Although the performance of the economy in 2001 was reasonably satisfactory, there
are worrying signs that the economic environment is deteriorating rapidly. The
economy has managed to survive one major domestic shock in the form of the foot
and mouth crisis without a major downturn. However, the current international
situation has far more serious repercussions and may well lead to the first significant
recession in the UK for ten years. In particular the downturn of economic activity in
the United States is likely to lead to problems throughout the world and, although
both the Federal Reserve in the US and the Bank of England in the UK have
responded by relaxing monetary policy, this is unlikely to be enough to offset the
recessionary forces which have become evident in the second half of the year.


Membrane microdomains/nanodomains are sub-compartments of the plasma membrane enriched in sphingolipids and characterized by their unique protein composition. They play important roles in regulating plant development and plant-microbe interactions including mutualistic symbiotic interactions. Several protein families are associated with the microdomain fraction of biological membranes such as flotillins, prohibitins, and remorins. More recently, GmFWL1, a FWL/CNR protein exclusively expressed in the soybean nodule, was functionally characterized as a new microdomain-associated protein. Interestingly, GmFWL1 is homologous to the tomato FW2-2 protein, a major regulator of tomato fruit development. In this review, we summarize the knowledge gained about the biological, cellular, and physiological functions of members of the FWL/CNR family across various plant species. The role of the FWL/CNR proteins is also discussed within the scope of their evolution and transcriptional regulation.


In the software testing contest, practitioners and researcher's are invited to test their test approaches against similar approaches to evaluate pros and cons and which is perceivably the best. The 2017 iteration of the contest focused on Graphical User Interface-driven testing, which was evaluated on the testing tool TESTONA. The winner of the competition was announced at the closing ceremony of the international conference on software testing (ICST), 2017.


D-002 is a mixture of 6 high molecular weight primary alcohols purified from beeswax with anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. This study investigated the in vitro genotoxic potential of D-002 to produce chromosomal aberrations (CA) in peripheral blood lymphocytes. Fresh suspensions of BWA were added (500; 750, 1000, 2500 and 5000 μg/mL) to cultures with (microsomal liver fraction S9 mix) or without metabolic activation. Concurrent negative (Tween/water vehicle) and positive controls (cyclophosphamide 15 ?g/mL and mitomicyn C (0.3 μg/mL in the tests with and without metabolic activation, respectively) were included. Two hundred (200) metaphases by group were examined and the numbers and frequencies of cells with aberrations and the mitotic index were quantified. D-002 added up to 5 mg/mL of culture did not induce chromosomal aberrations in presence or not of S9 mix compared with negative controls and no trends with the doses were observed. Positive controls evidenced increases on the numbers and frequencies of CA. Mitotic indexes were unchanged with the treatment, which indicates that D-002 does not affect cell proliferation. In conclusion, BWA added in vitro (0.5-5 mg/mL) to peripheral blood lymphocyte cultures did not show evidences of cytotoxic or genotoxic potential in the CA test.


Biologists now engineer transgenic crop varieties that offer farmers a new tool for effectively managing pests. Concern over pest resistance, however, has prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to require resistance management plans. This paper develops an economic model of pest management with pest resistance to estimate the constant proportion of cropland planted in refuge that maximizes farm income over a fixed planning horizon. Results indicate a clear economic tradeoff between the pest control benefits of a transgenic variety and the resistance management benefits afforded by refuge.


Dark Web-Hsinchun Chen 2011-12-17 The University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab (AI Lab) Dark Web project is a long-term scientific research program that aims to study and understand the international terrorism (Jihadist) phenomena via a computational, data-centric approach. We aim to collect "ALL" web content generated by international terrorist groups, including web sites, forums, chat rooms, blogs, social networking sites, videos, virtual world, etc. We have developed various multilingual data mining, text mining, and web mining techniques to perform link analysis, content analysis, web metrics (technical sophistication) analysis, sentiment analysis, authorship analysis, and video analysis in our research. The approaches and methods developed in this project contribute to advancing the field of Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI). Such advances will help related stakeholders to perform terrorism research and facilitate international security and peace. This monograph aims to provide an overview of the Dark Web landscape, suggest a systematic, computational approach to understanding the problems, and illustrate with selected techniques, methods, and case studies developed by the University of Arizona AI Lab Dark Web team members. This work aims to provide an interdisciplinary and understandable monograph about Dark Web research along three dimensions: methodological issues in Dark Web research; database and computational techniques to support information collection and data mining; and legal, social, privacy, and data confidentiality challenges and approaches. It will bring useful knowledge to scientists, security professionals, counterterrorism experts, and policy makers. The monograph can also serve as a reference material or textbook in graduate level courses related to information security, information policy, information assurance, information systems, terrorism, and public policy.


Today, in terms of policy as a fundamental phenomenon, often associate with the concept of bureaucracy in two definitions good and bad. Austria's government structure has some unique features, which is important to analyze, given the fact that the Republic of Lithuania in this field must learn. One of the most important principles in Austria is social partnership, which is accompanied by a democratic political factors and a long history of development. The Republic of Austria joined in the EU since 1995 (Lithuania – in 2004), so the experience and practice of this country is an example for other in local government system is appropriate and purposeful. The Government in the Republic of Lithuania wants to improve the management of the institutional capacity, to manage effectively budget funds, to improve public services for citizens. It is true that the government does not always succeed in achieving those objectives, which are named in the Government program and strategic direction setting of development of Lithuanian documents. Perhaps the most important reason – undemocratic states and the public in the past. Today's fundamental consequence of the Republic of Austria is extremely stable polar state. They noticed a number of political changes in countries that are now gaining political experience. To assess the stability of the Republic of Austria with local political context, it is important to review the country's legal framework, practical application of the active participation of citizens and local institutions. The main Austrian political system of local government in respect of properties are summarized and analyzed in this article. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ppaa.11.3.2502


Fucosidosis is a rare, autosomal recessive lysosomal storage disorder caused by a severe deficiency of alpha-L-fucosidase. Here we present a 27-month-old male who was referred to us for evaluation of developmental delay, which was first detected at age six months. His past medical history was also remarkable for recurrent pulmonary infections and myoclonic seiures. His family history revealed that he was the first living child from a consanguineous marriage. He had a younger sister who died at five months of age from pneumonia who had facial resemblance to the proband, developmental delay and a congenital heart defect. Physical examination revealed length: 81 cm (25-50p), weight: 10.2 kg (25-50p), and head circumference: 49 cm (50-75p). He had a coarse face, hepatomegaly and generalized spasticity. His initial laboratory examination revealed negative urine screening column chromatography for mucopolysaccharidosis. His X-ray findings were consistent with mild form of dysostosis multiplex. Based on clinical and laboratory features, fucosidosis was suspected. Fucosidase enzyme activity was zero. In addition to fucosidosis, thyroid function tests indicated primary hypothyroidism. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the fourth case of fucosidosis diagnosed in Turkey.


Always the focal point in modern times for momentous political, social and cultural upheaval, Berlin has continued, since the fall of the Wall in 1989, to be a city in transition. As the new capital of a reunified Germany it has embarked on a journey of rapid reconfiguration, involving issues of memory, nationhood and ownership. Bertolt Brecht, meanwhile, stands as one of the principal thinkers about art and politics in the 20th century. The 'Street Scene' model, which was the foundation for his theory of an epic theatre, relied precisely on establishing a connection between art's functioning and everyday life. His preoccupation with the ceaselessness of change, an impulse implying rupture and movement as the key characteristics informing the development of a democratic cultural identity, correlates resonantly with the notion of an ever-evolving city. Premised on an understanding of performance as the articulation of movement in space, Street Scenes interrogates what kind of 'life' is permitted to 'flow' in the 'new Berlin'. Central to this method is the flaneur figure, a walker of streets who provides detached observations on the revealing 'detritus of modern urban existence'. Wal


This paper first summarizes the macroeconomic and trade performance of Senegal, emphasizing the limits of traditional exports. It then focuses on three export sectors which have had some success in the past and have good potential for future growth: tourism, horticulture and information technology-enabled services. Sector-specific constraints are identified including beach erosion and hotel quality (tourism), access to land (horticulture), and lack of competition and skilled labour (information technology). Common problems include the absence of strategies and reliable data, tax administration, and the need for a stronger dialogue with the private sector.


This study investigates the corporate decision to voluntarily purchase premium-priced Green Electricity (GE) by examining the internal and external factors which influence environmental decision making. In-depth interviews were conducted with eight paired firms in Alberta, Canada. Firms purchasing GE typically employed a top-down decision-making process, while firms characterised by a participative process did not. An internal driver (environmental champion) was more significant than external factors (regulations, stakeholder pressure) at influencing firms to voluntarily adopt GE purchasing, while organisational culture was found to moderate the effect of drivers. Cost is a common inhibitor to green purchase decisions, but customer (oil industry) perceptions and government regulations were also identified in some cases.


Background Isolated mediastinal lymphadenopathy is an increasingly common finding as a result of the increasing use of cross-sectional thoracic imaging. We investigated the performance of endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial needle-aspiration (EBUS-TBNA) in establishing a pathological diagnosis in patients with isolated mediastinal lymphadenopathy. Methods We retrospectively analysed all consecutive EBUS-TBNA examinations performed over a 4-year period at a single tertiary referral centre. Final diagnoses were made using pathology reports, correlated with clinical features and the results of any other investigations. Results In total, 126 EBUS-TBNA examinations were performed to investigate isolated mediastinal lymphadenopathy. A positive pathological diagnosis was made following EBUS-TBNA in 54 cases (43%). When the results of further investigations and variable radiological follow up were included, the final sensitivity of EBUS-TBNA for making a diagnosis in isolated mediastinal lymphadenopathy was 80% (95% CI 69%-89%). Conclusions This study confirms that EBUS-TBNA has acceptable sensitivity for detecting both benign and malignant pathologies underlying isolated mediastinal lymphadenopathy.


