This article presents results from experimental studies and techno-economic analysis of a catalytic process for the conversion of whole biomass into drop-in aviation fuels with maximal carbon yields. The combined research areas highlighted include biomass pretreatment, carbohydrate hydrolysis and dehydration, and catalytic upgrading of platform chemicals. The technology centers on first producing furfural and levulinic acid from five- and six-carbon sugars present in hardwoods and subsequently upgrading these two platforms into a mixture of branched, linear, and cyclic alkanes of molecular weight ranges appropriate for use in the aviation sector. Maximum selectivities observed in laboratory studies suggest that, with efficient interstage separations and product recovery, hemicellulose sugars can be incorporated into aviation fuels at roughly 80% carbon yield, while carbon yields to aviation fuels from cellulose-based sugars are on the order of 50%. The use of lignocellulose-derived feedstocks rather than commercially sourced model compounds in process integration provided important insights into the effects of impurity carryover and additionally highlights the need for stable catalytic materials for aqueous phase processing, efficient interstage separations, and intensified processing strategies. In its current state, the proposed technology is expected to deliver jet fuel-range liquid hydrocarbons for a minimum selling price of $4.75 per gallon assuming nth commercial plant that produces 38 million gallons liquid fuels per year with a net present value of the 20 year biorefinery set to zero. Future improvements in this technology, including replacing precious metal catalysts by base metal catalysts and improving the recyclability of water streams, can reduce this cost to $2.88 per gallon.


This article traces the history of the forced conversion of Jews to Islam in al-Andalus and Morocco from the Middle Ages to modern times. An account is given of the various discriminative measures and even persecution to which Jewish converts were exposed. Indeed, even though they became with time sincere and learned Muslims, just as the Marranos in Christian Spain, the sincerity of their conversion was doubted and they were constantly accused of the negative traits attributed to the Jews. The article also discusses a recently discovered defence of the New Muslims authored by an Islamic scholar of Jewish origin which throws new light on the fate of these converts.


ABSTRACTArblick (Reg. No. GP-128; PI 658528) and Ecoturf (Reg. No. GP-129; PI 658529) are rhizoma peanut (RP) ( Arachis glabrata Benth.) germplasms released by the Univ. of Florida in 2008. These plant introductions were identifi ed as lower growing "ground cover" type plants. These lines are being released as germplasm to document the dual purpose ornamental and forage characteristics of the lines. Arblick was collected near the town of Bela Vista, Brazil, located on the border of Brazil and Paraguay. It has green group leaves (RHS 137B), with an orange group standard petal (RHS 24A and a yellow orange group wing petal (RHS 14B). Arblick generally is somewhat slower to establish than other forage type cultivars, has limited forage potential, and has not been widely planted. Ecoturf was collected along the Brazil–Paraguay border on the same collection expedition as Arblick, not far from where Arblick was collected. Flower color of Ecoturf is similar to Arblick, but it has yellow green group leaves (RHS 144A). Arblick and Ecoturf are lower growing types that fl ower profusely during the growing season. Ecoturf has gained acceptance by the commercial landscape industry for use as an ornamental ground cover. These germplasms will benefi t specialty users of "ornamental" types of RP but also because of their dual-use potential will diversify the RP plantings to avoid the near monoculture of 'Florigraze'


Scheelite related compounds with general formula Mn(XO4)m are the subject of hefty interest owing to their optical properties, stability and relatively simple preparation. Eu3+-containing scheelites are considered as red-emitting phosphors and the main factors affecting their luminescence are thought to be chemical composition and particle size while the influence of their structure is generally ignored. Here we report eight compounds from the NaxEu(2−x)/3MoO4 series prepared by conventional solid-state reaction and present a detailed analysis of their crystal structures. Six of them have modulated structures, a common feature of SRCs, in which dopant Eu3+ ions are orderly distributed. Moreover, different amounts of Eu3+ dimers are detected in the modulated structures, characterized by weak satellite reflections appearing in the lower angle part of the XRD patterns. These reflections are indexed and incorporated into Rietveld's refinement using superspace (3 + 1)-dimension symmetry. The remarkable feature of the compounds is that the characteristic luminescence parameters, overall (QEuL) and intrinsic (QEuEu) quantum yields, Eu(5D0) lifetimes, and sensitization efficiencies (ηsens), correlate with the number of Eu3+ aggregates, but not directly with the composition x of the materials. This provides an efficient tool for understanding and controlling the luminescence properties of scheelite related compounds.


Results from an intercomparison campaign of ultraviolet spectroradiometers that was organized at Nea Michaniona, Greece July, 1–13 1997, are presented. Nineteen instrument systems from 15 different countries took part and provided spectra of global solar UV irradiance for two consecutive days from sunrise to sunset every half hour. No data exchange was allowed between participants in order to achieve absolutely independent results among the instruments. The data analysis procedure included the determination of wavelength shifts and the application of suitable corrections to the measured spectra, their standardization to common spectral resolution of 1 nm full width at half maximum and the application of cosine corrections. Reference spectra were calculated for each observational time, derived for a set of instruments which were objectively selected and used as comparison norms for the assessment of the relative agreement among the various instruments. With regard to the absolute irradiance measurements, the range of the deviations from the reference for all spectra was within ±20%. About half of the instruments agreed to within ±5%, while only three fell outside the ±10% agreement limit. As for the accuracy of the wave-length registration of the recorded spectra, for most of the spectroradiometers (14) the calculated wavelength shifts were smaller than 0.2 nm. The overall outcome of the campaign was very encouraging, as it was proven that the agreement among the majority of the instruments was good and comparable to the commonly accepted uncertainties of spectral UV measurements. In addition, many of the instruments provided consistent results relative to at least the previous two intercomparison campaigns, held in 1995 in Ispra, Italy and in 1993 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. As a result of this series of intercomparison campaigns, several of the currently operating spectroradiometers operating may be regarded as a core group of instruments, which with the employment of proper operational procedures are capable of providing quality spectral solar UV measurements.


It has been reported that in cross-cultural contexts, Western science content is often not used in everyday practice, and the learning of science is often viewed as difficult and having no social meaning (e.g., Aikenhead & Michell, 2011). It is suggested that the cultural relevance of everyday family practices and Western constructions of science concepts may be worlds apart, requiring new forms of brokering between schools and communities. But this expansive cross-cultural work says very little about everyday family life for supporting the cultural learning of science for the birth to five year period. In this paper we report on how everyday and abstract scientific concepts are meaningfully constructed in the context of culturally relevant life events (Vygotsky, 1987) for the early childhood period. We analyse the science concepts involved in the process of a South Sudan Dinka wedding in Australia, and explore these concepts through science related games with families who in turn introduce the concepts to their children as part of their playgroup activities. The results of the study indicate that finding Dinka words to name Western science concepts was challenging, and conceptualising everyday routines and cultural practices with scientific lenses amplified emotional engagement in science and generated new family discourses between children and their extended families. The study contributes to better understanding the relations between everyday cultural practices and Western science learning in the early childhood period.International Research in Early Childhood Education, vol. 7, no. 1, p. 122-141


Metam sodium (MS) is often applied to potato fields via sprinkler irrigation systems (water-run, WR) to reduce propagules of soil-borne pathogenic fungi, particularly Verticillium dahliae, to prevent yield loss from potato early dying disease. However, this procedure has not been effective for controlling quality defects in tubers caused by Columbia root-knot nematode (Meloidogyne chitwoodi). In five trials from 1996 to 2001, application of MS by soil shank injection (SH) provided better control and tuber quality than that generally obtained by WR MS, in three of five trials. Results were similar when SH MS was injected at one (41–45 cm), two (15 and 30 cm) or three (15, 30 and 45 cm) depths. In the two trials where SH metam potassium was tested, culls were reduced to 3% and 0% and were equivalent to those resulting from a similar rate in kg a.i./ha of SH MS. A shank-injected tank mix of MS plus ethoprop EC and SH MS plus in-season chemigation applications of oxamyl provided acceptable control in trials where SH MS alone was inadequate. In-furrow application of aldicarb at planting following SH MS did not appear to increase performance. Most consistent control (0–2% culled tubers in five trials) occurred when SH MS at 280 liters/ha was used together with 1,3dichloropropene (140 liters/ha), applied simultaneously or sequentially. This was similar to combinations of 1,3-D and WR MS, but SH MS may be preferred under certain conditions.


Recent research on multimodal prosody has begun to identify associations between discrete body movements and categori-cal acoustic prosodic events such as pitch accents and bound-aries. We propose to generalize this work to understand more about continuous prosodic phenomena distributed over a phrase - like those indicative of speaker engagement - and how they covary with bodily movements. We introduce movement amplitude , a new vision-based metric for estimating continuous body movements over time from video by quantifying frame-to-frame visual changes. Application of this automatic metric to a collection of video monologues demonstrates that speakers move more during phrases in which their pitch and intensity are higher and more variable. These findings offer further evidence for the relationship between acoustic and visual prosody, and suggest a previously unreported quantitative connection between raw bodily movement and speaker engagement.


Pyrimidines are one of the most important class of heterocyclic compounds with a variety of biological activities. Keeping this in view, it was proposed to synthesize some novel pyrimidines from chalcones. The condensation of chalcones of 4'-piperzine acetophenone with guanidine hydrochloride gives pyrimidines. The structures of the synthesized compounds RCP1-5 were assigned on the basis of elemental analysis, IR and 1H NMR spectroscopy data. These compounds were also screened for their anti-histamine activity. The recorded % of histamine inhibition showed significant anti-histamine activity, when compared with standard antihistamine drug mepiramine.


