Visual cortical areas in the adult mammalian brain are linked by a network of interareal feedforward and feedback circuits. We investigated the topography of feedback projections to ferret (Mustela putorius furo) area 18 from extrastriate areas 19, 21, and Ssy. Our objective was to characterize the anatomical organization of the extrastriate feedback pool to area 18. We also wished to determine if feedback projections to area 18 share similar features as feedback projections to area 17. We injected the tracer cholera toxin B subunit (CTb) into area 18 of adult ferrets to visualize the distribution and pattern of retrogradely labeled cells in extrastriate cortex. We find several similarities to the feedback projection to area 17: (i) Multiple visual cortical areas provide feedback to area 18: areas 19, 21, Ssy, and weaker inputs from posterior parietal and lateral temporal visual areas. Within each area a greater proportion of feedback projections arises from the infragranular than from the supragranular layers. (ii) The cortical area immediately rostral to area 18 provides the greatest proportion of total cortical feedback, and has the greatest peak density of cells providing feedback to area 18. (iii) The spacing (peak cell density and nearest neighbor distances) of cells in extrastriate cortex providing feedback to areas 17 and 18 are similar. However, peak density of feedback cells to area 18 is comparable in the supra- and infragranular layers, whereas peak density of feedback cells to area 17 is higher in the infragranular layers. Another prominent difference is that dorsal area 18 receives a cortical input that area 17 does not: from ventral cortex representing the upper visual field; this appears to be roughly 25% of the feedback input to area 18. Lastly, area 17 receives a greater proportion of cortical feedback from area 21 than from Ssy, whereas area 18 receives more feedback from Ssy than from area 21. While the organization of feedback projections from extrastriate cortex to areas 17 and 18 is broadly similar, the main difference in input topography might arise due to differences in visual field representations of the two areas.


In December 2005, 34,000 New York City transit workers went on strike following the breakdown of contract negotiations with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority ("MTA") over retirement, pension, and wage increases. The strike lasted only sixty hours but captured substantial media and political attention in a city that had not seen a transit strike since 1980. The striking workers and their union, the Transport Workers Union ("TWU") were penalized under New York State's Taylor Law. The Taylor Law prohibits public sector strikes on the grounds that health and safety will be jeopardized if police, firefighters, sanitation workers, civil service workers, teachers, and others in the public employ have the right to stop working. By depriving workers of the ability to strike, however, the Taylor Law disrupts the very balance of bargaining power it purports to establish. It allows employers to be recalcitrant in their bargaining without fear of repercussion, and deprives workers of their most potent bargaining tool. Strike deterrence is achieved, but to the detriment of workers and the bargaining process itself. This Note proposes two ways to reform the Taylor Law and restore a balance of power to negotiations, while maintaining the public order. First, the ban on public sector strikes should be limited to only those workers who perform "essential services" as defined by the International Labour Organization ("ILO"). Second, the Taylor Law's requirement that parties bargain in good faith should be enforced so that it is truly meaningful. I. INTRODUCTION In December 2005, nearly 34,000 members of the Transport Workers Union, Local 100 ("TWU") went on strike after contract negotiations over retirement, pension, and wage increases with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority ("MTA") broke down.1 Most transit workers observed the strike, effectively halting all subway and bus service for sixty hours and affecting millions of commuters.2 This was the third ever strike against New York City's Transit Authority, and the first since 1980.3 Although the strike was short lived, it had lasting repercussions on relations between the MTA and the TWU.4 It also renewed calls to reform the Taylor Law, the principal law regulating labor relations in New York State.5 The Taylor Law applies to most public employees within New York State, whether they work for the state or for counties, cities, towns, villages, school districts, public authorities, or certain special service districts.6 It grants public employees the right to organize and to be represented by the employee organizations of their choice, and requires public employers to negotiate and enter into agreements with these organizations regarding the terms and conditions of their employment.7 It establishes procedures for the resolution of impasses in collective bargaining disputes and creates a state agency, the Public Employment Relations Board ("PERB"), to administer the law.8 But the Taylor Law is best known for its prohibition on strikes by public employees - an aspect of the law that has been controversial since its implementation in 1967.9 The penalties the Taylor Law establishes for a striking union are severe. A striking union faces suspension of its "dues checkoff," which provides for the automatic deduction of union dues from member paychecks.10 When a union is deprived of this means of support, it must set up an administrative mechanism to have funds paid directly to it or face the interruption of its day-today operations.11 In addition, the costs of direct dues collection are exacerbated by the characteristically hefty fines that unions face for violating court injunctions not to strike.12 The fine for an individual worker is twice the striking employee's salary for each day the strike lasts.13 Additionally, union leaders whose members strike in violation of the law face imprisonment.14 By effectively depriving public sector workers of their most potent bargaining tool without similarly handicapping employers, the Taylor Law tips the balance of power in negotiations, giving more bargaining clout to the employer. …


The Social Rural Research Institute confirms that 60-70% of village people in India seek the health services of a rural private practitioner (RPP), 98-99% of whom are men. Dais or female midwives provide most obstetric and childbirth care and have done so for generations. They have learned the skills needed to deliver infants from their forebears. They constitute a category separate from that of RPPs in rural India. Villagers have begun to accept modern medicine, resulting in the marginalization of Dais. Consequently, Dais face social pressures, lack of professional recognition, and problems of credibility. The government of India has trained rural health workers (75% of whom are female) in preventive and promotive health care since 1977. Other community workers include Anganwadi workers, Saathins, and trained assistant nurse-midwives but they have little authority or power to make decisions. The government claims that training women for these grass root roles empowers them, but it has not granted them power to make decisions, resulting in their low social status. They do not receive wages for their work, but honorariums, while most men receive a salary. Some cases objecting to this mode of payment have become before the High Court in Jaipur. In 1990 in Padampura, Saathins protested their low wages in relation to their long work hours, large workload, and commitment. Gender, caste, and class biases further undermine the status of many of these grass roots workers (e.g., the rape case of a Saathin in Bhateri district of Rajasthan). They must work odd hours and in far away villages with no transportation or other support. The government and nongovernmental groups should support them vigorously, including promoting their professional and social legitimacy and credibility. They should institutionalize a link between the community workers, RPPs, and primary health care physicians to establish this needed legitimacy and credibility.


The delightful sunshine and gentle warm breezes of early spring gave way to torrential summer rain and stormy winds in the UK. Not surprisingly, many of us are sick of the weather! In the future, however, this is an expression that may take on a more literal meaning. Our health and well-being may be increasingly threatened by climate change. This raises important new questions. Must we accept that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions will rapidly change our weather and living conditions? Will this expose us to new illnesses? Can we expect governments and international bodies to protect us? What rights do we have in this regard?


