The development of an organ involves dynamic regulation of gene transcription and complex multipathway interactions. To better understand transcriptional regulatory mechanism driving heart development and the consequences of its disruption, we isolated cardiomyocytes (CMs) from wild-type zebrafish embryos at 24, 48 and 72 hours post fertilization corresponding to heart looping, chamber formation and heart maturation, and from mutant lines carrying loss-of-function mutations in gata5, tbx5a and hand2, transcription factors (TFs) required for proper heart development. The integration of CM transcriptomics (RNA-seq) and genome-wide chromatin accessibility maps (ATAC-seq) unravelled dynamic regulatory networks driving crucial events of heart development. These networks contained key cardiac TFs including Gata5/6, Nkx2.5, Tbx5/20, and Hand2, and are associated with open chromatin regions enriched for DNA sequence motifs belonging to the family of the corresponding TFs. These networks were disrupted in cardiac TF mutants, indicating their importance in proper heart development. The most prominent gene expression changes, which correlated with chromatin accessibility modifications within their proximal promoter regions, occurred between heart looping and chamber formation, and were associated with metabolic and hematopoietic/cardiac switch during CM maturation. Furthermore, loss of function of cardiac TFs Gata5, Tbx5a, and Hand2 affected the cardiac regulatory networks and caused global changes in chromatin accessibility profile. Among regions with differential chromatin accessibility in mutants were highly conserved non-coding elements which represent putative cis regulatory elements with potential role in heart development and disease. Altogether, our results revealed the dynamic regulatory landscape at key stages of heart development and identified molecular drivers of heart morphogenesis.


The idea of jihad is central to Islamic faith and ethics, and yet its meanings have been highly contested over time. They have ranged from the philosophical struggle to live an ethical life to the political injunction to wage war against enemies of Islam. Today, more than ever, jihad signifies the political opposition between Islam and the West. As the line drawn between Muslims and non-Muslims becomes more rigid, Ayesha Jalal seeks to retrieve the ethical meanings of this core Islamic principle in South Asian history.Drawing on historical, legal, and literary sources, Jalal traces the intellectual itinerary of jihad through several centuries and across the territory connecting the Middle East with South Asia. She reveals how key innovations in modern Islamic thought resulted from historical imperatives. The social and political scene in India before, during, and after British colonial rule forms the main backdrop. We experience the jihad as armed warfare waged by Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly between 1826 and 1831, the calls to jihad in the great rebellion of 1857, the fusion of jihad with a strand of anti-colonial nationalism in the early twentieth century, and the contemporary politics of self-styled jihadis in Pakistan, waging war to liberate co-religionists in Afghanistan and Kashmir."Partisans of Allah" surveys this rich and tumultuous history of South Asian Muslims and its critical contribution to the intellectual development of the key concept of jihad. Analyzing the complex interplay of ethics and politics in Muslim history, the author effectively demonstrates the preeminent role of jihad in the Muslim faith today.


147 case records of infants referred to the Brompton Hospital in the first year of life with a provisional diagnosis of congenital heart disease were examined. Statistical analyses were performed to evaluate selective criteria for the allocation of these infants into a group with lung disease, or into 1 of 5 major haemodynamic groups--namely, acyanotic, complete transposition of the great arteries, pulmonary outflow tract obstruction, common mixing situations, or hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Arterial PO2 in high oxygen concentration, cardiothoracic ratio, and pulmonary vascular markings on the admission chest x-ray; respiratory rate; P-wave morphology, the electrical sign of the T-wave in lead V4R, and the presence or absence of Q-waves in leads V4R and v6 on the electrocardiogram were significant. A decision tree for the differential diagnosis of infants with suspected congenital heart disease into 5 haemodynamic groups and a group with lung disease is presented, and its predictive value is assessed.


Recently, the allergic reactions against to cephalosporin which is one of the beta-lactam antibiotics, increases due to use of the increasing this drugs. The diagnosis of beta-lactam allergy is difficult but is helped by skin testing. IgE-dependent beta-lactam allergy is first assessed by skin tests-prick tests and then, if negative, intradermal tests. Systemic reactions can be seen rarely during the skin test with these drugs. Except for a few adult patients there are no publications on anaphylaxis developed during the skin tests with ceftriaxone in pediatric patients up till now. In our case, four year old male patient was diagnosed as otitis media in another clinic and intramuscular ceftriaxone was prescribed. Flushing on the face and ears, urticaria, generalized pruritus and intractable cough were observed 15 minutes after intramuscular ceftriaxone. The patient was diagnosed as anaphylaxis and consulted to our allergy clinic for verification of the diagnosis. The skin tests with ceftriaxone and penicillin were planned to be performed six weeks after the reaction. Five minutes after the intradermal test with ceftriaxone, flushing on the face and ears, conjunctivitis, running nose, urticaria, generalized pruritus and intractable cough were observed. Patient was diagnosed as anaphylaxis and intramuscular adrenaline and antihistamine were performed. Our objective for reporting this case is to emphasize the need to become prepared for systemic reactions (anaphylaxis) likely to develop during the skin tests with ceftriaxone.


We investigated whether amyloid-β (Aβ) and tau affected cognition in cognitively normal (CN) individuals, and whether norms for neuropsychological tests based on biomarker-negative individuals would improve early detection of dementia. We included 907 CN individuals from 8 European cohorts and from the Alzheimer's disease Neuroimaging Initiative. All individuals were aged above 40, had Aβ status and neuropsychological data available. Linear mixed models were used to assess the associations of Aβ and tau with five neuropsychological tests assessing memory (immediate and delayed recall of Auditory Verbal Learning Test, AVLT), verbal fluency (Verbal Fluency Test, VFT), attention and executive functioning (Trail Making Test, TMT, part A and B). All test except the VFT were associated with Aβ status and this influence was augmented by age. We found no influence of tau on any of the cognitive tests. For the AVLT Immediate and Delayed recall and the TMT part A and B, we calculated norms in individuals without Aβ pathology (Aβ- norms), which we validated in an independent memory-clinic cohort by comparing their predictive accuracy to published norms. For memory tests, the Aβ- norms rightfully identified an additional group of individuals at risk of dementia. For non-memory test we found no difference. We confirmed the relationship between Aβ and cognition in cognitively normal individuals. The Aβ- norms for memory tests in combination with published norms improve prognostic accuracy of dementia.


I used a mixed-methods research study for this experiment. I wanted to see if women perceived makeup as a type of value system that reflects on their self-confidence. Previous research has had mixed results and I wanted to do a study with a bigger sample size. I used both qualitative and quantitative methods for data collection. I used a closed-ended survey that asked twentythree questions and used two personality scales at the end of the survey. In addition, I interviewed radio talk-show host Davi Crimmins from The Bert Show. I asked her seven openended questions about her personal experience of going thirty days without wearing makeup. The survey was gender specific to women where 116 participants were recruited and only ninetyfour completed the survey in its entirety. Through Crimmins' personal experience and results from the survey, I found a correlation between self-confidence and makeup. The personality scales have shown the participants to have high self-confidence. Results show that women value makeup in social and professional settings, but do not care about makeup when it comes to running errands. 2 Siegel Institute Ethics Research Scholars, Vol. 2 [2017], Art. 2 http://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/siers/vol2/iss1/2


Historically, public ownership of telecommunications, railways, ports, and energy, amongst other infrastructure, has been important in New Zealand. In the electricity sector local authorities generated and supplied electricity from the early 1900s. Thus in a sense electricity generation was in the hands of community owned and operated trading enterprises. However, the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s brought significant restructuring of this infrastructure based on the market model of privatisation. Since 1992 energy companies have been required to operate as successful businesses despite being ultimately owned by community trusts which, in effect, hold the assets of the energy company in trust for the community. However, it is arguable as to whether this model actually pursues social and community objectives. Community ownership of wind turbines is common in some European countries, but there are currently no examples of this form of ownership in New Zealand. This thesis defines community ownership and by examining case studies in Scotland, Denmark and Australia, proposes a model of community ownership appropriate to wind turbine ownership in New Zealand. Specifically, this thesis seeks to identify community ownership models that are capable of promoting holistic environmental justice by reconciling social justice with ecological justice. A number of forms of community ownership are identified in the various case study countries and a comparative analysis is carried out of these exemplars. On the basis of these studies it is found to be possible for a form of community ownership of wind turbines to exist in New Zealand that incorporates both social justice and ecological justice principles as holistic environmental justice.


We consider the problem of query execution when there is limited access to the relations, i.e. when binding patterns require values to be specified in order to get data from the relation. This problem is common in virtual data integration systems where there are heterogeneous sources with various restricted access patterns and query capabilities. Another problem is the lack of the statistical information about the sources and occurrence of unpredictable events. We introduce two mobile join operators, MDJoin and SMDJoin which are designed for restricted sources and implemented using 'mobile agents' in order to benefit from their autonomous and reactive characteristics. Mobile operators of restricted sources are capable to deal with restricted sources and react to the variations between the compile-time estimations and run-time computations of data during query execution. The difference between the two new query operators lies in their level of adaptation ability to the execution environment. Performance results show that mobile agent-based approach at operator level can lead to a significant reduction in response time with restricted sources.


