4) Memorize it, (5) Support it, and (6) Independent performance, were used by this researcher to introduce writing strategies. Mnemonics were used to facilitate retention of components of the final product. The post writing sample was given to the 20 participants on March 11, 2003. The writing prompt was identical to the prompt given to the study group on October 14, 2002. The samples were scored holistically defining performance levels based on written descriptors. Numeric scores range from a score of 1-Inadequate Command of written language to a score of 6-Superior Command of written language. There was an increase of 1.0 points in the mean scores from the pre-test (2.5) to the post-test (3.55).