In the resource-based theory, the balance between knowledge and other resources is for the benefit of the changed knowledge, so that knowledge has become a determinant factor, even more than land, work and capital. But the development of the organizational knowledge is rooted in organizational learning that appears at all of organizational levels and the most important way for improving the level of the organizational learning is also the management of the tacit knowledge of the employees and turning it into the explicit knowledge. On the other hand, information technology (IT) has opened a new area for releasing, interchanging and presenting information by the human that is considered a deep revolution in many aspects. The main purpose of the research is to analyze the role of information technology in making the knowledge of the companies with a high technology of the science and technology park explicit, and the population of the research is the managers and the experts of the companies of Pardis science and technology park in Tehran. Using the sampling formula and substituting the standard deviation taken from the distribution of the elementary questionnaire in it, the sample size was obtained 142 and after distributing the standard questionnaire of the research, 154 complete questionnaires gathered from the employees and the managers of the companies of Pardis science and technology park were analyzed. After examining any of the variables of the research in the companies being examined through student t's test, variance analysis and LSD, although no significant relationship was observed between using IT and making knowledge explicit, the results indicated that there was a significant relationship between using IT in the external structure dimension and making knowledge explicit and most of the measures of this dimension were related to IT's infrastructures.


Abstract. This paper investigates the syntax of the Romanian modal putea, which exhibits two selectional options in free alternation: an infinitive complement, as in equivalent Romance constructions, and a subjunctive complement, as in equivalent Balkan constructions. The tests show that both derivations qualify as configurations with clause union, although the syntactic mechanism for achieving the clause union may differ: subjunctive complements conform to the tense triggered pattern for biclausal union, as generally accepted in current studies; whereas bare infinitive complements reveal a parallel pattern yielding monoclausal structures ("tight" verb restructuring). The uniform treatment of modal constructions as configurations with verb restructuring demonstrates that the lexical properties of the modal verb remain constant across the syntactic variation, and this reduces the typological differences between Romance and Balkan languages.


Innovation continues to be high on the agenda in construction. It is widely considered to be an essential prerequisite of improved performance both for the sector at large and for individual firms. Success stories dominate the parts of the academic literature that rely heavily on the recollections of key individuals. A complementary interpretation focuses on the way innovation champions in hindsight interpret, justify and legitimize the diffusion of innovations. Emphasis is put on the temporal dimension of interpretation and how this links to rhetorical strategies and impression management tactics. Rhetorical theories are drawn upon to analyse the accounts given by innovation champions in seven facilities management organizations. In particular, the three persuasive appeals in classic rhetoric are used to highlight the rhetorical justifications mobilized in the descriptions of what took place. The findings demonstrate the usefulness of rhetorical theories in complementing studies of innovation.


Something is wrong with the global financial system. One might think the system would shift money from rich countries, where capital is in abundance, to those where it is scarce, while transferring risk from poor countries to rich ones, which are most able to bear it. A well-functioning global financial system would provide money to countries in their times of need, thereby contributing to global economic stability. Through an orderly bankruptcy procedure, a well-functioning global financial system would grant a fresh start to those who cannot meet their debt obligations, giving creditors an incentive to pursue good lending practices, while ensuring that borrowers able to repay loans do so. The current global financial system does none of these things. As a result, international financial crises or near-crises have become regular events. The question is not whether there will be another crisis, but where it will be. Mexico, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey have each endured a major crisis or near-crisis, bringing the global average for the past eight years to about one crisis per year. This list does not even include the smaller countries, such as Ecuador and Uruguay, whose crises devastated their countries but made less of a dent on Wall Street. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. It is becoming rarer for a country not to have a crisis than to have one, and by some reckonings, there have been 100 crises in the past 35 years. This much seems clear: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose responsibility it is to ensure the stability of the global financial system, has failed miserably in its mission to stabilize international financial flows, arguably m aking matters worse. Meanwhile, instead of channeling funds from rich countries to poor ones, the global financial system has allowed the United States to become the largest borrower in the world, absorbing about US$40 billion per month to finance a consumption binge amidst declining investment and savings and a decades-old trade deficit that is close to five percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Observers in the early 1990s, however, lauded the huge flows of private capital--at one point exceeding US$300 billion--from developed to developing countries, heralding a new era in which the private sector would supplant the need for public assistance. But this was a hollow boast. Even then, it was clear that most of the money went to a few countries, most notably China, and virtually none to the countries that needed it most, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa. Nor was the money spent in desperately needed sectors like healthcare, education, and the environment. Developing countries could attract firms to extract their natural wealth--provided they gave it away cheaply enough. There was far less success in attracting investments that would create new jobs. Worse still, much of the money was speculative--hot money--coming in while the going was good, but fleeing the moment matters looked less rosy. The countries did grow a little faster while the money was flowing in, but the damage that ensued when it fl owed out more than offset the initial gains. Economists studying capital flows have long recognized that, especially in developing countries, they are procyclical, coming in good times and leaving in bad thus making the booms more intense and the busts worse. Capital flows are among the primary causes of economic fluctuations and have less to do with what is going on in a particular country than with what is happening elsewhere. Bankers and speculators have given new meaning to the old adage that bankers lend to people who do not need money and refuse to lend in times of need. These bankers should not be vilified; their vocation, after all, is business, not charity. Instead, the blame lies with the LMF and US Treasury for assuring developing countries that opening their markets to these short term speculative flows would lead to greater stability. …


We describe here a rare, incomplete but articulated skull of the dicynodont Placerias from
the Blue Mesa Member of the Petrified Forest Formation in northern Arizona. This specimen comes
from near the type locality of P. hesternus Lucas, 1904 in the vicinity of Ward's Terrace. Although the skull is crushed and somewhat distorted, it confirms previous reconstructions that posit the presence of a relatively short squamosal bar and dorso-ventrally robust, but relatively short, maxillary process, as opposed to the first reconstruction based on isolated bones from the Placerias quarry in east-central Arizona. With the exception of the Placerias quarry, dicynodonts in general are uncommon in the Chinle Group, but their occurrences are from strata of Otischalkian or Adamanian (late Carnian) age, and in part define a Placerias biochron of Otischalkian-Adamanian age.