A Fizeau interferometer utilizes a multimode laser as a light source for testing thin transparent plate samples. As a result of multimode linear laser operation, interference fringes are obtained only when the optical path difference between two surfaces is equal to twice a multiple of the laser's effective cavity length. For three parallel surfaces, we can either adjust their separations or select a laser such that only two of the three surfaces meet the requirement of twice a multiple of the laser's effective cavity length.


In recent times South African politics has come to exhibit features typical of many post-colonial contexts, not least the rise of acrimonious and confrontational politics based around personalities and forms of populism. In such contexts rational dialogue and demo- cratic deliberation become increasingly difficult to get going and to sustain. Drawing on Richard Turner's The Eye of the Needle, first published some forty years ago, the paper examines the role religion, and religious organisations, could play in returning such acrimonious public debate to more democratic and visionary grounds. The key point is that religion offers a form of transcendence from the divisive and bitter particularities that animate contemporary political con- flicts. It does this through the spiritual affirmation of our shared human worth due to the love of God(s). From this recognition, achieved through spiritual appeals, the conditions for more rational and democratic debate can be retrieved. In addition, religious tran- scendence redeems the value of utopian thinking, and thus could help re-orientate public debate from a politics of blame for past wrongs to a politics of imagining of future rights.


OBJECTIVE
Since stability of DSM-IV diagnoses of disorders with psychotic features requires validation, we evaluated psychotic patients followed systematically in the McLean-Harvard International First Episode Project.

METHOD
We diagnosed 517 patients hospitalized in a first psychotic illness by SCID-based criteria at baseline and at 24 months to assess stability of specific DSM-IV diagnoses.

RESULTS
Among 500 patients (96.7%) completing the study, diagnoses remained stable in 77.6%, ranking as follows: bipolar I disorder (96.5%) > schizophrenia (75.0%) > delusional disorder (72.7%) > major depressive disorder (MDD), severe, with psychotic features (70.1%) > brief psychotic disorder (61.1%) > psychotic disorder not otherwise specified (NOS) (51.5%) >> schizophreniform disorder (10.5%). Most changed diagnoses (22.4% of patients) were to schizoaffective disorder (53.6% of changes in 12.0% of subjects, from psychotic disorder NOS > schizophrenia > schizophreniform disorder = bipolar I disorder most recent episode mixed, severe, with psychotic features > MDD, severe, with psychotic features > delusional disorder > brief psychotic disorder > bipolar I disorder most recent episode manic, severe, with psychotic features). Second most changed diagnoses were to bipolar I disorder (25.9% of changes, 5.8% of subjects, from MDD, severe, with psychotic features > psychotic disorder NOS > brief psychotic disorder > schizophreniform disorder). Third most changed diagnoses were to schizophrenia (12.5% of changes, 2.8% of subjects, from schizophreniform disorder > psychotic disorder NOS > brief psychotic disorder = delusional disorder = MDD, severe, with psychotic features). These 3 categories accounted for 92.0% of changes. By logistic regression, diagnostic change was associated with nonaffective psychosis > auditory hallucinations > youth > male sex > gradual onset.

CONCLUSIONS
Bipolar I disorder and schizophrenia were more stable diagnoses than delusional disorder or MDD, severe, with psychotic features, and much more than brief psychotic disorder, psychotic disorder NOS, or schizophreniform disorder. Diagnostic changes mainly involved emergence of affective symptoms and were predicted by several premorbid factors. The findings have implications for revisions of DSM and ICD.


This paper has a twofold aim: to analyze the possible opportunities disclosed by the observed growth of studentedited law reviews in Europe and to propose an innovative model of student participation to legal publication. The first part explores the phenomenon of student-edited law reviews in the U.S., focusing on its recognized educational benefits. Among others, it is observed that participation in student-edited law reviews might promote greater scholarly maturity among J.D. students, who might in turn be better equipped for a career in the academia after finishing law school, in comparison to their same-age European peers. Hence, there follows an examination of the possible beneficial repercussions that the establishment of student-edited law reviews may yield on the process of faculty education in (continental) Europe, in light of the general practice therein endorsed of academic "apprenticeship" under a mentor. Such benefits may consist, among others, in the enticement of larger numbers of potential academicians and in their possible greater intellectual maturity, providing new meaning to the aforementioned time-honored European practice. The second part of the paper focuses, instead, on the drawbacks brought about by excessive proliferation of studentedited law reviews in the U.S., such as alleged decrease in the quality of published scholarship as a consequence of the superficial quality control that student editors sometimes perform. In view of the foregoing, an innovative model of student publication is proposed, in order to prevent the onset of such drawbacks in Europe, while retaining the above-outlined benefits of early student involvement in academic discourse. It is suggested to complement few, authoritative sources of published scholarship in the form of peer-reviewed journals with student-edited working paper series which, if based on the guideline to provide substantial constructive feedback to authors, could ultimately help foster a quality improvement of published scholarship. ILSU WORKING PAPER NO. 2008-12/EN This paper can be downloaded without charge from ILSU Working Paper Series www.ilsuwps.org ILSU WORKING PAPER NO. 2008-12/EN 2 LAST MODIFIED: 31/07/2008 A TINY HEART BEATING: STUDENT-EDITED LEGAL PERIODICALS


The use of collagen in the biomedical device industry has led to major advances in soft tissue repair. This is attributed largely to the favourable biological and physiochemical properties of collagen. Regenerative medicine and tissue engineering favoured the use of this biomaterial and various commercial products have become available in the past few decades. This study aims to develop a collagen and chondroitin-6-sulphate dermal regeneration scaffold with enhanced resistance against enzymatic degradation. Frozen slurries (0.5% collagen) were dried under vacuum, coated with silicone, crosslinked and then thoroughly rinsed. The scaffolds were subjected to a range of quantitative and qualitative tests that included: scanning electron microscopy analysis, collagenase enzymatic degradation, and cytotoxicity assessment. Scaffold resistance to enzymatic degradation was manipulated after dehydrothermal treatment by employing combinations of crosslinking agents, such as glutaraldehyde and / or carbodiimide, with or without the presence of L-lysine. Results indicate that highly porous (mean pore diameter of 87.3 µm), bioactive, non-cytotoxic tissue engineering matrices were obtained. Enhanced stability of these scaffolds was achieved through extensive crosslinking and suggests the potential to prevent in vivo wound contraction sufficiently.


This study investigated the extent counselling as a learner support service have enhanced the quality of learning for students of National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) Study centres in South-East of Nigeria. Two research questions and one null hypothesis guided the study. The descriptive design was adopted for the study. Survey research study that was carried out at the four Study Centres of NOUN in the South-East states of Nigeria The population of study was 4,765 students while a sample of 480 respondents were selected using a multi-stage sampling technique. The instrument for data collection was researchers` structured questionnaire titled "Counselling as a Learner Support Service for Enhancing Quality Learning" which was face validated by three experts. The Reliability coefficient of 0.77 using Cronbach Alpha was obtained. The research questions were answered mean while hypothesis was tested using Mann-Whitney U-test. The result from the study showed that counselling as a learner support to a high extent have enhanced the quality of learning at the NOUN South-East Study centres. Based on these findings, recommendations were made among which were that: National Open University of Nigeria should make provision for adequate media facilities for counselling so as to ensure that students are guided as expected. Availability of a standard well-equipped computer counselling room that provides for a more supportive counselling delivery will ensure that distance learners' problems are attended to at all times.


TWIST (Transport with a Social Target) is a European part-financed project by INTERREG III B - CADSES. It oriented towards the promotion of the mo¬bility in underprivileged areas by experimenting a Demand Responsive System (DRT). Various European countries participated in the project and implemented the pilot system. The project is inspired by the cohesion policies of the EU which aim for territorial integration of countries or regions of countries which are structurally less developed. Areas participating show a lack of balance in infra¬structural and transport services in mountain, rural and suburban areas. The implementation of a DRT system aimed to reduce the social and eco¬nomic gap between rural/mountainous and urban areas, and aimed to set up an appropri¬ate model to solve the problems in areas with similar background offering the possibility for greater mobility to the weakest part of the population, such as the elderly or disabled people, women, children and others who have no own cars. Experience from the research results suggest that for financial and scheduling reasons DRT services do not aim to be dominant public transport providers in a market, but are regarded as vital suppliers of services where conventional solutions are untenable, for example low demand areas, special transport ser¬vices and where social exclusion is evident with low number of potential sub¬sidy. Old-aged people, disabled social groups and individuals without cars may have extreme significance in servicing transport demands within the framework of DRT systems. As the research shows, the more regulated the legal envi¬ronment, the less conflict there is between DRT and other public transport modes. It seems in terms of technologies for DRT services, the level of telematics support available at the local level too. Intermodality needs an adequate environment. Some fixed stops are needed by all means for interconnections. Services need fixed starting time and a definite starting point for departure. Completely circular schemed flexible routes very rarely prove to be viable in the long run. One of the most serious problems is the unclear juridical status and regulation of the governance of DRT systems. Their financial system with the charging mechanism is rather chaotic and hectic (too many subjective elements are built into the system) and the degree and efficiency of their subsidization system also leaves several question marks especially.