'Reputation' refers to information about the past behaviour of others, learnable either by direct observation, eavesdropping, or gossip. Reputations are thought to play a key role among human societies in ensuring that people behave cooperatively. When it is gained by eavesdropping, it is called 'indirect reputation'. The aim of this thesis was to investigate the role that 'indirect reputation' plays in the lives of non-human great apes, with a special focus on chimpanzees. There were two projects: (1) an observational study of captive chimpanzees (Chester Zoo, U.K.), and (2) social preference experiments with chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans (Leipzig Zoo, Germany). All results are put into the context of the evolution of cognitive abilities. The observational project focused on grooming behaviour. The aim was to examine how individuals observe the grooming of others when involved in polyadic (multi-individual) grooming cliques. I also provide detailed information on the social structure of the Chester Zoo chimpanzees, and a detailed introduction and catalogue of polyadic grooming cliques. For the purpose of studying reputation, there was an analysis of how individuals differ (according to age, sex, and social position) of how individuals behave in a 'peripheral groomer' position. This occurs when an individual (A) sees a pair of groomers (e.g. B C) and joins them, forming a triad (e.g. A --> B C). In this position, the peripheral is at a disadvantage because of the likelihood of being ignored. A number of analyses were conducted on the peripheral's behaviour: partner choice, payoff (whether groomed in return), and how long the peripheral persisted in grooming (duration of attempt). The result relevant to reputation was that younger individuals gave up more quickly when the recipient of their grooming was socially closer to the third groomer than to them (AB BC). This result implies that chimpanzees understand how their own relationship with the recipient (AB) compared with the relationship between third parties (BC). This result was corroborated in a psychology experiment that tested for 'image scoring' ('A monitors the giving behaviour of B towards C'). Here, apes were allowed to passively observe two play-acted incidents among humans: (1) a 'nice person' gave food to a human who begged for it, and (2) a 'nasty person' refused. After, the ape could approach one or both human actors (nice/nasty) sitting side-byside holding grapes (but neither offering grapes if approached). The subject's expectation of which human was more likely to offer food was measured by comparing the proportion of time that subjects spent near each person. Chimpanzees spent significantly more time near the 'nice' person compared to 'nasty' (result not significant for other species). Both this and the observational work suggest that chimpanzees, at least, are cognisant of 'indirect reputation'.


Galvanostatic overpotential rise and decay transients observations were carried out on the electrode of a thin layer of Cu and Ag deposited on a Pd foil substrate. The overpotential components similar to those on Pd electrodes were observed, and their behaviours led to the conclusion that mechanism of the hydrogen electrode reaction on Cu and Ag was the Tafel-Volmer type. Kinetic parameters of the elementary steps were evaluated. Introduction It has been demonstrated in earlier reports l 4) that galvanostatic overpotential rise and open-circuit decay transients on Pd foil electrode in aqueous solution, both in cathodic and anodic regions, yield important information on the mechanism of the hydrogen electrode reaction (HER). This was essentially based on the peculiar nature of Pd which absorbs a large amount of hydrogen, and thus provides a simple way of separation of the overpotential components responsible to the constituent elementary steps. The TafelVolmer reaction route with the exchange c. d. ratio, mo=ioV/iOT' of ca. 10 was derived. This value of mo means that both the steps are out of equilibrium under polarization conditions so that the r.eaction intermediate, hydrogen adatom, H (a), aquires an activity not equal to the value at the equilibrium potential of the HER nor to the value calculated by the Nernst equation applied to the overpotential. Extention of the analysis to the distribution of the reaction affinity to the constituent steps, synthesis of the overall reaction kinetics from those of the elementary steps, etc. were also carried out.4-6) The technique was thus very powerful to investigate mechanism of the HER, but was unfortunately limited only to Pd. There might be a further possibility of applying the technique to several other hydrogen absorbing metals suchd as Ti, Zr, etc., as the analysis is entirely based on permeation " The Research Institute for Catalysis, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, 060 Japan.


Background: Developing a well-adept social competence in preschool years is considered important and seems to play a pivotal role in later social functioning like school readiness and academic competence. Due to the individual development in children, establishing potential early markers of early social problems has been difficult. Although parent, peer, and contextual factors may be important to children's development of social competence, the present study addressed the range of individual differences in children that may facilitate or impede social skills development.Method: The paper is based on data from the comprehensive longitudinal Trondheim Early Secure Study (TESS) of a screen-stratified community sample of 2475 children who were assessed at 4 year of age (T1) and followed up at the age of 6 (T2) (n=797). General linear modeling weighting data back to yield true population estimates of the predictive value of Social Competence, Gender, Negative Affectivity, Surgency, Effortful Control, Inattention, Hyperactivity, Impulsivity, Peer Problems, Disorganized Attachment and Callous-Unemotional traits assessed at T1 in predicting Social Competence at T2, when adjusting for Social Competence at T1.Results: Analysis indicates that Social Competence, Surgency, Inattention, Peer Problems high levels of Callous-Unemotional traits and Disorganization were unique predictors of Social Competence when adjusting for all variables. Negative Affectivity failed to predict Social Competence.Conclusions: Beyond a sizable continuity in social competence a range of child characteristics may enhance social skills development in young children . The identification of such child factors, when controlling for other potential factors, may inform health promotion efforts towards increasing young children's social competence.


Justice Antonin Scalia wrote two major opinions considering the nondelegation doctrine. In Whitman v. American Trucking Associations, he accepted and applied a very broad, indeed virtually unlimited, view of Congress's power to delegate authority to administrative agencies that was consistent with the Court's precedents since the New Deal. In his dissent in Mistretta v. United States, however, he concluded that the constitutional structure formally barred the delegation of naked rulemaking power to an agency that was untethered to other law execution tasks. This essay analyzes Justice Scalia's nondelegation jurisprudence in light of the general jurisprudential commitments he championed throughout his tenure, in particular his preference for rules versus standards as a method of cabining judicial discretion and his devotion to constitutional originalism. The essay concludes first that Justice Scalia embraced a broad view of Congress's power to delegate because he (again, consistently with the Court's longtime understanding) believed that the line-drawing required for courts to police delegations was ultimately a matter of discretionary judgment that judges are unsuited to make. With respect to his nondelegation doctrine jurisprudence's consistency with originalism, it is a gap in his jurisprudence that he never took on that question. That gap is best understood, the essay suggests, by his attraction to the deferential nature of the Court's longstanding precedents and the doctrine of stare decisis.


This study was designed to measure the efficacy of a nasal valve suspension technique and determine the adequate traction length without creation of nasofacial fullness in a cadaveric model. Seven fresh frozen cadaveric heads were evaluated. Minimal cross-sectional (MCA) areas were measured with a transient-signal acoustic rhinometer (Ecco Vision; Hood Instruments, Pembroke, MA) before and after suspension. The adequate traction length, which did not cause obvious changes, was determined. Five millimeters of lateral nasal valve traction was determined to be the maximal traction achievable without creating facial fullness. After lateral nasal suspension, average MCA increased by 13.7%. Average distance to the MCA from the nostril changed from 1.57 to 1.76 cm. Postsuspension values were significantly higher than the presuspension values (p < 0.05). Nasal valve suspension with 5 mm of lateral traction has a significant impact on nasal valve area without obvious nasofacial changes.


Samantha Power's book examines the American political tactic of doing nothing in response to the major genocides of the twentieth century. Power argues that American leaders are apathetic in response to genocide because politicians and the general public are suffering from a failure of imagination. Since genocide involves human anguish at an enormous scale, Power's contention is that human nature would rather turn away from recognizing such horrors. While Power's argument is persuasive, this Book Review argues that the reasons for apathy in response to genocide stem from a more fundamental failure of moral and legal perspective. This Book Review analyzes the AngloAmerican legal structure as an outgrowth of what Carol Gilligan refers to as an "ethic of justice." Because Anglo-American law is primarily concerned with defining and protecting individual rights, acting out of a sense of responsibility to prevent genocide can seem fraught with legal tension.


Many system components and network applications are written in languages that are prone to memory corruption vulnerabilities. There have been countless cases where simple mistakes by developers resulted in memory corruption vulnerabilities and consequently security exploits. While there have been tremendous research efforts to mitigate these vulnerabilities, useafter-free still remains one of the most critical and popular attack vectors because existing proposals have not adequately addressed the challenging program analysis and runtime performance issues. In this paper we present DANGNULL, a system that detects temporal memory safety violations—in particular, use-after-free and double-free—during runtime. DANGNULL relies on the key observation that the root cause of these violations is that pointers are not nullified after the target object is freed. Based on this observation, DANGNULL automatically traces the object's relationships via pointers and automatically nullifies all pointers when the target object is freed. DANGNULL offers several benefits. First, DANGNULL addresses the root cause of temporal memory safety violations. It does not rely on the side effects of violations, which can vary and may be masked by attacks. Thus, DANGNULL is effective against even the most sophisticated exploitation techniques. Second, DANGNULL checks object relationship information using runtime object range analysis on pointers, and thus is able to keep track of pointer semantics more robustly even in complex and large scale software. Lastly, DANGNULL does not require numerous explicit sanity checks on memory accesses because it can detect a violation with implicit exception handling, and thus its detection capabilities only incur moderate performance overhead.


