Individual differences can be observed in the propensity to experience certain emotions; for some emotions, most notably anxiety and disgust, the notion of sensitivity was also explored, namely one's tendency to evaluate negatively a given emotion and its effects. Based on observations made in the clinical practice, the authors suggest that this distinction may be usefully applied also to guilt, creating a specific instrument to measure guilt sensitivity. In the wake of such considerations, the authors developed the Guilt Sensivity Scale, a 10-item scale. It evaluates subjective sensitivity to guilt feelings by investigating: the tendency to avoid this feeling, its influence on the patient's life, and his/her ability to tolerate it. The major goal of this study is testing the psychometric properties of this scale. To this end, the scale was administered to a sample of 916 participants. In terms of psychometric properties, the instrument seems to be characterized by a significant, promising reliability and validity.


The main objective of this study was to investigate the types of landslides and their causes in Kittony area of Elgeyo Marakwet County, Kenya. The specific objectives were: To determine he types of landslides common in Kittony area and identify the factors that cause landslides in the area. The study population comprised of 2000 residents of Kittony area in Elgeyo Marakwet County.  Five local administrators and the County Geologist were included in the study. The sample size consisted of the following respondents: Two hundred and forty six residents of Kittony area which translated to 12.3% of the total population was selected as study respondents through Simple Random Sampling. One local chief of Kittony area and a County Geologist was purposively selected and interviewed. A descriptive survey research design was adopted. Qualitative research methodology was utilized during the study. Systems theory was used to underpin the study and a conceptual framework showing the interrelationship between the dependent and independent variables was used to guide and conceptualize the study. The final findings of the study included: The types of landslides that exist in the area are mudslides, rock fall and earth flows. The heavy rains, poor soils and the rugged topography in the area are the factors that triggered landslides. The government despite assisting by providing humanitarian assistance and advising people to move to safer locations, more was needed in terms of relocating residents to safer areas and converting the affected areas into forest lands, building gabions to control soil erosion and controlling other human activities. This study can also be replicated in other areas having similar problems.


The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on people's social interaction and has brought changes on education, environment and economy COVID-19, which affects every aspect of life, has produced results that require re-evaluating the perspective on education Distance learning, digital learning, e-learning has reshaped education in many ways There can be a chance of the pandemic in the digital age to turn into an advantage for the education sector In this period, it can be said that those who have high interest in technology move more easily in distance education and e-learning processes In this context, expressing the best skills in the digital age, it was thought that the concept of digital citizenship would have positive effects on e-learning This study is a relational survey and tested by establishing a relationship between digital citizenship and e-learning The study was conducted among higher education students It has been observed that there is a positive relationship between digital citizenship behaviors and e-learning attitudes In addition, it has been observed that the negative anxiety of students due to the pandemic is reflected in their e-learning processes However, overall results show that digital citizenship behavior digital learning process could be a positive response to COVID-19 closure period © 2021 by the authors;licensee CEDTECH by Bastas


Although a substantial body of research concurs that most urban areas have a challenge in providing adequate car parking space, there is a scarcity in the literature on how conformity to planning standards that regulates the provision of car parking spaces may be analyzed. This study, therefore, examines the extent to which the planning standards that regulate compliance with the provision of car parking spaces in the residential areas are enforced in Kenya, a case study of Kisii Town. It is anchored in the theory of regulatory compliance with a sample size of 364 residential developments proportionately drawn from the seven neighborhoods. Data were collected using questionnaires and analyzed using means, standard deviation, paired sample t-test and Pearson's bivariate correlation. Research findings showed that although the recommended standard for car parking in Kenya is a ratio of one parking space for every two dwelling units, most developers disregarded the requirement. Hypothesis testing confirmed a significant difference between the recommended planning standards on the minimum number of parking spaces and the extent of conformity by developers, t (289) = 20.261, p=.000), thus, compliance declined by a mean of four. The study concludes that developers rarely comply with planning standard owing to insufficient development control. It is recommended that when approving building plans, it should be mandatory to make provision for adequate parking space followed by monitoring to ensure compliance. The study benefits the international readers by validating how conformity to the standards that regulate car parking space may be statistically analyzed.


Purpose: To investigate the hypothesis that audiovisual biofeedback reduces motion blurring artifacts in 4D PETimages.Method and Materials: 4D PET scans were acquired on a GE PET/CT scanner using audiovisual biofeedback guided and free breathing traces. A static image was used as the reference. The physical phantom consisted of six hollow spheres (NEMA ICE body phantom) with 10, 13, 17, 22, 28 and 37 mm in diameter as targets and a cylinder (Hoffman 3D brain phantom) as background. The sphere targets were filled with 18F‐FDG at a fixed target‐to‐background ratio (8:1) based on 10 mCi/70 kg. The phantom was placed on a 3D programmable motion platform which produced the breathing patterns of four subjects with and without audiovisual biofeedback. 4D PETimages with five respiratory bins were reconstructed for each breathing pattern. The segmented volumes, dice coefficients, 1D profiles, and 2D profiles were determined for evaluation and compared for each respiratory bin. The breathing patterns were analyzed for correlation between irregularity of breathing and motion blurring.Results: Audiovisual biofeedback significantly reduced motion blurring by 16.5% (1D profile, p=0.004), 22.6% (2D profile, p=0.003), 34.5% (volume, p=0.009) and 6.5% (dice coefficient, p=0.004) on average for the small spheres (≤17 mm), and by 4.3% (p=0.008), 2.7% (p=0.104), 0.7% (p=0.446) and 5.0% (p=0.014), respectively, for the large spheres (≥20 mm). In general, 4D PET motion blurring was dependent on the magnitude and irregularity of motion. Conclusion: The first investigation of the effect of breathing training on 4D PETimages has been performed. The results indicate that audiovisual biofeedback can significantly reduce motion blurring in 4D PETimages and may facilitate improved identification and localization of small lung tumors. Conflict of Interest: Supported by NIH/NCI R01 93626


A group lifestyle education program for overweight/obese children 6 to 15 years old and parents was adapted for the youngest age group (6-9 years) based on program evaluation. The new curriculum had parents reflect on their influence over the family health-related environment while exploring feeding and activity relationships. Children experienced self-expression through verbal, physical, and creative facets of healthy lifestyle behaviors. Six groups experienced a 2-week program (two 5-hour sessions on 2 consecutive Saturdays). Summary evaluation demonstrated significant increases in parent perceived knowledge for each subject area and a high degree of program satisfaction. One recommendation by parents was to receive this information earlier in the parenting experience.


This book explores what development banks, governments, and communities have learned in the last decade of careful negotiation between social and environmental protections in the Andean Amazon, and the pressures of a surging infrastructure and development boom. While mega-dams, highways, and ports are filling up the pipelines of planners, the national governments of Andean and Amazon-basin countries and major development banks have enacted ambitious social and environmental protections. The book traces the development of social and environmental protections after years of struggle by affected communities, going beyond official policies to discover how these reforms work in practice, and ultimately whether they are enough to stem the risks of infrastructure mega-projects. As Chinese public banks play an increasingly important role in the region, the book also demonstrates that there is a risk of governments undercutting their own standards. By contrast, this book shows that making infrastructure work for everyone involved requires mutually reinforcing networks of support and accountability among communities, governments, and development banks. This book, led by an expert multi-disciplinary, international team, will be of considerable interest to researchers in the fields of development and development economics, geography, anthropology, and ecology, as well as practitioners in development banks and in government regulatory and foreign aid agencies.


It is widely agreed that the spectre of growing communalism is the most important issue facing India today. In the battle for the soul of Indian nationalism three positions have been staked out. Firstly, there are those who insist that Indian nationalism must rest on cultural and psychological foundations of an impeccably Hindu provenance, though the ecumenical character of Hinduism licenses pragmatic shifts in interpretation so as to deflect charges of communalism. Secondly, there are those who insist that Indian nationalism must derive from secular principles. Notwithstanding the enduring problems of precise definition, the term 'secular' does possess an agreed core meaning: state neutrality with regard to religion. In a multireligious society like that of India, this can mean either a fundamental separation of the state from religious activity and affiliation, or state impartiality on all issues relating to the religious interests of different communities. In practice, 'Indian secularism' has been a mixture of the two: an unsatisfactory attempt to reconcile what some consider to be essentially incompatible approaches. Reflections on Communalism and Nationalism in India


In this paper, we depict and analyze simple models of moral hazard, namely "operating moral hazard" and "investing moral hazard." First we assume that a corporation exists primarily for the benefit of their shareholders. Then, moral hazard occurs when managers choose an option knowingly that is not optimum for shareholders. We evaluate the loss to shareholders in terms of cash flow to them in the long run. Operating moral hazard occurs when managers adopt a non-optimum operating strategy in day-to-day operations. This moral hazard was depicted in Ijiri and Lin (2006) using Markov processes. We will first examine the essence of this model as a basis for comparing with investing moral hazard. The two types of moral hazard are different in that loss to shareholders occur gradually and continuously in operating moral hazard (possibly allowing shareholders to react), while the loss occurs discretely and often in one-lump sum in investing moral hazard. In particular, we depict and analyze investing moral hazard using a model in a high tech industry called "planned obsolescence," namely not obsolescence that naturally occurs but one that is induced by the seller of the equipment. In the final section, we will compare the two models to see some common elements between the two types of moral hazard, such as the larger losses to shareholders occurring in earlier periods before the dynamic system returns to its steady state. (230 wds). 1 The authors are, respectively, Robert M. Trueblood University Professor of Accounting and Economics and Assistant Professor of Accounting. Tepper School of Business Working Paper #_______.