The patent system is built on the premise that exclusion leads to innovation. But a mounting body of evidence calls into question the assumption that "innovation by exclusion" – innovation based on excluding rivals – is the only, or even primary, way innovation happens today: nearly 50% of manufacturers got the idea for their most important new product from an outside source that shared it with them, 45-60% of patentees acquire patents to access the technology of others, and over 1,300 companies, including five of the ten top holders of patents, have pledged to share their patents with others. But because of the patent system's traditional focus on exclusion, policymakers have paid less attention to how patents can better support the diffusion of technology through mechanisms such as disclosure, transfer, waiver, and the pursuit of freedom to operate. This paper addresses this gap by exploring in depth the way that the patent system can encourage the diffusion of technology between rivals and innovators, revealing a surprising number of overlooked levers within the patent system for encouraging innovation. For example, making it easier to place inventions in the public domain through effective defensive publication, encouraging greater disclosure of patent-product relationships through the marking requirement, and changing the default for provisional applications to being open rather than closed, and for utility applications to publish upon filing, rather than after an 18-month delay, but with the right of inventors to opt-out of this default, would enhance patent disclosure by enabling technical information and permissions to use them to be available earlier to the world. Improving reporting and discovery of patent information, including ownership, availability for licensing, licensing status in the case of publicly funded inventions in accordance with existing law, patent licenses, and standards commitments, could boost markets for technology. Making it easier to waive patent rights and rely on waivers of patent rights, through the creation of a government registry of patent rights, and creating, e.g. an "open" or "defensive only" option that allows patentees to pay discounted maintenance fees in exchange for promising to use their patents only defensively, or to give up certain rights, akin to "license of right" schemes in the UK and Germany, would increase freedom to operate. As innovation increasingly takes place in open and closed modes, and often both, the patent system, by offering more ways for patentees to decide the fate of their inventions, can increase its relevance to "all of the above" types of innovation.


Green (1971) notes the apparent unacceptability of certain quantificational expressions as possessors of singular head nouns. We provide data from a range of English dialects to show that such constructions are not straightforwardly unacceptable, but there are a number of restrictions on their use. We build on Kayne's (1993, 1994) analysis of English possessives in conjunction with considerations on floating quantifiers to explain both the types of possessive that are permitted in the relevant dialects and their distribution, which is restricted to predicative position.


China is Venezuela's largest bilateral lender as well as a source of diplomatic support. Yet for half a decade Beijing has been steadily unwinding its financial ties with the struggling South American nation. In this article, we demonstrate how China has been ensnarled in a creditor trap in Venezuela. For years, China lent to Venezuela with few policy conditions, securing their lending with loan-for-oil deals and wagering that Venezuela's oil production capacity was a sufficient guarantee for debt repayment. However, under the shaky leadership of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela's economic and political dysfunction has grown at the same time that Chinese confidence in the Bolivarian nation appears to have plummeted. China's recent lending has been defensive, providing some temporary debt relief to Venezuela to protect Beijing's considerable financial commitments in the country. At the same time, the Asian giant has signaled its willingness to work with opposition leaders. What does the future hold for China-Venezuela relations, in both economic and political terms?


OBJECTIVES
To evaluate the efficacy of an individually tailored nursing intervention for reducing chemotherapy-related symptom distress in adult patients with cancer.
.

SAMPLE & SETTING
A control group (n = 71) received usual care and an intervention group (n = 72) received usual care and the CHEMO-SUPPORT intervention, all at the University Hospitals of Leuven in Belgium.
.

METHODS & VARIABLES
The intervention effect was evaluated by measuring the difference in outcomes between the two groups. The primary outcome, overall symptom distress, and other symptom-related outcomes were self-reported at the start of treatment (baseline) and at 3, 6, and 12 weeks.
.

RESULTS
The CHEMO-SUPPORT intervention showed significantly less worsening of overall symptom distress and severity. Self-efficacy and outcome expectations (measured at six weeks) were significantly higher in the intervention group. Self-care (measured at 12 weeks) was statistically similar between the two groups. The results emphasize the importance of nurses in coaching patients to adequately self-manage their symptoms at home.
.

IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING
Providing goal-directed self-management support using motivational interviewing as well as tailoring are promising areas for reducing chemotherapy-related symptom distress.


When the fashion industry declares that lime green is the new black, or instructs us to "think pink!", it is not the result of a backroom deal forged by a secretive cabal of fashion journalists, designers, manufacturers, and the editor of Vogue. It is the latest development of a color revolution that has been unfolding for more than a century. In this book, the award-winning historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk traces the relationship of color and commerce, from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design, describing the often unrecognized role of the color profession in consumer culture. Blaszczyk examines the evolution of the color profession from 1850 to 1970, telling the stories of innovators who managed the color cornucopia that modern artificial dyes and pigments made possible. These "color stylists", "color forecasters", and "color engineers" helped corporations understand the art of illusion and the psychology of color. Blaszczyk describes the strategic burst of color that took place in the 1920s, when General Motors introduced a bright blue sedan to compete with Ford' all-black Model T and when housewares became available in a range of brilliant hues. She explains the process of color forecasting--not a conspiracy to manipulate hapless consumers but a careful reading of cultural trends and consumer taste. And she shows how color information flowed from the fashion houses of Paris to textile mills in New Jersey. Today professional colorists are part of design management teams at such global corporations as Hilton, Disney, and Toyota. The Color Revolution tells the history of how colorists help industry capture the hearts and dollars of consumers.


R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is one of the major poets of our time, as well as one of the finest religious poets in the English language and Wales's greatest poet. This substantial gathering of his late poems shows us the final flowering of a truly great poet still writing at the height of his powers right through his 70s and 80s. It begins with his autobiographical sequence The Echoes Return Slow, which has been unavailable for many years, and goes up to Residues, written immediately before his death at the age of 87. These powerful poems - about time and history, the self, love, the machine, the Cross and prayer - cover all of his major areas of questioning. This is R.S. Thomas in a winter light, his fury concentrated on the inhumanity of man and modern technology, his gaze absorbed by the God he felt in Nature, but finding nourishment in 'waste places'. At the same time he writes with resigned feeling and immense insight, as well as grim humour and playful irony, of isolation, ageing, marriage and 'love's shining greenhouses'. For Thomas, 'Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect /by way of the heart.' Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 is the sequel to R.S. Thomas's Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix Press, 1995), which only covers his collections up to Experimenting with an Amen (1986). It reprints in full the contents of R.S. Thomas's last five collections, The Echoes Return Slow (Macmillan, 1988: unavailable for many years), and Bloodaxe's Counterpoint (1990), Mass for Hard Times (1992), No Truce with the Furies (1995) and the posthumously published Residues (2002).


The significance of political education is recognized by most countries in accomplishing the desired values in the society, but differs in form according to their ideologies. This research, is an attempt to study the different approaches to the teaching of political-education in Egypt, in comparison with England and the Soviet Union. The research report is divided into ten chapters. Chapters two and three are devoted to a study of the theoretical framework of political education, and political socialization. The development of political life and ideology in Egypt, is covered in chapters four and five. Chapter six deals with the different approaches to political education, in the light of official statements of the state. Chapters seven and eight focus on the study of the teaching of political education in the school curriculum, and the approaches to political education. Chapter nine is concerned with the work of political parties in political education. Chapters one and ten cover the introduction, conclusion, and recommendations. In this research, political education is mainly seen as the political learning which develops the ability of young people to participate in political life, and to influence the system and its values. However, attempts at political learning which aim to support the system and its values, are regarded as political socialization. It has been noted that whilst Egypt encourages a more open approach to political education than before, the approach to political socialization still exists. Improvements in political education in England are greater than in Egypt. Nevertheless, approaches to political socialization have always been emphasized in the Soviet Union. Some recommendations are suggested to improve political education in Egypt. They are mainly based on developing the political awareness of the young people, and their ability to participate in democratic life and to influence the system.


Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) are adducts formed on proteins by glycation with reducing sugars, such as glucose, and tend to form and accumulate under hyperglycemic conditions. AGE accumulation alters protein function and has been implicated in the pathogenesis of many degenerative diseases such as diabetic complications. AGEs have also been shown to promote the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, but the roles of AGEs in inflammasome signaling have not been explored in detail. Here, we present evidence that AGEs attenuate activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome in bone marrow–derived macrophages (BMDMs) as determined by caspase-1 processing and interleukin-1β production. AGEs also dampened the assembly of the NLRP3 inflammasome, but did not affect the NLRC4 or AIM2 inflammasome activation. Moreover, our data indicated that AGE treatment inhibited Toll-like receptor (TLR)-dependent production of pro-inflammatory cytokines in BMDMs. This immunosuppressive effect of AGE was not associated with a receptor for AGEs (RAGE)-mediated signaling. Instead, AGE treatment markedly suppressed lipopolysaccharide-induced M1 polarization of macrophages. Furthermore, AGEs significantly dampened innate immune responses including NLRP3 inflammasome activation and type-I interferon production in macrophages upon influenza virus infection. These observations collectively suggest that AGEs could impair host NLRP3 inflammasome–mediated innate immune defenses against RNA virus infection leading to an increased susceptibility to infection.