OBJECTIVE
There is little information on the natural history of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and associated interstitial lung disease (ILD). Cryptogenic fibrosing alveolitis (CFA) is known to have a poor longterm prognosis, and we compared the 2 conditions through a longitudinal prospective study.

METHODS
We previously compared baseline clinical, physiological, and radiological characteristics in 18 RA-ILD patients with 18 case controls with CFA. Clinical, physiological, and radiological assessment was repeated in all survivors at 5 years, and data on treatment and mortality were collected.

RESULTS
The median age in each group was 77 years and 10 patients in each group were male. More patients with RA-ILD survived to 5 years (8 RA-ILD vs 2 CFA; p = 0.03), and median survival was significantly longer for patients with RA-ILD (60 mo) compared to CFA (27 mo; p <or= 0.05). Death was due to respiratory failure in half the patients with CFA, but was more often due to other causes in patients with RA. Clubbing and reduced baseline gas transfer were predictors of poor prognosis, while normal technetium clearance enhanced survival in nonsmokers.

CONCLUSION
Patients with RA-ILD did better than those with CFA, and died less often from respiratory failure. Patients with finger clubbing and/or low gas transfer declined more rapidly.


In Malaysia, the application of the pile is very broaden. However, there is a limited study
on the quality requirement of the piling industry. Quality requirement of pile installation
method are very important in order to provide a safety of the structure in future and to
provide the effectiveness performance of the pile. Toward the problem, this research will
study on the type specifications of pile based on the type of the installation method such
as driven piles, bored piles and jack-in piles. Further the study, the pile testing procedures
also has been studied. Interviewing, site observation study, questionnaires and
observation was selected as the methodologies method for this study. The site study will
be planned to the site construction that involved with piling installation and pile testing
performance in order to see the real work in construction industry. A set of questionnaire
was distributed among the professional team such as contractor and consultant team. The
results of the questionnaire and site observation have been identified in order to see the
compliance activities based on the JKR specification. From the observation, the results of
compliance are driven pile 87.41 %, maintained load test 97.64 % and pile driving
analyzer 90.91 %. From the questionnaire, the results of compliance are driven pile 94.41
%, bored pile 63.63 %, jack-in pile 73.33 %, maintained load test 100.00 % and pile
driving analyzer 52.74 %.


In Malaysia, fast food restaurants have experienced high growth rates and
have introduced more new products and services. As a result, the level of
competition has increased. Now, the issue is how each individual restaurant
will maintain its competitiveness in terms of service quality. The study
examines consumers' perceptions and expectations of service quality in
selected fast food restaurants.
The service quality scale called SERVQUAL measured consumers'
perceptions and expectations. SERVQUAL consists of five dimensions of
service quality, which are tangible, reliability, assurance, empathy and
responsiveness. The SERVQUAL technique provides an overall measure of quality across all the five dimensions of service quality. In this study, 20 pairs
of questions were used. One question from each pair asked consumers' to
describe their expectation while the other question asked for their
perceptions.
A total of 456 consumers were selected as respondents. Frequency counts
and percentages were used to analyze the demographic characteristics of
the respon dents. Gap analysis was used to identify the differences between
the consumers' perceptions and expectations. Factor analysis was used to
examine the underlying pattern of the statements in the 20 items of the
SERVQUAL scale.
The study shows that the reliability dimension constituted the lowest score
on the SERVQUAL scale. This was followed by the empathy, tangible and
assurance dimensions. The factor analysis results identified six factors that
affect consumers' perceptions and expectations of service quality. These six
factors are reliability, customer care, customer service, company-oriented
item, visionary and caring.


The agricultural commodity crisis of 2006-8 and the recent evolution of commodity markets have reignited anxieties in Finland over fast-rising food prices and food security. Although the impact of farm commodity price shocks on the final consumer is mitigated by a large degree of processing as well as the complex structure of the food chain, little is known about the strength of the linkages between food markets and input markets. Using monthly series of price indices from 1995 to 2010, we estimate a vector error-correction (VEC) model in a co-integration framework in order to investigate the short-term and long-term dynamics of food price formation. The results indicate that a statistically significant long-run equilibrium relationship exists between the prices of food and those of the main variable inputs consumed by the food chain, namely agricultural commodities, labour, and energy. When judged by the magnitude of long-run pass-through rates, farm prices represent the main determinant of food prices, followed by wages in food retail and the price of energy. However, highly volatile energy prices are also important in explaining food price variability. The parsimonious VEC model suggests that the dynamics of food price formation is dominated by a relatively quick process of adjustment to the long-run equilibrium, the half life of the transitional dynamics being six to eight months following a shock.


Substance use among adolescents is a major cause of concern as it can compromise adolescents' health, defined in 1948 by the World Health Organization (WHO) as ―a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being‖ and may hinder adolescents from achieving the developmental transitions they are supposed to accomplish. Further, when individuals initiate substance use as adolescents, addiction is established more easily and quickly (Crews, He, & Hodge,2007; Prokhorov et al., 2006) and individuals remain at greater risk for negative outcomes in the future even if they successfully stop using (Georgiades & Boyle, 2007; Meier et al., 2012; von Sydow, Lieb, Pfister, Hofler, &Wittchen, 2002). With substance use being a preventable behaviour, prevention interventions have been implemented worldwide, mostly focused on demand reduction (Kulis, Nieri, Yabiku, Stromwall, & Marsiglia, 2007) and aimed at achieving some form of abstinence (Midford, 2009). Over recent years, efforts to determine whether prevention interventions are effective have increased due to the growing demand for accountability of interventions in public health (Hillebrand & Burkhart, 2009). Programme evaluation, besides considering the positive and desirable effects from prevention interventions, should also taken into consideration its negative and undesirable effects (i.e. iatrogenic effects) (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA, 2012a). Programme evaluation is the mechanism through which this judgment on efficacy can be made (Midford, 2000), and isan essential tool to enable policy makers and practitioners to decide which projects to fund and whether a particular intervention is worth continuing, adapting, or discarding (EMCDDA, 2012a).

However, in Europe, despite prevention interventions now being systematically monitored by the majority of Member States (EMCDDA, 2009a), prevention effectiveness remains poorly researched (EMCDDA, 2010) and very few prevention interventions have actually been evaluated (EMCDDA, 2012b). Thus, evaluation of prevention interventions is urgently required to increase knowledge about how to enhance their intended effects and decrease the unintended, which in turn will contribute to future prevention interventions' success in reducing the prevalence of substance use among adolescents.


Justice and equality are the two subjects often talked about by most of the nationalists and leaders of various political and ideological streams across the world including India. India was at the forefront in condemning racial discrimination particularly apartheid and also the influence of super power(s) on the internal affairs of independent nations. Her commitment to secure its citizens freedom, justice, equality and fraternity is reflected in the very preamble of the Indian Constitution. Towards achieving these challenging goals, special provisions have also been made in the Constitution to protect and promote the interests of the most oppressed section of Indian society — traditionally known as Untouchables and Constitutionally as the Scheduled Castes. These provisions are expected to alter the given unjust distribution of power (political and economic) and status (social) among different sections of people and thereby transform India into an egalitarian society. Given India's unequivocal commitment to secure its citizens particularly the most exploited and pilloried section of India these noble ideals, we shall attempt here to understand Indian villages, which host over 80 per cent of the Indian population, from the point of view of whether or not these villages patronise the institution of caste which is in contravention of these ideals or are these little republics ideal for realising the said goals and thus to be preserved as they are as claimed by many social reformers including Mahatma Gandhi. In the process, we shall also address the question of how caste has remained unchanged, how it controls social interaction between higher and lower caste groups and accordingly perpetuates unequal control over power and status. And most importantly we shall also understand whether all the Scheduled Castes (lower castes) treat their members as equals or there is hierarchy, discrimination and practice of untouchability even among them.


This paper presents the design and analysis of a wideband inductorless variable-gain amplifier (VGA) for high-speed communication receiver systems. The proposed methodology of using a dual-feedback network for bandwidth extension and dc offset cancellation is analyzed theoretically. The proof of concept is verified by a measured stand-alone VGA chip and it achieves several record performances compared to the existing publications up to date. The chip achieves a 2.2 GHz 3-dB bandwidth with wide tuning range from -10 dB up to 50 dB. Moreover, it consumes only 2.5 mW through a 1 V supply and occupies 0.01 mm2 active area in a standard 90 nm CMOS technology.