Aesthetics has generated thorny and contentious problems for philosophy going back to its earliest roots in ancient Greek culture. Plato held little esteem for art, since in his mind it stands at two removes from reality, being the imitation of the visible world, which is itself an imitation of the world of the Forms. Moreover, insofar as art tends to arouse the emotions - or at least the wrong ones - it was irrational and to be repudiated. His pupil, Aristotle, took a somewhat more sensible approach, seeing art, especially tragic performances (and likely comic ones as well, though we possess only small fragments of his writings on this topic) as useful in training the public how to correctly engage emotions, an essential element in his ethical theory. The role of emotions has been of special interest in aesthetics even up to the contemporary era. In one of the more influential aesthetic theories of the last century, and still heavily anthologized today, Clive Bell offered that what distinguished the perception of true artworks is that they elicit from perceivers a particular kind of emotion namely, the aesthetic emotion, as he called it.1 Without denying that emotions regularly, perhaps always, play some role in our interactions with works of art, Bell's critics have noted that his theory failed to give any satisfactory account of just what an aesthetic emotion itself is, what, aside from being elicited by an artwork, made an emotion aesthetic such that it could be truly distinguished from "regular" emotions.2 Bell's basic hypothesis is in fact slightly more involved, founded on two reciprocal claims; on the one hand, as just mentioned, all and only works of art provoke an "aesthetic emotion"; no two works will produce an identical emotion, but the emotions any two true artworks do produce will be aesthetic not "ordinary" - whatever that would be by contrast.3 In other words, aestiietic emotion is a completely new breed of emotion, wholly different in kind from die ordinary emotions of the dayto-day. Bell does not have in mind that some ordinary emotions are occasionally experienced as having an aesthetic quality; he is clear to state that aesthetic emotions have nothing whatsoever to do with the emotions of everyday Ufe, they neither percolate up from daily concerns nor redirect us to back to that life.4 On the other hand, Bell speculated further that if it were possible to examine all such works which provoke an aesthetic emotion, it would be possible to determine at least a single common element which each and every work possessed that could account for the provocation of this alleged aesthetic emotion in the viewer. That single common element Bell called "significant form," and he held it to be present in any work of visual art in which the lines, shapes, colors, textures, and so on were so related as to embody significant form and thus rouse one's aesthetic emotions. Thus only works that provoke aesthetic emotions by embodying significant form count as true works of art. But despite the prima facie objectivity of this latter criterion it is ultimately reducible to the subject's idiosyncratic dispositions. Subjectivism of this sort has perennially plagued aesthetics. Bell recognized his vulnerability to such criticism, stating that, "it may be objected that I am making aesthetics a purely subjective business, since my only data are personal experiences of a particular emotion . . . that the objects that provoke this emotion vary with each individual, and that therefore a system of aesthetics can have no objective validity."5 As the first section of this essay will show, Bell's response to this charge is to come down with both feet firmly on the side of subjectivity, and in so doing not only does he not explain the relation between the elements of the work and the purported objective presence of significant form, he also fails to account both for how it is that the subject comes to recognize it in those cases, and how the subject then gets from that moment of consciousness to the moment of the alleged aesthetic emotion. …


Objectives: To develop a pharmaceutics laboratory module on compounded sterile products for the second year pharmacy students as preparation for an institutional pharmacy experiential course. Method: A 5-week lab module was designed and implemented as part of the Pharmaceutics Lab Course to provide training in the basic skills of sterile product compounding. The module included techniques in the handling of sterile products, aseptic techniques, medium risk products, and hazardous products. A practical exam was given at the end of this module to ensure student competency. Upon completion of the lab module, students enrolled in a required 4-week institutional pharmacy experiential course (IPPE-2), where students were required to compound a minimum of 10 sterile products. Students were then asked to participate in a survey assessing the effectiveness and relevance of the lab module as preparation for their IPPE-2. Results: The sterile product lab module was offered in the spring semester with 75 students enrolled. All students passed the sterile product lab module and continued onto the IPPE-2 course during the following summer. The student survey indicated that the students felt well prepared for the IPPE-2 and that the preceptors were satisfied with their prior training in sterile compounding. The average scores ranged from 4.8 6.5 (scale of 1-7) for the various products addressed in the lab module. Implications: The 5-week sterile product lab module progressively prepares the students with the basic skills and knowledge in compounding sterile products. This preparedness allows the students to transition smoothly into the subsequent institutional pharmacy experiential course. Copyright © 2011 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy Disciplines Education | Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences Comments Poster presented at Faculty Scholarship Celebration, St. John Fisher College, October 25, 2012. Originally presented at the 112th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, San Antonio, TX, July 9-13, 2011. Abstracts of posters presented at the conference are available through PubMed at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3142979/ Authors Fang Zhao, Christine R. Birnie, Anthony Corigliano, Susan Hughes, John Loughner, and Stephen Valentine This poster presentation is available at Fisher Digital Publications: http://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/pharmacy_facpub/7


If simplified, every information retrieval problem can be solved when the information need implied by its expression has been identified. We are interested in the criteria used in realising a good information retrieval problem expression. We have listed these criteria through some principles and maxims which first characterized the communication between two persons are applied. We choose to use the gricean maxims because they are the most favoured for this type of situation. Secondly, we have tried to identify some others principles that can be used to realise a good information retrieval problem expression. The principles by Grice can not resolve all forms of error associated with this particular form of communication. In our work, we defined three other principles namely: adhesion principle, reformulation principle, memorization principle. We give some examples of situations where the principles we have formulated are not applicable and the consequences. We present the possible applications of our new model: MIRABEL, which can help in the description of information retrieval problem from. It also compels its user to use essential good expression principle implicitly.


We prove that the two-fluid Landau hydrodynamic equations, when applied to a gas interacting with infinite scattering length (unitary gas) in the presence of harmonic trapping, admit exact scaling solutions of mixed compressional and surface nature. These solutions are characterized by a linear dependence of the velocity field on the spatial coordinates and a temperature-independent frequency which is calculated in terms of the parameters of the trap. Our results are derived in the regime of small amplitude oscillations and hold both below and above the superfluid phase transition. They apply to isotropic as well as to deformed configurations, thereby providing a generalization of Castin's theorem [Castin, C. R. Phys. 5, 407 (2004)] holding for isotropic trapping. Our predictions agree with the experimental findings in resonantly interacting atomic Fermi gases. The breathing scaling solution, in the presence of isotropic trapping, is also used to prove the vanishing of two bulk viscosity coefficients in the superfluid phase.


There is strong interest in broadening engineering education, bringing in more liberal arts content as well as additional subjects such as economics, business and law, with which engineers now have to be familiar. There are also cogent arguments for balancing against what is now the almost exclusively quantitative nature of the curriculum, adding more elements that relate to the actual practice of engineering, and structuring engineering education so as to provide multiple and later entry points, which should enable more informed career choices and make engineering attractive to a more diverse range of the population. Many have also sought a change in the level of the professional engineering degree from the bachelor"s to the graduate level, which would logically, and probably also necessarily, accompany these changes. However, progress towards such changes in the United States has been marginal, in large part because incentives on the micro- and meso-scales do not match those on the macro-scale. On the other hand, there is much more substantial change in other countries, driven in part by the Bologna process. For the United States to be the last to change would be counter to the goal of retaining higher-functioning engineering jobs in the U. S. What needs to happen in order for the U. S. to change is evaluated.


The purpose of the study was to investigate the differences and relationships in male and female coaches assessment of coachability traits. Subjects were twenty-five male and twenty-five female coaches, The testing included a paired comparison of ten coachability traits, Data were analyzed by a Pearson product-moment coefficient of correlation and analysis of variance. The conclusion of this study was that the two groups of subjects are very similar in the selection of coachability traits.


The Retinal Pigmented Epithelium (RPE) has many functions, one of which is the phagocytosis of shed photoreceptor outer segments (POS). This process is vital to the maintenance of both the RPE and photoreceptors. Outer segment shedding and internalisation are under circadian regulation, such that shedding is followed by a burst of phagocytosis at the onset of light. Annexin 2 is well placed to have a role in this process. Its direct involvement in actin dynamics and association to vesicle membranes during endocytosis may be significant in RPE outer segment phagocytosis, as this process requires extensive re-organisation of actin and re-distribution of membrane on the apical processes of the RPE. This thesis examines cell differentiation in two RPE cell lines and in primary porcine RPE cells, in order to evaluate the best system for conducting phagocytosis experiments.
In vitro experiments provided evidence that annexin 2 localises to the phagocytic cup during POS internalisation but dissociates once internalisation is complete. Following knock down of annexin 2, phagocytosis was shown to decrease. Furthermore annexin 2 was shown to be phosphorylated during phagocytosis. We also found that c-Src is phosphorylated alongside annexin 2 and therefore may phosphorylate annexin 2, which contains a c-Src phosphorylation site. To investigate the circadian aspects of POS phagocytosis by the RPE, apical and basal phagosomes were quantified in the RPE from annexin 2 knock out and wild type eyes, harvested before and after light onset. Phagosomes from eyes harvested one hour after light onset were also mapped relative to Bruch's membrane. The annexin 2 knock out animals lack the characteristic burst of phagocytosis one hour after light onset exhibited in wild type animals. Phagosomes were also retarded in the apical processes one hour after light onset, at the peak of phagocytosis, when they are normally internalised into the cell body for processing and degradation. Lysates from wild type eyes showed that annexin 2 is phosphorylated before light onset along with c-Src and FAK, key molecules in the RPE phagocytic machinery. Importantly, the absence of annexin 2 in knock out eyes delayed phosphorylation of c-Src and FAK. This delay in phosphorylation of two key RPE phagocytosis molecules may account for the delay in ingestion of outer segments into the cell body and the accumulation of phagosomes in the apical processes observed in the knock out animals.
In conclusion, work in this thesis has demonstrated that annexin 2 is required for efficient RPE internalisation of rod outer segments both in vitro and in vivo. Annexin 2 is required for the timely phosphorylation of FAK and c-Src, which may account for the delay in POS internalisation observed in the annexin 2 knock out mice.