Recently, there has been an increasing deployment of content distribution networks (CDNs) that offer hosting services to Web content providers. In this paper, we first compare the uncooperative pulling of Web contents used by commercial CDNs with the cooperative pushing. Our results show that the latter can achieve comparable users' perceived performance with only 4%-5% of replication and update traffic compared with the former scheme. Therefore, we explore how to efficiently push content to CDN nodes. Using trace-driven simulation, we show that replicating content in units of URLs can yield 60%-70% reduction in clients' latency, compared with replicating in units of Websites. However, it is very expensive to perform such a fine-grained replication. To address this issue, we propose to replicate content in units of clusters, each containing objects which are likely to be requested by clients that are topologically close. To this end, we describe three clustering techniques and use various topologies and several large Web server traces to evaluate their performance. Our results show that the cluster-based replication achieves performance close to that of the URL-based scheme, but only at 1%-2% of computation and management cost. In addition, by adjusting the number of clusters, we can smoothly trade off management and computation cost for better client performance. To adapt to changes in users' access patterns, we also explore incremental clustering that adaptively adds new documents to the existing content clusters. We examine both offline and online incremental clustering, where the former assumes access history is available while the latter predicts access pattern based on the hyperlink structure. Our results show that the offline clustering yields performance close to that of the complete re-clustering at much lower overhead. The online incremental clustering and replication cut down the retrieval cost by 4.6 times compared with random and by 8 times compared with no replication. Therefore it is especially useful to improve document availability during flash crowds.


For those who see science as an ever finer parsing of causes and effects, the article in this issue of BioScience on changes in bird abundance in eastern North America might seem less than completely satisfying. The authors, Ivan Valiela and Paulina Martinetto, crunched a huge amount of data gathered over decades by the thousands of observers who participate in the North American Breeding Bird Survey. Valiela and Martinetto used these data to paint an impressionistic portrait of multidecadal trends in the recorded abundance of species classified by habitat preference and migratory habit. The survey is susceptible to a variety of possible biases, acknowledged by the authors, which would make it hard to reach definite conclusions about the actual trend in abundance for many individual species. Nonetheless,Valiela and Martinetto's results yield striking patterns from more than 300 species, amply justifying the exercise. Although the total number of birds recorded as nesting in the eastern and central United States has—no surprise—steadily decreased since 1966, the decreases were heavily concentrated among species that either resided or migrated within the United States and Canada; nesters that migrated farther south after the nesting season did not in general decrease, and a substantial number increased in abundance. Decreases were especially common among birds preferring open, edge, and wetland habitat, a fact the authors tentatively ascribe to the spread in North America of industrial, suburban, and other human-affected land cover—loosely, "urban sprawl." Forest-loving species, in contrast, often increased in abundance, an observation that finds a likely explanation in the expansion of northern forests during much of the 20th century. The increases among forest-loving birds were most pronounced, however, among species that migrate south of the United States, which is a surprise, given the well-publicized loss of forest in the Neotropics; likewise, open-habitat birds that migrate south for the northern winter did not by and large increase as a result of the growing amount of pasture in the Neotropics. A possibly related surprise is the relative lack of declines among wetland-loving birds that migrate south of the United States. All told, the patterns prompt Valiela and Martinetto to suggest that alterations in the northern part of the ranges of migrant birds dominate over the effects of changes further south. Readers are referred to the article, which begins on p. 360, for complete details. This sort of broad-brush description of trends cannot unambiguously identify causes, but it can help suggest further research. Despite the limitations of the data set, the patterns can hardly all be the result of observational bias. The notion of an expanding ecological footprint of changes in North America (and the apparently smaller effects of land-use changes further south) is a nonobvious idea that deserves more detailed study.


Section 502 of the Labor-Management Relations Act (LMRA) allows employees to stop working if they face "abnormally dangerous conditions," and a rule under the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act creates an employee right to refuse work because of "apprehension of death or injury." Using a hypothetical scenario, I show that neither law would assist emergency workers who lack protective gear while responding to a terror attack.

I propose an NLRB rule to strengthen Section 502, a 1947 law that is dormant but appropriate for these abnormal workplace dangers. Although part of my proposal draws on the experiences of 9/11, it is mainly founded on fundamental changes in job duties and government employment regulations that recognize a permanent threat to domestic security. The growing list of affected occupations includes dockworkers and doctors, subway and airport workers, power plant and postal employees, and more. However, my proposal excludes police, firefighters, and most paramedics. They perform immediate lifesaving services, and in any event, are excluded from the NLRB's jurisdiction because they are public employees.

My proposal draws from the fruitless experience of appellate court decisions on Section 502. This caselaw is conflicted because courts disagree as to whether an employee must present proof in fact of an extreme risk, or be motivated by good faith belief. My proposal is also based on the intent of the drafters of Section 502. The two sponsors of this law were Republican senators who strongly opposed union interests. However, when proposing this law in the midst of enacting strike controls, they said "it would be very unfair and very unjust to employees in any industry to penalize them, if, because of abnormal or unusually dangerous conditions, they should refrain from working."

Using evidence from recent GAO reports and other studies, I show that new types of emergency workers are poorly trained and equipped. For the few who train for a cataclysmic attack, their simulations are unrealistic. These employees— who, in their routine jobs do little or no life-threatening work— are not trained for their own fear and panic. Thus, there is too little attention to the possibility that these essential workers will refuse orders when their lives are endangered.

By breathing life into Section 502, the NLRB would join the large circle of federal and state agencies that are currently immersed in this emergency planning. The purpose of my Article is not to spare a few careers that might otherwise be lost in a poor response to an attack. If these newly designated or de facto emergency workers are not extended a work refusal right, their employers will continue to be lax in improving protective equipment, communication systems, bio-terror inoculations, and work procedures. In the final analysis, proper training and protection of these new emergency workers is essential to deter, prevent, respond to, and mitigate an attack.


Muscle contraction occurs when the constitutive proteins, actin and myosin, interact via crossbridge formation, powered by the hydrolysis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). It is a physical process that transduces chemical energy into mechanical work, producing directional motion. The central question is how force generation and movement in muscle contraction are associated with major conformational changes in contractile and regulatory proteins. The best available technique for such an approach is X-ray diffraction which can provide structural information with a submolecular resolution. X-ray diffraction with intense synchrotron radiation has demonstrated a structural basis for the molecular mechanism underlying muscle contraction with high spatial- and time-resolution. The structural alterations in vertebrate skeletal muscles undergoing contraction by synchrotron X-ray diffraction are outlined by putting a lot of weight on the thin filament as the locus of actomyosin interaction.

Key Concepts:

Muscle contraction occurs when constitutive proteins actin and myosin in muscle interact with each other, powered by the hydrolysis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), leading to a force generation or a shortening of the sarcomere.

Sliding filament theory is a proposal on the basis of the discovery that when a sarcomere shortens, two types of filaments slide each other with little change in their lengths, resulting in an overall shortening of muscle.

Elastic elements sustaining the tension that muscle exerts during contraction are thought to be resided somewhere in a sarcomere. In the current hypothesis, the only elastic elements are assumed to reside somewhere around or within the myosin heads.

Extensibility of the thin actin filament: The force is transmitted to the ends of the contractile unit through the thin actin filaments, which have been thought to contribute very little compliance to the mechanochemical machinery. Evidence that the thin actin filaments are purely elastic under active force generation has been obtained.

Twisting of the thin actin filament suggests that the force acting at a myosin crossbridge contains torque components around the axis of the thin actin filament.

X-ray diffraction is the interference of the X-rays scattered from the electron densities of the matter, and the Fourier transformation of the interference pattern yields the structure of the matter.

Synchrotron radiations are electromagnetic waves that are emitted in the tangential direction of the orbit when electrons or positrons circulating near the speed of light in an accelerating ring (synchrotron). Synchrotron X-rays with high brilliance are an indispensable tool for muscle structural research.

Keywords:

muscle contraction;
muscle regulation;
thin filament;
thick filament;
extensibility of thin filament;
twisting of thin filament;
X-ray fibre diffraction;
synchrotron radiation


In The Report of the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education, Cochran-Smith and Zeichner's (2005) review of studies in the field of teacher education revealed that many studies lacked theoretical and conceptual grounding. The author argues that Derrick Bell's (1980) interest convergence, a principle of critical race theory, can be used as an analytic, explanatory, and conceptual tool in the study and analyses of policies and practices in teacher education. In particular, the author outlines interest convergence as a tenet of critical race theory, conceptualizes some broad themes of "raced" interests in teacher education, applies the interest-convergence principle to teacher education, and introduces an evolving theory of disruptive movement in teacher education to fight against racism in teacher education policies and practices.


Deaths from cholera in London, UK, were recorded weekly from 1824 to 1901. Three features of the time series stand out: (i) cholera deaths were strongly seasonal, with peak mortality almost always in the summer, (ii) the only non-summer outbreaks occurred in the spring of 1832, the autumn of 1848 and the winter of 1853, and (iii) extraordinarily severe summer outbreaks occurred in 1832, 1849, 1854 and 1866 (the four 'great' cholera years). The non-summer outbreaks of 1832, 1848 and 1853 appear to have been herald waves of newly invading cholera strains. In addition, a simple mathematical model confirms that a non-summer introduction of a new cholera strain can result in an initial herald wave, followed by a severe outbreak the following summer. Through the analysis of the genomes of nineteenth-century specimens, it may be possible to identify the strains that caused these herald waves and the well-known cholera epidemics that followed.