Background To the best of our knowledge, no study has exhaustively evaluated the association between maternal morbidities and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) during the first wave of the pandemic in pregnant women. We investigated, in natural conceptions and assisted reproductive technique (ART) pregnancies, whether maternal morbidities were more frequent in pregnant women with COVID-19 diagnosis compared to pregnant women without COVID-19 diagnosis during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods and findings We conducted a retrospective analysis of prospectively collected data in a national cohort of all hospitalizations for births ≥22 weeks of gestation in France from January to June 2020 using the French national hospitalization database (PMSI). Pregnant women with COVID-19 were identified if they had been recorded in the database using the ICD-10 (International Classification of Disease) code for presence of a hospitalization for COVID-19. A total of 244,645 births were included, of which 874 (0.36%) in the COVID-19 group. Maternal morbidities and adverse obstetrical outcomes among those with or without COVID-19 were analyzed with a multivariable logistic regression model adjusted on patient characteristics. Among pregnant women, older age (31.1 (±5.9) years old versus 30.5 (±5.4) years old, respectively, p < 0.001), obesity (0.7% versus 0.3%, respectively, p < 0.001), multiple pregnancy (0.7% versus 0.4%, respectively, p < 0.001), and history of hypertension (0.9% versus 0.3%, respectively, p < 0.001) were more frequent with COVID-19 diagnosis. Active smoking (0.2% versus 0.4%, respectively, p < 0.001) and primiparity (0.3% versus 0.4%, respectively, p < 0.03) were less frequent with COVID-19 diagnosis. Frequency of ART conception was not different between those with and without COVID-19 diagnosis (p = 0.28). When compared to the non-COVID-19 group, women in the COVID-19 group had a higher frequency of admission to ICU (5.9% versus 0.1%, p < 0.001), mortality (0.2% versus 0.005%, p < 0.001), preeclampsia/eclampsia (4.8% versus 2.2%, p < 0.001), gestational hypertension (2.3% versus 1.3%, p < 0.03), postpartum hemorrhage (10.0% versus 5.7%, p < 0.001), preterm birth at <37 weeks of gestation (16.7% versus 7.1%, p < 0.001), <32 weeks of gestation (2.2% versus 0.8%, p < 0.001), <28 weeks of gestation (2.4% versus 0.8%, p < 0.001), induced preterm birth (5.4% versus 1.4%, p < 0.001), spontaneous preterm birth (11.3% versus 5.7%, p < 0.001), fetal distress (33.0% versus 26.0%, p < 0.001), and cesarean section (33.0% versus 20.2%, p < 0.001). Rates of pregnancy terminations ≥22 weeks of gestation, stillbirths, gestational diabetes, placenta praevia, and placenta abruption were not significantly different between the COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 groups. The number of venous thromboembolic events was too low to perform statistical analysis. A limitation of this study relies in the possibility that asymptomatic infected women were not systematically detected. Conclusions We observed an increased frequency of pregnant women with maternal morbidities and diagnosis of COVID-19 compared to pregnant women without COVID-19. It appears essential to be aware of this, notably in populations at known risk of developing a more severe form of infection or obstetrical morbidities and in order for obstetrical units to better inform pregnant women and provide the best care. Although causality cannot be determined from these associations, these results may be in line with recent recommendations in favor of vaccination for pregnant women.


Accepted to the International Conference on Engineering Education 18-22 August 2002, Manchester, UK Introducing Flexibility in Traditional Engineering Education by Providing Dedicated Online Experimentation and Tutoring Resources Sylvie Ursulet and Denis Gillet Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) School of Enginerring, ME – Ecublens, CH – 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland Tel: +41 21 693-5168, FAX: +41 21 693-2574 Email: email@example.com Abstract The clear distinction we had in the past between the open universities and the traditional ones is nowadays vanishing. While the open universities are more and more supplying online the learning material that was previously delivered by postal services, the traditional universities are making some of their course contents available through the Internet. This trend brings both the open and the traditional academic institutions to potentially meet the educational needs of a same segment of the student community. This also leads towards a hybrid learning scheme in which online courses can be combined with on-campus studies in traditional curricula. Such a scheme is an interesting form of what is defined as flexible education. With the MIT decision to provide a free access to 2000 of its courses over the next 10 years and with the well spread European conviction that the knowledge is not a marketable product, the identity and the reputation of the universities will mainly depend in a near future on the accredited courses selection and on the student support offer. The typical online content that includes video-on-demand streams and electronic documents will hence be considered just as today textbooks. In engineering education, the potential added value that can be brought in student support comes from the availability of resources for carrying out hands-on experimentation and of tutors for sustaining the learning process. These requirements that are well recognized in traditional education gain even more importance in distance learning and in flexible education to compensate for the students' remoteness. The paper describes an ongoing initiative to provide a flexible access to remote experimentation resources for engineering students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. It shows how the tutoring scheme as been adapted to sustain the transition from traditional teaching to flexible learning. Evaluation results obtained during the first deployment year with pilot students from mechanical engineering are also presented and analyzed.


The overall aim of this scientific report is the assessment of the probability of entry of Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV) into the European Union (EU) through active or passive movement of vectors. Two different import pathways were considered in this report, i.e. import through flights and import via cargo on ships. The import through road transport, eggs or immature stages, and wind was not considered in this report as thought to be zero or negligible. In total 39 potential RVFV vectors were identified based on our review. Of the 39 identified potential vectors of RVFV, the five highest ranked based on their distribution in the African at-risk countries, their potential role as vector, and their behavioural and ecological traits influencing the risk of transportation were: Anopheles pharoensis, Aedes aegypti, Mansonia uniformis, Aedes mcintoshi, and Culex quinquefasciatus. Four of these species were also detected in airports or airplanes in the EU. The estimated probability of entry of RVFV infected mosquito vectors into the EU through the passive movement of mosquito vectors by flights is medium for the Netherlands, France, Germany and Italy. These countries are heavily connected through direct flights from the 14 at-risk countries in Africa. A low risk of RVFV import was estimated for Spain, Poland, Belgium and Austria and for 16 countries the risk was zero. Overall the risk of RVFV import through ship-cargo was zero for most of the EU Member States and low for the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Belgium.


Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) is a new 3D imaging technique with unprecedented potential for resolving submicron structural details. Existing volume visualization methods, however, are not able to reveal details of interest due to low signal-to-noise ratio. In order to design more powerful transfer functions, we propose leveraging soft segmentation as an explicit component of visualization for noisy volumes. Our technical realization is based on semi-supervised learning, where we combine the advantages of two segmentation algorithms. First, the weak segmentation algorithm provides good results for propagating sparse user-provided labels to other voxels in the same volume and is used to generate dense pseudo-labels. Second, the powerful deep-learning-based segmentation algorithm learns from these pseudo-labels to generalize the segmentation to other unseen volumes, a task that the weak segmentation algorithm fails at completely. The proposed volume visualization uses deep-learning-based segmentation as a component for segmentation-aware transfer function design. Appropriate ramp parameters can be suggested automatically through frequency distribution analysis. Furthermore, our visualization uses gradient-free ambient occlusion shading to further suppress the visual presence of noise, and to give structural detail the desired prominence. The cryo-ET data studied in our technical experiments are based on the highest-quality tilted series of intact SARS-CoV-2 virions. Our technique shows the high impact in target sciences for visual data analysis of very noisy volumes that cannot be visualized with existing techniques.


Introduction: The menopausal period comprises about onethird of average women's life. During this period, women are vulnerable to conditions caused by estrogen deficiency from short-term discomfort to long-term health problems. Aim: To evaluate the clinical efficacy of Ashokarishta, Ashvagandha Churna and Pravala Pishti in the management of menopausal syndrome and to evaluate changes in the quality of life in women. Materials and methods: This trial was a multicenter singlearm study conducted at three Institutes of Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences. One hundred fifteen women aged between 40 and 55 years with Kupperman menopausal index score ≥15, follicle-stimulating hormone ≥20 IU/L, and endometrial thickness ≤5 mm were included in the study. Three Ayurvedic classical formulations, viz., Ashokarishta, Ashvagandha Churna and Pravala Pishti, were administered for 12 weeks followed by subsequent 2 weeks without intervention follow-up. Outcome measures were changes in menopausal symptoms using menopause rating scale (MRS) and improvement in the quality of life using menopause-specific quality of life (MENQOL) questionnaire and they were assessed at the baseline, 84th day, and at the end of 2 weeks after the completion of intervention period. Paired sample t-test was used to compare mean change from baseline to 84th day. A p-value <0.05 was considered significant. Results: The findings of the study reveal that the effect of therapy has shown statistically significant decrease in MRS total RESEARCH ARTICLE 1,6-8Research Officer (Ayurveda), 2,4,5Research Officer (Ayurveda) S-2, 3Former Research Officer (Ayurveda) S-4, 9Statistical Officer 10Statistical Assistant, 11Deputy Director General, 12Former Deputy Director General, 13Director General 1,2Regional Ayurveda Research Institute for Mother and Child Health Care, Nagpur, Maharashtra, India 3Regional Ayurveda Research Institute for Lifestyle Related Disorders, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India 4Ayurveda Contraceptive Drug Research Institute, Ahmedabad Gujarat, India 5-13Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences New Delhi, India Corresponding Author: Sarada Ota, Research Officer (Ayurveda), Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences New Delhi, India, Phone: +919810425662, e-mail: sarada_ota@ yahoo.com score (p-value <0.001). The mean MRS total score at the baseline was 22.43 and decreased to 5.29 after treatment at 84th day, and further reduced to 5.06 at the 14th week (follow-up period without trial interventions). The improvements of MENQOL in four domains, viz., vasomotor, psychosocial, sexual, and physical, at the end of 12th week and 14th week were also significant (p-value <0.001) in comparison with the baseline. Further, all the safety parameters like liver function tests and kidney function tests remained within the normal limits throughout the trial period and no adverse events or adverse drug reaction were reported, which confirm the clinical safety of the trial drugs. Conclusion: Ashokarishta, Ashvagandha Churna and Pravala Pishti are found to be safe and effective in the management of menopausal syndrome.