Recent public debates about same-sex marriage and women's right to abortion have challenged the party divide that normally forms the foundation for parliamentary voting. Instead of a clear party line dictating the way in which members of Parliament vote, such issues tend to be regarded as 'moral' issues warranting a vote of conscience. In the sometimes-heated public debates on these issues, Christian Churches and Church-based groups are vocal in stating their case and many members of parliament likewise express their position in terms of a Church view. Others however reject the role of the Churches in these debates, arguing instead that the argument is based upon the premise that for Parliament to be truly representative, members' decision-making of the Churches have no place in determining the rights of all Australian citizens. The latter n issues of conscience should not be beholden to Church views that are not representative of the community. This paper reviews the parliamentary debates of the last 10-15 years over the use of human embryos in stem cell research to ascertain whether, and the extent to which, it could be said that Christian Churches do indeed influence Australian law. It finds that while a variety of influences - Church and otherwise - can be said to influence individual voting on issues of conscience, whether there is an institutional Church influence
is not clear-cut.


We exploit the combinatorial advantage of electrokinetics and tortuosity of a cellulose-based paper network on laboratory grade filter paper for the development of a simple, inexpensive, yet extremely robust (shows constant performance for 12 days) 'paper-and-pencil'-based device for energy harvesting applications. We successfully achieve harvesting of a maximum output power of ∼640 pW in a single channel, while the same is significantly improved (by ∼100 times) with the use of a multichannel microfluidic array (maximum of up to 20 channels). Furthermore, we also provide theoretical insights into the observed phenomenon and show that the experimentally predicted trends agree well with our theoretical calculations. Thus, we envisage that such ultra-low cost devices may turn out to be extremely useful in energizing analytical microdevices in resource limited settings, for instance, in extreme point of care diagnostic applications.


About a quarter of the people in the world today speak or use English. In homes and schools, offices and meeting rooms, ships and airports, people are speaking English...How has this happened? How did English begin, and what will become of it in the future? The history of the English language is a journey through space and time, from thousands of years ago to today and beyond, and to all parts of the world. Come on that journey and meet the monks and soldiers, the kings and scientists, the printers, poets, and travellers who have helped to make the English of today.


The increasing adoption of electronic medical records is producing a massive accumulation of routinely collected electronic clinical data (ECD). This data can be used not only for direct patient care but for secondary purposes such as clinical research, quality improvement, and public health. However, using clinical data collected for one purpose does not necessarily render it usable for secondary purposes. This dissertation seeks to explore (1) researchers' data needs and whether ECD is fit for use for research purposes, (2) the barriers and facilitators to secondary use faced by clinical researchers, and (3) to propose a solution to help address one of the barriers identified. To do this, this dissertation is composed of three different but interrelated studies. The first one consists of a Delphi process to develop a tool to systematically assess the fitness for use of ECD for research and its subsequent application to a set of clinical data requests. The second study is a qualitative inquiry into the barriers and facilitators to secondary use of clinical data experienced by researchers at the University of Washington, Group Health Research Institute and the Veterans Affairs' Northwest Center for Outcomes Research in Older Adults. The third study describes the development of a system to query clinical relational databases based on temporal abstractions and patterns, which could enable researchers to identify high-level concepts from clinical databases. The results of this dissertation make contributions that should allow us to improve the reutilization of ECD for research purposes.


Optimistic replication can provide high data availability for collaborative applications in large scale distributed systems (grid, P2P, and mobile systems). However, if data reconciliation is performed by a single node, data availability remains an important issue since the reconciler node can fail. Thus, reconciliation should also be distributed and reconciliation data should be replicated. We have previously proposed the DSR-cluster algorithm, a distributed version of the IceCube semantic reconciliation engine designed for cluster networks. However DSR-cluster is not suitable for P2P networks, which are usually built on top of the Internet. In this case, network costs must be considered. The main contribution of this paper is the DSR-P2P algorithm, a distributed reconciliation algorithm designed for P2P networks. We first propose a P2P-DHT cost model for computing communication costs in a DHT overlay network. Second, taking into account this model, we propose a cost model for computing the cost of each reconciliation step. Third, we propose an algorithm that dynamically selects the best nodes for each reconciliation step. Our algorithm yields high data availability with acceptable performance and limited overhead.


G protein amplification occurs automatically in an activated rod cell, but not so simply in olfactory cells, according to Vikas Bhandawat, Johannes Reisert, and King-Wai Yau (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD).

Photon activation of a single rhodopsin molecule activates many G proteins, thereby amplifying the signal until rhodopsin is inactivated by phosphorylation. "Based on this one well-studied system, it has generally been assumed that other G protein pathways behave similarly," says Yau. Now, his group's analyses of single olfactory receptor neurons reveal a low amplification system.

An individual odorant-bound receptor exhibited a very low probability of activating even one downstream G protein molecule, as odorant receptor binding was transient—lasting 1 ms or less. "We expect many other ligand-triggered G protein pathways to behave similarly," says Yau.

Olfaction amplification therefore requires increasing the probability of G protein activation. This could be achieved either via many odorant molecules that continuously bind to receptors, or via a large number of receptors, so that odorants at low concentrations will still be able to find a receptor. "When these events are summated across all receptor molecules on the cell, and all cells express the same receptor protein," says Bhandawat, "this produces substantial signal amplification and therefore high sensitivity in the brain."

Reference:

Bhandawat, V., et al. 2005. Science. 308:1931–1934. [PubMed]


In the field of experimental small arms ballistics there has always been a large amount of energy put into how a test weapon is secured. Various philosophies exist; however, this is largely left to experience and is more of an artistic approach rather than a scientific approach. Many experimentalists leverage physical understanding of the firing event to reduce motion or vibration. However, in most cases, there is no direct measurement of the performance of the mounting technique. Often the dispersion performance of a weapon system when fired from a specific mount is used as a gauge, ignoring the fact that dispersion is comprised of many sources. Through complex jump testing, the US Army Research Laboratory has shown the ability to dissect the relative contribution of individual dispersion sources. This work showed that it is possible to mount a weapon system in a way that barrel motion does not affect the dispersion or jump behavior. This effort employs an easy-to-use modern measurement technique to characterize barrel motion of a commercial AR-15 weapon during dispersion testing. High speed digital micrometers were used to measure barrel motion before, during, and after firing in order to establish the pointing angle and crossing velocity variability as a function of mounting configuration. Ten mounting configurations were examined for a single weapon type firing match grade ammunition with the intention of isolating the barrel motion effects.


Compounds which partition into water and which are adsorbed by solid phases ('geotracers') are lost from petroleum along migration pathways, giving important clues about the nature and length of the route from source to reservoir. Many factors influence the distribution of petroleum geotracers, including migration distance, the inherent properties of the migration systems, the chemical properties of the tracers, the volume of reservoired oil and the filling sequence. This paper constructs the mathematical models that are required to describe adequately the occurrence of geotracers in migrated and reservoired oils. The models show that for commonly used geotracers (phenol and carbazole compounds): (1) adsorption to oil-wet mineral sites is a major process removing geotracers from oil; (2) adsorption onto mineral surfaces can be treated as an equilibrium process on a geological time-scale; (3) diffusion of tracers from a migrating oil slug to the surrounding sediments can be neglected; and (4) the tracer concentration in a reservoired oil is not related uniquely to migration distance but is negatively correlated to the ratio of relative migration distance divided by the volume of reservoired oil having travelled the migration pathway. The potential applications of the models in petroleum exploration include: assessment of the route and relative distance of oil migration (with implications for the identification of undrilled prospects); estimation of the volume of lost oil by spill from a reservoir; and differentiation of migration through fractures and capillary migration through fine-grained rocks.