During this investigation, both microstructural and fatigue analyses were carried out to determine the structural integrity of a flexible pavement system with a 4% cement-stabilised base course. Scanning electron microscope analyses as well as material characterisation studies, which included Texas triaxial, resonant-frequency, ultrasonic pulse, and accelerated load facility tests, were conducted to collect the requisite data. Additionally, dynamic finite element analyses were employed to determine the critical strains necessary to calculate the fatigue performance. Correlations between selected microstructural parameters and the fatigue performance of treated pavement structures were established by multilayer feed-forward neural networks. The results, which demonstrated a meaningful relationship between microstructural information and fatigue characteristics of a flexible pavement, may be used to predict the fatigue performance of such systems.


This study contributes to our understanding of the ageing process by investigating whether particular psychological dispositions among older people are associated with healthy ageing. The study's objective is to further our knowledge about what constitutes 'health' for the 'oldest-old' (people aged 80 or more years) in China. It is recognised that apart from the absence of disease, good health is a subjective experience, and it is posited that self-reported health is associated with psychological disposition, or in other words, that an individual's personal attitudes, motivations, and beliefs condition their perception of health and illness. Using data from China's Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (1998 and 2000 waves), we examine whether psychological disposition in 1998 had an independent effect on self-reported health in 2000. The study is based on a stratified random sample of 4,366 people aged 80 or more years. After introducing controls for health status and socio-demographic variables, the multivariate, longitudinal results demonstrate that a robust psychological disposition was indeed associated with good short-term, self-reported health. The findings also illustrate that the effect differed by age, for the relationship was significant for octogenarians and nonagenarians but insignificant for centenarians. Data limitations prevented an empirical investigation of the processes that underlie the relationship between psychological disposition and self-reported health.


Demand side response (DSR) is widely seen as the main intervention tool to address issues of peaks and troughs in electricity demand. Businesses can provide DSR through a variety of measures, such as using on-site generators or reducing their electricity consumption in response to external signals. To date, energy intensive firms have been the main providers of demand side response. However,
the realization of the technical potential of DSR requires that other electricity end-users also alter their consumption patterns in response to system needs and there is little research on what influences their capacity and willingness to do so. This paper contributes to filling this gap by examining DSR participation of large energy consumers in the commercial and public-sector. In
this sector, energy costs typically represent a smaller proportion of overall costs than in energy intensive industries and partly because of this, energy initiatives tend be perceived as marginal to the core business. These differences suggest that the drivers that have encouraged energy intensive industries to participate in DSR may be insufficient to unlock the technical flexibility of the
commercial and public sector. Using concepts from neo classical and behavioural economics and insights from organizational theory and social practice theory, we explore impediments to the uptake of DSR by large commercial firms and public-sector organizations. We argue that to encourage their participation it would be important to investigate what electricity loads are used for in different firms, how energy initiatives are approached within these organizations, and what role
barriers such as hidden costs and status-quo-bias may have in inhibiting engagement in demand side response.


In elective microsurgical procedures, it is necessary to occlude small branches when mobilizing vessels in obtaining vein grafts. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relative merits of suture ligation, bipolar cauterization, and hemoclip ligation, and to determine the minimum safe distance of occlusion. The left inferior epigastric vein and the right profunda femoris artery were ligated under operating microscope magnification with 10-0 nylon suture, small hemoclip, or bipolar cauterization at distances of 0, 1, or 2 mm from the parent vessel in 75 rats. Suture ligation was significantly better than bipolar cauterization (p less than .01) and hemoclip ligation (p less than .001). All cauterization failures occurred at 0 and 1 mm. Hemoclip failures occurred at all three distances. In the management of small branching vessels: suture ligation is safe at 0, 1, and 2 mm; bipolar cauterization is safe at 2 mm; and hemoclip ligation is unsafe.


Despite his long-standing opposition to the Miranda doctrine, why did Justice Rehnquist vote to save the Miranda doctrine in Dickerson v. United States? As written, many prevailing accounts accept Justice Rehnquist's opinion in Dickerson v. United States at face value and disavow the potential of a strategic explanation for his behavior. The difficulty with the non-strategic accounts is their failure to outline explicitly the evidence supporting the uniqueness of their theory. Specifically, these explanations largely ignore the alternative set of preferences that could have produced the Chief's decision. This is troubling because prior social science scholarship demonstrates that a chief justice possesses a unique set of institutional powers that provides significant incentive for him to behave sophisticatedly.Many prevailing explanations for Dickerson at a minimum are incomplete because they fail to determine whether his vote and opinion were the result of moderation, fidelity to traditional legal principles, or, in fact, strategic behavior. This article pursues a uniqueness claim, arguing the available evidence supports a strategic explanation for Justice Rehnquist's behavior in Dickerson. To do this, the article first reviews the methodological debate that exists within the social science scholarship, a debate relevant to the competing explanations for the Dickerson decision. Next, the article explores the strategic or quasi-game theoretic approach by describing the multistage sophisticated process that produces all Supreme Court decisions. It culminates in a general form diagram that maps the behavioral choice faced by all similarly situated Chief Justices'. This diagram - inspired by game theoretic literature on judicial decision making - is carried forward into Part II of the article. Part II directly considers the Dickerson decision. This section begins with a description of the Supreme Court's Miranda jurisprudence before reviewing the specific facts and procedural history of the case. Next, Part II reviews Justice Rehnquist's Miranda-related decisions which, taken together, demonstrate the truly anomalous nature of the Dickerson opinion. The article then outlines its strategic account, an approach rejecting many prevailing explanations of Rehnquist's behavior. Strategic and non-strategic behaviors are often observationally equivalent. Thus, in order firmly to support its strategic theory, this article concludes with a discussion of several important post-Dickerson decisions, where the Chief Justice surprisingly supports the preservation of certain exceptions to Miranda even after his Dickerson opinion supposedly afforded Miranda full constitutional status. The cases are critical to the analysis because they help determine what end Chief Justice Rehnquist actually achieved in his Dickerson opinion. He successfully froze a set of pre-Dickerson Miranda exceptions that he personally developed during his thirty-year tenure on the Court. It is from this perspective that commentators in fact are correct to argue that Dickerson is critical to understanding the legacy of the late Chief Justice.


THIS series gives readers the opportunity to consider and contribute to discussion of some of the ethical dilemmas that can arise in veterinary practice. Each month, a case scenario is presented, followed by discussion of some of the issues involved. In addition, a possible way forward is suggested; however, there is rarely a cut-and-dried answer in such cases, and readers may wish to suggest an alternative approach. This month's dilemma, 'Questioning morals', was submitted and is discussed by Richard Brown. Readers with comments to contribute are invited to send them as soon as possible, so that they can be considered for publication in the next issue. Discussion of the dilemma 'Changing established protocols', which was published in the February issue of In Practice, appears on page 151. The series is being coordinated by Steven McCulloch, a practising vet with a PhD in the ethics of veterinary policy. It is hoped it will provide a framework that will help practitioners find solutions when facing similar dilemmas.


The ninth Sustainable Development Goal advises countries to build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation. Industry has historically been one of the most important pillars of economic and social development, but traditional resource-intensive and heavily polluting production is no longer sustainable in the face of climate change. If the path of industrial growth is not redirected immediately and effectively, reaching the target set in the 2015 Paris Agreement to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below two degrees celsius, will become unrealizable. The good news is that recent practices demonstrate how industry could be a big part of the solution for climate mitigation and inclusive, sustainable development. The unprecedented task presented in Paris, to decarbonize, globally introduces challenges but also enormous opportunities for industries as they seek a greener path to production while remaining globally competitive. This report helps chart that path to industrial competitiveness through policy and technology interventions that improve industrial operations. At the same time it explores ways that industrial products can become greener through public standards while companies and countries maintain, and even increase, competitiveness. The information is directed toward government leaders, policy makers, and multilateral institutions in the fields of energy, climate mitigation, and sustainable development. The report's recommendations to policy makers are based on comprehensive case studies and quantitative and qualitative analyses.


Since 1980, Shenzhen has grown in a record-breaking pace to the megacity it is today. Initially, Shenzhen's growth was based on low-cost mass industrial production. In recent years, however, the Shenzhen city government is trying to modernize and diversify its economy. Shenzhen has embraced the creative and cultural industries as one of the most promising sectors for its economic future. While many publications have appeared about Shenzhen's spectacular transformation from a fishing village to a megacity, much less is written about Shenzhen's ambitions in the creative economy and the implications this may have for its urban planning policies and strategies. This paper makes an inventory of Shenzhen's creative city initiatives, policies and strategies, explores which concrete evidence of a flourishing creative economy we can already witness in the city, and asks the question whether Shenzhen is not only an attractive location for creative companies, but also for creative workers.


Persistent, widespread wet conditions in the western United States in the early twentieth century have been noted in a number of studies. Here, we investigate the character of this pluvial, which covered a roughly 9‐state region and lasted about 13 years. Paleoclimatic data used to evaluate the period in a long‐term context indicate that the twentieth‐century pluvial is an extremely rare event, as previous studies have suggested, even when assessed in the context of a 1186‐year reconstruction of regional drought. An analysis of twentieth‐century climate data, characterizing precipitation seasonality, intensity, and frequency, shows that the pluvial was primarily a result of winter season, heavy to moderately heavy precipitation events, during a handful of extremely wet winters. Temperatures were also anomalously cool. The combination of duration, intensity, and spatial extent make this an unusual event, not only in twentieth century, but in the past 12 centuries.