Title of dissertation: DETECTING OBJECTS AND ACTIONS WITH DEEP LEARNING Bharat Singh, Doctor of Philosophy, 2018 Dissertation directed by: Professor Larry S. Davis University of Maryland, College Park Deep learning based visual recognition and localization is one of the pillars of computer vision and is the driving force behind applications like self-driving cars, visual search, video surveillance, augmented reality, to name a few. This thesis identifies key bottlenecks in state-of-the-art visual recognition pipelines which use convolutional neural networks and proposes effective solutions to push their limits. A few shortcomings of convolutional neural networks are, lack of scale invariance which poses a challenge for tasks like object detection, fixed structure of the network which restricts their usage when presented with new class labels, and difficulty in modeling long range spatial/temporal dependencies. We provide evidence of these problems and then design effective solutions to overcome them. In the first part, an analysis of different techniques for recognizing and detecting objects under extreme scale variation is presented. Since small and large objects are difficult to recognize at smaller and larger scales of an image pyramid respectively, we present a novel training scheme called Scale Normalization for Image Pyramids (SNIP) which selectively back-propagates the gradients of object instances of different sizes as a function of the image scale. As SNIP ignores gradients of objects at extreme resolutions, following up on this idea, we developed SNIPER (Scale Normalization for Image Pyramids with Efficient Re-sampling), an algorithm for performing efficient multi-scale training for instance level visual recognition tasks. Instead of processing every pixel in an image pyramid, SNIPER processes context regions (512x512 pixels) around ground-truth instances at the appropriate scale. For background sampling, these context-regions are generated using proposals extracted from a region proposal network trained with a short learning schedule. Hence, the number of chips generated per image during training adaptively changes based on the scene complexity. SNIPER brings training of instance level recognition tasks like object detection closer to the protocol for image classification and suggests that the commonly accepted guideline that it is important to train on high resolution images for instance level visual recognition tasks might not be correct. Next, we present a real-time large-scale object detector (R-FCN-3000) for detecting thousands of classes where objectness detection and classification are decoupled. To obtain the detection score for an RoI, we multiply the objectness score with the fine-grained classification score. We show that the objectness learned by R-FCN-3000 generalizes to novel classes and the performance increases with the number of training object classes supporting the hypothesis that it is possible to learn a universal objectness detector. Because of generalized objectness, we can train object detectors for new classes, just with classification data, without even requiring bounding boxes. Finally, we present a multi-stream bi-directional recurrent neural network for action detection. This was the first deep learning based system which could perform action localization in long videos and it could do it just with RGB data, without requiring any skeletal models or performing intermediate tasks like pose-estimation. Our system uses a tracking algorithm to locate a bounding box around the person, which provides a frame of reference for appearance and motion while suppressing background noise that is not within the bounding box. We train two additional streams on motion and appearance cropped to the tracked bounding box, along with full-frame streams. To model long-term temporal dynamics within and between actions, the multi-stream CNN is followed by a bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layer. We show that our bi-directional LSTM network utilizes about 8 seconds of the video sequence to predict an action label and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks.


Problems such as low academic achievement, maladjustment with self and others,irrational cognitive systems and emotional disturbances have not been investigated
among university students in Yemen.Four instruments were therefore selected and distributed to an overall sample of 800 subjects with 456 of the instruments returned.
Nevertheless,the n= 456 met the minimum required sample size (Cohen, 1988; Othman,2001).The current study comprises descriptive correlational research to explore the relationship between a set of belief systems and a set of emotional disturbances among undergraduate students at Taiz University in Yemen.The results of the research indicated that the set of belief systems as the predictive variables intercorrelated within the same set and with the set of criterion variables are also intercorrelated within the same set as proved by Canonical Correlation Analyses
(CCA).The four methods of Pillais's,Hotelling's, Wilks's and Roy's canonical correlation were explored to evaluate the full canonical model.However,in this research,Multivariate Analysis with Wilks's Lambda


This volume contains reports on the preliminary findings of archaeological salvage projects carried out by the Department of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University during the summer of 1971. A total of 26 archaeological sites endangered by industrial expansion, timber leases and logging, park and housing development, or the forces of natural erosion were excavated. In addition, four archaeological surveys of localities threatened by flooding or other activities were conducted. The projects were spread throughout the province from Kimsquit in the north to Kamloops in the east, and from the Skagit Valley in the south to the Gulf Islands in the west (Fig. 1). These activities yielded over 5000 artifacts, and a quantity of other archaeological information, and provided a valuable experience in archaeology for 60 students.


Contrasting them with the poet-in-a poet, Harold Bloom says that "Critics may be wary of origins or consign them disdainfully to those carrion-eaters of scholarship."<!) That in literary criticism there is an abundance of influence is hard to deny. Actually influence in this field has been firmly established as an accepted procedure with its own decorum and etiquette. Critics often doff to each other in recognition. And one may argue that there is too some anxiety of influence here and a variety of evasion ratios. Bloom, in trying to investigate this phenomenon, seeks to formulate a "theory of poetry," a phrase which he uses as a subtitle to his other book on the subject The Anxiety of Influence. Whether it is possible to speak of a theory of literary criticism on the basis of influence and evasion is an interesting and even stimulating question, one which this paper attempts to answer by a consideration of some relevant works<> of criticism dealing with Shakespeare's history play Richard II on its psychological, historico-political, and artistic levels.


The research is to identify important diffusion factors and their effects on green car diffusion process using system dynamics perspectives and a causal-loop analysis. First, we briefly investigate Korean government's effort to promote green car diffusion and the increase of green car in the country. And then, through a deep review on previous research, we have found the important factors of green car diffusion process. Price, driving range, network effect, recharge system, fuel cost had important facilitation on consumer attraction and green car diffusion. Based on the review, we have constructed a causal loop diagram explaining hybrid car diffusion process. We have found 3 important reinforcing loops in the causal loop diagram. Loop for learning & economies of scale(supply side), loop for network effect(consumer side), and loop for battery development(technology side) had most significant roles in the whole diffusion process. Through a deliberate analysis on the 3 causal loops, we have found meaningful results. First, there seems to exist a critical mass in the diffusion. Second, of the 3 loops, the battery technology had most significant role. Third, sales, not consumer installed base, must be a standard to decide whether the critical mass is achieved or not. Based on these findings, several meaningful implications are suggested for the government and corporations related to the green car industries. 1 This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean government (NRF-2011-330-B00094). The authors also would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.


Background The seasonal aggregations of whale sharks that occur at coastal sites throughout the tropics are the focus of growing ecotourism industries. Genetic and modelling studies suggest that these aggregations may be linked by migration, although the temporal and spatial scales at which this occurs is unknown. Here, we utilized a continuously expanding photoidentification database collected by citizen scientists and researchers to assess connectivity and residency patterns of five whale shark aggregation sites across the entire Indian Ocean at timescales of up to a decade. We also investigated the effectiveness of such an approach in detecting different levels of migration given the population size at each aggregation site. Approach We used the semi-automated program I3S (Individual Interactive Identification System) to compare 6,519 photographs of the unique natural marking patterns of individual whale sharks collected from aggregations at Mozambique, the Seychelles, the Maldives, Christmas Island (Australia) and Ningaloo Reef (Australia). We searched the database for matches between aggregations (migration) and matches between years within aggregations (residency). A Monte Carlo simulation approach utilizing population sizes of aggregations reported by previous studies was used to examine the sample sizes that would be required to reliably detect varying levels of migration rates among four of these aggregations. Results We found no evidence of connectivity of whale shark aggregations at ocean-basin scales within the time frame of the study, and evidence for only limited connectivity at regional (100s–1000s km) scales. A male whale shark sampled in January 2010 at Mozambique was resighted eight months later in the Seychelles and was the only one of 1,724 individuals to be photographed at more than one site. On average, 35% of individuals were re-sighted at the same site in more than one year. The Monte Carlo simulation study showed that the power of this photo-identification approach was strongly dependent on both the number of individuals identified in aggregations each year and the size of resident populations. The simulation also indicated that there was a higher chance of detecting migrants (if they were present) in aggregations at Ningaloo Reef and the Maldives than the Seychelles and Mozambique given the current numbers of individuals identified each year. Conclusions The weight of evidence from both our photo-identification study and previous tagging studies suggests regional or small-scale movements (10–100s km) may be more common in whale sharks than movement at ocean-basin scales. We recommend that the management of whale sharks in the Indian Ocean occur at regional scales, and photo-identification databases are expanded to include additional sampling sites within each region.