Single event upset (SEU) or soft error caused by alpha particles and cosmic neutrons has emerged as a key reliability concern in nanoscale CMOS technologies. The decrease in signal charge due to the reduction of the operating voltage and node capacitance primarily increases the soft error rate (SER) in integrated circuits. The situation is aggravated by the increasing number of memory elements (e.g., flip-flops) on chip, the lack of inherent error masking mechanisms in these elements, and the below-nominal voltage operation for reducing the power consumption. In fact, limiting the power consumption is critical to enhance the battery life of portable electronic devices. In this thesis, I present several soft error tolerant flip-flops that offer high speed while consuming low power either inherently or through low-energy clocking scheme.
The proposed soft error tolerant flip-flops can be divided into two major categories: i) flip-flops with square-wave clock and ii) flip-flops with energy recovery sinusoidal clock, which is very attractive to significantly lower the clock power consumption. The two square-wave clock based proposed flip-flops are: a true single phase clock (TSPC) DICE flip-flop and a clocked precharge soft error robust flip-flop. These flip-flops use fewer transistors and offer as much as 35% lower power-delay-product (PDP) than existing soft error robust pulsed DICE flip-flop. The energy recovery clock based proposed flip-flops are: a soft clock edge SEU hardened (SCESH) flip-flop, C2-DICE flip-flop, a conditional pass Quatro (CPQ) flip-flop, and two energy recovery TSPC flip-flops. These flip-flops exhibit lower PDP ranging from 30% to 69% when compared to the pulsed DICE flip-flop and the single-ended conditional capturing energy recovery (SCCER) flip-flop. Thus, the proposed flip-flops provide a wide range of power and delay choices and as such can be used in a variety of low-power or high performance applications including high-end microprocessors, low-power system-on-chips (SOCs), and implantable medical devices.


Gifted and talented students have unique characteristics and needs. Arts Integration is an effective differentiation strategy that helps meeting these students' needs. STEM subjects are easily and organically integrated with the Arts because scientific and artistic inquiry are very similar. This practical article describes an arts-integrated project that provided the gifted and talented participants with an increased level of challenge, an opportunity for self-expression and for building social skills, amplified motivation, and a chance to deepen and demonstrate their knowledge of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, social studies and English Language Arts. In this project, identified gifted students completed figural transformations (creation of a new image by adding lines or shading to a given squiggle or geometric figure) related to one of these subject areas and learned a set of creative skills identified by E. Paul Torrance. The final stage of the project included students analyzing and reflecting on the progress they had made over the course of the semester in content knowledge and creativity.


This classic volume, reprinted twenty years after it was first published, takes a close look at the theory of direct nuclear reactions. It emphasizes the microscopic aspects of these reactions and their description in terms of the changes induced in the motion of individual nucleons, except where collective motion in nuclei gives a more succinct description. Assuming only a modest knowledge of quantum mechanics and some acquaintance with angular momentum algebra, the book begins essentially at the beginning. Its goal is to provide the novice with the means of becoming competent to do research on direct reactions, and the experienced researcher with a detailed discussion of advanced topics. For completeness, appendices on angular momentum algebra and special functions are included.


Background: Artemisinin, a kind of sesquiterpene lactone endoperoxide, is isolated from Artemisia annua., has been used to effectively treat different forms of malaria. Recently, some researchers showed that artemisinin decreased serum triacylglycerol in rats. However, the molecular mechanism remains unclear. Aim: In this study, we investigated the effect of artemisinin on lipid accumulation in an in vitro model of NAFLD. Methods: The cytotoxicity of OA and artemisinin on SMMC-7721 cells was measured by using the WST-8 based Colorimetric Assay Cell Counting kit8. To establish an in vitro cellular model of NAFLD, the human hepatocarcinoma SMMC-7721 cells were treated with OA. Lipid and TAG contents were measured by Oil Red O staining and enzymatic assay. Effects of artemisinin on expression of lipogenic and lipolytic genes in SMMC-7721 cells were analyzed by RT-PCR, real time PCR and Western Blotting. Results: The in vitro model of NAFLD was constructed in SMMC-7721 cells with the addition of 1.0 mM OA. Artemisinin reduced intracellular lipid accumulation and TAG concentration in SMMC-7721 cells induced by OA. The addition of artemisnin induced a decrease in the mRNA and protein level of CD36, while it had no effect on both mRNA and protein level of PPARα and SREBP1. Conclusion: Artemisinin can reduce hepatocellular lipid accumulation and triacylglycerol content via the inhibition of CD36 expression.


Abstract Granitic plutons (the Dolina Będkowska valley and Pilica area) were found in a few boreholes in the Małopolska Block (MB). These granitic rocks may represent apical parts (apophyses) of a great magmatic bodies (batholiths) located in deeper level of the Ediacaran/Paleozoic basement. They are described as 'stitching intrusions', generated during/after collision in Carboniferous/Permian period (~300 Ma) between the Upper Silesian Block (USB) and the Małopolska Block (MB). These rocks are fresh, unaltered granodiorites that are pale grey in colour. They have holocrystalline, medium- to coarse-grained structure and massive texture. For the first time, several mafic microgranular enclaves (MME), varying in size and colour, were found in the granodioritic host (HG). The occurrence of MME in the host granodioritic rocks is evidence of a mingling process between mafic and felsic magmas. The MME are pale/dark grey in colour, fine-grained rocks with 'porphyritic' textures. They consist of large megacrysts/xenocrysts of plagioclase, quartz, alkali feldspars and the fine-grained groundmass of pseudo-doleritic textures (lath-shaped plagioclases, blade-shaped amphiboles/biotites). According to their modal/mineral composition, they represent Q-diorites and tonalites. The MME, similar to the host granodiorites (HG), are I-type rocks, exhibit high Na2O content >3.2 wt%; normative diopside or normative corundum occurs (mainly <1%). They are metaluminous to slightly peraluminous (ASI <1.1) and have calc-alkaline, medium-K to high-K character. They generally belong to magnesian series (#Mg=0.20-0.40) and have low agpaitic index (<0.87). They are low evolved magmatic rocks. The rocks studied are enriched in LREEs (La, Ce, Sm) compared to HREEs. The Eu* negative anomaly and high Sr contents point to varying degrees of plagioclase fractionation connected to the mixing process rather than simple fractional crystallization. Both rocks studied (HG and MME) are characterized by a high content of LILEs (K, Ba, Rb) in normalized patterns and a low HFS/LIL elements ratio (Ta, Nb)/(K, Rb, La). The projection points of the rocks studied plot in different fields of various petrochemical diagrams: mainly in the arc granites that are rare in the pre-collisional granites as well as the syn-subductional to post-collisional granites fields. For the first time, inner textures in rock-forming minerals related to mixing processes are described both in the granodioritic host (HG) and in the MME. Mantled boxy cellular plagioclase megacrysts with 'old cores' of labradorite composition, and amphibole aggregates with titanite and opaque minerals, represent peritectic rather than primary residual minerals. The plagioclase, quartz and alkali feldspar megacrysts/xenocrysts were mechanically transferred from the granodioritic host (HG) to MME. The presence of lath-shaped plagioclases, blade-shaped amphiboles/biotites and acicular-shaped apatites in the groundmass of the MME is evidence of undercooling of hot mafic blobs in a relatively cold granodioritic magma chamber. The MME were hybridized by leucocratic melt squeezed from the granodioritic magma in a later stage of the mixing process (quartz and alkali crystals in the interstices in the MME groundmass). In the granodiorites (HG), the spike and spongy cellular zones as well as biotite/amphibole zones in plagioclase megacrysts are connected to the mixing process. Both of the rocks studied are characterized by different amounts of major elements (SiO2, Na2O and K2O), trace elements (Ni, Cr, V, Ti and P), #Mg and modified alkali-lime index (MALI) that is related to their origins from different sources. On the other hand, they have similar chondrite-normalized patterns (for trace elements and REE), LILEs contents (Sr, Ba, Rb), aluminum saturation index (ASI) and isotopic signatures (high 86Sr/87Sr (0.079-0.713) and low 143Nd/144Nd (0.512) values but lower than in continental crust), which are evidence of the strong hybridisation of mafic enclaves by the granodioritic host magma. The parental rocks of both rocks studied have a similar mafic signature but were generated in different sources: the host granodiorites (HG) magma in lower continental crust rocks, and the MME magma in enriched upper mantle. The MME crystallized from strongly hybridized magma of intermediate compositions (Q-diorite, tonalite) rather than from primary mafic magma. The host granodiorites (HG) originated from completely homogenized crustal granodioritic magma which inherited its geochemical signature from ancient arc-rocks in a subduction-related setting


Speech interaction systems have been gaining popularity in recent years. The main purpose of these systems is to generate more satisfactory responses according to users' speech utterances, in which the most critical problem is to analyze user intention. Researches show that user intention conveyed through speech is not only expressed by content, but also closely related with users' speaking manners (e.g. with or without acoustic emphasis). How to incorporate these heterogeneous attributes to infer user intention remains an open problem. In this paper, we define Intention Prominence (IP) as the semantic combination of focus by text and emphasis by speech, and propose a multi-task deep learning framework to predict IP. Specifically, we first use long short-term memory (LSTM) which is capable of modeling long short-term contextual dependencies to detect focus and emphasis, and incorporate the tasks for focus and emphasis detection with multi-task learning (MTL) to reinforce the performance of each other. We then employ Bayesian network (BN) to incorporate multimodal features (focus, emphasis, and location reflecting users' dialect conventions) to predict IP based on feature correlations. Experiments on a data set of 135,566 utterances collected from real-world Sogou Voice Assistant illustrate that our method can outperform the comparison methods over 6.9-24.5% in terms of F1-measure. Moreover, a real practice in the Sogou Voice Assistant indicates that our method can improve the performance on user intention understanding by 7%.