Phenylacetone monooxygenase (PAMO) is the most stable and thermo-tolerant member of the Baeyer-Villiger monooxygenase family, and therefore it is an ideal candidate for the synthesis of industrially relevant compounds. However, its limited substrate scope has largely limited its industrial applications. In the present work, we provide, for the first time, the catalytic mechanism of PAMO for the native substrate phenylacetone as well as for a linear non-native substrate 2-octanone, using molecular dynamics simulations, quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics calculations. We provide a theoretical basis for the preference of the enzyme for the native aromatic substrate over non-native linear substrates. Our study provides fundamental atomic-level insights that can be employed in the rational engineering of PAMO for wide applications in industrial biocatalysis, in particular, in the biotransformation of long-chain aliphatic oils into potential biodiesels.


A monoclonal antibody dot-blot assay was used to evaluate detergent lysates of tonsil tissue from mule deer to detect PrPCWD, the marker for the cervid transmissible spongiform encephalopathy chronic wasting disease (CWD). Samples of formalin-fixed brain and tonsil tissues from mule deer were examined for PrPCWD using immunohistochemistry (IHC) with Mab F99/97.6.1, the gold standard for diagnosis of preclinical CWD. The contralateral tonsil from each of the 143 deer was prepared for confirmatory IHC and as a 10% (wt/vol) detergent lysate without purification or enrichment steps for monoclonal antibody dot-blot assay. PrPCWD was detected by dot-blot assay in 49 of 50 samples considered positive by IHC. Forty-eight of the positive samples were evaluated with a quantitative dot-blot assay calibrated with recombinant PrP. Tonsillar PrPCWD concentrations ranged from 34 to 1,188 ng per 0.5 mg starting wet weight of tissue. The abundant PrPCWD in mule deer tonsil will facilitate development and validation of high-throughput screening tests for CWD in large populations of free-ranging deer.


Effective knowledge sharing within project teams is of critical importance to knowledge- intensive organizations. Prior research studies indicate a positive association between shared cognitive perspective and effective knowledge sharing behavior among co-workers. Building on these studies and drawing from theoretical foundations found in the sociological and social- psychological literature on organizational trust and knowledge sharing, this study sought to test the effect of shared perspective (i.e. shared language and shared vision) on organizational knowledge sharing behavior. The data were provided by 275 'legal professionals' and paralegals who were all knowledge workers engaged in shared legal project work at one of Canada's largest multijurisdictional law firms. The nature of their work required a significant reliance on co-workers for both explicit and tacit knowledge. Multiple regression analysis, among other statistical techniques, was used to test the hypotheses and determine significant relationships. Overall, having a shared cognitive perspective had a positive effect on knowledge sharing behavior in the firm. Results showed a positive relationship between shared perspective and willingness to share knowledge; where higher amounts of shared language or shared vision led to higher willingness by the respondent to share with their co-worker, regardless of working relationship. Results also showed a positive relationship between shared vision and willingness to use knowledge. Surprisingly, no significant relationships were found between shared language and willingness to use knowledge in either group. Interestingly, the results also suggested that both shared language and shared vision led to a significantly higher perception that knowledge received from positive referent co-workers was useful. However, neither shared language nor shared vision had a significant effect with negative referents. This finding suggested a need to further explore the effect of working relationships in subsequent research.


We study the problem of allocating indivisible items to agents with additive valuations, under the additional constraint that bundles must be connected in an underlying item graph. Previous work has considered the existence and complexity of fair allocations. We study the problem of finding an allocation that is Pareto-optimal. While it is easy to find an efficient allocation when the underlying graph is a path or a star, the problem is NP-hard for many other graph topologies, even for trees of bounded pathwidth or of maximum degree 3. We show that on a path, there are instances where no Pareto-optimal allocation satisfies envy-freeness up to one good, and that it is NP-hard to decide whether such an allocation exists, even for binary valuations. We also show that, for a path, it is NP-hard to find a Pareto-optimal allocation that satisfies maximin share, but show that a moving-knife algorithm can find such an allocation when agents have binary valuations that have a non-nested interval structure.


When revolutions rocked Europe in 1848, Frederick Douglass responded almost immediately by framing these movements across the Atlantic in global terms, connecting class strife in the Old World to the struggle over slavery in the New. Yet he also used the revolts of 1848 long after they had ended to discern other, related patterns of protest and repression in the slavery crisis of the 1850s, in the Civil War, and in the rise and fall of Radical Reconstruction. His reflections on these rebellions thereby shuttle between times and locations, weaving together disparate places and events in ways that advance a multilinear sense of historical time. The manner in which Douglass writes through 1848- connecting Europe to the United States and integrating those failed rebellions into a capacious philosophy of history-thus suggests that transnationalism itself inheres in a particular kind of temporal, and even literary, transport.


The H2S test was created to assess the microbial quality of drinking water in low-resource settings, but the original version of the H2S test lacks sensitivity and specificity for faecal indicator bacteria. There is evidence that a modified media formula of the H2S test may be more sensitive and specific for the faecal indicator bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli) and less sensitive to organisms of non-faecal origin. This research established the detection threshold and operational range of the H2S test, to increase its sensitivity and specificity for E. coli. A total of 20 modifications of the H2S test, and the original test, were assayed against 20 confirmed and pure culture bacteria of faecal and non-faecal origin at varying concentrations. Additionally, some of the H2S test modifications were evaluated against standard methods for drinking-water analysis. Results indicate that using a modified version of the H2S test containing L-cystine and 2-mercaptopyridine, and bile salts or penicillin G, E. coli will produce H2S. In addition, this research reveals which organisms react positively to the original and modified versions of the H2S test. The modified versions of the H2S test can be promoted as a simple screening test for microbial drinking-water safety in low-resource settings.


In a task domain characterized by physical actions and where information has value, competing teams gain advantage by spying on and deceiving an opposing team while cooperating teammates can help the team by secretly communicating new information. For a robot to thrive in this environment it must be able to perform actions in a manner to deceive opposing agents as well as to be able to secretly communicate with friendly agents. It must further be able to extract information from observing the actions of other agents.
The goal of this research is to expand on current human robot interaction by creating a robot that can operate in the above scenario. To enable these behaviors, an architecture is created which provides the robot with mechanisms to work with hidden human mental states. The robot attempts to infer these hidden states from observable factors and use them to better understand and predict behavior. It also takes steps to alter them in order to change the future behavior of the other agent. It utilizes the knowledge that the human is performing analogous inferences about the robot's own internal states to predict the effect of its actions on the human's knowledge and perceptions of the robot. The research focuses on the implicit communication that is made possible by two embodied agents interacting in a shared space through nonverbal interaction.
While the processes used by a robot differ significantly from the cognitive mechanisms employed by humans, each face the similar challenge of completing the loop from sensing to acting. This architecture employs a self-as-simulator strategy, reusing the robot's behavioral mechanisms to model aspects of the human's mental states. This reuse allows the robot to model human actions and the mental states behind them using the grammar of its own representations and actions. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)


Land-use practices have long been associated with alterations in stream ecosystem structure and function, however, 'exurbanization' and its impact on streams is poorly understood. This study compares the ecosystem structure and function of 9 southern Appalachian streams of differing land-use (forested, exurban, agricultural). Impacts of land-use on leaf breakdown are examined in Chapter 1. Leaf breakdown rates were significantly related to land-use. Forested streams exhibited the slowest breakdown rates, followed by exurban streams, with agricultural streams having the fastest rates. Leaf breakdown was most strongly related to discharge (white oak) and some fine sediment metrics (red maple). Our results suggest that the altered hydrological regimes in agricultural streams, as well as the influx of fine sediments into streams from exurban development, can play a role in altering instream organic matter processing. The taxa and number of shredders present may play a role to a lesser extent. Impacts of land-use on macroinvertebrate assemblages are examined in Chapter 2. Shannon diversity, %EPT, and NCBI were significantly related to land-use regime. There were significant negative relationships between macroinvertebrate diversity and conductivity and temperature. In addition, biotic integrity had a significant negative relationship with conductivity. Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) showed that agricultural streams were characterized by temperature and flow, forested streams by MPS and standing stock course particulate organic matter (SSCPOM), and two of three exurban streams by conductivity and temperature. Principal Coordinates Analysis (PCoA) revealed that while macroinvertebrate communities overlapped, some differences in community assemblage could be seen between


In this paper, we present archaeological and ethnographic observations of several shell middens located near the Luanda lagoon in Angola, focusing on the evolution of the use of one mollusk, Arca senelis L., over the past two millennia. Known in the literature, the site of Cabolombo has been the subject of recent research (test pit 1) that supports the hypothesis that the site was first occupied by shellfish collectors, probably of the Bantu tradition. The sites of Kamabanga and Kitala suggest the existence of populations, between the 8 th and 14 th centuries, that were still collectors but who also took part in regional exchange networks. They may also have been specialized in the production of discs from shell test that could have been used as coins during the formative period of the Kingdom of Kongo. Test pits 4 and 14 at Cabolombo yielded indications of a colonial context (locally manufactured pipes) in an economic environment still oriented toward predatory activities. Test pit 9, on the other hand, revealed the use of mabangas as the raw material for lime production, probably under strict control by the Portuguese. Finally, though the major stages in the history of the peopling of the region can be reconstructed through archaeological research and though oral enquiries document the formation processes of the sites, the socio-economic and cultural status of the populations remains unclear.