Biomedical ethics developed in the late twentieth century as a challenge to the self- regulatory ethic that previously governed medical practice. Yet in recent years bioethics has come under scrutiny from the social sciences, which claim that the field relies upon an idealised notion of moral agency and fails to consider the extent to which ethical discourse is embedded in a wider societal context. In addition, bioethical concepts such as patient autonomy and informed consent have also recently been challenged by the rise of genetic medicine. After evaluating debates in the historical and philosophical development of biomedical ethics, this thesis uses a case study in genetic epidemiology (commonly referred to as biobanking) to examine competing normative and empirical claims made by bioethicists and social scientists. The study investigates the views and experiences of potential donors to a biobank in north-west England. Data analysis gives particular emphasis to socio-ethical issues such as consent, genetic donation, altruism, and benefit-sharing. Evidence from the case study illustrates that bioethics is susceptible to many of the charges levelled against it - namely that it lacks proper understanding of the processes by which moral concepts and categories are embedded in ongoing forms of social practice and experience. The thesis concludes with suggestions as to how bioethics may better combine philosophical and sociological methods.


Since the 2000s, forms of articulation between materialist and Marxist theory and queer theory have been emerging and have thus created a "queer materialism." After a predominance of poststructuralist analyses in the social sciences in the1980s and 1990s, since the late 1990s, and even more so after the economic crisis of 2008, a materialist shift seems to be taking place. These recompositions of the Marxist, queer, and feminist, which took place in activist and academic arenas, are decisive in understanding how the new approaches are developing in their own fields.
 The growing legitimacy of feminist and queer perspectives within the Marxist left is part of an evolution of Marxism on these issues. On the other side, queer activists and academics have highlighted the economic and social inequalities that the policies of austerity and capitalism in general induce among LGBTQI people and have turned to more materialist references, especially Marxist ones, to deploy an anticapitalist and antiracist argument. Even if nowadays one cannot speak of a "queer materialist" current as such, because the approaches grouped under this term are very different, it seems appropriate to look for a "family resemblance" and to group them together. Two specific kinds of "queer materialisms" can thus be identified. The first, queer Marxism, seeks to theorize together Marxist and queer theories, particularly in normalization and capitalist accumulation regimes. The second, materialist queer feminism, confronts materialist/Marxist feminist thought with queer approaches and thus works in particular on the question of heteropatriarchy based on this double tradition.


In the last decades, a growing amount of evidence has showed that the adult brain is capable of undergoing dramatic reorganisation: learning new skills or acquiring novel experiences determine brain responses in order to reflect the changing circumstances. Changes in behaviour and brain function are probably accompanied by structural alterations in neuronal cells: while extensive descriptions of local rearrangements driven by experience during postnatal development have been provided, the adult brain was classically described to be resistant to such structural modifications. Nevertheless, recent studies convincingly showed that the adult brain is able not only to adapt synaptic transmission, but also to undergo remodelling of pre- and postsynaptic compartments in response to experience. Plasticity phenomena have been generally described for either pre- or postsynaptic compartments within small cortical fields, thus not fully clarifying the influence of structural remodelling on the synaptic transmission, on the neuronal behaviour (e.g. global versus local behaviour of a given axonal projection) and, lastly, on the circuit connectivity. In addition, considerable effort is currently made in order to establish a causal relationship between synaptic, structural and representational or topographic map plasticity. In order to address, at least in part, these questions, we exploited the simple and well-characterized cerebellar circuitry: this system has long been known as a centre for fine motor control and sensorymotor integration; moreover, in the past decade, new results have suggested an involvement of the cerebellum in cognitive and emotional functions. In addition, the cerebellum is a brain region endowed with a high degree of structural plasticity during development, as well as in the adulthood, not only following damage, but also in order to maintain its normal architecture under the influence of activity. The cerebellar anatomy is characterized by a simple and stereotyped connectivity between readily identifiable neurons, and therefore allows the investigation of synaptic rearrangements on a comprehensive scale. We focused our attention on the input stage of the vermal lobule V, namely at the synapse between mossy fiber (MF) terminals and granule cell (GC) dendrites. MF axons convey multimodal sensory information from distinct sources, such as spinal cord, vestibular system and cerebral cortex. The physiological properties and the anatomical arrangement at this stage, make the MF-GC synapse an advantageous system to investigate pre- and postsynaptic structural plasticity induced by experience. Here, we used two distinct behavioural paradigms: in one case, mice were housed in an enriched environment (EE), in order to provide social interactions and extensive sensorymotor stimulation. In a second set of experiments, mice were trained to associate a neutral stimulus with an aversive one, exploiting a pavlovian learning paradigm that relies on fear emotion (fear conditioning, FC). We combined these tasks with large-scale confocal imaging in transgenic mouse lines that express membrane-targeted GFP in few neuronal cells, thus revealing their morphology in crisp details. This approach allowed us to solve and analyze entire MF projections, and related presynaptic terminals, as well as GC dendritic compartments. In general, we found that distinct experiences elicit substantially different remodelling events, in terms of structural outcome and time course. Upon EE, the MF-GC connectivity is profoundly altered in the properties of the afferent projections and in the putative amplification and transmission of the sensory information. The refinement of the connectivity (i.e. the number of presynaptic inputs per cell) is particularly altered in animals that were reared since birth in the enriched context; but a similar robust remodelling of single synaptic units (i.e. the dendritic endings) also occured in animals that experienced EE only in the adulthood. We further found that FC triggers a stepwise remodelling of the local connectivity at the MF-GC synapse, which proceeds for several days after the training and affects the whole population; the extent and quality of remodelling is lobule-specific and can be further modulated according to subsequent experience. The structural rearrangements we observed upon distinct experiences show that the adult cerebellar system is able to undergo extensive reshaping of its connectivity and synaptic organization. Complementary evidence about synaptic transmission at the MF-GC synapse upon EE and FC would help to assess a correlation between anatomical and functional properties.