Gentle remediation options (GRO) are risk management strategies/technologies that result in a net gain (or at least no gross reduction) in soil function as well as risk management. They encompass a number of technologies, including the use of plant (phyto-), fungi (myco-), and/or bacteria-based methods, with or without chemical soil additives or amendments, for reducing contaminant transfer to local receptors by in situ stabilization, or extraction, transformation, or degradation of contaminants. Despite offering strong benefits in terms of risk management, deployment costs, and sustainability for a range of site problems, the application of GRO as practical on-site remedial solutions is still in its relative infancy, particularly for metal(loid)-contaminated sites. A key barrier to wider adoption of GRO relates to general uncertainties and lack of stakeholder confidence in (and indeed knowledge of) the feasibility or reliability of GRO as practical risk management solutions. The GREENLAND project has therefore developed a simple and transparent decision support framework for promoting the appropriate use of gentle remediation options and encouraging participation of stakeholders, supplemented by a set of specific design aids for use when GRO appear to be a viable option. The framework is presented as a three phased model or Decision Support Tool (DST), in the form of a Microsoft Excel-based workbook, designed to inform decision-making and options appraisal during the selection of remedial approaches for contaminated sites. The DST acts as a simple decision support and stakeholder engagement tool for the application of GRO, providing a context for GRO application (particularly where soft end-use of remediated land is envisaged), quick reference tables (including an economic cost calculator), and supporting information and technical guidance drawing on practical examples of effective GRO application at trace metal(loid) contaminated sites across Europe. This article introduces the decision support framework. ©2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


Sit-to-stand motion is an important daily activity, and it is important to study the mechanism of the motion to improve the ability when it becomes weak. To study the mechanism, we hypothesized that muscle synergy generates muscle activity as a feedforward signal, which is modified by sensory input. This study focuses on determining the sensory input primarily used for modifying sit-to-stand motion. To obtain this, we built artificial neural network models that generate muscle activities based on sensory input and feedforward signals and analyzed the effect of each input on the output. The models were built for each motion phase. The input was information from vestibular and somatosensory input and averaged muscle synergy as feedforward signals, and the output was muscle synergy. As a result, it was revealed that humans may primarily use hip angle to bend forward, ankle and vertical foot reaction force to hip rise, ankle, knee, and lumber angles and vertical foot reaction force to extend body, and lumber angle to stabilize. This indicates the type of sensory input used to control each muscle synergy in each motion phase. The information should be used to modify the sit-to-stand motion in environmental conditions where the motion is performed. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT


Objective(s): The aim of this open label crossover study was to investigate the effects of Nigella sativa on reproductive health and metabolic profile of perimenopausal women in Rawang, Malaysia. Materials and Methods: Sixty nine perimenopausal women aged 45 to 65 were allocated into the experimental group treated orally with 1600mg/day of encapsulated pure powdered N. sativa compared to control groups treated with placebo for 12 weeks. At the end of study, participants underwent washout period for fourteen days before being crossed over and continued for another cycle of treatment. Participants were abstained from taking any other drugs, herbal preparations or food supplements throughout the study. Body weight, height, waist circumference, blood pressure, biochemical parameters and hormonal levels were measured at baseline and at the end of experiment for both cycles. Face to face interview was carried out at baseline and every week to check for compliance, minimize dropouts and to record reproductive health and quality of life indicators using Greene climacteric and SF-36 instruments. Results: The treatment groups in both cycles showed significant improvement with reference to low density lipoprotein cholesterol and blood glucose (P<0.05). There were no significant differences between groups in total cholesterol, high density lipoprotein and triglyceride concentration. Treatment with N. sativa induced a significant reduction of prevalence and severity of menopausal symptomsas well as significant improvement in some components of quality of life (P<0.05). Conclusion: These results suggested that treatment with N. sativa exert a therapeutic and protective effect by modifying weight gain, improving lipid profile and blood glucose as well as hormonal level which is believed to play an important role in the pathogenesis of metabolic syndrome during menopause.


In this dissertation we introduce several novel techniques for performing data mining on web documents which utilize graph representations of document content. Graphs are more robust than typical vector representations as they can model structural information that is usually lost when converting the original web document content to a vector representation. For example, we can capture information such as the location, order and proximity of term occurrence, which is discarded under the standard document vector representation models. Many machine learning methods rely on distance computations, centroid calculations, and other numerical techniques. Thus many of these methods have not been applied to data represented by graphs since no suitable graph-theoretical concepts were previously available.
We introduce the novel Graph Hierarchy Construction Algorithm (GHCA), which performs topic-oriented hierarchical clustering of web search results modeled using graphs. The system we created around this new algorithm and its prior version is compared with similar web search clustering systems to gauge its usefulness. An important advantage of this approach over conventional web search systems is that the results are better organized and more easily browsed by users.
Next we present extensions to classical machine learning algorithms, such as the k-means clustering algorithm and the k-Nearest Neighbors classification algorithm, which allows the use of graphs as fundamental data items instead of vectors. We perform experiments comparing the performance of the new graph-based methods to the traditional vector-based methods for three web document collections. Our experimental results show an improvement for the graph approaches over the vector approaches for both clustering and classification of web documents. An important advantage of the graph representations we propose is that they allow the computation of graph similarity in polynomial time; usually the determination of graph similarity with the techniques we use is an NP-Complete problem. In fact, there are some cases where the execution time of the graph-oriented approach was faster than the vector approaches.


Abstract This paper addresses the emerging global real estate appraisal research agenda by examining and comparing the contents of research papers presented at the 1993-2001 American Real Estate Society, European Real Estate Society, Pacific Rim Real Estate Society and RICS Cutting Edge conferences. The study indicates that interest in appraisal is significant, as measured by the number of papers delivered and the wide diversity of topics represented. Clearly appraisal themes such as finance and computer-based modeling predominate and generate greater interest than more regional or local areas of research activity. The challenge facing real estate professionals and organizations is to harness the increasingly rigorous and internationally evolving appraisal research agenda to the benefit of the discipline. Introduction Over the past decade there has been a significant growth in real estate research throughout the world. While many countries are characterized by differing histories of real estate education and research reflecting variations in political systems, land tenure, culture and economic development the past ten years have witnessed a dramatic increase both in the volume of research and the opportunities for presentation and publication of findings. This paper focuses on the global convergence that appears to be emerging within the field of real estate research particularly in relation to the pricing of real estate assets. The aim of the research is to identify and analyze common themes in research activity over the past decade and to date four papers have been delivered by the research team (Adair, Crosby, Watkins and Lim, 2000; and Adair, Crosby, Lim and Watkins 2001a, 2001b, 2002). The first, presented at the 2000 RICS Cutting Edge (RICS CE) conference, analyzed all research output from the RICS CE conferences whereas the second, presented at the 2001 World Valuation Congress in Singapore analyzed the appraisal research agenda in the United Kingdom from papers presented at the 1993-2000 RICS CE conferences. The third paper, delivered at the 2001 European Group of Valuers' Associations (TEGoVA) conference in Berlin, compared the emerging appraisal research agenda in mainland Europe with that of the U.K. through a comparative analysis of the European Real Estate Society (ERES) and the RICS CE conferences. The fourth paper, delivered at the 2002 Pacific Rim Real Estate Society (PRRES) conference in Christchurch, presented findings from a comparative analysis of appraisal output presented at the 1993-2001 RICS CE, ERES and PPRES conferences. These papers confirm that appraisal issues are at the forefront of the real estate research agenda, along with investment and market analysis issues (Adair et al., 2001b). The current paper extends the research through the inclusion of the American Real Estate Society (ARES), with the ultimate aim of providing a total world view of research activity in the field. The emerging themes and characteristics of a global appraisal research agenda are discussed together with the implications for future research. A multi-dimensional rationale is advanced for undertaking such evaluative research. First, it is an established and rigorous form of activity in related academic disciplines such as urban economics. Second, it reflects a maturation of the participating community whereby the track record of appraisal research activity is evaluated in terms of its contribution to knowledge. Third, the exercise facilitates an audit of developments within the discipline, current achievements and more importantly future research directions. This activity is even more crucial for a vocational discipline as current research should reflect the cutting edge of applied knowledge moulding developments in both the curriculum and practice. The need for significant improvements in appraisal practice has been recognized in a study undertaken by Investment Property Forum/Investment Property Databank (2000). …


We report on high-pressure and high-temperature chemical transformations of Pb(2+)-exchanged natrolite (Pb-NAT, Pb8Al16Si24O80·16H2O) using a combination of in situ synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction and ex situ HAADF-STEM real space imaging. Three high-pressure polymorphs of natrolites (Pb-NAT-I, II, III) are observed via step-wise pressure-induced hydrations (PIH) up to 4.5 GPa, during which the number of H2O molecules located inside the natrolite channel increases from 16 to 40 H2O per unit-cell. At 4.5 GPa after heating the high-pressure Pb-NAT-III phase at 200 °C a reconstructive phase transits into a lawsonite phase (Pb-LAW, Pb4Al8Si8O28(OH)8·4H2O) with an orthorhombic space group Pbnm and a = 5.8216(9), b = 9.114(1) and c = 13.320(1) Å is observed. The structure of the recovered Pb-LAW phase was characterized using Rietveld refinement of the in situ synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction data and HAADF-STEM real space imaging. In the recovered Pb-LAW phase the Pb(2+) content is close to 42 wt% and as bond valence approximations reveal the Pb(2+) cations are more tightly coordinated to the framework oxygen atoms than originally in the natrolite phase.


Some thirty years ago filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard told critic Gene Youngblood, I am trying to change the world. He has pursued his revolution in works ranging from the explosive Breathless to the eloquent Contempt to the controversial Hail Mary and the postmodern Histoire(s) du cinema, shaking up conventional formulas with boldly innovative ap-proaches to every aspect of cinema and video-including film criticism via provocative essays in Cahiers du Cinema and interviews dating to the early years of his career. This book presents a varied selection of his conversations with critics, scholars, and journalists, spanning the 1960s to the 1990s and illuminating key facets of his life, work, and ideas. Topics include the seductiveness of cinema (Films are the only things by which to look inside of people, and that's why people are so fond of movies and why they'll never die); film as a blend of truth and beauty (I mix images and sounds like a scientist, I hope. The mystery of the scientific is the same as the mystery of the artist. So is the misery); and the personal realities of aging (Maybe it's that when you get old, in one way you feel younger and younger but still being old-young oldness, if I may say so, which is very...comforting). As challenging and evocative as they are quirky and unpredictable, these interviews cast light on Godard's lifelong position as a proudly unclassifiable thinker who feels, as he said in 1980, that a language is obviously made to cross borders. I'm someone whose real country is language, and whose territory is movies. David Sterritt is an associate professor of film at Long Island University and film critic of The Christian Science Monitor.