ABSTRACT Resistance to pentavalent antimonial (Sbv) agents such as sodium stibogluconate (SSG) is creating a major problem in the treatment of visceral leishmaniasis. In the present study the in vivo susceptibilities of Leishmania donovani strains, typed as SSG resistant (strain 200011) or SSG sensitive (strain 200016) on the basis of their responses to a single SSG dose of 300 mg of Sbv/kg of body weight, to other antileishmanial drugs were determined. In addition, the role of glutathione in SSG resistance was investigated by determining the influence on SSG treatment of concomitant treatment with a nonionic surfactant vesicle formulation of buthionine sulfoximine (BSO), a specific inhibitor of the enzyme γ-glutamylcysteine synthetase which is involved in glutathione biosynthesis, and SSG, on the efficacy of SSG treatment. L. donovani strains that were SSG resistant (strain 200011) and SSG sensitive (strain 200016) were equally susceptible to in vivo treatment with miltefosine, paromomycin and amphotericin B (Fungizone and AmBisome) formulations. Combined treatment with SSG and vesicular BSO significantly increased the in vivo efficacy of SSG against both the 200011 and the 200016 L. donovani strains. However, joint treatment that included high SSG doses was unexpectedly associated with toxicity. Measurement of glutathione levels in the spleens and livers of treated mice showed that the ability of the combined therapy to inhibit glutathione levels was also dependent on the SSG dose used and that the combined treatment exhibited organ-dependent effects. The SSG resistance exhibited by the L. donovani strains was not associated with cross-resistance to other classes of compounds and could be reversed by treatment with an inhibitor of glutathione biosynthesis, indicating that clinical resistance to antimonial drugs should not affect the antileishmanial efficacies of alternative drugs. In addition, it should be possible to identify a treatment regimen that could reverse antimony resistance.


Gas turbine engines always run during poor working conditions that have high temperatures, high pressures, and high mechanical and thermal stress. Thus, the performance of the gas path components gradually degrades, leading to serious faults. So, the health status of the engine gas path components provides essential information for users and operators. Here, a new gas path analysis approach has been developed to predict gas turbine engine health status by using gas path measurements. The developed approach has been tested in seven test cases where the degradation of a model gas turbine engine similar to a three-shaft marine engine has been analyzed. The case studies have shown that the approach can accurately and quickly detect, isolate, and quantify the degradation of major engine gas path components with the existence of measurement noise. The test cases have also shown that the time cost by the approach is short enough for its potential application of online health monitoring.


The article provides an assessment of the European Commission's recent proposal for reform in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) under the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). It does so on the basis of a public law theory of international adjudication that presents international courts and tribunals as multifunctional actors who exercise public authority and therefore require democratic legitimacy. The article introduces this understanding against the background of other, traditional basic conceptions of international courts and tribunals. It then focuses on the prospects of appellate review and politico-legislative input under the European Commission's proposal for TTIP, as well as on the provisions pertaining to the arbitrators, the judicial process, and the judicial decisions. While the net merits of ISDS in the Trans-Atlantic context are uncertain, the article submits that the European Commission's proposal provides, in principle, a welcome response to some of the more egregious shortcomings of investor-state arbitration.


THOR is a behavioral simulation environment intended for use with digital circuits at either the gate, register transfer, or functional levels. Models are written in the CHDL modeling language (a hardware description language based on the "C" programming language). Network descriptions are written in the CSL language supporting hierarchical network descriptions. Using interactive mode, batch mode or both combined, a variety of commands are available to control execution. Simulation output can be viewed in tabular format or in waveforms. A library of components and a toolbox for building simulation models are also provided. Other tools include CSLIM, used to generate boolean equations directly from THOR models and an interface to other simulators (e.g. RSIM and a physical chip tester) so that two simulations can be run concurrently verifying equivalent operation. This technical report is part one of two parts and is formatted similar to UNIX manuals. Part one contains the THOR tutorial and all the commands associated with THOR. Part two contains descriptions of the general purpose functions used in models, the parts library including many TTL components, and the logic analyzer model.


Dust storms that occurred in East Asia during the spring of 2002 and 2003 were simulated by a regional dust deflation and transport model. Particular focus was placed on dust incursion events over Taiwan. Two of the events were analyzed in detail to give a complete picture of the three dimensional transport patterns. The general characteristics of dust incursion events were summarized, including the source locations, transport route and distribution pattern in three dimensions, traveling time, duration of incursion, and the seasonal spatial distribution of dust concentration. Significant differences were also found in these characteristics between the two years, the main cause of which was a change in regional climate patterns. The performance of the model developed for this study was evaluated against other dust forecast models, and found to have superior capability for forecasting in the Taiwan area.


During the lasts two decades, the employee stock option plans (ESOPs) have become more important in the global remuneration polices to first level executives. As a consequence of this, the repurchase activity has been increased to face the exercise of those options.
This text is committed to give the reader a general overview of the ESOPs and share repurchases (SR), as well as analyse the current situation in some of the biggest companies in Sweden. To do this, the following report is divided in two main parts; first it will be introduced "why" and "when" ESOPs are profitable for the company and which facts could influence a company to start a buyback of own shares. The second part will introduce the data collected from the annual reports of the Swedish companies and will analyse if the fact of having an ESOP implemented influences the choice on the benefits distribution method.
Considering the tightly relation between share repurchases and dividends distributions, this text includes a small summary of the impact of the ESOPs in the dividends polices. For that reason, the database also includes data regarding to the share yields and profit distribution.
After having analysed all the data collected, the results point to a non-influence of the Employee Stock Option Plans on the benefits distribution method. Thus, a significant difference between the fraction of total number of shares repurchased and the dividend yield in companies with and those without outstanding stock options among their managerial group cannot be confirmed.
Although having found a non-significant difference on the dividend treatment between companies with and without stock options, a weak negative relation between the magnitude of the ESOP and the dividend yield was found for those companies with stock options among their managerial group.
Moreover, after having divided the sample depending on the type of stock options their managerial group held, the results show a slight difference between those companies with outstanding warrants and employee options; and those without stock options. Despite this fact, it is not possible to assert a real influence of these facts due to a not enough number of observations gathered for the sample.


From the end of the nineteenth century until his death, one of history's greatest mathematicians languished in an asylum, driven mad by an almost Faustian thirst for universal knowledge. THE MYSTERY OF THE ALEPH tells the story of Georg Cantor (1845-1918), a Russian born German whose work on the 'continuum problem' would bring us closer than any mathemetician before him in helping us to comprehend the nature of infinity. A respected mathematician himself, Dr. Aczel follows Cantor's life and traces the roots of his enigmatic theories. From the Pythagoreans, the Greek cult of mathematics, to the mystical Jewish numerology found in the Kabbalah, THE MYSTERY OF THE ALEPH follows the search for an answer that may never truly be trusted.


Both pathogenic bacteria and fungi are developing resistance to common antimicrobial treatment at an alarming rate. To counteract this development, it is of essence to develop new classes of antimicrobial agents. One such class is antimicrobial peptides, most of which are derived from the innate immune system. In this study, a series of novel 2,5‐diketopiperazines were designed, synthesized, and evaluated for their antimicrobial abilities. The compounds were designed to probe the pharmacophore dictated for short linear mimics of antimicrobial cationic peptides, and as such, the compounds contain a range of cationic and hydrophobic functionalities. Several of the prepared compounds displayed high antimicrobial activities toward bacteria and also against human pathogenic fungi. Of particular interest was the high activity toward fungal strains with an inherent increased resistance toward conventional antifungal agents. The most effective compounds displayed inhibition of Candida glabrata and Candida krusei growth at concentrations between 4 and 8 μg/mL, which is comparable to commercial antifungal agents in use. Structure activity relationship studies revealed a similar dependence on cationic charge and the volume of the hydrophobic bulk as for linear cationic antimicrobial peptides. Finally, the hemolytic activity of selected compounds was evaluated, which revealed a potential to produce active compounds with attenuation of unwanted hemolysis. The findings highlight the potential of cyclic cationic amphiphilic peptidomimetics as a class of promising compounds for the treatment of infections caused by microorganisms with an increased resistance to conventional antimicrobial agents.


Grain size and sorting studies are of great importance in order to texturally characterize the sedimentary environments. These parameters are useful in order to characterize the dynamic beach environment, which is of potential interest for research on natural resources and to interpret analogous ancient sedimentary environments. The main scope of this work deals with the interactions, between grain size and sorting of beach sands and their possible relationship with the coastal plain width. More than 10 000 km of sandy littoral were covered through 274 beach locations: five regions in the Pacific and Gulf of California and four regions from the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. The samples were sieved and the grain size and sorting were obtained. The sands were mostly well sorted to moderately sorted and the more abundant classes were medium to fine sands. The average grain size decreases from inshore towards backshore; foreshore and backshore sands are better sorted than the inshore sands, the latter are probably greatly influenced by mixtures and variations in processes related to waves and currents. The sands of terrigenous beaches exhibit finer grain sizes than those from beaches of carbonated provinces. A relationship between the coastal plain width and the average grain size and sorting was found: better sorted and finer sands are associated with wider coastal plains. A statistical correlation between grain size and sorting is observed (r 2 = 0.7957) when their average values are plotted according to major physiographic coastal plain regions.