Orthogonal analysis of amino acid substitutions as a result of SNPs in existing proteomic datasets provides a critical foundation for the emerging field of population-based proteomics. Large-scale proteomics datasets, derived from shotgun tandem MS analysis of complex cellular protein mixtures, contain many unassigned spectra that may correspond to alternate alleles coded by SNPs. The purpose of this work was to identify tandem MS spectra in LC-MS/MS shotgun proteomics datasets that may represent coding nonsynonymous SNPs (nsSNP). To this end, we generated a tryptic peptide database created from allelic information found in NCBI's dbSNP. We searched this database with tandem MS spectra of tryptic peptides from DU4475 breast tumor cells that had been fractioned by pI in the first-dimension and reverse-phase LC in the second dimension. In all we identified 629 nsSNPs, of which 36 were of alternate SNP alleles not found in the reference NCBI or IPI protein databases. Searches for SNP-peptides carry a high risk of false positives due both to mass shifts caused by modifications and because of multiple representations of the same peptide within the genome. In this work, false positives were filtered using a novel peptide pI prediction algorithm and characterized using a decoy database developed by random substitution of similarly sized reference peptides. Secondary validation by sequencing of corresponding genomic DNA confirmed the presence of the predicted SNP in 8 of 10 SNP-peptides. This work highlights that the usefulness of interpreting unassigned spectra as polymorphisms is highly reliant on the ability to detect and filter false positives.


This paper is part of a larger historical study on Malay pantun translations into English since the nineteenth century. Two of the main aims of the historical study were: (1) to describe the prevalent translation styles adopted by the translators of pantun from the nineteenth century to the present times and (ii) to identify the extent to which the translation style is influenced by the skopos or translation purpose. The discussion in this paper is similarly directed by these two aims and is especially devoted to the only two women writers in British Malaya that is, Katherine Sim and Martha Blanche Lewis who highlighted the importance of the Malay pantun as an essential element of the Malay language and the ingenuity of the Malay mind. Sim"s and Lewis"s reference to/discussion of the pantun via translations in English in their referential texts (which total to about less than 160 pantun translations) contributed significantly towards promoting the pantun to an English readership in their times. The categorization of translation styles in this study is based on Christiane Nord"s functional typology (1997), which is namely divided into two large categories: documentary (grammatically literal) translations and instrumental (creatively modulated/literary) translations.


In this paper, a semi-supervised graph-based method for estimating 3D body pose from a sequence of silhouettes, is presented. The performance of graph-based methods is highly dependent on the quality of the constructed graph. In the case of the human pose estimation problem, the missing depth information from silhouettes intensifies the occurrence of shortcut edges within the graph. To identify and remove these shortcut edges, we measure the similarity of each pair of connected vertices through the use of sliding temporal windows. Furthermore, by exploiting the relationships between labeled and unlabeled data, the proposed method can estimate the 3D body poses, with a small set of labeled data. We evaluated the proposed method on several activities and compared the results with other recent methods. Our method significantly reduced the mean squared error, showing the positive effect of removing shortcut edges.


Abstract Objective: to identify efficacy of fetal stem cells use in treatment of the patients with cancer of caput pancreatis; to summarize all hematology advantages and positive effects on overall condition of the patients, improvement of their life quality. Material and methods: we studied 15 patients who had been suffering from cancer of the head of pancreas and were administered treatment by use of fetal stem cell (FSCs) suspensions at Cell Therapy Center EmCell. All such patients underwent general and clinical examination over 1 and 3 months after FSCs transplantation: we were using functional CT and ultrasonography (US) for assessment of organs of abdominal cavity. Results: FSCs treatment contributed to better life quality in patients of the MG who revealed improvement of asthenia syndrome components: reduced fatigability, less exhaustion and emotional instability; decrease in hyperesthesia and phenomena of vegetative dysfunction. In the patients of the MG leucocytes count was significantly reduced in comparison with indexes which were recorded prior to FSCs treatment. Such results might be an evidence of reduction in inflammation of biliary ducts, as well as decreased paracancerous inflammation in the patients under study. Conclusion: Combined use of FSCs and conventional therapy for the patients with caput pancreatis cancer is well-tolerated by all patients, leads to reduced intoxication contributing to improved tolerability of standard anti-cancer therapy and promotes better life quality in the cancer patients. Positive changes in cell-mediated immunity were recorded in the patients after treatment.


Background: Editing of HIV-1 DNA and RNA by APOBEC family cytidine deaminases to produce hypermutated sequences has emerged as a potent host antiviral response. This effect is modulated by the presence of vif that opposes APOBEC activity. Here we examine the clinical relevance and extent of hypermutation within proviral DNA, the sequence context of G®A hypermutation, and the contributions of genetic variation in host APOBEC3G and HIV-1 vif.

Methods: Full-length HIV-1 proviral DNA sequences from 227 antiretroviral-naive patients were examined, including 24,675 G®A substitutions. Hypermutation was classified by 3 criteria and validated by analyses of the population distribution of G®A substitutions. In individuals with hypermutation, APOBEC3G exonic and putative 5' regulatory region sequences were compared with control data (n = 200). Analyses of vif amino acid sequences were also undertaken, and pre-treatment viral load was assessed in group comparisons.

Results: All 3 criteria for hypermutation were satisfied in sequences obtained from 8 (3.5%) individuals, with 1 criterion met by 21 (9.3%). Viral load (log10 copies/mL) was significantly lower in the hypermutated group using the broader definition (4.19 vs 4.72, p = 0.01) but not the restrictive definition (4.56 vs 4.68, p = 0.38). Compared with background rates of 6.9 ± 4.0% G®A substitution, hypermutated sequences demonstrated 20.3 ± 6.2% G®A substitutions by a restrictive definition (broad = 15.5 ± 1.2%) (both p < 0.001). Hypermutated G®A substitutions demonstrated a preference for G at the +1 position (45% vs 23%) and enrichment of T at position –1 (34% vs 23%) (p < 0.001) consistent with an APOBEC3G plus strand DNA target motif TGG (corresponding to CCA on the minus strand DNA). Expected strong selection against CpG dinucleotides was also universally noted. APOBEC3G sequencing of the 8 subjects with definite hypermutation revealed no novel variants. Analysis of vif sequence however, revealed that 100% of the hypermutated group had defective vif, defined as absence of appropriate start and stop codons and/or presence of in-frame stop codons.

Conclusions: This in vivo study demonstrates that hypermutation is not infrequent at a population level and is associated with lower pretreatment viral load, in keeping with a host antiviral effect potentially mediated by APOBEC3G.


This thesis studies the issue of domestic work in urban China as related to sex segregation in the labor market and traditional gender ideology. The data suggest that the unequal situation in the household is closely related to the above two factors, especially the first one. Sex segregation in the labor force can be characterized by three features. As in most other countries, Chinese women are under-represented in many high-priority, prestigious occupations and heavily concentrated in other, lower status, lower paying occupations. Furthermore, although women only hold one-third of the positions in the state-owned enterprises, they account for half of the work force in the collective enterprises, which do not have most of the benefits and privileges that state-owned ones do. Lastly, with China's rapid economic development in recent years, sex segregation in the labor force has been worsened. Enterprises, driven by profit motive, increasingly discriminate against women, even female college graduates. Sex segregation in the labor force is closely connected to men's and women's different educational levels. Higher levels of education tend to help more in obtaining a higher position. Women, with average lower levels of education, are more likely to remain the lower positions in the work force. Traditional gender ideology, though not as openly and overwhelmingly present in people's mind as it used to be, is still affecting people's domestic work behavior. In the families of those who think that a wife should have a greater responsibilities for domestic work, the work is more likely to be done by the wife alone and less likely to be done by the husband alone or by shared efforts of both husband and wife. It is also reflected in husbands' and wives' attitudes toward each other's jobs. In the families of those who think that the husband's career is more valuable than the wife's, the domestic work is much more likely to be done by the wife alone, instead of by shared efforts, and vice versa. Women, who hold lower positions in the work place, such as factory workers, service workers, or government workers, are more likely to take a larger share of domestic work than those who hold a higher position, such as officials in the work place or educational professionals. Sex segregation does play a role in the domestic work patterns at home. All those factors help to explain the unequal situation in domestic sharing pattern at home. Women, with lower levels of education, lower relative position in the work place, a less valuable career, and lesser financial contribution, are stated to take over more of the family responsibilities. There have been dramatic improvements. At least people are more likely to "say" in the equalitarian way, though they are still not acting likewise. If women will be given more education opportunities and therefore more employment opportunities, the situation will get much better.


Background Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE) (Togaviridae, Alphavirus) is a highly pathogenic mosquito-borne arbovirus that circulates in an enzootic cycle involving Culiseta melanura mosquitoes and wild Passeriformes birds in freshwater swamp habitats. Recently, the northeastern United States has experienced an intensification of virus activity with increased human involvement and northward expansion into new regions. In addition to its principal role in enzootic transmission of EEE virus among avian hosts, recent studies on the blood-feeding behavior of Cs. melanura throughout its geographic range suggest that this mosquito may also be involved in epizootic / epidemic transmission to equines and humans in certain locales. Variations in blood feeding behavior may be a function of host availability, environmental factors, and/or underlying genetic differences among regional populations. Despite the importance of Cs. melanura in transmission and maintenance of EEE virus, the genetics of this species remains largely unexplored. Methodology and principle findings To investigate the occurrence of genetic variation in Cs. melanura, the genome of this mosquito vector was sequenced resulting in a draft genome assembly of 1.28 gigabases with a contig N50 of 93.36 kilobases. Populations of Cs. melanura from 10 EEE virus foci in the eastern North America were genotyped with double-digest RAD-seq. Following alignment of reads to the reference genome, variant calling, and filtering, 40,384 SNPs were retained for downstream analyses. Subsequent analyses revealed genetic differentiation between northern and southern populations of this mosquito species. Moreover, limited fine-scale population structure was detected throughout northeastern North America, suggesting local differentiation of populations but also a history of ancestral polymorphism or contemporary gene flow. Additionally, a genetically distinct cluster was identified predominantly at two northern sites. Conclusion and significance This study elucidates the first evidence of fine-scale population structure in Cs. melanura throughout its eastern range and detects evidence of gene flow between populations in northeastern North America. This investigation provides the groundwork for examining the consequences of genetic variations in the populations of this mosquito species that could influence vector-host interactions and the risk of human and equine infection with EEE virus.