Acha is a less utilized cereal grain in Africa. Scaling up of the processing technology of acha seeds is desirable if accurate information on effect of processing on its properties is available. This study investigated the effect of cooking duration on the chemical and physical properties of acha seeds. Cooking times (2.5, 5, 7.5 and 10 minutes) at 100 o C were used. The volume, length, breadth, thickness, porosity, density, sphericity, aspect ratio, specific heat capacity, thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, moisture, protein, fat, ash, crude fibre and carbohydrate were determined using standard methods. Data were analysed using ANOVA at p = 0.05. The results obtained revealed that varietal difference had a significant effect on volume, length, breadth, thickness, true density, bulk density, porosity, sphericity and aspect ratio. The moisture content, ash, protein, crude fibre, fat, carbohydrate, specific heat capacity, thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity varied from 8.80 - 56.17 %, 0.32 - 1.87%, 1.92 - 11.50%, 0.29 - 1.58%, 0.32 - 2.81%, 40.94 - 76.26%, 1.66 -2.97 kJkg -1 K -1 , 0.26 -0.43 Wm -1 K -1 and 0.85 x 10 -7 - 1.17 x 10 -7 ms -2 respectively, as significantly influenced by cooking time. Cooking for 7.5 minutes was appropriate using the moisture uptakes and thermal properties as criteria.


Nanomedicine has been one of the focuses of drug delivery field, especially when it comes to cancer therapy, due to the unprecedented potential benefits it could bring, such as specificity and high cargo loading. Standing on the advantages of nanoscale delivery vehicle, gene delivery targets the root of a disease instead of the product of the disease pathology, striving to achieve specificity on an even higher hierarchy. The discovery of miRNAs might be the critical piece of the cancer research puzzle since one miRNAs can regulate a broad network of genes involved in different signaling pathways. The overall objective of this dissertation is to test the hypothesis that systematic study of the assembly and disassembly process of delivery carrier will provide guidance for the development of more efficacious anti-miRNA delivery technologies. Surface properties of methoxy-poly(ethylene glycol-b-lactide-b-arginine) micelles were varied by controlling the oligoarginine block length and conjugation density. Depending upon the oligoarginine length and density, micelles exhibited anti-miRNA loading capacity directly related to the presentation of charged groups on the surface. The unpackaging of nucleic acid from micelleplexes requires thoughtful design considerations because the release of nucleic acids payloads from carrier in cytoplasm is a necessary step for effective nucleic acids delivery. Redox responsive feature was found to contribute significantly to anti-miRNA dissociation from the micelleplex and lead to higher delivery efficiency, indicating the necessity of including self-disassembly function in anti-miRNA delivery carrier. Stability issue has been plaguing the systematic administration of micelle-based nanoparticles. For the first time, it was demonstrated that micelles and micelleplexes have significantly better stability in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) than in human plasma, indicating the advantage of applying micelle-based nanoparticles for CNS disease.


The main aim of this work is to rise the challenge of relentless growth of digital technologies into our daily life. Smart phones, smart watches, tablets, etc and Internet have become common tools is several fields of human activities, connecting, guiding, informing, and in a last stance making people interconnected and informed. Public open spaces (POS) (such as, parks, gardens, squares, plazas) would greatly benefit by this growing availability of relevant geolocated information. Therefore, our aim is to unfold two main questions: how can we use digital technologies to attract people to spend more time outdoors for a more active lifestyle; and what opportunities technology opens to increase knowledge about users and uses of public open spaces? The discussion is backed by experience exchanges carried out within the Cyberparks Project and articulates around the ICT potential to enhance communication among (potential) users, transforming public open spaces production an interactive process. Such improved interactivity, on a turn, enables creative community participation, empowerment and capacity building. Besides a discussion on the mobile technology for human interaction with spaces, this paper presents an overview of the possible technological benefits for users, policy makers, practitioners and planners.


NEWMAN, Jay. Religion and Technology: A Study in the Philosophy of Culture. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1997. ix + 195 pp. Cloth, $55.00.--In this rather brief polemic, Newman proposes to clarify the relation between technology and religion in Western culture. His aim is primarily practical: to promote "intelligent, farsighted adjustments to the relations currently obtaining between particular religious phenomena and particular technologies, or between religion and technology generally" (p. 3). This requires an affirmation of technological progress as the cultural expression of religion's universal impulse to improve the world for humans. Technology is thus taken to be a religious endeavor, and religion, suprisingly, a kind of technology. Both are united in the notion of culture as the amelioration of the human condition. Given this understanding of culture, Newman finds the modern idea of progress unassailable in spite of its many philosophical and theological critics, whom he blithely lumps together as antitechnologists. While he admits that Jacques Ellul, Langdon Gilkey, and a host of others from Marcel and Heidegger to George Grant and Hans Jonas "deserve a hearing," he is not averse to characterizing them as "reactionaries" and "antagonistic cranks" who engage more in nostalgia and "romantic walling" than in rational analysis. Newman devotes an early chapter to a rebuttal of the antitechnological position and its claims of the desacralization, dehumanization, and idolatry inherent in "Satanic technology." Later, toward the end of the book, he returns to this critique, actually concluding that it "mirrors the pattern of techniques that an educator might employ in trying to free someone from anti-Semitic attitudes" (p. 165). Newman is offended by the antitechnologists, since, in his mind, their targets are not just abstractions like the "technological society" or the "technological mentality" but real, "flesh and blood human beings," who, as well-intentioned producers and users of technology, are simply trying to make our world a better place. His explanation for this invidious irrationalism and ingratitude is a dualism of Augustinian provenance that is most apparent in the work of Ellul and its puritanical rejection of the material world and the human body. Herein lies the great divide between anti- and protechnologists, with the latter espousing a theology or philosophy more in accord with the Judeo-Christian message of charity and life affirmation. To his credit, Newman is aware of the complexity and the at times contradictory character of this heritage when it comes to attitudes about science and technology, but he chooses to cast his lot with the early modern Protestant worldview associated with the Scientific Revolution and with more recent theologians such as Teilhard de Chardin and Harvey Cox, thinkers, he believes, who "cannot abide too much in the way of tradition, orthodoxy, and stability . …


Smith, R. 2018. Biological consequences of endothelial cell signaling. Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Medicine 1508. 49 pp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-91-513-0481-6. Endothelial cells make up the inner lining of blood and lymphatic vessels, where they participate in functions vital to survival of the tissue; endothelial cells maintain vessel integrity, dynamically respond to the changing metabolic needs of tissues, and participate in many tissuespecific functions. Endothelial cells sense environmental cues which initiate signal transduction pathways that regulate behavior. Endothelial cell dysfunction is a feature of many diseases, such as cancer, atherosclerosis, and retinopathies and therefore knowledge of endothelial signal transduction pathways is important for designing therapies to treat these diseases. The receptor tyrosine kinase VEGFR2 is a master regulator of endothelial cell biology, regulating survival, growth, migration, angiogenesis and vessel permeability. VEGF stimulation of VEGFR2 results in phosphorylation of tyrosine residues in the receptor's intracellular domain. The phosphorylation of Y949, Y1173, and Y1212 is known to initiate complex signaling pathways in endothelial cells, but it is still unclear how each individual phosphosite contributes to overall endothelial regulation. The scaffold protein palmdelphin has been found to be highly expressed in endothelial cells, though its role in endothelial biology is still unclear. In this thesis I present investigations of endothelial cell signaling pathways. In Paper I, we identify VEGFR2 pY1212 binding partners and use a mouse model to reveal the effect of abrogated Y1212 signaling in vivo. In Paper II, we investigate endothelial palmdelphin and establish that loss of palmdelphin in vitro and in vivo results in morphological changes for endothelial cells. Additionally, loss of palmdelphin leads to a misalignment of endothelial nuclei in response to flow, implicating palmdelpin in a mechanotransduction pathway. In Paper III, we use mouse models of proliferative retinopathy to demonstrate that loss of VEGFR2 Y949 signaling leads to a reduction or delay in neovascularization and a decrease in vessel leakage from pathological lesions. In summary, the investigation of endothelial cell signal transduction pathways can help us understand and unravel the complexities of vascular biology. Designing therapies which affect only a specific signaling axis has the potential to reduce side effects and optimize treatment.


By November 2015, the West Africa Ebola epidemic had caused 28598 infections and 11299 deaths in the three countries most affected. The outbreak required rapid innovation and adaptation. Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) scaled up its usual 20-30 bed Ebola management centres (EMCs) to 100-300 beds with over 300 workers in some settings. This brought challenges in patient and clinical data management resulting from the difficulties of working safely with high numbers of Ebola patients. We describe a project MSF established with software developers and the Google Social Impact Team to develop context-adapted tools to address the challenges of recording Ebola clinical information. We share the outcomes and key lessons learned in innovating rapidly under pressure in difficult environmental conditions. Information on adoption, maintenance, and data quality was gathered through review of project documentation, discussions with field staff and key project stakeholders, and analysis of tablet data. In March 2015, a full prototype was deployed in Magburaka EMC, Sierra Leone. Inpatient data were captured on 204 clinical interactions with 34 patients from 5 March until 10 April 2015. Data continued to also be recorded on paper charts, creating theoretically identical record "pairs" on paper and tablet. 83 record pairs for 33 patients with 22 data items (temperature and symptoms) per pair were analysed. The overall Kappa coefficient for agreement between sources was 0.62, but reduced to 0.59 when rare bleeding symptoms were excluded, indicating moderate to good agreement. The time taken to deliver the product was more than that anticipated by MSF (7 months versus 6 weeks). Deployment of the tablet coincided with a dramatic drop in patient numbers and thus had little impact on patient care. We have identified lessons specific to humanitarian-technology collaborative projects and propose a framework for emergency humanitarian innovation. Time and effort is required to bridge differences in organisational culture between the technology and humanitarian worlds. This investment is essential for establishing a shared vision on deliverables, urgency, and ownership of product.