In this paper, we study the coordinated tracking problem of multiple heterogeneous Lagrange systems with a dynamic leader. Only nominal parameters of Lagrange dynamics are assumed to be available. Under the local interaction constraints, i.e., the followers only have access to their neighbors' information and the leader being a neighbor of only a subset of the followers, continuous coordinated tracking algorithms with adaptive coupling gains are proposed. Except for the benefit of the chattering-free control achieved, the proposed algorithm also has the attribute that it does not require the neighbors' generalized coordinate derivatives. Global asymptotic coordinated tracking is guaranteed, and the tracking errors between the followers and the leader are shown to converge to zero. Examples are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.


Over the past 70 years, a proposal to narrow the scope of banks has emerged more and more frequently in financial debates and research. Narrow banking would prevent deposit-issuing banks from lending to the private sector and restrict nonbank intermediaries from funding investments with demand deposits. Proponents of narrow banking defend it as a step toward greater financial stability and efficiency. This study reviews the literature on the subject, contrasts the concept of narrow banking with contemporary banking theories, and evaluates the potential effects of narrow banking on finance and the real economy. The study also delineates an empirical exercise to estimate the costs of bank narrowness and draws policy conclusions based on those estimates.


State-of-the-art face recognition systems (FRS) are vulnerable to morphing attacks, in which two photos of different people are merged in such a way that the resulting photo resembles both people. Such a photo could be used to apply for a passport, allowing both people to travel with the same identity document. Research has so far focussed on developing morphing detection methods. We suggest that it might instead be worthwhile to make face recognition systems themselves more robust to morphing attacks. We show that deep-learning-based face recognition can be improved simply by treating morphed images just like real images during training but also that, for significant improvements, more work is needed. Furthermore, we test the performance of our FRS on morphs of a type not seen during training. This addresses the problem of overfitting to the type of morphs used during training, which is often overlooked in current research.


The health threats of modern day travel change as population, wealth and tourism increase across the world. A series of three articles have been written to describe the spectrum of health issues associated with travel. Pre-travel health advice has become more focused on risk assessment and educating the traveller about infectious disease and the more frequent non-infectious hazards associated with travel, while ensuring they are not unnecessarily exposed to injury from vaccines and drugs. In part one, the role of the health advisor and the needs of the traveller are examined. The importance of risk assessment during a consultation is described and factors that influence recommendations and prescribing are explored. As most travel-associated morbidity and mortality is non-vaccine preventable, the focus of the pre-travel consultation should be on educating the traveller and influencing behaviour change. The second article in this series deals with the highest risk group of travellers--residents who visit friends and relatives. It highlights their specific problems and special needs and how to influence their risk of disease by addressing their health beliefs and their cultural dimension of risk. The third article explores the common, and not so common, clinical problems found in returned travellers. Nurses have to deal with a large range of clinical problems and diagnostic dilemmas when attending to the returned traveller. The review provides a perspective on the frequency and severity of problems and how nurses should manage travel associated disease.


This thesis proposes novel ways both to represent the static surfaces, and to parameterize their deformations. This can be used both by automated algorithms for efficient 3–D shape reconstruction, and by graphics designers for editing and animation. Deformable 3–D models can be represented either as traditional explicit surfaces, such as triangulated meshes, or as implicit surfaces. Explicit surfaces are widely accepted because they are simple to deform and render, however fitting them involves minimizing a nondifferentiable distance function. By contrast, implicit surfaces allow fitting by minimizing a differentiable algebraic distance, but they are harder to meaningfully deform and render. Here we propose a method that combines the strength of both representations to avoid their drawbacks, and in this way build robust surface representation, called implicit mesh, suitable for automated shape recovery from video sequences. This surface representation lets us automatically detect and exploit silhouette constraints in uncontrolled environments that may involve occlusions and changing or cluttered backgrounds, which limit the applicability of most silhouette based methods. We advocate the use of Dirichlet Free Form Deformation (DFFD) as generic surface deformation technique that can be used to parameterize objects of arbitrary geometry defined as explicit meshes. It is based on the small set of control points and the generalized interpolant. Control points become model parameters and their change causes model's shape modification. Using such parameterization the problem dimensionality can be dramatically reduced, which is desirable property for most optimization algorithms, thus makes DFFD good tool for automated fitting. Combining DFFD as a generic parameterization method for explicit surfaces and implicit meshes as a generic surface representation we obtained a powerfull tool for automated shape recovery from images. However, we also argue that any other avaliable surface parameterization can be used. We demonstrate the applicability of our technique to 3–D reconstruction of the human upper-body including – face, neck and shoulders, and the human ear, from noisy stereo and silhouette data. We also reconstruct the shape of a high resolution human faces parametrized in terms of a Principal Component Analysis model from interest points and automatically detected silhouettes. Tracking of deformable objects using implicit meshes from silhouettes and interest points in monocular sequences is shown in following two examples: Modeling the deformations of a piece of paper represented by an ordinary triangulated mesh; tracking a person's shoulders whose deformations are expressed in terms of Dirichlet Free Form Deformations.


An experimental study of third-harmonic generation in methane with a 100-fs, 820-nm, Ti:sapphire laser in a tight focusing geometry is presented. The harmonic intensity and bandwidth were measured in a range of intensities extending from below to far above the first ionization threshold and at pressures as high as 10 atm (1 atm=760 Torr). The harmonic signal follows a power-law dependence on the laser intensity with an exponent of ∼7 and saturates at an intensity Is∼4×1014 W/cm2. The conversion efficiency was found to increase with the pressure for laser intensities smaller than the saturation intensity Is and to decrease with the pressure at larger intensities. At laser intensities larger than the saturation intensity a substantial modification in the third-harmonic bandwidth and structure was observed.


We present high-resolution observations of horizontal flow fields measured by local correlation tracking from intensity images in three wavelengths, i.e., G band (GB), white light (WL), and near-infrared (NIR). The observations were obtained on 2003 October 29 within the flaring super active region NOAA 10486, which was the source of several X-class flares, including an X10 flare that occurred near the end of the observing run. The data were obtained at National Solar Observatory/Sacramento Peak (NSO/SP) using the newly developed high-order adaptive optics (AO) system. We also use Dopplergrams and magnetograms from MDI on board SOHO to study the line-of-sight flow and magnetic field. We observe persistent and long-lived (at least 5 hr) strong horizontal and vertical shear flows (both in the order of 1 km s-1) along the magnetic neutral line (NL) until the X10 flare occurred. From lower photospheric level (NIR), the direction of the flows does not change up to the upper photosphere (GB), while the flow speeds in the shear motion regions decrease and, on the contrary, those in regions without shear motions increase with increasing altitude. Right after the X10 flare, the magnetic gradient decreased, while both horizontal and vertical shear flows dramatically enhanced near the flaring NL. Our results suggest that photospheric shear flows and local magnetic shear near the NL can increase after the flare, which may be the result of shear release in the overlying large-scale magnetic system or the reflection of a twisted or sheared flux emergence carrying enough energy from the subphotosphere.


A diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A (DGEBA) epoxy resin was chemically modified using a silanol-terminated polymethylphenylsiloxane (PMPS) and two methoxy-terminated PMPS intermediates with high (3.3/1) and low (0.5/1) phenyl/methyl ratios. At room temperature, the methoxy-terminated PMPS with the high phenyl/methyl ratio was miscible with the epoxy resin and formed a one-phase system; however, both the silanol-terminated PMPS and the methoxy-terminated PMPS with low phenyl/methyl ratio were incompatible with the epoxy resin and phase separation occurred. While, at 120°C, resins modified with all three PMPS intermediates formed homogeneous solutions. A range of the tensile and the fracture properties of unmodified and modified epoxy systems was obtained by changing the modification method, the concentration and the type of PMPS modifiers, the type of curing agent, and the cure cycle. The modified epoxy systems have slightly decreased tensile moduli. The chemical modification method is more efficient in the improvement of the fracture toughness than the physical blending method. The fracture toughness increases with an increase in PMPS concentration. The silanol-terminated PMPS has a better toughening effect than the two methoxyl-terminated PMPS modifiers. The polyoxypropylene diamine (POPDA) cured epoxy systems have much higher fracture toughness values than the 1,3-phenylenediamine (MPDA) cured epoxy systems.


Abstract. Water vapour (H2O) is one of the operationally retrieved key species of the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) instrument aboard the Environmental Satellite (ENVISAT) which was launched into its sun-synchronous orbit on 1 March 2002 and operated until April 2012. Within the MIPAS validation activities, independent observations from balloons, aircraft, satellites, and ground-based stations have been compared to European Space Agency (ESA) version 4.61 operational H2O data comprising the time period from July 2002 until March 2004 where MIPAS measured with full spectral resolution. No significant bias in the MIPAS H2O data is seen in the lower stratosphere (above the hygropause) between about 15 and 30 km. Differences of H2O quantities observed by MIPAS and the validation instruments are mostly well within the combined total errors in this altitude region. In the upper stratosphere (above about 30 km), a tendency towards a small positive bias (up to about 10%) is present in the MIPAS data when compared to its balloon-borne counterpart MIPAS-B, to the satellite instruments HALOE (Halogen Occultation Experiment) and ACE-FTS (Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment, Fourier Transform Spectrometer), and to the millimeter-wave airborne sensor AMSOS (Airborne Microwave Stratospheric Observing System). In the mesosphere the situation is unclear due to the occurrence of different biases when comparing HALOE and ACE-FTS data. Pronounced deviations between MIPAS and the correlative instruments occur in the lowermost stratosphere and upper troposphere, a region where retrievals of H2O are most challenging. Altogether it can be concluded that MIPAS H2O profiles yield valuable information on the vertical distribution of H2O in the stratosphere with an overall accuracy of about 10 to 30% and a precision of typically 5 to 15% – well within the predicted error budget, showing that these global and continuous data are very valuable for scientific studies. However, in the region around the tropopause retrieved MIPAS H2O profiles are less reliable, suffering from a number of obstacles such as retrieval boundary and cloud effects, sharp vertical discontinuities, and frequent horizontal gradients in both temperature and H2O volume mixing ratio (VMR). Some profiles are characterized by retrieval instabilities.