Echinoderms from the point of view of their taxonomy and evolution form one
of the most interesting groups of marine animals. Except for the R.I.M.S. "Investigator"
collections reported on by various authors there has been no sustained work on this
group in this country till detailed investigations were initiated recently by Mr. D.B.
James of this Institute. In the course of extensive work carried out, he had taken
considerable pains to collect a vast number of references to form a comprehensive
bibliography which has been augmented with some of the references collected by Mr.
R.S. Lal Mohan for Bulletin Nos. 4 and 11 issued by this Institute. There are in all 691
references listed in the present Bulletin covering all the classes of echinoderms and it is
hoped that the availability of a consolidated bibliography like this would act as an
incentive to interested workers to take up this group for study. The authors have done
their best to make the list as comprehensive as possible. However, it would very much
be appreciated if omissions and errors if any, are kindly brought to our notice.


This article examines major theoretical assumptions about forgiveness by victims of human rights abuses in the context of transitional justice in the Czech Republic. The authors hypothesize that forgiveness is facilitated by restoring equality between victims and perpetrators, namely: individual, social and political empowerment of victims; decreasing the superior position of perpetrators, especially through their punishment; and a repentant gesture of perpetrators towards victims, especially by apologizing. The results of path analysis confirm that religious belief, individual, social, and political empowerment, punishment, and apology directly promote forgiveness. This enables the authors to distinguish four types of forgiveness: religious, reparatory, retributive, and reconciliatory forgiveness. They suggest that policy interventions that promote forgiveness may not be mutually exclusive as often proposed in the dilemmas of transitional justice


This study considers an intelligent control system to integrate flexibly its components by using weighted information where the system evaluation is reffected. Such system evaluates the information flowing through the components and converts them by weighting depending on the degree of importance. Integration of components based on the system evaluation enables a system consisting of them to realize various, flexible and adaptive control. In this study, the intelligent control method is applied to a swing up and stabilization control problem of a number of cart and pendulum systems on a restricted straight guide. To stabilize the pendulum in a restricted environment, each system should realize not only a swing-up and stabilization control of the pendulum, but also a position control of the cart to avoid collision or deadlock. The experiment using a real apparatus demonstrated that the controller learning light interaction acquires egoistic character, the controller learning heavy interaction behaves altruistically, and the controller equally considering self cart and another cart becomes cooperative. In other words, these autonomous decentralized controllers can acquire various characters and flexibility for cooperation.


Abstract Understanding effects of non-hydrostatic pressure on phase transitions in minerals relevant to the Earth's mantle is important to translate the observable seismic signals to not directly observable mineralogical models for the deep Earth. SiO2 can occur as a free phase in subducting slabs, which contain sedimentary layers and/or mid-ocean-ridge basalts. In this study, we report on the effect of deviatoric strain on the pressure-induced phase transition in SiO2 and its consequences on the seismic signal. The acoustic velocity in polycrystalline stishovite across the post-stishovite phase transition was measured by Brillouin scattering in the pure SiO2 system at room temperature under deviatoric stress. High-pressure synchrotron X‑ray diffraction data were also collected at SPring-8. A linear fit to the symmetry-breaking strain values and the pressure of the transverse velocity minimum indicate a transition pressure between 25 and 35 GPa, which is about 20 GPa lower than that under hydrostatic conditions. The transverse velocity dropped by about 3% at around 25 GPa in this study. This is much smaller than the prediction from ab initio calculations that a transverse velocity reduces by ~60% at around 50 GPa under hydrostatic conditions. The results of the present study indicate that the deviatoric stress lowers the transition pressure and reduces the acoustic velocity change associated with the post stishovite phase transition. Sedimentary and mid ocean ridge basalt (MORB) layers in a subducting slab are likely sites for finding stishovite and its high-pressure polymorphs in the deep earth. Seismic observations of deep earthquakes occurring in subducting slabs indicate the existence of considerable stress in down-going slabs. This study suggests that nonhydrostatic deviatoric stress is one of the possible reasons for the absence of general seismic features that can be directly related to the poststishovite phase transition in subducting slabs at 1500 km depth. The phase transition of stishovite under deviatoric stress, which occurs at shallower depths, can affect the local seismic scattering structures and the rheological behavior of a subducting slab in the mid-lower mantle region.


Cover crop—based, organic rotational no-till (CCORNT) corn and soybean systems have been developed in the mid-Atlantic region to build soil health, increase management flexibility, and reduce labor. In this system, a roller-crimped cover crop mulch provides within-season weed suppression in no-till corn and soybean. A cropping system experiment was conducted in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware to test the cumulative effects of a multitactic weed management approach in a 3-yr hairy vetch/triticale—corn—cereal rye—soybean—winter wheat CCORNT rotation. Treatments included delayed planting dates (early, intermediate, late) and supplemental weed control using high-residue (HR) cultivation in no-till corn and soybean phases. In the no-till corn phase, HR cultivation decreased weed biomass relative to the uncultivated control by 58%, 23%, and 62% in Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, respectively. In the no-till soybean phase, HR cultivation decreased weed biomass relative to the uncultivated treatment planted in narrow rows (19 to 38 cm) by 20%, 41%, and 78% in Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, respectively. Common ragweed was more dominant in soybean (39% of total biomass) compared with corn (10% of total biomass), whereas giant foxtail and smooth pigweed were more dominant in corn, comprising 46% and 22% of total biomass, respectively. Common ragweed became less abundant as corn and soybean planting dates were delayed, whereas giant foxtail and smooth pigweed increased as a percentage of total biomass as planting dates were delayed. At the Pennsylvania location, inconsistent termination of cover crops with the roller-crimper resulted in volunteer cover crops in other phases of the rotation. Our results indicate that HR cultivation is necessary to achieve adequate weed control in CCORNT systems. Integration of winter grain or perennial forages into CCORNT systems will also be an important management tactic for truncating weed seedbank population increases. Nomenclature: Common ragweed, Ambrosia artemisiifolia L.; giant foxtail, Setaria faberi Herrm.; smooth pigweed, Amaranthus hybridus L.; cereal rye, Secale cereale L.; hairy vetch, Vicia villosa Roth; triticale, × Triticosecale Wittm. ex A. Camus [Secale × Triticum]; corn, Zea mays L.; soybean, Glycine max (L.) Merr.; winter wheat, Triticum aestivum L.


This thesis is concerned with devising an objective means of testing whether or not the people of the European Upper Palaeolithic used systems of notation to create intentional records. I begin with a discussion of the theoretical parameters that I intend to adopt, notably an adaptive rather than a progressive model of change over time, and the need for a controlled use of analogical comparisons between present phenomena and prehistory. By briefly summarising the approach of past researchers in this area, I identified engraved mobiliary artefacts as the primary source of data. In order, to construct an objective model to test the hypothetical existence of notation, I first examine other forms of visual communication, notably iconicity, decoration and the use of signs and symbols. I conclude that any recognisable examples of notation would be structured in order to effectively convey information. As a result I devise a series of criteria based on first principles by which I hope to be able to distinguish between examples of representational, decorative, notational and purely random accumulations of lines. To test the effectiveness of these criteria, I apply then to examples of known systems of visual representation taken from the Ethnographic collections of four museums. These include Australian message sticks, tallies, records of time and calendars. I conclude that my criteria are able to discriminate between examples of notation and other classes of meaningful representation. I also isolate the recurrent use of translational symmetry and rotational symmetry in notational artefacts, and the absence of mirror and slide refection. By discussing in some detail the approach of past researchers to the identification of notation in engraved mobiliary artefacts from the Upper Palaeolithic I isolate certain practical and theo-reucal problems. To correlate my results with those of Marshack I apply my criteria to five of his selected examples and conclude that two out of the five are not notational by my criteria. I also test my criteria against some artefacts from the Piette and Saint-Perier collections in Paris and conclude that the structure of the marks on some examples conform to my criteria of notation. Marshack is criticised for claiming to identify evolving systems and traditions of notation using only a handful of examples from sites all over Europe and the timescale of the Upper Palaeolithic. I counter this defect by looking at a sample of data taken from a single site, Enleue in Ariege. The engraved artefacts date to Perigordian V and the Early and Middle Magdalenian and are backed by independent dating techniques and a wealth of complementary finds. By providing a detailed summary of the characteristics of this data set I was able to identify certain common characteristics of non-figurative engraved mobiliary artefacts. By measuring the physical properties of the lines on the complete data namely their length, distance and orientation, I demonstrate the presence or absence of order and structure using Multivariate Cluster Analysis and Two- and Three-Dimensional plots. The cases are selected from Marshack's data, my Paris data, the complete examples from Enlene, with known examples of notation and randomly generated examples to act as controls. As a result of the identification of orientation and then inter-line distance as the prime indications of artefact variability, the broken bones from Enlene are included. Further statistical tests isolate certain artefacts as examples of low variabilty, which are confirmed by my criteria to be the most likely examples of notation or decoration at Enlene.