Summary A cutaneous infection with Alternaria spp. was diagnosed in a 2-yearold male intact Irish setter dog, presenting with multifocal papules, plaques and ulcerations involving all four distal limbs, shoulder blades, scrotum, pinnae and nasal mucous membranes. The dog had been treated for inflammatory bowel disease and lymphangiectasia with immunosuppressive doses of cyclosporine and prednisolone for approximately 3 months. The diagnosis was based on clinical signs, the demonstration of fungal elements within skin biopsies, deep fungal culture and fungal PCR from a formalin-fixed tissue specimen. Complete clinical remission was achieved by tapering and cessation of the immunosuppressive medication, treatment with cold atmospheric-pressure plasma (CAPP) and topical enilconazole within 8 weeks.


There is an increased awareness of the importance of flood management aimed at preventing human and material losses. A wide variety of numerical modelling tools have been developed in order to make decision-making more efficient, and to better target management actions. Hydroinformatics assumes the holistic integrated approach to managing the information propagating through models, and analysis of uncertainty propagation through models is an important part of such studies. Many popular approaches to uncertainty analysis typically involve various strategies of Monte Carlo sampling of uncertain variables and/or parameters and running a model a large number of times, so that in the case of complex river systems this procedure becomes very time-consuming. In this study the popular modelling systems HEC-HMS, HEC-RAS and Sobek1D2D were applied to modelling the hydraulics of the Timis–Bega basin in Romania. We considered the problem of studying how the flood inundation is influenced by uncertainties in water levels of the reservoirs in the catchment, and uncertainties in the digital elevation model (DEM) used in the 2D hydraulic model. For this we used cloud computing (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud platform) and cluster computing on the basis of a number of office desktop computers, and were able to show their efficiency, leading to a considerable reduction of the required computer time for uncertainty analysis of complex models. The conducted experiments allowed us to associate probabilities to various areas prone to flooding. This study allows us to draw a conclusion that cloud and cluster computing offer an effective and efficient technology that makes uncertainty-aware modelling a practical possibility even when using complex models.


Tourism does not occur out of "nothingness", an indefinite space, but it is an activity inserted in a particular geographical and sociocultural entity developed in a certain historical-political-geographic space and which has its own centres for potential, power and sustainable development force, interest groups, etc., with a special consistency and resiliency. The significant resilience of Romanian tourism is that ability to withstand shocks, even to adapt well to "n" challenging situations like the economic crisis, the latest attacks launched in major capitals and tourist destinations (Istanbul, Paris, flues of all kinds, either avian or swine, the war in Ukraine, which favoured the development of cruise tourism, etc.), from which the Romanian tourism has emerged victorious, transforming many of these "shocks" into opportunities, emerging ever more powerful on the regional and international tourism market, itself subject to multiple metamorphoses. Key-words: tourism, risk, resilience, sustainable development, destination Cuvinte-cheie: turism, risc, reziliență, dezvoltare durabilă, destinație


This interdisciplinary work combines the use of shape- and size-defined Pd nanocrystals (cubes of 10 and 18 nm, and octahedra of 37 nm) with in situ techniques and DFT calculations to unravel the dynamic phenomena with respect to Pd reconstruction taking place during acetylene hydrogenation. Notably, it was found that the reacting Pd surface evolved at a different pace depending on the shape of the Pd nanocrystals, due to their specific propensity to form carbides under reaction conditions. Indeed, Pd cubes (Pd(100)) reacted with acetylene to form a PdC0.13 phase at a rate roughly 6-fold higher than that of octahedra (Pd(111)), resulting in nanocrystals with different degrees of carburization. DFT calculations revealed changes in the electronic and geometric properties of the Pd nanocrystals imposed by the progressive addition of carbon in its lattice.


O'Leary et al. (Research Article, 8 February 2013, p. 662) examined mammalian relationships and divergence times and concluded that a single placental ancestor crossed the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary. This conclusion relies on phylogenetic analyses that fail to discriminate between homology and homoplasy and further implies virus-like rates of nucleotide substitution in early Paleocene placentals.


BACKGROUND
Chemotherapy-induced oral thermal hyperalgesia (OTH) is a common and debilitating side effect of platinum-based anticancer agents. This study evaluated the efficacy of oral cryotherapy in preventing OTH during oxaliplatin chemotherapy infusion.

METHODS
Patients with gastrointestinal cancer treated with biweekly oxaliplatin (85 mg/m2 over 120 minutes) at Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania were randomized to receive oral cryotherapy (ice chips) during oxaliplatin infusion or standard-of-care treatment. All patients completed baseline questionnaires regarding oral and peripheral symptoms and on-treatment questionnaires on day 1 of each subsequent chemotherapy cycle. Those in the treatment arm were asked to document how long they kept the ice chips in their mouths (0, <30, 30, 60, 90, or 120 minutes) and to report their discomfort associated with oral cryotherapy. Evaluable patients were those who had completed at least 2 cycles of oxaliplatin therapy.

RESULTS
Of 62 randomized patients with a variety of gastrointestinal malignancies, 50 (25 per treatment arm) were evaluable for efficacy. The rate of patients with oral symptoms after the first treatment cycle was significantly lower in the intervention arm (n=8; 32%) than in the control arm (n=18; 72%), meeting the primary study objective (P=.01). The magnitude of difference in symptom scores before versus after the first treatment cycle was significantly less in the intervention versus control arm (P=.001). No difference in oral symptoms over time was seen between the intervention and control groups (P=.20), although a high attrition rate was noted. Duration of ice chip exposure was associated with improved oral symptoms over time (P=.02).

CONCLUSIONS
Oral cryotherapy is a tolerable and cost-effective method of diminishing OTH in patients receiving oxaliplatin chemotherapy, and seems to be most effective in the early stages of treatment.


AIM
To analyze the influence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection on the course of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection.

METHODS
We performed a meta-analysis to quantify the effect of HIV co-infection on progressive liver disease in patients with HCV infection. Published studies in the English or Chinese-language medical literature involving cohorts of HIV-negative and -positive patients coinfected with HCV were obtained by searching the PUBMED, EMBASE and CBM. Data were extracted independently from relevant studies by 2 investigators and used in a fixed-effect meta analysis to determine the difference in the course of HCV infection in the 2 groups.

RESULTS
Twenty-nine trails involving 16750 patients were identified including the outcome of histological fibrosis or cirrhosis or de-compensated liver disease or hepatocellular carcinoma or death. These studies yielded a combined adjusted odds ratio (OR) of 3.40 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 2.45 and 4.73]. Of note, studies that examined histological fibrosis/cirrhosis, decompensated liver disease, hepatocellular carcinoma or death had a pooled OR of 1.47 (95% CI = 1.27 and 1.70), 5.45 (95% CI = 2.54 and 11.71), 0.76 (95% CI = 0.50 and 1.14), and 3.60 (95% CI = 3.12 and 4.15), respectively.

CONCLUSION
Without highly active antiretroviral therapies (HAART), HIV accelerates HCV disease progression, including death, histological fibrosis/cirrhosis and decompensated liver disease. However, the rate of hepatocellular carcinoma is similar in persons who had HCV infection and were positive for HIV or negative for HIV.


The paper summarises one of the on-going efforts at the national level to enhance technology management capabilities in the country. While technology management has been accorded considerable importance all along, the dynamics of economic and market environments has led to technology, and consequently its management, acquiring a far more significant role in recent times. While industry, research and academic organisations and other institutions are contributing to enhancing technology capabilities through various measures introduced by them from time to time, the Government has, on its part, initiated a number of activities for the development, utilisation and transfer of technology. One significant step that has been taken is the spearheading of a specific programme, wholly devoted to the cause of Technology Management. The Department of Scientific & Industrial Research in the Ministry of Science & Technology is the nodal centre for this program. An integrative framework covering knowledge enhancement, facilitation and training has been adopted by the Department to derive benefits both in the short as well as in the long term. Wide-ranging activities have been undertaken in close inter-action with industry, research organisations, technical/management institutes, consultants and others.


This thesis presents a qualitative study of genetic counselling. Using a combination of semi-structured interviews and conversation analysis, it focuses on the role, function and structure of genetic counselling and on its status as medical or counselling work. Semi-structured interviews are used to ascertain genetic counsellors' accounts or perceptions of the nature of their role, their views on client expectations, and genetic counselling clients' perceptions and expectations of the same. Conversation analytic study of recorded genetic counselling consultations is used to identify whether or not they possess an overall shape and whether they appear conversationally as a counselling or a medical interaction. Rose's (1998, 1999) sociological work on the growth of the therapeutic community and the techne of 'psy' provides a framework for a discussion on the strength of the genetic counselling profession's association with a Rogerian counselling philosophy and on the potential difficulties this may bring. The questions are raised; does genetic counselling have many similarities to "personal, emotional or psychological" 'counselling' at all? And is this alliance with the counselling community either fair or possible for the professionals involved? The results were as follows. First, that the genetic counselling consultations in this corpus do not present with one unique overall shape that can encompass all interactions. Second, that the accounts of the genetic counsellors and clients in this sample, and the conversation analytic study of the recorded consultations, suggest that genetic counselling is primarily a medical-based activity and that this is what clients want. Third, that genetic counselling has a number of dissimilarities to psychotherapeutic counselling that suggest it is not so much 'counselling' as using counselling skills, and finally, that the tensions incurred in fulfilling medical-type tasks within what is ostensibly a 'counselling' role are neither fair nor practical for the professionals involved.