Abstract. Vertical profiles of the aerosol particles hygroscopic properties, their mixing state as well as chemical composition were measured above northern Italy and the Netherlands. An aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS; for chemical composition) and a white-light humidified optical particle spectrometer (WHOPS; for hygroscopic growth) were deployed on a Zeppelin NT airship within the PEGASOS project. This allowed one to investigate the development of the different layers within the planetary boundary layer (PBL), providing a unique in situ data set for airborne aerosol particles properties in the first kilometre of the atmosphere. Profiles measured during the morning hours on 20 June 2012 in the Po Valley, Italy, showed an increased nitrate fraction at  ∼  100 m above ground level (a.g.l.) coupled with enhanced hygroscopic growth compared to  ∼  700 m a. g. l. This result was derived from both measurements of the aerosol composition and direct measurements of the hygroscopicity, yielding hygroscopicity parameters (κ) of 0.34  ±  0.12 and 0.19  ±  0.07 for 500 nm particles, at  ∼  100 and  ∼  700 m a. g. l., respectively. The difference is attributed to the structure of the PBL at this time of day which featured several independent sub-layers with different types of aerosols. Later in the day the vertical structures disappeared due to the mixing of the layers and similar aerosol particle properties were found at all probed altitudes (mean κ ≈ 0.18  ±  0.07). The aerosol properties observed at the lowest flight level (100 m a. g. l.) were consistent with parallel measurements at a ground site, both in the morning and afternoon. Overall, the aerosol particles were found to be externally mixed, with a prevailing hygroscopic fraction. The flights near Cabauw in the Netherlands in the fully mixed PBL did not feature altitude-dependent characteristics. Particles were also externally mixed and had an even larger hygroscopic fraction compared to the results in Italy. The mean κ from direct measurements was 0.28 ±  0.10, thus considerably higher than κ values measured in Italy in the fully mixed PBL.


Majority of the rural households in Kenya depend mainly on agriculture as a source of food and livelihoods. Agricultural productivity has been declining due to many factors including climate change. Declining agricultural productivity has in turn resulted in increased food insecurity in the country. Consequently, there is a renewed interest in promoting drought-tolerant crops such as sorghum, which are known to perform well in the arid and semi-arid lands of the developing world. Owing to its ability to thrive in drought prone and low input conditions, sorghum production has been widely promoted among smallholder farmers in the arid and semi-arid parts of Kenya. However, performance of sorghum production among the smallholder farmers has remained low. This study was carried out to determine the technical efficiency of sorghum production among smallholder farmers in Machakos and Makindu districts in Kenya. Multistage sampling technique was used to sample a total of 143 sorghum-farming households; 71 households in Makindu district and 72 in Machakos district as representative samples. A semistructured questionnaire was administered to collect data and information on farm inputs and outputs; and on farm and farmer characteristics. Data Envelopment Analysis technique was used to estimate efficiency scores, while a Tobit regression analysis model was used to determine the influence of farm and farmer characteristics on the technical efficiency. Result highlights showed that the average technical efficiency achieved overall in both districts was 41%. This implies that technical efficiency in sorghum production in Machakos and Makindu districts is low and could be improved by 59% through better use of available resources given the prevailing state of technology. Research findings suggest that technical efficiency was positively influenced by various farm and farmer characteristics such as land sizes planted with sorghum and use of manure; and formal education of the household head, household size, years of sorghum farming experience, membership to farmer associations, hired labour, and production advice given to farmers. It is recommended that in order to reduce technical inefficiency farmers should be trained appropriately to improve their agronomic knowledge on sorghum production . Farmers are also encouraged to form and be active members of farmer associations. Policies and programmes that promote extension services should be emphasized in order to improve performance of sorghum production enterprise in Machakos and Makindu districts, Kenya.


We present a generalization of independent component analysis (ICA), where instead of looking for a linear transform that makes the data components independent, we look for a transform that makes the data components well fit by a tree-structured graphical model. This tree-dependent component analysis (TCA) provides a tractable and flexible approach to weakening the assumption of independence in ICA. In particular, TCA allows the underlying graph to have multiple connected components, and thus the method is able to find "clusters" of components such that components are dependent within a cluster and independent between clusters. Finally, we make use of a notion of graphical models for time series due to Brillinger (1996) to extend these ideas to the temporal setting. In particular, we are able to fit models that incorporate tree-structured dependencies among multiple time series.


In geology and daily life, kinetics and dynamics of particle (including crystal, droplet, and bubble) dissolution or growth in a liquid are a large class of often-encountered problems. The growth or dissolution of bubbles and drops are usually controlled by mass transfer, whereas the growth or dissolution of crystals may be controlled either by mass or heat transfer or by interface reaction. In this paper, recent advances in kinetics and dynamics of particle dissolution or growth controlled by mass transfer are reviewed, focusing on quantitative prediction models. Mass-transfer-controlled growth or dissolution can be further distinguished as diffusive (non-convective) or convective. For both types of particle dissolution or growth, approximate models are available for not only a single particle, but also multiple particles. These models have no free parameters. Hence, dissolution or growth rates can be calculated as long as the relevant physical and chemical properties are known, including: diffusivity in the liquid, viscosity of the liquid, and saturation condition between the particle and the liquid.


Since arriving on the island of Guam in the 1940s, the brown tree snake ( Boiga irregularis ) has extirpated native birds, bats, and lizards, and disrupted entire ecosystems. Scientists and government agencies are waging a constant battle to prevent the snakes from invading nearby islands. A new control method, in which toxic mice are tossed from helicopters, may bring the ultimate goal of eradication closer.


The baby abandoned on the doorstep is a phenomenon that has virtually disappeared from our experience, but in the early modern world, unwanted children were a very real problem for parents, government officials, and society. The "Unwanted Child" skillfully recreates sixteenth-century Nuremberg to explore what befell abandoned, neglected, abused, or delinquent children in this critical period. Joel F. Harrington tackles this question by focusing on the stories of five individuals. In vivid and poignant detail, he recounts the experiences of an unmarried mother-to-be, a roaming mercenary who drifts in and out of his children's lives, a civic leader handling the government's response to problems arising from unwanted children, a homeless teenager turned prolific thief, and orphaned twins who enter state care at the age of nine. Braiding together these compelling portraits, Harrington uncovers and analyzes the key elements that link them, including the impact of war and the vital importance of informal networks among women. From the harrowing to the inspiring, "The Unwanted Child" paints a gripping picture of life on the streets five centuries ago.


Shifts in schooling policy have had substantial impact upon the role of principals as well as the relationship that principals have with their teaching staff. In this paper we report on the initiatives 30 principals in a diverse range of devolved Australian government schools adopt to shape and support the local, school-level working conditions of teachers. Surprisingly, principals were commonly unable to articulate – or even respond to – this matter. More commonly principals reported being oriented to lifting capability through a focus on student outcomes, a focus that is consistent with much of the devolution and autonomy rhetoric. Of those who could respond regarding working conditions, dispositions of paternalistic 'care', basic distributive actions or even a lack of influence or control were reported, and clear spatial and social dimensions accompanied these patterns. Given that devolution has recently created new responsibilities for principals in Australian government schools, including in relation to staff, this finding is understandable but none the less holds substantial implications and raises questions about the managerial capacity needed for schools to be sustainable, positive workplaces.


'The hell with it ...let chaos reign ...louder music, more wine ...All the old traditions are exhausted and no new one is yet established. All bets are off! The odds are cancelled! It's anybody's ballgame ...' Tom Wolfe introduces and exults in his generation's journalistic talent: Truman Capote inside the mind of a psychotic killer Hunter S. Thompson skunk drunk at the Kentucky Derby Michael Herr dispatching reality from the Vietnam killing fields Rex Reed giving the star treatment to the ageing Ava Gardner As well as Norman Mailer Joe Eszterhas Terry Southern Nicholas Tomalin George Plimpton James Mills Gay Talese Joan Didion and many other legends of tape and typewriter telling it like it is from Warhol's Factory to the White House lawn, from the saddle of a Harley to the toughest football team in the US.