Liquid crystals (LCs), presently the basis of the dominant electronics display technology, also hold immense potential for the design of new self-assembling, self-healing, and "smart" responsive materials. Essential to many of these novel materials are liquid crystalline defects, places where the liquid crystalline order is forced to break down, replacing the LC locally with a higher-symmetry phase. Despite the energetic cost of this local melting, defects are often present at equilibrium when boundary conditions frustrate the material order. These defects provide micron-scale tools for organizing colloids, focusing light, and generating micropatterned materials. Manipulating the shapes of the boundaries thus offers a route to obtaining new and desirable selfassembly outcomes in LCs, but each added degree of complexity in the boundary geometry increases the complexity of the liquid crystal's response. Therefore, conceptually minimal changes to boundary geometry are investigated for their effects on the self-assembled defect arrangements that result in nematic and smecticA LCs in three dimensions as well as two-dimensional smectic LCs on curved substrates. In nematic LCs, disclination loops are studied in micropost confining environments and in the presence of sharp-edged colloidal inclusions, using both numerical modeling and topological reasoning. In both scenarios, sharp edges add new possibilities for the shape or placement of disclinations, permitting new types of colloidal selfassembly beyond simple chains and hexagonal lattices. Two-dimensional smectic LCs on curved substrates are examined in the special cases where the substrate curvature is confined to points or curves, providing an analytically tractable route to demonstrate how Gaussian curvature is associated with disclinations and grain boundaries, as well as these defects' likely experimental manifestations. In three-dimensional smectic-A LCs, novel self-assembled arrangements of focal conic domains (FCDs) are shown to arise from geometric patterning or curvature in boundaries exhibiting so-called hybrid anchoring. These new arrangements allow control over both the packing of the FCDs and their eccentricities. In general, defect self-assembly behavior in LCs is shown to depend sensitively on the shapes of confining boundaries, colloidal inclusions, and substrates, and several broad, new geometrical principles for directing the assembly of nontrivial defect configurations are presented. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Physics & Astronomy First Advisor Randall D. Kamien This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1532


Elektrostimulator combined in acupunture therapy to provide the stimulation of electric energy at the point of the meridians of the body. Granting the power to create a balance of energy (chi) in the body. In administering the energy must pay attention to the voltage waveform, intensity, frequency and timing of stimuli. The purpose of this research is to change the system tools from analog into digital by changing the settings of the timer and frequency using the keypad that is controlled using the Microcontroller ATMega16. Specifications of the simulation tool elektrostimulator acupunture designed include the frequency setting of 5-100Hz, setting the intensity of a voltage 0 timer setting until 25Vac 60 minutes and has a spike waveform mode continou and electrodes used floating types. The test result show that simulated acupunture elektrostimulator tool result obtained in accordance with the compliance with the specifications but there is little the percentage error of frequency deviation i.e. 0.47% deviation of the timer of 0.29%, intensity of the voltage deviation of 0.073 % and waveform was nearing the same against his theory.


Static analysis tools are often used by software developers to entail early detection of potential faults, vulnerabilities, code smells, or to assess the source code adherence to coding standards and guidelines. Also, their adoption within Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines has been advocated by researchers and practitioners. This paper studies the usage of static analysis tools in 20 Java open source projects hosted on GitHub and using Travis CI as continuous integration infrastructure. Specifically, we investigate (i) which tools are being used and how they are configured for the CI, (ii) what types of issues make the build fail or raise warnings, and (iii) whether, how, and after how long are broken builds and warnings resolved. Results indicate that in the analyzed projects build breakages due to static analysis tools are mainly related to adherence to coding standards, and there is also some attention to missing licenses. Build failures related to tools identifying potential bugs or vulnerabilities occur less frequently, and in some cases such tools are activated in a "softer" mode, without making the build fail. Also, the study reveals that build breakages due to static analysis tools are quickly fixed by actually solving the problem, rather than by disabling the warning, and are often properly documented.


Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is a service on the Internet where digital TV signal data is delivered to the participants using the Internet Protocol (IP). IPTV promises to provide many TV channels with lower price for operators, lower price for consumers and it is also distributed more efficiently than using the nowadays prevalent coaxial cable distribution. As it is assumed that broadband connection of households will grow at a brisk pace, IPTV will play more and more important role in the incoming years in our lives. The plenty of TV channels requires large bandwidth for high clear TV programs in IPTV service which is a contradictory issue to the limitation of user access line bandwidth and aggregation network bandwidth. Multicast as a mature one-to-many packet data delivery technology, the use of multicast for IPTV service is considered necessary to resolve such contradiction. But which multicast or what level multicast will be best suited for this emerging technology is still a burning question. In this thesis we identify the appropriate multicast solution for IPTV. To accomplish our goal, we have done literature survey in gathering information to analyse different AL multicast protocol and IP multicast protocols. We have tried to find out different problems related to this protocol to deployment. Finally we have identified the best suited solution to carry multicast traffic for IPTV service.


This article demonstrates experimentally that individuals making decisions about their health management are affected by the decision making environment and that law and policy can serve important roles in improving the decision environment. With the support of a generous grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we conducted two series of experiments. First a lab experiment with approximately 700 respondents and next a web-based experiment with over 3000 respondents, including 300 medical doctors. In each of the experiments, in addition to manipulating the decision making environment and choice sets, we manipulated the state of the decision maker. In the first series of experiments we used the psychological mechanism of cognitive depletion and in the second series we tested the effects of cognitive overload. Most broadly, unlike past measures of risk aversion, our studies demonstrate that preferences for risk are not fixed in an individual but rather are highly sensitive to the role, context, and state of the decision maker in patterned ways. The project provides new evidence that cognitive processes affect decision making and judgment of risk, often leading to medically suboptimal choices. The lab studies suggest that often people process risk sub-optimally, e.g. favoring potentially harmful omissions over less harmful acts and being influenced by the order of warnings or choices, rather than their substantive value.


Governments often use fiscal, exchange rate, monetary policy as well as export promotion tax increases, privatization, and land reform as part of comprehensive adjustments packages for addressing economic imbalances, balance of payments, and structural weaknesses. Such approaches, however, have come under heavy criticism for failing to recognize the social and environmental costs associated with them. Critics have argued that economic growth, trade liberalization, and increased primary product exports increase pressure on many sectors, including the agricultural and forestry land use sectors. This paper examines a number of these types of external shocks. This paper makes two arguments. First, from a theoretical economic perspective, although in many cases structural adjustment programs can be expected to affect the domestic forest sector, in other cases they will not. Second, even when there is an impact on the forest, it need not be detrimental to environmental and ecosystem values. A sustainable forest system needs to provide wood, local environmental products and services, and global ecological services, but individual forests can specialize in some of these.


For a century, the history of the novel has been written in terms of nations and territories: the English novel, the French novel, the American novel. But what if novels were viewed in terms of the seas that unite these different lands? Examining works across two centuries, "The Novel and the Sea" recounts the novel's rise, told from the perspective of the ship's deck and the allure of the oceans in the modern cultural imagination. Margaret Cohen moors the novel to overseas exploration and work at sea, framing its emergence as a transatlantic history, steeped in the adventures and risks of the maritime frontier. Cohen explores how "Robinson Crusoe" competed with the best-selling nautical literature of the time by dramatizing remarkable conditions, from the wonders of unknown lands to storms, shipwrecks, and pirates. She considers James Fenimore Cooper's refashioning of the adventure novel in postcolonial America, and a change in literary poetics toward new frontiers and to the maritime labor and technology of the nineteenth century. Cohen shows how Jules Verne reworked adventures at sea into science fiction; how Melville, Hugo, and Conrad navigated the foggy waters of language and thought; and how detective and spy fiction built on sea fiction's problem-solving devices. She also discusses the transformation of the ocean from a theater of skilled work to an environment of pristine nature and the sublime. A significant literary history, "The Novel and the Sea" challenges readers to rethink their land-locked assumptions about the novel.


In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism for enriching the feature vector, for the task of sarcasm detection, with cognitive features extracted from eye-movement patterns of human readers. Sarcasm detection has been a challenging research problem, and its importance for NLP applications such as review summarization, dialog systems and sentiment analysis is well recognized. Sarcasm can often be traced to incongruity that becomes apparent as the full sentence unfolds. This presence of incongruity- implicit or explicit- affects the way readers eyes move through the text. We observe the difference in the behaviour of the eye, while reading sarcastic and non sarcastic sentences. Motivated by this observation, we augment traditional linguistic and stylistic features for sarcasm detection with the cognitive features obtained from readers eye movement data. We perform statistical classification using the enhanced feature set so obtained. The augmented cognitive features improve sarcasm detection by 3.7% (in terms of Fscore), over the performance of the best reported system.