This study empirically examines the relationship between knowledge capital and performance heterogeneity at the firm level. The model is based on a knowledge production function comprising of four interdependent equations linking innovativeness to innovation input, innovation output and productivity. The empirical part is based on Korean firm level innovation data. The model is estimated using advanced econometric methods. We investigate whether innovation is a significant and contributing determinant of performance heterogeneity among firms. In examining the relationship between innovation and productivity we correct for selectivity and simultaneity biases. The results show that there is a two-way causal relationship between knowledge capital and labor productivity. Firm-specific effects positively contribute to innovation output but they are negatively related to productivity. Industry heterogeneity does not affect innovation output or productivity.


Naïve T cell activation by dendritic cells (DCs) is a critical step in the adaptive immune response. Activation occurs as a result of prolonged contact between the cells through the formation of an immunological synapse (IS). The IS involves interactions between peptide major histocompatibility complexes (pMHCs) on the DC and T cell receptor (TCR) complexes on the naïve cell and between adhesion molecules on both cells. Although much is known about the cytoplasmic events that occur in T cells during IS formation, little is known about what occurs in DCs. Bloom et al. hypothesized that molecules involved in the formation of neuronal synapses might also play a role in IS formation. Immunofluorescence studies showed that the scaffold protein spinophilin, well known for its role in neuronal dendritic spines, was present in the cytoplasm of immature mouse DCs but was colocalized with MHC at the plasma membrane of mature DCs. When mature DCs that expressed a fusion protein of spinophilin and green fluorescent protein (GFP) were cocultured with antigen-specific T cells in the presence of antigen, live confocal microscopy showed that spinophilin-GFP was quickly distributed to the plasma membrane at the side of the DC closest to TCR clusters in the T cells. Antigen-specific T cells transferred to spinophilin-deficient mice were less efficiently activated than were those transferred to wild-type mice. Lack of spinophilin had no effect on MHC localization or on antigen uptake. This study provides a glimpse into the DC during IS formation and suggests that spinophilin is important for efficient antigen presentation to T cells. As Seed and Xavier discuss, this study raises important new questions about what other partners spinophilin might have. O. Bloom, J. J. Unternaehrer, A. Jiang, J.-S. Shin, L. Delamarre, P. Allen, I. Mellman, Spinophilin participates in information transfer at immunological synapses. J. Cell Biol. 181, 203-211 (2008). [Abstract] [Full Text] B. Seed, R. Xavier, Spinophilin and the immune synapse. J. Cell Biol. 181, 181-183 (2008). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Dredging poses an environmental risk by increasing suspended sediment which has a range of effects on sensitive benthic communities, particularly coral reefs. Understanding spatial and temporal sediment related dredging impacts is essential to improve environmental impact assessment (EIA), monitoring and management of dredge operations. Despite the scale of global dredging projects, our understanding of the impacts is limited due to a lack of sufficiently large water quality datasets, the site specific nature of water quality changes during dredging, and the complex response of corals to the various associated suspended sediment pressures (i.e. reduced light, increased sediment deposition). Of particular importance during the EIA phase, and while monitoring dredging impacts, is understanding the distance to dredge effects i.e. how far the dredge related sediment impacts extend to more accurately predict environmental impacts and provide greater protection to coral reefs during dredging operations.

The distance to dredge effects on water quality conditions (i.e. the spatial impacts of dredging) was investigated at Barrow Island, Western Australia, to determine how dredging affects turbidity, submarine light and sediment deposition conditions. Analysis was made possible using the largest water quality dataset ever collected prior to and during a large scale dredging operation. Water quality conditions prior to and during 18 months of dredging at Barrow Island, Western Australia, as well as the distance to dredge effects, were analysed to determine the impacts of dredging on turbidity, submarine light and sediment deposition. A high proportion of water quality sites (10/29) were located within 1.5 km south of dredging, allowing a high resolution of spatial dredging impact analysis close to the dredge zone. During dredging, water quality impacts were primarily confined to sites within 2 – 5 km south of the dredge zone, gradually decreasing to ambient levels at sites north of the dredge zone and sites > 10 km south. Turbidity maximums, means and standard deviations were up to 4 – 6 x higher, median light attenuation coefficients 1.5 x higher, median deposition levels up to 7 x higher and median overburden (dredge related turbidity, calculated using a simple statistical turbidity model which estimates natural turbidity during dredging) were 3 – 4 x higher at sites within 2 – 5 km south of dredging. Sites north of the dredge zone (extending up to 30 km north), sites > 10 km south of the dredge zone (extending up to 30 km south), and 2 dredge disposal perimeter sites were unaffected by dredging. There was also a strong relationship between light attenuation and turbidity at almost all of the 25 Barrow Island sites used to study light levels; 24 of the 25 sites had R² > 0.5 and 17 had R² ≥ 0.50.

Turbidity conditions at Barrow Island were also characterised by using a range of different temporal analysis, including running mean and spectral analysis. By applying running means using increasing window sizes (from 1 hour to 30 days) separately to the baseline and dredge periods, it was revealed that dredging increases both the intensity and the duration of turbidity, with monthly, daily and hourly turbidity conditions higher at sites within 2 km of dredging; monthly averages were up to 25 NTU (compared to ~ 10 NTU at reference sites), daily averages up to 200 NTU (compared to maximum ~ 30 NTU at reference sites) and hourly averages up to 400 NTU (compared to maximum 100 NTU at reference sites). Spectral analysis also revealed the occurrence of horizontal advection during dredging at sites within 2 km of dredging.

The use of a simple, statistical turbidity model to estimate natural turbidity (due to the natural resuspension processes of waves and tides) during dredging, and as a possible turbidity and deposition threshold exceedance monitoring tool, was investigated. The model is designed to be simple – an alternative method to the more complex three dimensional hydrodynamic models which require numerous inputs – and as such has expected limitations. Despite these limitations, the purpose of the model in this study is to decouple the natural turbidity and dredge induced turbidity, and possibly as an exceedance threshold tool. Model performance was tested in 2 different hydrodynamic settings – a clear water environment (Barrow Island) during a dredge operation and a turbid, energetic environment (Hay Point, Queensland) during a baseline water quality monitoring study. The model was successful at estimating daily turbidity at a few of the Hay Point and Barrow Island sites, with R² > 0.5 between modelled and measured turbidity at 83% of sites during the model test phase at Hay Point (although model skill scores were > 0.5 at only 1 site during the test phase), but only 38 % of sites had R² > 0.5 at Barrow Island and , but improvements could be made to both the input data and possibly more sophisticated parameter estimation tools (such as Bayesian analysis).