In America, a person has a 1 in 3 chance of falling each year once they reach the age of 65. When someone falls, they risk bodily injury. There are products available to help people when they fall, but they are only effective once a person reaches a point where they are at risk of falling. In order to reduce an individual's chance of falling as they age, preventive measures must be taken before the problems develop. With the use of digital technology, adults can be properly instructed on how to keep they bodies strong and balanced for there golden years. This thesis documents the research, conceptualization, and development of the Xcel Sleeve.


In this communication, N-doped carbon shell encapsulated Co3O4@Co nanoparticles (NPs) were assembled on N-doped reduced graphene oxide to form non-precious metal aerogels (Co3O4@Co/N-r-GO) for oxygen reduction. In an alkaline medium, the aerogels exhibit comparable oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) performances to the commercial Pt/C with respect to half-wave potential, current density and durability. Zn-air batteries (ZABs) assembled with Co3O4@Co/N-r-GO as the air cathode display high average voltages of ∼1.38 and ∼1.3 V at a current density of 1 and 5 mA cm-2, respectively, and show a specific capacity of ∼800 mA h g-1. These results demonstrate that Co3O4@Co/N-r-GO materials are highly active and durable ORR catalysts for ZABs. The unique structure of the composite aerogel, i.e. the carbon shell encapsulated Co3O4@Co NPs and the 3D interconnected macroporous N-r-GO matrix, is responsible for its high ORR activity and stability.


Anomalous microwave emission (AME) is believed to be due to electric dipole radiation from small spinning dust grains. The aim of this paper is a statistical study of the basic properties of AME regions and the environment in which they emit. We used WMAP and Planck maps, combined with ancillary radio and IR data, to construct a sample of 98 candidate AME sources, assembling SEDs for each source using aperture photometry on 1?-smoothed maps from 0.408GHz up to 3000GHz. Each spectrum is fitted with a simple model of free-free, synchrotron (where necessary), cosmic microwave background (CMB), thermal dust, and spinning dust components. We find that 42 of the 98 sources have significant (>5sigma) excess emission at frequencies between 20 and 60GHz. An analysis of the potential contribution of optically thick free-free emission from ultra-compact HII regions, using IR colour criteria, reduces the significant AME sample to 27 regions. The spectrum of the AME is consistent with model spectra of spinning dust. Peak frequencies are in the range 20-35GHz except for the California nebula (NGC1499), which appears to have a high spinning dust peak frequency of (50+/-17)GHz. The AME regions tend to be more spatially extended than regions with little or no AME. The AME intensity is strongly correlated with the sub-millimetre/IR flux densities and comparable to previous AME detections in the literature. AME emissivity, defined as the ratio of AME to dust optical depth, varies by an order of magnitude for the AME regions. The AME regions tend to be associated with cooler dust in the range 14-20K and an average emissivity index, beta d , of +1.8, while the non-AME regions are typically warmer, at 20-27K. In agreement with previous studies, the AME emissivity appears to decrease with increasing column density. This supports the idea of AME originating from small grains that are known to be depleted in dense regions, probably due to coagulation onto larger grains. We also find a correlation between the AME emissivity (and to a lesser degree the spinning dust peak frequency) and the intensity of the interstellar radiation field, G 0 . Modelling of this trend suggests that both radiative and collisional excitation are important for the spinning dust emission. The most significant AME regions tend to have relatively less ionized gas (free-free emission), although this could be a selection effect. The infrared excess, a measure of the heating of dust associated with HII regions, is typically >4 for AME sources, indicating that the dust is not primarily heated by hot OB stars. The AME regions are associated with known dark nebulae and have higher 12mum/25mum ratios. The emerging picture is that the bulk of the AME is coming from the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and small dust grains from the colder neutral interstellar medium phase. (1 data file).


This atlas presents plate reconstructions from 550 Ma to the present-day derived by the PLATES Project, Institute for Geophysics, The University of Texas at Austin. The atlas was made possible through the scientific contributions of many researchers, from UTIG and from other institutions. Their efforts are highly appreciated by the members of the PLATES research team. The atlas was created using the PaleoGIS (paleogis.com) for ArcGIS plate reconstruction software by The Rothwell Group, L.P., and the GPlates (http://www.gplates.org/) plate reconstruction software. For more information, contact firstname.lastname@example.com.


Indoor scenes are characterized by a high intra-class variability, mainly due to the intrinsic variety of the objects in them, and to the drastic image variations due to (even small) view-point changes. One of the main trends in the literature has been to employ representations coupling statistical characterizations of the image, with a description of their spatial distribution. This is usually done by combining multiple representations of different image regions, most often using a fixed 4x4, or pyramidal image-partitioning scheme. While these encodings are able to capture the spatial regularities of the problem, they are unsuitable to handle its spatial variabilities. In this work we propose to complement a traditional spatial-encoding scheme with a bottom-up approach designed to discover visual-structures regardless of their exact position in the scene. To this end we use saliency maps to segment each image in two regions: the most and least salient 50%. This segmentation provides a description of the images which is somehow related to the relative semantics of the discovered regions, complementing the canonical spatial description. We evaluated the proposed technique on three public scene recognition datasets. Our results prove this approach to be effective in the indoor scenario, while being also meaningful for other scene categorization tasks.


Abstract. We assess the ability of ocean biogeochemical models to represent seasonal structures in biomass and net community production (NCP) in the Southern Ocean. Two models are compared to observations on daily to seasonal timescales in four different sections of the region. We use daily satellite fields of chlorophyll (Chl) as a proxy for biomass and in situ observations of O2 and Ar supersaturation (ΔO2 / Ar) to estimate NCP. ΔO2 / Ar is converted to the flux of biologically generated O2 from sea to air (O2 bioflux). All data are aggregated to a climatological year with a daily resolution. To account for potential regional differences within the Southern Ocean, we conduct separate analyses of sections south of South Africa, around the Drake Passage, south of Australia, and south of New Zealand. We find that the models simulate the upper range of Chl concentrations well, underestimate spring levels significantly, and show differences in skill between early and late parts of the growing season. While there is a great deal of scatter in the bioflux observations in general, the four sectors each have distinct patterns that the models pick up. Neither model exhibits a significant distinction between the Australian and New Zealand sectors and between the Drake Passage and African sectors. South of 60° S, the models fail to predict the observed extent of biological O2 undersaturation. We suggest that this shortcoming may be due either to problems with the ecosystem dynamics or problems with the vertical transport of oxygen.


Abstruct- In this paper we address the constructive controllability problem for drift-free, left-invariant systems on finitedimensional Lie groups with fewer controls than state dimension. We consider small (c) amplitude, low-frequency, periodically time-varying controls and derive average solutions for system behavior. We show how the pth-order average formula can be used to construct open-loop controls for point-to-point maneuvering of systems which require up to (p - 1) iterations of Lie brackets to satisfy the Lie algebra controllability rank condition. In the cases p = 2.3, we give algorithms for constructing these controls as a function of structure constants that define the control authority, i.e., the actuator capability, of the system. The algorithms are based on a geometric interpretation of the average formulas and produce sinusoidal controls that solve the constructive controllability problem with O( cp ) accuracy in general (exactly if the Lie algebra is nilpotent). The methodology is applicable to a variety of control problems and is illustrated for the motion control problem of an autonomous underwater vehicle with as few as three control inputs.


The progression of β-amyloid deposition in the brains of mice overexpressing Swedish mutant β-amyloid precursor protein (APP-Swe), a model of Alzheimer disease (AD), was investigated in a longitudinal PET study using the novel β-amyloid tracer 18F-florbetaben. Methods: Groups of APP-Swe and age-matched wild-type (WT) mice (age range, 10–20 mo) were investigated. Dynamic emission recordings were acquired with a small-animal PET scanner during 90 min after the administration of 18F-florbetaben (9 MBq, intravenously). After spatial normalization of individual PET recordings to common coordinates for mouse brain, binding potentials (BPND) and standardized uptake value ratios (SUVRs) were calculated relative to the cerebellum. Voxelwise analyses were performed using statistical parametric mapping (SPM). Histochemical analyses and ex vivo autoradiography were ultimately performed in a subset of animals as a gold standard assessment of β-amyloid plaque load. Results: SUVRs calculated from static recordings during the interval of 30–60 min after tracer injection correlated highly with estimates of BPND based on the entire dynamic emission recordings. 18F-florbetaben binding did not significantly differ in APP-Swe mice and WT animals at 10 and 13 mo of age. At 16 mo of age, the APP-Swe mice had a significant 7.9% increase (P < 0.01) in cortical 18F-florbetaben uptake above baseline and at 20 mo there was a 16.6% increase (P < 0.001), whereas WT mice did not show any temporal changes in tracer uptake during the interval of follow-up. Voxelwise SPM analyses revealed the first signs of increased cortical binding at 13 mo and confirmed progressive binding increases in both the frontal and the temporal cortices (P < 0.001 uncorrected) to 20 mo. The SUVR strongly correlated with percentage plaque load (R = 0.95, P < 0.001). Conclusion: In the first longitudinal PET study in an AD mouse model using the novel β-amyloid tracer 18F-florbetaben, the temporal and spatial progression of amyloidogenesis in the brain of APP-Swe mice were sensitively monitored. This method should afford the means for preclinical testing of novel therapeutic approaches to the treatment of AD.