In this thesis I study the construction of a merger and acquisition (M & A) process
through emotional antenarratives. This builds on recent research in the M & A field,
which has called for a more thorough understanding of emotions during M & A
processes. After reviewing current literature on emotions as well as emotions in M &
A processes I point to a gap in understanding how emotional experiences, as present
in the organisation, shape the M & A process over time. I suggest that a narrative
perspective is particularly well suited to study emotional experiences present in the
organisation since organisations have often been conceptualised as storytelling
systems. Narratives, which refer to accounts of experiences, give insights into
emotions and construct M & A processes by shedding light on the sensemaking
processes reflected in the narratives that are told. I consider several different
approaches to narrative study, concluding that an antenarrative approach, which
focuses on the fragmented narratives before narrative closure is achieved, is
particularly well suited to studying storytelling during M & A, since storytelling
during M & A is often fragmented and rarely coherent and since antenarratives give
rich insights that are often lost in full narratives. I further point out that whilst recent
work has started to appreciate the importance of antenarratives during M & A
processes, no work has looked at the emotional dimension of antenarratives. In order
to fill both of these gaps, I study emotional antenarratives over time during M & A,
conceptualising emotional antenarratives as accounts of experiences with an
emotional dimension. In a longitudinal empirical study of a company undergoing a
merger I examine the way in which these emotional antenarratives construct the M &
A process over time from hope and promise through to critique to nightmare towards
betrayal. I do this by studying the characteristics of the emotional antenarratives. I
suggest that this progression is due to employees making sense of the merger as
breach of a psychological contract into which they have emotionally invested and
committed to. My findings allow me to contribute to literature on M & A as well as
M & A and emotions by showing how emotional experiences present in the
organisation shape and construct the M & A process. I further contribute to literature
on M & A and storytelling by showing the role the emotional dimension plays in
evolving M & A processes. I finally contribute to work on psychological contract
theory and work on emotional investment by showing their role in the M & A
process.


ESSAYS IN MACRO-LABOUR ECONOMICS Parisa Mahboubi Advisor: University of Guelph, 2017 Dr. Stephen Kosempel This dissertation consists of three independent chapters. In the first chapter, a life cycle model of human capital accumulation through learning-by-doing is constructed with heterogeneity in productivity and age. The model is used to evaluate the impacts of social security reforms on the welfare of individuals, as well as the distribution of labour supply, consumption, and physical capital accumulation over the life cycle in the long run. In the reference economy, retirement is mandatory with a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) social security system. The following policy reforms are considered: (i) terminating the social security system with mandatory retirement, (ii) terminating the social security system with voluntary retirement, and (iii) introducing voluntary retirement with the social security. The results from the policy experiments show that even low earners prefer an economy without a social security system. Furthermore, the impacts of introducing voluntary retirement on individuals' decisions vary by age and productivity. The retirement decision is also affected by the presence of the social security system, and the amount of income redistribution within the system. In particular, lowskilled individuals (non-college graduates) decide to retire earlier while high-skilled individuals (college graduates) remain longer in the workforce. Taxation was shown to exacerbate these effects. However, these results do not hold if human capital is assumed to be exogenous. In the second chapter, the impacts of investment-specific and neutral technology shocks on individuals' decisions are studied in a life cycle model, populated by heterogeneous individuals with respect to age. The results show that first the aggregate fluctuations are different in a life cycle model with an investment-specific technology shock compared to the standard infinitely lived agent models and in a model with only neutral technology shocks. Specifically, the role of investment-specific technology shocks as a driving source of fluctuations is weak. The results also show that the impacts of technology shocks on labour supply, consumption, and physical capital depend on an individual's age and the nature of shocks. Individuals' optimal decision is to increase their current consumption due to a positive neutral technology shock. Therefore, old individuals work more while young individuals borrow more physical capital. However, more accumulation of physical capital is optimal for all except the young individuals when a positive investment-specific technology shock is introduced in to the economy. This leads to a reduction in consumption of all individuals, and a sharp increase in the labour supply of old workers. The third chapter studies the labour market outcomes of second generation immigrants compared to other natives (third generation) in Canada, with an emphasis on cognitive skills and education. By using survey data from the 2003 International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey, this paper shows that children of immigrants are more likely to obtain a university degree. Moreover, they obtain higher test scores in cognitive skills and thus higher earnings compared to children of non-immigrants in Canada. Educational attainment and literacy skills are found to be important sources of success in the labour market for second generation immigrants. The positive association between parental education and human capital of children illustrates how the Canadian society benefits from the immigration point system in which immigrants with higher level of human capital are selected through an intergenerational effect.


Eclecticism tends to be the most popular approach in current foreign language learning (FLL) methodology. This does not mean that the differences between methods or a diversification in the market have disappeared. On the contrary, diversified approaches continue to serve the different needs and styles of different learners and teachers. Therefore, the notion of 'method' is re-defined as the selection and programming of tasks. Instead of adjusting the learner and the teacher to the method, as was done before, choices are now made to optimalize the learning process of particular learners in a given learning environment. These choices should be sustained by research, a didactic FLL vision and by an array of materials and designs. Only then will the individual teacher or curriculum designer be able to fulfil his or her role as filter to adopt a method, adapt the approach and apply strategies. This task is not an obvious one.


Many previous investigations have indicated that speech data has inherent low-dimensional structure and that it may be possible to efficiently represent speech using only a small number of parameters. This view is motivated by the
fact that articulatory movement is limited by physiological constraints and thus the speech production apparatus has only limited degrees of freedom. Also, the set of sounds used in human spoken communication is only a small subset of all producible sounds. A number of dimensionality reduction methods capable of discovering such underlying structure have previously been applied to speech. However, if speech lies on a manifold nonlinearly embedded in high-dimensional space, as has been proposed in the past, classic linear dimensionality reduction methods would be unable to discover this embedding. In this dissertation a
number of manifold learning, also referred to as nonlinear dimensionality reduction, methods are applied to speech to explore the possibility of underlying nonlinear manifold structure.

This dissertation describes a number of existing manifold learning methods and details the application of these methods to high-dimensional feature representations of speech data. Representations derived from the conventional
magnitude spectrum and less widely used phase spectrum are investigated. The manifold learning methods used in this study are locally linear embedding, Isomap, and Laplacian eigenmaps. The classic linear method, principal component
analysis (PCA), is also applied to facilitate the comparison of linear and nonlinear methods. The resulting low-dimensional representations are analysed through visualisation, phone recognition, and speaker recognition experiments. The recognition experiments are used as a means of evaluating how much meaningful discriminatory information is contained in the low-dimensional
representations produced by each method. These experiments also serve to display the potential value of these methods in speech processing applications.

The manifold learning methods are shown to be capable of producing meaningful lowdimensional representations of speech data suggesting speech has low-dimensional manifold structure. In general, these methods are found to outperform PCA in low dimensions, indicating that speech may lie on a manifold nonlinearly embedded in high-dimensional space. Phone classification experiments
show that Isomap can offer improvements over standard features and PCA-transformed features. Investigation of magnitude and phase spectrum representations found both to have similar low-dimensional structure and confirm that the phase spectrum contains useful information for phone discrimination. Results indicate that combining magnitude and phase spectrum information yields improvements in phone classification tasks. A method to combine magnitude and
phase spectrum features for increased phone classification accuracy without large increases in feature dimensionality is also described.


Anish Kapoor's public sculpture "Cloud Gate" and Frame of Reference. Author/Artist Bio Chris Brownell is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education, Director of the STEM and Mathematics Education Programs at Fresno Pacific University, and a Senior Researcher at The AIMS Center for Math and Science Education. He is a former high school mathematics teacher, turned university math professor, turned mathematics education researcher. Chris is presently working on his doctoral dissertation at the Claremont Graduate University. His work at FPU included briefly directing the Title V PASEO grant. While at Claremont he also worked as the Teachers Employing Applied Mathematics to Engage Students (TEAMES) grant Coordinator. His research interests lie in math education practice and policy, how children come to understand the concept of Function, the Standard of Mathematical Practice known as Modeling with Mathematics, and has recently been focusing on teacher concerns related to the inclusion of Transformation Geometry in the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics. Steve Pauls holds a joint position between the Math & STEM Education Program and the traditional undergraduate science program at Fresno Pacific University. Over the years he has taught a variety of courses including chemistry, physics, elementary science methods, mathematics, earth, and even life science. Steve loves to find new hands-on ways of integrating new science topics involving real world applications. He is interested in woodworking, ceramics, cartooning, and integrating 3D printing and Arduino microcircuit technology across the educational STEM curriculum. Dr. Pauls received his Bachelor's of Science degrees in Chemistry and Physics from Bethel College in Kansas and a PhD in Physical Chemistry from Kansas University. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This editorial is available in The STEAM Journal: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol2/iss1/29 Art, Math, and Physics; All About FOR Chris Brownell & Steve Pauls 1 Brownell and Pauls: Art, Math, and Physics; All About FOR


Glassy Eyed In crystalline materials, the collective motion of atoms in one- and two-dimensional defects—like dislocations and stacking faults—controls the response to an applied strain, but how glassy materials change their structure in response to strain is much less clear. Huang et al. (p. 224; see the Perspective by Heyde) used advanced-transmission electron microscopy to investigate the structural rearrangements in a two-dimensional glass, including the basis for shear deformations and the atomic behavior at the glass/liquid interface. Dynamics of individual atoms in a two-dimensional silicate glass have been observed using transmission electron microscopy. [Also see Perspective by Heyde] Structural rearrangements control a wide range of behavior in amorphous materials, and visualizing these atomic-scale rearrangements is critical for developing and refining models for how glasses bend, break, and melt. It is difficult, however, to directly image atomic motion in disordered solids. We demonstrate that using aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy, we can excite and image atomic rearrangements in a two-dimensional silica glass—revealing a complex dance of elastic and plastic deformations, phase transitions, and their interplay. We identified the strain associated with individual ring rearrangements, observed the role of vacancies in shear deformation, and quantified fluctuations at a glass/liquid interface. These examples illustrate the wide-ranging and fundamental materials physics that can now be studied at atomic-resolution via transmission electron microscopy of two-dimensional glasses.