The impact of dredging on submarine light levels was also investigated. Light attenuation coefficients (k) were analysed in lieu of measured PAR values due to non-uniform sensor depths across the water quality sites (depths ranged from ~ 4 to 14 m), which introduces a depth dependence to the distance to dredge analysis. Median light attenuation coefficients at sites closest to the main dredge zone (within 2 – 5 km) were between 0.4 – 0.55 m⁻¹ compared to all other sites which had levels 0.35 – 0.4 m⁻¹. As well as calculating k (using the Beer-Lambert Law) for the spatial analysis, the strong relationship between midday turbidity and k (R² > 0.5 at 96 % of sites and ≥ 0.7 at 68 %) was used to derive regression models of light attenuation from measured (midday) turbidity. The use of a double exponential method, which is an extension of the Beer Lambert Law developed by Paulson and Simpson (1977), was also investigated for estimating the light attenuation coefficients but was unsuitable for the Barrow Island study sites.


It is very common in studies of the learning capabilities of spiking neural networks (SNNs) to use homogeneous neural and synaptic parameters (time constants, thresholds, etc.). Even in studies in which these parameters are distributed heterogeneously, the advantages or disadvantages of the heterogeneity have rarely been studied in depth. By contrast, in the brain, neurons and synapses are highly diverse, leading naturally to the hypothesis that this heterogeneity may be advantageous for learning. Starting from two state-of-the-art methods for training spiking neural networks (Nicola & Clopath, 2017; Shrestha & Orchard, 2018), we found that adding parameter heterogeneity reduced errors when the network had to learn more complex patterns, increased robustness to hyperparameter mistuning, and reduced the number of training iterations required. We propose that neural heterogeneity may be an important principle for brains to learn robustly in real world environments with highly complex structure, and where task-specific hyperparameter tuning may be impossible. Consequently, heterogeneity may also be a good candidate design principle for artificial neural networks, to reduce the need for expensive hyperparameter tuning as well as for reducing training time.


Motivated by applications in orthopaedic surgery, new constitutive laws for trabecular (or spongious) bone are developed in the framework of continuum mechanics, implemented in a mechanical analysis computer program, validated by a number of in vitro experiments and illustrated by the simulation of a femoral total hip component. Current knowledge about the morphological and mechanical properties of trabecular bone is reviewed for setting the background and clarifying the contributions of the thesis. Comprehensive 1D and 3D theoretical models based on the approach of standard generalized materials are developed with a specific attention towards irreversible phenomena. The 1D model includes linear elasticity and rate-independent as well as rate-dependent plastic strain flow with damage. Based on a second order fabric tensor, the 3D model includes inhomogeneous, orthotropic linear elasticity and rate-independent plasticity with damage. In order to solve boundary value problems involving complex bone or bone-implant structures, implicit projection algorithms are developed for integrating the plastic flow rules with damage and implemented in the computer program TACT combining the finite element method, the linear iteration method and the finite difference method. The resulting numerical models are illustrated by the means of traction, bending and torsion benchmark tests. A number of pilot in vitro experiments are undertaken on human and bovine trabecular bone specimens in order to validate the theoretical models and identify the material constants. Quasistatic uniaxial and torsion experiments are performed with a method avoiding artefacts due to the inhomogeneous boundary conditions associated with porosity. Anisotropic elasticity, plasticity and damage of trabecular bone prove to be successfully described by the models in terms of structural density and morphology. Finally, the 3D constitutive law is applied to the biomechanical problem of primary stability of a cementless femoral total hip component in order to illustrate its potential.


Climate change and energy security are key issues motivating the development of Tidal Current Energy (TCE) technology. Small scale model testing of TCE devices is a major challenge facing the technology due to turbulent flow in tidal currents environment and scaling is a fundamental engineering procedure for prototype development and optimisation for cost effectiveness. This thesis presents the outcome from investigating Dimensional Scale Effects (DSE) and Turbulence Scale Effects (TSE) of a monopile support structure using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Scale models dimensioned according to the Froude scaling criterion was used for the DSE investigation whereas real time turbulent velocity profile sampled from the Firth of Forth, Scotland was used for the TSE investigation. The real time turbulent velocity profile is influenced by waves, channel sidewalls, seabed roughness and other natural, physical and biological processes occurring in the estuary. The following observations were made: 1) For the DSE, the drag coefficient of scale models within the subcritical flow regime varies as a function of a non-dimensional length and velocity scale. Equations for estimating the scale effects are presented. 2) The TSE investigation demonstrates a novel application of Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) data from a real site to generate significant upstream turbulence structures suitable for testing tidal current energy devices. The results show that, significant increase in turbulence in terms of maximum vorticity magnitude, by a factor more than 4, can be achieved in an empty channel and seabed drag coefficient is significantly reduced when compared with simulations done by specifying theoretical velocity profiles in a Large Eddy Simulation (LES). 3) Ambient turbulent flow around a monopile support structure causes a significant reduction in drag coefficient compared with simulations done by specifying the uniform and the 1/7th power law velocity profiles. The simulation results further demonstrate the possibility of representing a large scale prototype with a small scale numerical simulation domain that captures ambient vortex structures in real sites and that, the use of uniform flow and 1/7th power law velocity profiles in numerical simulations would lead to overestimation of hydrodynamic forces acting on an energy device and underestimation of available energy for extraction due to lower seabed drag coefficient. Further work is recommended to investigate effect of ambient turbulent structures on hydrodynamic loading and performance of a turbine undergoing sea trials using the methodology proposed in this study. The methodology has potential application to oil and gas subsea structures.


Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) remains a common and serious manifestation of coronary artery disease. The development of heart failure (HF) and/or evidence of left ventricular systolic dysfunction (LVSD) following AMI increases both in-hospital and longer-term mortality. A series of structural and functional changes occur within the heart in general and within the left ventricle (LV) in particular following AMI, initially providing a stabilising mechanism to maintain the cardiac output but over time becoming maladaptive and leading to progressive ventricular dilatation, dysfunction, HF and premature death. This process is termed remodelling. It is now understood that a complex series of mechanical, genetic and neurohormonal factors, including the mineralocorticoid hormone aldosterone, are implicated in its pathogenesis. Aldosterone antagonism reduces cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in patients with advanced chronic HF and survivors of large AMI who develop HF and/or are diabetic. These benefits could, at least in part, be due to an anti-remodelling action, although this was uncertain at the time I began my research project.

The work contained in this thesis examines cardiac remodelling, and the effects of the mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist eplerenone, in a cohort of 100 patients admitted with AMI, with depressed LV ejection fraction (LVEF) but without HF or diabetes mellitus, using a gold standard modality for LV functional assessment and infarct imaging: late gadolinium-enhanced cardiac magnetic resonance (LGE-CMR). Patients were treated with (double-blinded) eplerenone or placebo for 24 weeks, and underwent serial LGE-CMR scanning and measurement of haematological, urinary and genetic markers thought to be of pathophysiological importance in post-infarction remodelling.