Pulse Polarographic determination of gold (- 2 ppm) in a solution mixture with the presence of silver and copper ion without separation has been examined. Utilizing the suitable condition, polarographic peaks of gold, silver and copper were separated and thus could make the determination of gold possible in a solution with silver and copper ions. From the investigations carried out, several conclusions were derived i.e. : 1. A system of KOH 1,5M, KN03 0,02 M and KCN 0,01M, which was then called the complexing and supporting electrolyte mixture or "Elektrolit Pendukung Pengkompleks Campuran (EPPC)'; appeared to be capable to remove the interference of copper and silver peaks from the gold polarogram peak area in tile Derivative Pulse Polarography. 2. The capabilities of this EPPC are used to determine the concentration of gold in the range of 2 to 10 ppm. The determination was carried am by the Derivative Pulse Polarography in a solution mixture with 30 ppm of silver and copper ion. Preliminary application of the EPPC system to the analysis of gold in a rock sample was observed and the result was compared with Neutron Activation Analysis method


During the last decades, international trade flows of the industrialised countries became more and more intra-industry. At the same time, employment perspectives particularly of the low skilled by tendency deteriorated in these countries. This phenomenon is often traced back to the fact that intra-industry trade (IIT), which should theoretically involve low labour market adjustment, became increasingly vertical in nature. Against this background, this paper investigates the relationship between international trade patterns and selected labour market indicators in European countries. As the results show, neither inter- nor vertical intra-industry trade (VIIT) do have a verifiable effect on wage spread in EU member states. As far as structural unemployment is concerned, the latter increases only with the degree of countries' specialisation on capital intensively manufactured products in inter-industry trade relations. Only for unemployment of the less skilled, a slightly significant impact of superior VIIT seems to exist.


Finkelstein et al. (2014) estimated that an obese ten-year-old, typically in the fifth grade, will incur between $12,660 and $19,630 in direct medical costs beyond those of a normal-weight ten-year-old over a lifetime. PURPOSE: The purpose was to estimate the lifetime direct medical costs attributable to obesity for fifth graders in the two most populous states, Texas and California. METHODS: Body composition data from the Presidential Youth Fitness Program's FITNESSGRAM® administered in California and Texas each school year from 2010 – 2011 to 2012 – 2013 were used. Data included information on 447,619 – 456,409 fifth graders each year in California and 296,887 – 337,514 fifth graders in Texas. The number and percentage of students in each of the FITNESSGRAM® body composition categories was calculated and those in the Needs Improvement – High Risk (NI – HR) were used for cost estimation. The number of students in the NI – HR category for each year in each state was multiplied by the recommended cost estimate of $19,000 to project the elevated lifetime medical costs attributable to obesity for each group of fifth graders in each state. RESULTS: More than 33% of fifth graders in California and more than 36% of fifth graders in Texas were categorized as NI – HR each year over the 3-year period. Results indicate that the increased lifetime direct medical costs due to obesity will be nearly $3 billion for each group of fifth graders in California and more than $2 billion for each group of fifth graders in Texas. CONCLUSIONS: When the percentage of obese fifth graders is extrapolated to the entire United States' 4 million 10-yearolds, this results in more than $25 billion in elevated direct lifetime medical costs attributable to obesity for this 1-year age cohort. These estimates are for obesity and do not include the additional costs associated with overweight (i.e., FITNESSGRAM® Needs Improvement – Some Risk category). This information should be used to influence spending decisions and resource allocation to obesity reduction and prevention efforts.


For all who love New Mexico, and for those who aspire to know the state, this book is a graceful and compelling summary of what has made the Land of Enchantment its distinctive self. Originally published in 1977 to commemorate the bicentennial of American Independence, New Mexico is now available for the first time in a quality paperback edition with a new introduction by the author. In writing this book, Marc Simmons sets out to arrive at an understanding of the states character. His is an interpretive, sensitive, individualeven personalaccount. He shows that across the centuries the collision and mingling of cultures dominates New Mexicos history. Out of this complex interplay of human and natural forces he selects his examples of Pueblo life ways, Spanish domination, and Anglo control to make immediate and memorable the states rich history.


Strange Meetings provides a highly original account of the War Poets of 1914-1918, written through a series of actual encounters, or near-encounters, from Siegfried Sassoon's first, blushing meeting with Rupert Brooke over kidneys and bacon at Eddie Marsh's breakfasts before the war, through famous moments like Sassoon's encouragement of Owen when both are in hospital at the same time; on to the poignant meeting between Edward Thomas's widow and Ivor Gurney in 1932; and the last, strange lunch and 'longish talk' of Sassoon and David Jones in 1964, half a century after the great war began. Among the other poets and writers we encounter are Vera Brittain, Roland Leighton, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Nichols and Edmund Blunden. Ricketts's unusual approach allows him to follow their relationships, marking their responses to each other's work and showing how these affected their own poetry - one potent strand, for example, is the profound influence of Brooke, both as a model to follow and a burden to reject. The stories become intensely personal and vivid - we come to know each of the poets, their family and intellectual backgrounds and their very different personalities. And while the accounts of individual lives achieve the imaginative vividness of a novel, they also give us an entirely fresh sense of Georgian poetry, conveying all the excitement and frustration of poetic creation, and demonstrating how the whole notion of what poetry should be 'about' became fractured and changed for ever by the terrible experiences of the war.


Despite the frequency with which scholars have utilized the Political Terror Scale (PTS), a surprising number of questions remain regarding the origins of the scale, the coding scheme it employs, and its conceptualization of "state terror." This research note attempts to clarify these issues. We also take this opportunity to compare the PTS with the Cingranelli and Richards Human Rights Data Project (CIRI). Although the PTS and CIRI are coded from the same source material and capture the same class of human rights violations, we observe some important differences between the two that we believe may be of interest to scholars in the quantitative human rights community. First, we believe that the CIRI claims a level of precision that is not possible given the source data from which both datasets are coded. We believe that the PTS offers a transparent coding system that recognizes the inherent limitations in measuring abuses of physical integrity rights. Second, we argue that the CIRI's method of summing across abuse types leads to some inappropriate categorizations. For instance, the absence of one type of abuse prevents a state from being coded into a more repressive overall category regardless of the levels of other types of abuse. Lastly, the PTS accounts for the "range" of violence committed by the state—in short, what segments of the population are targeted. We believe that range is an important dimension to consider in measuring human rights and one to which CIRI does not attend.


Abstract In the dragonfly Perithemis tenera Say, males defend territories around oviposition sites and defense of a site is critical for reproductive success. This study first demonstrated that individual males varied consistently in how long they defended a particular territory within a day (their "tenure") and in the quality of the sites they defended. I then investigated a number of factors that may have affected territory tenure and may have led to the observed variation among males. Territory occupations that ended "voluntarily" were significantly longer than those that ended because the male was evicted from his territory. For voluntary desertions, tenure duration was unrelated to age, wing length, the amount of time the male fought that day, or site quality. However, tenure durations were longer for males that arrived earlier in the day than for those that arrived later, and consistent differences existed among males in arrival time. Furthermore, tenure durations were longer when males had successfully mated than when they did not mate; available evidence suggests that this pattern may be because mating success causes them to stay longer. Thus, the results suggest that the problem of explaining tenure duration in P. tenera can be largely broken down into identifying factors that affect a male's likelihood of being evicted and his relative arrival time. Overall, males that defended better sites and males that had longer wings were territorial for fewer total days. Of these two factors, site quality seems to have a larger effect than wing length on the number of days, suggesting that males may incur an increased cost by defending sites that are more attractive to other males.


Wells in the Gettysburg National Military Park, Eisenhower National Historic Site, and Gettysburg Borough supply drinking water to the park staff and, annually, more than 1 million visitors. These water resources are vulnerable to contamination by pollutants from activities in and outside park boundaries. This report describes the hydrogeology and ground-water quality of a 12-squaremile area of the park and vicinity, and outlines a ground-water-quality monitoring plan. A network of about 60 wells was established to measure water levels and sample ground water. Water levels were measured continuously in five wells and synchronously in the larger network during spring and fall of 1986. Shale, siltstone, and sandstone of the Gettysburg Formation, intruded by a 2,000-foot-thick diabase sill in the southeastern part of the area, form the bedrock framework. These rocks are tilted about 20 degrees to the northwest. Two vertical diabase dikes extend northward and form barriers to ground-water flow in the Gettysburg Formation. The regolith and fractures near the surface in both the Gettysburg Formation rocks and the diabase sill contain a shallow water-table aquifer. In the Gettysburg Formation, the shallow aquifer is connected to deep, discontinuous, tabular aquifers in beds prone to fracturing. Ground-water flow tends to be anisotropic parallel to the strike of bedding both in the shallow and deep aquifers of the Gettysburg Formation. Pumping affects water levels in wells more than 2,500 feet apart along strike. Calcium, magnesium, and bicarbonate are the dominant constituents in the ground water. Concentrations of dissolved solids are about 40 percent greater in water from the Gettysburg Formation than water from the diabase. Concentrations of nontoxic elements, iron and manganese, slightly exceed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) secondary maximum contaminant levels in 4 of 21 samples. No concentration of the toxic trace elements arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, selenium, or mercury exceeds the maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) established by USEPA. A nitrate concentration in excess of the USEPA MCL of 10 milligrams per liter was found only in water from one well. Pesticides were present, at nontoxic concentrations (near minimum detection limits) in water from five wells, two of which are currently (1987) in use. TCE and PCE were the dominant purgeable organic compounds (POC) detected. No POC were present in park wells above concentrations of 1 microgram per liter, and no concentration exceeded USEPA MCLs. POC were detected only in water from wells that are approximately aligned, and in a zone parallel to strike that extends into areas of known ground-water contamination and (or) production wells. Water-quality monitoring in the park is most important in the zone where TCE and PCE were detected. Areas that have production wells in which other contaminants in water have been detected are areas to be monitored for changes in concentration of the detected contaminants. Continued control of potential contaminants placed on the land surface, especially agricultural chemicals and wastes, can prevent or mitigate most ground-water contamination. Future monitoring activities will be dictated by events and conditions where and as they occur.