The passive mechanical properties of the dorsal aorta and the vena cava of Octopus vulgaris were investigated in vitro . Both vessels are highly distensible structures that exhibit non-linear elasticity, but have substantially different material properties. The volume compliance of each vessel is maximal within the resting physiological pressure range (2–3 kPa in the aorta and 0–0.5 kPa in the vena cava) but is five times greater in the vena cava than in the aorta. The aorta is mechanically suited to function as an elastic storage reservoir in the arterial circulation, while the vena cava is appropriately designed to be a low-pressure capacitance element. Pressure wave velocity in the aorta was calculated from the elastic modulus to be 1.8 ms −1 under resting conditions. Therefore, pressure changes will occur almost simultaneously throughout the arterial tree and pressure wave transmission properties can be described by a two-element Windkessel model. Predictions of vascular impedance amplitude made from this model are presented. The effectiveness of the aorta as an elastic reservoir appears to be severely reduced during exercise in Octopus . Because blood pressure increases while heart rate does not, the efficiency of the Windkessel will be diminished as the time constant of the system decreases and the pulsatile work of the heart subsequently increases. Note: Address for reprint requests.


Situation recognition is an important problem to solve for introducing new capabilities in surveillance applications. It is concerned with recognizing a priori defined situations of interest, which are characterized as being of temporal and concurrent nature. The purpose is to aid decision makers with focusing on information that is known to likely be important for them, given their goals. Besides the two most important problems: knowing what to recognize and being able to recognize it, there are three main problems coupled to real time recognition of situations. Computational complexity — we need to process data and information within bounded time. Tractability — human operators must be able to easily understand what is being modelled. Expressability — we must be able to express situations at suitable levels of abstraction. In this paper we attempt to lower the computational complexity of a Petri net based approach for situation.


Barbie has been a significant icon in mainstream Western culture since its debut in 1959. Adults have imposed their own visions of children's play, most of which were negative. At the same time their assessments of children's play were based on assumptions rather than on actual observations. This thesis explores the ways in which young (7-9-year-old) girls play with Barbie TM. Through a unique methodology that incorporated open-ended interviews with the girls, role-playing with the dolls and a demographic survey completed by the parents, this study produced a window into the girls' world of Barbie. Beauty, dating, marriage, heteronormativity, male privilege, competition, power and agency emerged as significant themes which informed and structured the girls' play. The girls imagine themselves as the dolls, leading glamorous and exciting lives while at the same time imagining the dolls as themselves experiencing the girls' lives. Occasionally, the girls use the dolls to subvert mainstream ideologies but most often Barbie TM is used to reinforce the conventional notions of femininity which are inscribed onto the body of the doll as well as in the marketing strategies of Mattei. One unexpected finding was the centrality of the Ken doll to the girls' play which enabled the girls to practice heterosexualized romantic scripts (dating and marriage). The girls played with BarbieTM as a way of imagining their future lives as women in a patriarchal society. They see the benefits and rewards that can be acquired by becoming successfully "feminine". It became apparent that the girls were using their interactions with Barbie TM to balance the tensions and pleasures of growing up female in a patriarchal society.


Evolution has been described by Richard Dawkins as a blind watchmaker due to its being unconscious and random but selective and able to produce complex forms. Evolution from an early, primitive organism (the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all life, LUCA) to Homo sapiens is the most dramatic biological process that has taken place on Earth and knowledge of it is important to understanding many aspects of biology including disease prevention and treatment.
We claim that computational biology has now reached the point that astronomy reached when it began to look backward in time to the Big Bang. Our goal is look backward in biological time, and to begin to describe, in more detail, LUCA and the evolution from LUCA to us. This evolution process is the path of the blind watchmaker.
This thesis presents a novel dataset of LUCA and other early, genome sequences that we have reconstructed. These ancestors serve as reference species for our models. We develop a sequence evolution model that reflects biological processes more accurately than prior work and apply it to the ancestral genome dataset. This model uses empirical mutation probabilities for scoring alignments and includes inversion mutations. The results of this model describe the mutations that must have taken place during the evolution of our reference species.
We then apply the sequence evolution results to our population evolution model. This model uses a dynamic set of population pools with related but distinct, mutating genomes reproducing sexually and asexually, and subject to speciation effects, selection pressures, and environmental carrying capacity limitations. Due to a dearth of empirical data needed to estimate model parameters of earlier organisms, our population model did not extend all the way back to LUCA; it instead extended back to a more recent, common ancestor. The results of this model are population size estimates, evolution duration estimates, and identification of critical evolution parameters and estimates of their values.
We present the results of these models along with evidence for some tantalizing, if speculative, discoveries along the path. This work also identifies significant opportunities for further efforts in silico, in vitro, and in vivo.


We study the ultraviolet (UV) and optical properties of 38 massive globular clusters (GCs) in the Virgo elliptical, M87, imaged using the STIS and WFPC2 instruments onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. The majority of these GCs appear extremely bright in the far-UV (FUV) – roughly a magnitude brighter than their Galactic counterparts with similar metallicities. The observed FUV flux is several times larger than predictions of canonical old stellar population models. These canonical models, which assume a fiducial helium enrichment parameter, ΔY/ΔZ= 2, are able to reproduce the observed FUV fluxes only if ages ∼3–5 Gyr larger than the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) age of the Universe are invoked, although the same models fit the UV photometry of Galactic and M31 GCs for ages less than the 'WMAP age'. A similar discrepancy (∼3 Gyr) is found between the mass-weighted and UV-luminosity-weighted ages of the massive Galactic GC ω Cen, whose colour–magnitude diagram (including peculiar features on its well-populated horizontal branch) can be accurately reproduced by invoking a small super-He-rich (ΔY/ΔZ≳ 90) stellar component. By comparison to ω Cen, we propose that the majority of M87 GCs in our sample contain strong signatures of similarly minor super-He-rich subcomponents. This hypothesis is supported by simulations which suggest that, based on the UV detection limit of this survey, the number of GCs detected is several times that predicted by canonical models. Although we cannot prove or disprove the extreme helium scenario at the moment, we show that the same phenomenon that causes the extended horizontal branch of ω Cen explains the UV brightness of our sample. If this is indeed due to the extreme helium, this study would be the first to find its signatures in extragalactic objects.


Since the time of Christ, caring for the sick and the poor has been a core distinctive of authentic Christianity.  The response of Christians during many of the great plagues of antiquity played an important role in the spread of Christianity.  In modern history, response to epidemics have been professionalized and, to a certain extent, secularized.  The 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa offers an important illustration of the role that faith leaders and faith-based organizations still play in providing a trusted link between communities and international relief workers.  In late 2018, the world was faced with another outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  It is vital to build upon the lessons of prior epidemics as we support local efforts to prepare for, detect and respond to inevitable future outbreaks.


Three native species of tree-infesting Agrilus (Coleoptera: Buprestidae) have regularly reached outbreak levels in the Lake States (Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin), including A. anxius Gory (bronze birch borer), A. bilineatus (Weber) (twolined chestnut borer), and A. granulatus liragus Barter & Brown (bronze poplar borer). The main host trees for these Agrilus are species of Betula for A. anxius, Castanea and Quercus for A. bilineatus, and Populus for A. granulatus liragus. Based on 197 annual forest health reports for Michigan (1950–2017, 66 years), Minnesota (1950–2017, 64 years), and Wisconsin (1951–2017, 67 years), A. bilineatus was the most often reported Agrilus species in all three states (mentioned in 90 annual reports), with A. anxius second (71 reports) and A. granulatus liragus third (21 reports). Drought was the most commonly reported inciting factor for outbreaks of all three Agrilus species, with defoliation events ranking second. The top two defoliators reported as inciting outbreaks of each species were, in decreasing order, Fenusa pumila Leach (Hymenoptera: Tenthredinidae; birch leafminer) tied with Malacosoma disstria Hubner (Lepidoptera: Lasiocampidae; forest tent caterpillar) for A. anxius; M. disstria and Alsophila pometaria (Harris) (Lepidoptera: Geometridae; fall cankerworm) for A. bilineatus; and M. disstria and Choristoneura conflictana (Walker) (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae; large aspen tortrix) for A. granulatus liragus. Other environmental factors occasionally listed as inciting Agrilus outbreaks included late spring frosts, ice storms, and strong wind events.


This study examines how technology-mediated cross-domain interruptions affect people's work and personal life on two aspects: level of conflict between work and personal life and people's ability to fulfill their responsibilities in each of the two domains. Based on the direction of an interruption, we differentiate between two types of cross-domain interruptions: work-to-nonwork (WTN) and nonwork-to-work (NTW). Drawing on interruption research and work-life interaction literature, we conceptualize distinct effects of the two interruption types on outcome variables. Data were collected through surveys from 137 knowledge workers. Results reveal asymmetric effects of WTN and NTW interruptions on work and personal life. The frequency of WTN interruptions is found to be positively associated with work-life conflict and negatively associated with fulfillment of personal life responsibilities, whereas the frequency of NTW interruptions significantly affects fulfillment of work responsibilities but not work-life conflict. Thus, results point to asymmetrically permeable boundaries between work and personal life. Results also suggest that the effects of WTN interruptions on fulfillment of personal life responsibilities are partially mediated by WTN conflict. The study concludes with implications for research and practice.


The two-path algorithm is an algorithm for line echo cancellation based on two parallel filters. This paper proposes a modification of the two-path algorithm that improves its performance. In the two-path algorithm a background filter is used for continuously adaptive estimation of the line echo, while a foreground filter is used for the actual cancellation. The coefficients of the background filter are copied into the foreground filter when the background filter is proven to perform better. A robust algorithm for line echo cancellation is thereby achieved. In this paper, the benefits and the drawbacks of the two-path algorithm are evaluated and demonstrated through simulations. A modification is proposed that reduces the negative effects of the two-path algorithm. This modification is compared to the original two-path algorithm. Simulations using real speech signals indicate that the proposed modification can improve the performance of the two-path algorithm.