There was, by chance, a significant imbalance in LV function at baseline between the randomised groups. After pre-specified covariate-adjustment, however, I found a significant effect of eplerenone on LV remodelling. Moreover I found that the use of eplerenone in addition to an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker was well-tolerated. I also found an effect of eplerenone on two matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) considered key enzymes in extracellular matrix turnover. Specifically, eplerenone decreased MMP-2 and attenuated the drop in MMP-9 seen in the placebo group, changes that are protective against remodelling. These findings suggest a potential anti-remodelling effect of eplerenone in 'asymptomatic' LVSD after AMI, i.e. patients in whom eplerenone is not currently indicated.

Patients with limited functional recovery early after AMI resulting in a persistently reduced LVEF require stringent monitoring and may qualify for an implantable cardioverter defibrillator. The use of predictive biomarkers to identify such patients is gaining popularity. I found that two biomarkers, tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) antigen and tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-4 (TIMP-4), measured in a blood sample taken a mean of 3 days after AMI, were independent predictors of adverse remodelling. These findings are novel, provide further pathophysiological insights into the inter-related biological systems that underlie remodelling, and may inform future trials aimed at modulating these pathways in order to attenuate remodelling.

LGE-CMR affords detailed characterisation of myocardium. In keeping with previous studies, infarct volume, endocardial extent and transmurality predicted LV remodelling. In addition I also found that the presence of microcirculatory dysfunction, defined as persistent microvascular obstruction (MVO) within the infarcted region on baseline LGE-CMR, divided my study population into two distinct groups with opposite remodelling outcomes. Patients with late MVO progressively remodelled, while those without reverse remodelled over 24 weeks. From these results, I propose that late MVO be used as an indicator of adverse ventricular remodelling. This may enhance the risk-stratification of survivors of AMI.

Aldosterone has a number of detrimental effects on the cardiovascular system and is strongly implicated in the pathogenesis of remodelling. I observed direct correlations between aldosterone sampled at baseline and CMR parameters of remodelling. Analysis by treatment group revealed an association between change in aldosterone over time and parameters of remodelling in placebo- but not eplerenone-treated patients, despite higher circulating aldosterone concentrations in the latter group. We propose that the cardiac effects of aldosterone display a temporal variation after AMI, specifically that circulating aldosterone in the first few days after infarction is key in selecting a remodelling pathway but that over the following weeks and months circulating aldosterone is less influential in potentiating the remodelling process. I also found a novel relationship between aldosterone and infarct volume, which merits further investigation as the role of aldosterone in the pathophysiology of remodelling is further described.

My trial design afforded the opportunity to examine the relationships of certain novel biomarkers with LV function and other established biomarkers after AMI. I demonstrated that circulating concentrations of the peptide apelin were reduced over 24 weeks after AMI compared to healthy controls but bore no relationship to LV function. Separately, I showed that concentrations of the soluble interleukin-1 receptor family member ST2 fell significantly over time after AMI and correlated with early and medium-term LV function and infarct volume. I detected a novel relationship between ST2 and aldosterone, which may suggest a pathophysiological role for ST2 in post-infarction remodelling and merits further investigation.

These studies provide further insights into the roles of aldosterone and of selective mineralocorticoid receptor antagonism in cardiac remodelling in a relatively under-studied population: survivors of AMI with 'asymptomatic' LVSD. The primary results may inform clinical trials powered to detect a mortality benefit in this patient group. The data provided on the use of established and recently-discovered biomarkers in the prediction of medium-term LV function after AMI represents a highly topical area for further studies. Finally, pre-discharge CMR was safe in AMI patients, and facilitated the detection of additional findings that positively influenced the management of almost one-quarter of the trial cohort. These findings may lead to greater uptake of this increasingly-available modality, to enhance the early management and risk stratification of survivors of large AMI.


Perovskites have been demonstrated in solar cells with a power conversion efficiency of well above 20%, which makes them one of the strongest contenders for next generation photovoltaics. While there are no concerns about their efficiency, very little is known about their stability under illumination and load. Ionic defects and their migration in the perovskite crystal lattice are some of the most alarming sources of degradation, which can potentially prevent the commercialization of perovskite solar cells (PSCs). In this work, we provide direct evidence of electric field-induced ionic defect migration and we isolate their effect on the long-term performance of state-of-the-art devices. Supported by modelling, we demonstrate that ionic defects, migrating on timescales significantly longer (above 103 s) than what has so far been explored (from 10−1 to 102 s), abate the initial efficiency by 10–15% after several hours of operation at the maximum power point. Though these losses are not negligible, we prove that the initial efficiency is fully recovered when leaving the device in the dark for a comparable amount of time. We verified this behaviour over several cycles resembling day/night phases, thus probing the stability of PSCs under native working conditions. This unusual behaviour reveals that research and industrial standards currently in use to assess the performance and the stability of solar cells need to be adjusted for PSCs. Our work paves the way for much needed new testing protocols and figures of merit specifically designed for PSCs.


The problem of combining many rank orderings of the same set of candidates, also known as the rank aggregation problem, has been intensively investigated in the context of Web (e.g meta-search) databases (e.g combining results from multiple databases), statistics (e.g. correlations), and last but not least sports and elections competitions. In this paper we investigate the use of rank aggregation in the context of Semantic Web services. More precisely we propose an optimization technique for ranking Semantic Web services based on non-functional properties by using parallelization and rank aggregation methods. Instead of using a ranking algorithm over the entire set of non-functional properties our approach splits the set of non-functional properties in multiple subsets, runs the ranking algorithm on each of the subsets and finally aggregates the resulting ranked lists of services into one unifying ranked list. Experimental results reported in this paper show improvements of our initial rank aggregation method both in terms of quality and processing time.


In Resurrection Flowers and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge Kaden C. Milliren seeks to
evaluate and analyze differences in perspectives and perceptions of the environment between
Western and Indigenous worldviews and, consequentially, the different attitudes and ways-ofbeing with the world that emerge as a result. In so doing, Milliren discusses the sacredness of
local landscape for Indigenous peoples and the role its spiritually-significant elements impact an
entire cosmology. These important elements of sacred local ecologies are socially, materially,
and symbolically rhetorical, ascribing meaning onto all elements of worldview from faith to
ceremony, oratory to cultural tradition, physical sustenance to ancestral connection. In feedback
and feedforward loops, these aspects of cosmology continue to ascribe meaning onto one
another, affecting and being affected by each other, continually weaving together meaning and,
therefore, rhetorical mattering.In this case study Milliren discusses the sacredness of the landscape of Southcentral Washington
State, the land of the Yakama Nation, an affiliation of 14 bands and tribes indigenous to the area.
Central to the physical ecology, as well as the ecology of life for the Indigenous population, is
the salmon, a food source significant to all areas of Yakama life and central to Yakama
spirituality, oral tradition, ceremony, and nourishment. Tracing the impact of colonial capitalism
beginning in the 19th century, Milliren discusses diminished salmon populations and its impact
on the local landscape as well as the Yakama way of life. Additionally, he discusses the Yakama
Nation's response to colonial violence through acts of culturally-situated events aimed at
maintaining Yakama tradition and improving its peoples' cultural and physical health. Coining
the term resurrection flowers Milliren analyzes the ways the government has utilized the salmon
for monetary gain at the expense of Indigenous populations, and how Indigenous activists have
fought to preserve the salmon population and resurrect cultural tradition through revitalized acts
of decolonial cultural practices.