A modeling framework has been developed to examine the spatial and temporal aspects of biomass burning emissions from southern African savanna fires. The complexity of the fire emissions processes is described using a spatially and temporally explicit model that integrates recently published satellite‐driven fuel load amounts, the GBA‐2000 satellite burned area time series and empirically derived parameterizations of combustion completeness and emission factors (EFs). To represent fire behavior characteristics, land cover is classified into grasslands and woodlands using the MODIS percent tree cover product. The combustion completeness is modeled as a function of grass fuel moisture and the EFs as a function of grass fuel moisture in grasslands and fuel mixture in woodlands. Fuel moisture is derived from satellite vegetation index time series. The analysis at the regional scale shows that early burning in grasslands may lead to higher amounts of products of incomplete combustion, despite the lower amounts of fuel consumed, compared with late dry season burning. In contrast, early burning in woodlands results in lower emissions, in both products of complete and incomplete combustion, because less fuel is consumed than in the late dry season when the fuels are drier. Overall, burning in woodlands dominates the regional emission budgets. Emissions estimates for various atmospheric species, many of which are modeled for the first time, are reported. The modeled estimates for 2000 are (in Tg) 296 CO2, 11.7 CO, 0.350 CH4, 0.348 NMHC and 1.1 particulates (<2.5 μm). Especially high is the previously undetermined contribution of oxygenated volatile organic compounds (0.915 Tg). A sensitivity analysis of fixed vs. seasonally variable EFs and combustion completeness demonstrates the importance of accounting for the seasonal variations of these two variables in emissions modeling.


Five varieties of diseased onion samples, four local (Taherpuri, Faridpuri, Kalashnagari, and Zitka) and one Indian (Pusa Red) were collected from different markets of Mymensingh, to isolate and identify the associated fungi. Five different fungal species belonging to three genera were repeatedly isolated. Healthy looking and diseased onions were kept at room temperature. The population of associated fungi increased proportionately with the duration of storage period. The isolated fungi were Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus flavus, Penicillium spp., Fusarium oxysporum and Fusarium moniliforme. Healthy onion bulbs were inoculated (with injury and without injury) with these fungi. Individual fungi produced distinguishable symptom of disease in incubation chamber at 22-23oC temperature. After 30 days of inoculation, bulbs showed comparatively low amount of disease development than those at 60 and 90 days. Maximum disease development was found in the variety Pusa Red (with injury) and it was minimum in Zitka variety (without injury).


The notion that the optical contrast transfer function is a useful tool for assessing the performance of image-forming instruments has been accepted generally for some time and is now well established. This paper discusses one method of making the transition from ray-trace data to the evaluation of this important function. First, the light distribution in the point image is rigorously derived in terms of an integral over angular coordinates involving the eikonal function about a reference surface at infinity. Then, the ray-trace procedure is developed in the language of refraction and translation matrices culminating in matrix elements which are simply related to the eikonal coefficients of wave optics. Finally, the numerical evaluation of the contrast transfer function in amplitude and phase from these eikonal coefficients is presented, and the paper ends with an example showing the off-axis transfer function for line structures oriented at various azimuths. All calculations are carried out to fifth order in the eikonal coefficients, and emphasis is placed on the usefulness of this approach on relatively slow, low-capacity computing machines.


In a world of mobile capital, the current system of nominal interest taxation implies that the cost of capital and the return to saving in each country are strongly and negatively correlated with the rate of inflation. It follows that a country's net foreign asset position (and its current account balance) ought to be negatively correlated with its inflation rate. The magnitude of these effects is shown to be large, both theoretically and empirically. For OECD countries, cross-sectional regressions confirm that inflation rates are good predictors of current accounts, even after controlling for business cycles and government budget deficits. These results imply that existing current account imbalances largely reflect tax distortions rather than an optimal allocation of world savings.


Peptide-based nanostructures are very promising for nanotechnological applications because of their excellent self-assembly properties, biological and chemical flexibility, and unique multifunctional performance. However, one of the limiting factors for the integration of peptide assemblies into functional devices is poor control of their alignment and other geometrical parameters required for device fabrication. In this work, we report a novel method for the controlled deposition of one of the representative self-assembled peptides-diphenylalanine (FF)-using a commercial inkjet printer. The initial FF solution, which has been shown to readily self-assemble into different structures such as nano- and microtubes and microrods, was modified to be used as an efficient ink for the printing of aligned FF-based structures. Furthermore, during the development of the suitable ink, we were able to produce a novel type of FF conformation with high piezoelectric response and excellent stability. By using this method, ribbonlike microcrystals based on FF could be formed and precisely patterned on different surfaces. Possible mechanisms of structure formation and piezoelectric effect in printed microribbons are discussed along with the possible applications.


We present a new language design which smoothly integrates modular composition and nesting of Java-like classes. That is, inheritance has been replaced by an expressive set of composition operators, inspired by Bracha's Jigsaw framework, and these operators allow to manipulate (e.g., rename or duplicate) a nested class at any level of depth. Typing is nominal as characteristic of Java-like languages, so types are paths of the form outern. c1..... ck which, depending on the class (node) where they occur, denote another node in the nesting tree. However, paths denoting the same class are not equivalent, since they behave differently w.r.t. composition operators.
 The resulting language, called DeepFJig, obtains a great expressive power, allowing, e.g., to solve the expression problem, encode basic AOP mechanisms, and bring some refactoring techniques at the language level, while keeping a very simple semantics and type system which represent a natural extension for, say, a Java programmer.


Many targeted childhood interventions such as the Perry Preschool Project select eligible children based on a risk score. The variables entering the risk score and their corresponding weights are usually chosen ad hoc and are unlikely to be optimal. This paper develops a simple economic model and exploits Danish administrative data to address the issue of efficient targeting in childhood interventions. We define children to be in need of an intervention if they suffer from an socially undesirable outcome, such as criminal behavior, at around age 30. Because interventions are most effective very early in life, we then test if and to what extent indicators available at birth can predict the emergence of these outcomes. We find fair to good levels of prediction accuracy for many outcomes, especially educational attainment, criminal behavior, placement in foster care as well as combinations of these outcomes. Logistic regressions perform as well as other machine learning methods. A parsimonious set of indicators consisting of sex, parental education and parental income predicts almost as accurately as using the full set of predictors. Finally, we derive optimal weights for the construction of risk scores. Unlike the ad hoc weights used in typical childhood interventions, we find that optimal weights vary with the outcome of interest, differ between father and mother for the same predictor and should be disproportionately large when parents are at the bottom of the education and income distribution.


In common with most Latin American countries, as governments embrace safety nets to attack poverty, conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes have become part of mainstream social policy in Brazil. Under president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002), and especially since Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office in 2003, targeted assistance in education, health and nutrition, now united under Bolsa Familia, have expanded rapidly to benefit forty-four million (24 per cent of the total population), absorbing almost two-fifths of the social assistance budget earmarked for the poorest sectors. Despite its operational problems, Bolsa Familia appears to have been effective in providing short-term relief to some of the most deprived groups in Brazil. Yet it could prove to be a double-edged sword. There is a risk that, due to its popularity among both the poor and Brazil's politicians, Bolsa Familia could greatly increase patronage in the distribution of economic and social benefits and induce a strong dependence on government handouts. There are also early signs that it may be contributing to a reduction in social spending in key sectors such as education, housing and basic sanitation, possibly undermining the country's future social and economic development.


Hapten is a small molecule, not immunogenic by itself, that can react with antibodies of appropriate specificity and elicit the formation of such antibodies when conjugated to a larger antigenic molecule (usually protein called carrier in this context). These hapten molecules are of great importance in the production of antibodies of desired specificity as antibody production involves activation of B lymphocytes by the hapten and helper T lymphocytes by the carrier protein. We developed a comprehensive database of hapten molecules called Haptendb. This is a crurated database where information is collected and complied from published literature and web resources. Presently database has more than 1700 entries where each entry provides comprehensive detail about a hapten molecule that includes: i) nature of the hapten; ii) methods of anti- hapten antibody production; iii) information about carrier protein; iv) coupling method; v) assay method (used for characterization) and vi) specificities of antibodies. The Haptendb covers wide array of haptens ranging from antibiotics of biomedical importance to pesticides. A web interface has been developed to access the Hapten database via internet. It has number of web tools to perform various tasks. It also provides internal and external links to various databases/resources to obtain the further information about hapten, their carriers and antibodies. This database will be very useful for studying the serological reactions and production of antibodies, as haptens are the small molecules with known structures, which can be altered to generate antibody of desired specificity


Modern state-of-the-art database systems are designed around a single data storage layout. This is a fixed decision that drives the whole architectural design of a database system, i.e., row-stores, column-stores. However, none of those choices is a universally good solution; different workloads require different storage layouts and data access methods in order to achieve good performance. In this paper, we present the H2O system which introduces two novel concepts. First, it is flexible to support multiple storage layouts and data access patterns in a single engine. Second, and most importantly, it decides on-the-fly, i.e., during query processing, which design is best for classes of queries and the respective data parts. At any given point in time, parts of the data might be materialized in various patterns purely depending on the query workload; as the workload changes and with every single query, the storage and access patterns continuously adapt. In this way, H2O makes no a priori and fixed decisions on how data should be stored, allowing each single query to enjoy a storage and access pattern which is tailored to its specific properties. We present a detailed analysis of H2O using both synthetic benchmarks and realistic scientific workloads. We demonstrate that while existing systems cannot achieve maximum performance across all workloads, H2O can always match the best case performance without requiring any tuning or workload knowledge.