As mobile cloud usage has become more and more prevalent, with more people depending on the cloud for both their work and their leisure, cloud-to-end-user latency have risen to become a key issue. One oft-forgotten way to cost effectively improve the quality of experience is to simultaneously make use of the several network interfaces, e.g., WiFi and 3G/4G interfaces, available on most of todays mobile devices including smartphones and tablets; that is, to employ multihoming. This paper provides an initial evaluation of the latency characteristics of the multipath extensions to TCP, Multipath TCP (MPTCP), that are currently being standardized by IETF. In particular, the paper considers the possible reductions in latency that could be obtained by using MPTCP and multiple network paths between a cloud service and a mobile end user. Traffic from three cloud applications are studied, Netflix, Google Maps, and Google Docs, representing typical high-, mid-, and low- intensity cloud-to-end-user traffic. The result suggests that significant latency reductions are indeed possible, however, primarily for high- intensity video traffic such as Netflix.


The Leishmaniases are parasitic diseases caused by intracellular infectious agents – the kinetoplastid Leishmania spp. parasites. Few effective treatments are available to combat the leishmaniases, thus the development of new drugs is urgently required. Studying the metabolism of Leishmania spp. offers a route to assist the identification of new drug candidates that target critical leishmanial metabolic pathways. The research of this thesis focused on the development of defined medium (DM), which was used to culture Leishmania promastigotes and characterise various aspects of these cells.

DM consists exclusively of known chemical compounds, meaning that serum and protein supplements have been omitted. The development of DM offers fully-characterised culture conditions for Leishmania promastigote growth, removing the effects of unidentified growth factors/compounds which are usually present in serum. DM use also prevents variability that commonly arises from serum batch variations. The cultivation of Leishmania promastigotes in DM was successful, with growth rates being comparable with those of cells grown in HOMEM (rich) medium. Phenotypic analysis indicated that DM-cultured cells are significantly reduced in size relative to HOMEM-cultured cells. The DM-cultured cells were more sensitive to several oxidative stress inducing agents. Metabolomics analysis revealed that DM-cultured cells display aspects of a 'stringent metabolic response,' consuming fewer nutrients and secreting lower levels of the metabolic end-products associated with glucose, arginine and tryptophan metabolism.

Interestingly, DM-cultured cells are hypersensitive to miltefosine, but less susceptible to amphotericin B. The difference in miltefosine sensitivity between DM- and HOMEM-cultured cells is likely due to miltefosine having a high protein-binding capability – high levels of serum-derived protein are present in HOMEM medium only. Metabolic changes were not marked when comparing cells grown in HOMEM and DM and expression levels of the miltefosine transporter did not differ between HOMEM- and DM-cultured cells. The application of RNA-seq to determine any changes in the expression of other genes expression that may be associated with miltefosine sensitivity was also conducted. ATG8 and cytochrome C are highly expressed in DM-cultured cells. Both of these genes are related to nutrient starvation and apoptotic events.

The DM-cultured cells were also used to study mechanisms of amphotericin B resistance. Resistance took a longer timescale to select in DM relative to HOMEM-cultured cells. Moreover, on short term exposure to AmB, metabolomics experiments showed that some changes, including the increased flux through the pentose phosphate pathway in HOMEM, were not seen in DM grown cells. This indicated differences in oxidative stress related events. This may relate to the difference in resistance levels in cells selected in HOMEM (~5-fold) versus DM(~2-fold) since genetic analysis revealed that in both cases mutations to sterol methyltransferase (SMT) genes related to resistance. The sterol profile also changed between the AmBr lines cultured in different media. High accumulation of ergosta-5,7,24 trienol is found in AmBr resistant DM-cultured cells, which decreased in AmBr resistant HOMEM-cultured cells. In contrast, the accumulation of cholesta-5,7,22-dienol is increased in AmBr resistant HOMEM-cultured cells, but is decreased in AmBr DM-cultured cells.


We study the problem of guaranteed-performance routing under statistical traffic uncertainty. Relevant traffic models are presented and a polynomial-time algorithm for solving the associated robust routing problem is given. We demonstrate how our techniques, in combination with fundamental limitations on the accuracy of estimated traffic matrices, enable us to compute bounds on the achievable performance of OSPF-routing optimized using only topology information and link count data. We discuss extensions to other types of traffic uncertainties and describe an alternative, more memory efficient, algorithm based on combined constraint and column generation. The proposed techniques are evaluated in several numerical examples to highlight the features of our approach.


This dissertation discusses the access to finance of mostly financially constrained firms on several dimensions.
The first study investigates the relationship between corporate leverage and the asset structure. It appears that non-current assets are more important sources of collateral than current assets. The collateral channel is more pronounced for bank-dependent firms, but it weakened the most for these firms during the crisis.
The second study investigates whether SMEs receive more trade credit after they experienced a negative shock to bank credit. This ability to substitute depends in a positive way on the credit quality of the firms and the stage of the economy. Moderately financially constrained firms
are most likely to substitute.
The third study investigates how several variables related to banking sector development, stock market development and legal development affect the access to SME finance.
The main finding is that SME's have better access to finance if they are located in countries with a competitive banking sector, with a strong preference for long debt maturity, with high quality credit registries, with liquid and low-volatile stock markets and with strong creditor protection rights.


ARTICLE INFO By applying BOR-FDTD method, fluorescence enhancement by using nano-antennas is investigated. Details of computational method are described including, updating equations, source, detector, absorbing boundary conditions. It is shown that fluorescence enhancement depends on nano-antenna features, ambient environment, the wavelength of incident light and the distance between emitter and nano-antenna. By the precise investigation of the impact of distance on the parameters effective in fluorescence enhancement (Purcell factor, antenna gain, the electric field intensity) we show that by setting the appropriate emitter distance from nano-antenna the highest enhancement can be obtained.


The study investigated the sources, availability, and nutritional values of Crab (Callinectes spp); Oyster (Ostrea edulis); Periwinkle (Littorina irrorata); and the Raphia palm weevil larvae (Rhynchophorus phoenicis) in the study area. Bassambiri and Ogbolomabiri in Bayelsa State and Isaka and Okrika Communities of Rivers State were selected at random from other communities in Niger Delta with abundance of these selected species. Data for the study were obtained through administration of structured questionnaire, in-depth-interview and personal observation. A set of questionnaires was administered systematically to 4% of household representatives in the four selected communities. In all, a total of 301 households were sampled in the four communities. Data obtained were analysed using descriptive statistics. The species are harvested manually or with local traps. According to many respondents (54.46%) Crabs are more abundant in the rainy season while the Oyster, Periwinkle and Edible maggot are more abundant during the dry season. Although Periwinkle, Oyster, Crab and Raphia palm weevil larvae contain Sodium, Phosphorus, Potassium, Magnesium, Calcium and Iron, Crab is relatively the best source of Calcium among the species, while Oyster is the least since the shells are entirely removed during extraction. Harvesting of these species is done by most members of households. Boiling is the most preferred method for processing these species because it makes them tasty (64.03%). However, majority (83.33%) of respondents from Ogbolomabiri community in Bayelsa State prefer smoking the species because it increases their shelf life. These non-vertebrate wildlife species are of utmost importance to the rural people of the Niger Delta thus their decline and depletion subsequently could result in loss of income, malnourishment and overall poverty.


Nano TiO2 as a potential photocatalyst has been widely studied for application of environmental decontamination. In this paper, we examine and review the efforts in property improvements by modification, synthesis technique and operation parameter combined with some theory analysis. The effects of the modification by coupling with precious metal and narrow semiconductor, and doping with N, S, and/or C were reviewed. The improvement in synthesis technique includes the increase in amount of doping N, S, and/or C, processing dependence and fabrication of aerogels and nanotubes. The improvement in operation parameter involves approaches to obtain appropriate values of pH, light intensity, H2O2, temperature, catalyst concentration, and initial dyes concentration.


Surface or interface properties along the surface channel region have great influences on the MOSFET characteristics. The interface-trap density increases during the repeated program-erase cycling of non-volatile floatinggate and SONOS memory transistors. Thus, the compact modeling community faces great challenges to model the interface-trap effect, which is an important step towards modeling device reliability. In this work, the unified regional surface potential (URSP) approach is extended to explore the effect of interface traps at the SiO2/Si interface on the surface-potential and gate-capacitance lineshapes in bulk MOSFETs. Due to the trapped charges alone surface channel region, the interface traps significantly distort the surface-potential and gate-capacitance curves. The result suggests that the explicit URSP model has powerful capability to characterize interface-trap properties without major loss of accuracy.


The Internet is becoming indispensable in daily life for many people, and it has changed the way people search for informational, entertainment and communication needs. The use of the Internet to acquire health information is increasingly common. A modified questionnaire drawn from a previous study was used as this study's instrument. The study was a descriptive cross-sectional study, and the survey was completed by pregnant women in the waiting area of the Prenatal Clinics at King Saud Medical City of 210 questionnaires distributed, 190 were returned and 150 were valid, giving a response rate of 71.4%. The study found that more than half of the respondents were using Google and other research tools to find pregnancy-related health information. They visited women's forums to obtain information about pregnancy, commercial pages for maternity and childhood health information, and sometimes used YouTube, Face book, and Twitter to find educational health content. The most researched topics on the Internet are fetal development, stages of pregnancy and changes during pregnancy.