In a previous paper we emphasised the changing national and international accounting standards used to measure net pension liability. Beginning with the implications of this analysis for the financing of German employer-sponsored pensions, in this paper we focus upon the internal management of corporate pension assets and liabilities. Two issues drive the analysis. One has to do with the emerging coalescence of interests joining corporate management and shareholders in relation to the management of pension assets and liabilities. The second issue has to do with the allocation of risk and uncertainty between social partners when negotiating the financing and final value of promised retirement income. We analyse the importance of workers' risk aversion and the widely-held goal of stable long-term real incomes for the management of pension assets. In the context of global financial markets, we suggest that the institutional framework of investment decision making common to many of Germany's largest firms is under considerable pressure; three models of investment decision making relevant to pension assets and liabilities are used to illustrate this point. Contrasts are drawn with competing systems of corporate governance, noting the incorporation of pension financing into Anglo-American corporate treasuries. Implications are drawn with respect to the changing status of German employer-sponsored supplementary pensions in relation to debate over the future of social security and social insurance.


The specter of a Calvinist George Herbert loomed ever larger during the 1980s, and some critics clearly fear that, should such a view prevail, the poetic landscape will go grayer from the pale Genevan's breath. It is at first difficult to know whether to include Terry G. Sherwood among the fearful. On the one hand, in this clearly and carefully argued book, Sherwood assumes Herbert to be a kind of Calvinist—the kind who went beyond mere intellectual assurance of election to seek "experimental" confirmation of election in a direct, personal love relationship with God (pp. 37 ff.). On the other hand, Sherwood argues that this influence of Calvinism on Herbert "has encouraged the view that he believed in a debilitated self radically dependent on God. Yet much in Herbert's prayerful art moderates this influence. Herbert's notion of the self ... expresses his convictions that it is inseparable from its artistic powers. The dialogue with God infers importance on the human partner, whose struggle to find the right words necessarily contributes to that dialogue" (p. 5). Thus Sherwood would return us to the understanding of this divine-human love that was foundational to the older, "Anglo-Catholic" Herbert criticism of Rosemond Tuve and Louis L. Martz—love as caritas , not agape. Sherwood's- choice of terms virtually determines his understanding of Herbert's individual lyrics and entire poetic vision.


Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia (PJP) causes life-threatening respiratory failure in immunocompromised patients such as patients with HIV infection, hematologic and solid malignancies, organ transplantations, and autoimmune diseases and patients receiving immunosupressive medications. In HIV patients, PJP usually takes an indolent course while in HIV negative but immunocompromised patients, the disease is usually severe and is associated with a high mortality rate. A high index of suspicion and early institution of therapy is warranted. We present a case of life-threatening PJP as the first manifestation in a patient with undiagnosed acute leukemia. J Med Cases. 2016;7(5):181-183 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14740/jmc2472w


Sunshine to Petrol (S2P) is a technology framework using a concentrated solar energy source and energy depleted CO2 and water feedstocks for producing liquid hydrocarbon fuels as sustainable alternatives to vulnerable and limited supplies of conventional petroleum. S2P encompasses numerous design configurations that integrate several unit operations to thermochemically convert CO2 and water to a final energized marketable product. In an earlier paper, hereafter referred to as Paper I, we established both a baseline system design and a methodology for evaluating system efficiencies, economics, and lifecycle impacts. Therein we demonstrated that design details of the balance of system following the initial solar to chemical conversion could have significant impact on full system efficiencies, which largely determine both economics and the lifecycle. Here we assess and compare results from three types of choices in the system configuration: the initial solar to chemical conversion, separations, and the final product. Each design option begins with CO2 capture. Options A–C differ in the initial solar splitting: (A) splitting CO2, (B) splitting H2O and (C) splitting both CO2 and H2O. Significantly, we find that splitting both has notable advantages over splitting just one, in efficiency and consequently in derived minimum selling price (MSP) of a methanol product. Option D splits both but replaces the methanol end-product with likely higher value Fischer Tropsch (FT) liquids. The production of the FT end product comes with a small decrease in solar to fuel energy efficiency (∼3.5% relative decrease from option C) and a small relative increase in the energy equivalent MSP (∼5%). Importantly, we find that in all options, the primary contributor to MSP is the cost of capital for the solar thermochemical sub-system (including the solar collectors) and not in the balance of system components or operating costs. The advantages of options C and D, over the baseline A, stem primarily from the decrease in CO2 to recover and recycle, motivating changing the separation component and replacing conventional and mature MEA-based CO2 separations with a technology to recover the minor component, CO. Of significance, we find that the choice of separations can yield considerable system benefits; for example in option F, splitting both CO2 and H2O, and separating CO from the produced CO2/CO mix, the system efficiency increases by 10% relative to option C for a resource-efficient full system solar to liquid fuel energy efficiency of 12.9%, and the MSP decreased by 18%. Motivated to determine if attractive economics are plausible and to identify the largest opportunities to reduce cost, we show results of a sensitivity analysis for key system and economic parameters. Finally, we construct alternate scenarios that consist of reductions in the most sensitive parameters, which include: solar utility prices, the solar dish–CR5 price, and the interest rate. The most optimistic but plausible parameter set yields an encouraging MSP for methanol of USD 4.24 per GGE (gallon of gasoline energy equivalent). The promising configuration splits both CO2 and H2O, separates the minority component CO, reduces solar derived utility costs an anticipated 60%, achieves 20% reductions in estimated manufacturing cost of the dish/CR5 component, and obtains a favorable 6.4% interest rate.


In this essay I argue that, contrary to what most criminal law scholars believe, consent does not operate as a justification that relieves the actor of liability for conduct that admittedly satisfies the offense elements of battery. Rather, I contend that consent is only relevant to battery liability when, in conjunction with other factors, it modifies the definition of the crime in a way that reveals that the defendant's act does not actually fall within the range of conduct prohibited by the offense. The argument proceeds in three parts.In Part I, I argue that there are three ways of conceiving the interest sought to be protected by the offense of battery. These approaches provide different accounts of the exculpatory nature of consent in battery cases, none of which is compatible with the claim that consent operates as a justification defense.In Part II, I argue that, contrary to what several criminal theorists have argued, the offense of battery does not seek to protect personal autonomy. Therefore, I claim that the exculpatory role of consent in cases of battery cannot be explained by claiming that recognizing consent as a defense vindicates the victim's autonomy. Instead, I suggest that consent is relevant only insofar as it reveals that the infliction of bodily harm was socially acceptable.In Part III, I argue that consent to battery currently operates as a factor that modifies the definition of the offense in a way that demonstrates that the defendant did not engage in the type of conduct that the legislature desired to prohibit as battery. Furthermore, I claim that the offense of battery seeks to prevent the infliction of non-trivial physical harm in circumstances where the infliction of such harm is not considered a normal occurrence given current societal practices. Consequently, I suggest that consent is relevant in cases of battery only when, in conjunction with other factors, it reveals that the perpetrator's infliction of bodily harm was a normal occurrence rather than an extraordinary or regrettable event.


The body temperature is normally maintained within a narrow range. In a hot environment, however, heat gain can exceed heat loss and heat related disorders may occur. Heat-related disorders range in severity from a minor discomfort to life threatening. An excess of 14,800 deaths was reported during the 2003 heat wave in France. In this study, the effect of heat stress on the electrocardiogram (ECG) and the acceleration plethysmogram (APG) was investigated. The main peaks of the ECG and APG signals had to be detected in order to extract the features. Nine peak detection algorithms, described in literature, were examined but none of the nine these performed satisfactory when applied to the heat stress ECG or APG signals. A new peak detection technique achieved a comprehensive detection of more than 98 percent for both the ECG and APG signals without adjusting thresholds. A method to detect abnormalities using bior5.5 wavelet was developed and tested using the MT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. The method achieved successful separation of normal and abnormal beats. However, the technique did not detect significant changes in the ECG signals during heat stress. Results of ECG interval analysis were consistent with exercise tests in cooler conditions. An unexpected finding was the fact that the heart rate continued to increase, even though the exercise intensity and the environment remained the same. The heart rate variability indices seem to follow the change of the heart rate in the early stage of exercise, but not during the later stage of the test. This may be due to the fact that the heart is functioning close to its maximum capacity during the later stage of the test. The APG showed clear shape changes during heat stress for most subjects. Despites the large increase in the heart rate and the shape changes of the APG, the APG waveform could not be classified as one of the abnormal APG types described in literature. This indicates that the effect of heat stress is different from the previously described abnormalities. A decreasing depth at the d point of the APG was seen resulting in a smooth signal. An index to quantify this effect, the d point depression, was shown to correlate with both the heart rate and body core temperature.


Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology constitutes a breakthrough in the design of wireless communications systems, and is already at the core of several wireless standards. Exploiting multipath scattering, MIMO techniques deliver significant performance enhancements in terms of data transmission rate and interference reduction. This book is a detailed introduction to the analysis and design of MIMO wireless systems. Beginning with an overview of MIMO technology, the authors then examine the fundamental capacity limits of MIMO systems. Transmitter design, including precoding and space-time coding, is then treated in depth, and the book closes with two chapters devoted to receiver design. Written by a team of leading experts, the book blends theoretical analysis with physical insights, and highlights a range of key design challenges. It can be used as a textbook for advanced courses on wireless communications, and will also appeal to researchers and practitioners working on MIMO wireless systems.