The advent of computers with high processing power has led to the generation of large, multidimensional collections of data. Visualization lends itself well to the challenge of exploring and analyzing these information spaces by harnessing the strengths of the human visual system. Most visualization techniques are based on the assumption that the display device has sufficient resolution, and that our visual acuity is adequate for completing the analysis tasks. However, this may not be true, particularly for specialized display devices (e.g., PDAs or large-format projection walls).
 In this article, we propose to: (1) determine the amount of information a particular display environment can encode; (2) design visualizations that maximize the information they represent relative to this upper-limit; and (3) dynamically update a visualization when the display environment changes to continue to maintain high levels of information content. To our knowledge, there are no visualization systems that do this type of information addition/removal based on perceptual guidelines. However, there are systems that attempt to increase or decrease the amount of information based on some level-of-detail or zooming rules. For example, semantic zooming tags objects with "details" and adds or removes them as the user zooms in and out. Furnas's original fisheye lens system [9] used semantic details to determine how much zoom was necessary to include certain details. Thus, while zooming for detail, you see not only a more detailed graphic representation, but also more text details (e.g., more street names on the zoomed-in portion of a map). Level-of-detail hierarchies have also been used in computer graphics to reduce geometric complexity where full resolution models are unnecessary and can be replaced with low-detail models where the resulting error cannot be easily recognized. Our approach is motivated by all these ideas, but our key contribution is that we use human perception constraints to define when to add or remove information.


Aim: To estimate the reliability and validity of the Dental Anxiety Scale (DAS) and identify the prevalence and the effect of the socio-demographic characteristics of dental anxiety, in a sample of 212 adults. Methods: The psychometric sensitivity of the scale was assessed. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed, and the convergent validity and internal consistency were determined. The prevalence of anxiety was estimated, and the effect of socio-demographic variables on anxiety was assessed using structural equation modelling. Results: The participants' mean age was 33.5 (SD = 15.6) years, and 62.3% were female. There was an adequate factorial adjustment of the scale in this sample. The convergent validity and internal consistency were adequate in the one-factor model. Regarding two-factor model, there was a high correlation (r) among the factors, which jeopardized the discriminant validity. A total of 47.6% of the participants (IC 95% = 40.9 - 54.4) presented low levels of anxiety, 32.5% (IC 95% = 26.2 - 38.9) moderate levels, and 12.3% (IC 95% = 7.8 - 16.7) exacerbated levels. There was a non-significant effect of gender, age and education on the anxiety levels of this sample. Conclusion: We concluded that the one-factor model presented better psychometric qualities, that anxiety was highly prevalent and there was no significant effect of the demographic variables on anxiety, in this sample.


The problem of Entity relation discovery in structured data, a well covered topic in literature, consists in searching within unstructured sources (typically, text) in order to find connections among entities. These can be a whole dictionary, or a specific collection of named items. In many cases machine learning and/or text mining techniques are used for this goal. These approaches might be unfeasible in computationally challenging problems, such as processing massive data streams. A faster approach consists in collecting the cooccurrences of any two words (entities) in order to create a graph of relations a cooccurrence graph. Indeed each cooccurrence highlights some grade of semantic correlation between the words because it is more common to have related words close each other than having them in the opposite sides of the text. Some authors have used sliding windows for such problem: they count all the occurrences within a sliding windows running over the whole text. In this paper we generalise such technique, coming up to a Weighted-Distance Sliding Window, where each occurrence of two named items within the window is accounted with a weight depending on the distance between items: a closer distance implies a stronger evidence of a relationship. We develop an experiment in order to support this intuition, by applying this technique to a data set consisting in the text of the Bible, split into verses. Keywords—Cooccurrence graph, entity relation graph, unstructured text, weighted distance.


abstract: the paper is concerned with technical and organizational innovation in work organizations. it employs an 'internal politics' approach based on two central concepts: 'zones of uncertainty' and 'politioal arenas'. control over four zones of uncertainty (problem definition, choice of means, process integration, integration into the organization) is regarded as a source of power in organizational micro-politics. three major political arenas are distinguished: the relation between top and middlemanagement, relations between factions of the middle management and the relation between management and workers. empirical analysis on the basis of case studies of the introduction of new technologies into various firms in austria yields the following main results: the absorption of uncertainty inherent to such innovation processes is influenced by organizational as well as environmental structures producing typical patterns of micro-politics. innovation processes representing a 'project of consent' can be differentiated from the type of 'hegemonic compromise' and 'authoritarian enforcement'. relations between these patterns and the way the organization and control of work is restructured can be identified.;


The emphasis on practical experience over ideology is viewed by many historians as a profoundly American characteristic, one that provides a model for exploring the colonial challenge to European belief systems and the creation of a unique culture. Here Jim Egan offers an unprecedented look at how early modern American writers helped make this notion of experience so powerful that we now take it as a given rather than as the product of hard-fought rhetorical battles waged over ways of imagining one's relationship to a larger social community. In order to show how our modern notion of experience emerges from a historical change that experience itself could not have brought about, he turns to works by seventeenth-century writers in New England and reveals the ways in which they authorized experience, ultimately producing a rhetoric distinctive to the colonies and supportive of colonialism.Writers such as John Smith, William Wood, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Tompson, and William Hubbard were sensitive to the challenge experiential authority posed to established social hierarchies. Egan argues that they used experience to authorize a supplementary status system that would at once enhance England's economic, political, and spiritual status and provide a new basis for regulating English and native populations. These writers were assuaging fears over how exposure to alien environments threatened actual English bodies and also the imaginary body that authorized English monarchy and allowed English subjects to think of themselves as a nation. By reimagining the English nation, these supporters of English colonialism helped create a modern way of imagining national identity and individual subject formation.


and Implications A total of 96 weanling barrows were utilized in a 27 d experiment to determine the effects of post-weaning failure to thrive (PFTS) on organ weight, blood chemistry, and small intestine physiology and function. Thirty-two pigs from each of the lightest, median, and heaviest weight categories at weaning were placed in individual metabolism cages and allowed ad libitum access to water and a common nursery diet. After a 5 d acclimation period, growth rate was evaluated for 27 d. Pigs with ADG that were below two standard deviations from the mean were termed pigs with PFTS (n = 4). All other pigs were considered normal contemporaries. After the 27 d experiment, pigs were fasted overnight and humanely euthanized. Organs were emptied of digesta and weighed, blood was collected for analysis in a complete blood panel and white blood cell differential, and ileal samples taken for morphology and absorptive capacity analyses. Pigs with PFTS had increased (P < 0.02) stomach, intestine, kidney, and liver weights relative to body size. Additionally, PFTS pigs had decreased (P < 0.05) hemoglobin hematocrit, albumin, sodium, and anion gap concentrations, suggesting either anemia or increased dehydration compared to normal pigs. Finally, PFTS was associated with increased ileal villous crypt depth (P < 0.0001), but not with villous height or differences in absorptive capacity of various glucose or amino acids. These data suggest that pigs with PFTS may have a higher maintenance cost due to increased organ weight and a possible anemia or imbalance of blood chemistry. However, differences in post-weaning performance do not appear to affect small intestine function.


Callbacks are essential in many programming environments, but drastically complicate program understanding and reasoning because they allow to mutate object's local states by external objects in unexpected fashions, thus breaking modularity. The famous DAO bug in the cryptocurrency framework Ethereum, employed callbacks to steal $150M. We define the notion of Effectively Callback Free (ECF) objects in order to allow callbacks without preventing modular reasoning. An object is ECF in a given execution trace if there exists an equivalent execution trace without callbacks to this object. An object is ECF if it is ECF in every possible execution trace. We study the decidability of dynamically checking ECF in a given execution trace and statically checking if an object is ECF. We also show that dynamically checking ECF in Ethereum is feasible and can be done online. By running the history of all execution traces in Ethereum, we were able to verify that virtually all existing contract executions, excluding these of the DAO or of contracts with similar known vulnerabilities, are ECF. Finally, we show that ECF, whether it is verified dynamically or statically, enables modular reasoning about objects with encapsulated state.


Background: Stroke is the second leading cause of death globally. Computerized tomography is used to distinguish between ischemic and hemorrhagic subtypes, but it is expensive and unavailable in low and middle income countries. Clinical stroke scores are proposed to differentiate between stroke subtypes but their reliability is unknown. Materials and Methods: We searched online databases for studies written in English and identified articles using predefined criteria. We considered studies in which the Siriraj, Guy's Hospital, Besson and Greek stroke scores were compared to computerized tomography as the reference standard. We calculated the pooled sensitivity and specificity of the clinical stroke scores using a bivariate mixed effects binomial regression model. Results: In meta-analysis, sensitivity and specificity for the Siriraj stroke score, were 0.69 (95% CI 0.62-0.75) and 0.83 (95% CI 0.75-0.88) for ischemic stroke and 0.65 (95% CI 0.56-0.73) and 0.88 (95% CI 0.83-0.91) for hemorrhagic stroke. For the Guy's hospital stroke score overall sensitivity and specificity were 0.70 (95% CI 0.53-0.83) and 0.79 (95% CI 0.68-0.87) for ischemic stroke and 0.54 (95% CI 0.42-0.66) and 0.89 (95% CI 0.83-0.94) for hemorrhagic stroke. Conclusions: Clinical stroke scores are not accurate enough for use in clinical or epidemiological settings. Computerized tomography is recommended for differentiating stroke subtypes. Larger studies using different patient populations are required for validation of clinical stroke scores.