In this paper, we consider the design and implementation of practical, yet near-optimal, pursuit-evasion games. In prior work, we developed, using the theory of zero-sum games, minimal completion-time strategies for pursuit-evasion. Unfortunately, those strategies do not scale beyond a small number of robots. In this paper, we design and implement a partition strategy where pursuers capture evaders by decomposing the game into multiple multi-pursuer single-evader games. Our algorithm terminates, has bounded capture time, is robust, and is scalable in the number of robots. In our implementation, a sensor network provides sensing-at-a-distance, as well as a communication backbone that enables tighter coordination between pursuers. Our experiments in a challenging office environment suggest that this approach is near-optimal, at least for the configurations we have evaluated. Overall, our work illustrates an innovative interplay between robotics and communication.


Motivated by a need within the aerospace industry to detect and characterize degradation in the insulation of onboard wires, this thesis reports testing of several extant methods and development of novel capacitive sensors. This work focuses on measuring the electrical parameters resistance and capacitance that are directly related to the material parameters conductivity and permittivity, respectively, of the insulation. It is shown that the measured electrical parameters successfully indicate degradation in the wire insulation. Insulation resistance tests were performed on 17 wire samples, removed from various locations on a retired aircraft, and compared with those conducted on pristine wire samples, in order to assess any change in conductivity exhibited by degraded insulation. Timed resistance tests were also performed to determine the dielectric absorption of the insulation. Curved patch-electrode sensors were applied in order to measure the capacitance and dissipation factor of the same wires. Results from the resistive and capacitive tests both identified wire samples that were apparently significantly degraded, as indicated qualitatively by visual inspection. Further, a novel cylindrical interdigital capacitive sensor was developed. The interdigital sensor is designed with the goal of achieving a good signal-to-noise ratio, the lowest instrument error possible at 1 MHz, full circumferential coverage of the wire, and the ability to adjust the penetration depth of the electric field into the insulation layer by adjusting the separation of the sensor digits. With the aim, ultimately, of quantitative measurement of insulation complex permittivity, a numerical model was developed using a cylindrical Green's function and the Method of Moments to calculate theoretically the capacitance of the interdigital sensor. Benchmark experiments were carried out on large-scale dielectric-coated conductive cylinders to test the validity of the model. Experimental results agreed with measured results to within 5% for sensor configurations with 22 and 30 digits of each polarization, tested on insulation polymers acetal copolymer, acrylic and polytetrafluoroethylene. A design method by which


Background: Genetic polymorphisms in IL-7R are associated with the risk of development of multiple diseases, including breast malignancy. At present, no evidence exists for an influence of gene polymorphism of IL-7R on BC susceptibility in Saudi Arabian populations. The aim of the study was therefore to evaluate whether common polymorphisms in the IL-7R gene (rs1053496 and rs12516866) are correlated with the risk of BC development among Saudi Arabian women.
Methods: In total, 243 samples were collected and divided in to two cohorts: 127 female Saudi patients with BC and 116 age-matched healthy individuals as a control group. Genomic DNA was extracted from peripheral blood samples of individuals of both groups. The IL-7R rs1053496 and rs12516866/T gene variations were genotyped using the TaqMan assay. Odds ratios and 95% confidence interval were computed from logistic regression models after adjusting for age and estrogen status of the BC group.
Results: The IL-7R gene promoter variant rs12516866 was correlated with a decreased risk of breast cancer development among the estrogen receptor negative (ER-) participants. The TT homozygote mutant genotype and the T mutant allele provided significant protection against the susceptibility to breast cancer, suggesting that the presence of that genotype and allele is a vital protective factor against BC susceptibility. However, the presence of IL-7R rs1053496 was not significantly associated with BC development in the study population.
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the IL-7R gene rs12516866 polymorphism could serve as a potential biomarker for early detection of BC among female Saudi individuals.


We propose a method for intrinsic dimension estimation. By fitting the power of distance from an inspection point and the number of samples included inside a ball with a radius equal to the distance, to a regression model, we estimate the goodness of fit. Then, by using the maximum likelihood method, we estimate the local intrinsic dimension around the inspection point. The proposed method is shown to be comparable to conventional methods in global intrinsic dimension estimation experiments. Furthermore, we experimentally show that the proposed method outperforms a conventional local dimension estimation method.


BACKGROUND
The use of sagittal abdominal diameter (SAD) has been proposed for screening cardio-metabolic risk factors; however, its accuracy can be influenced by the choice of thresholds values.

AIM
To determine the SAD threshold values for cardio-metabolic risk factors in Mexican adults; to assess whether parallel and serial SAD testing can improve waist circumference (WC) sensitivity and specificity; and to analyze the effect of considering SAD along with WC and body mass index (BMI) in detecting cardio-metabolic risk.

METHODS
This cross-sectional study was conducted during 2012-2014 in Northeast Mexico (n = 269). Data on anthropometric, clinical, and biochemical measurements were collected. Sex-adjusted receiver-operating characteristic curves (ROC) were obtained using hypertension, dysglycemia, dyslipidemia and insulin resistance as individual outcomes and metabolic syndrome as a composite outcome. Age-adjusted odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were estimated using logistic regression.

RESULTS
The threshold value for SAD with acceptable combination of sensitivity and specificity was 24.6 cm in men and 22.5 cm in women. Parallel SAD testing improved WC sensitivity and serial testing improved WC specificity. The co-occurrence of high WC/high SAD increased the risk for insulin resistance by 2.4-fold (95% CI: 1.1-5.3), high BMI/high SAD by 4.3-fold (95% CI: 1.7-11.9) and SAD alone by 2.2-fold (95% CI: 1.2.-4.2).

CONCLUSIONS
The use of SAD together with traditional obesity indices such as WC and BMI has advantages over using either of these indices alone. SAD may be a powerful screening tool for interventions for high-risk individuals.


Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data consists of time series for each voxel recorded during a cognitive task. In order to extract useful information from this noisy and redundant data, techniques are proposed to select the voxels that are relevant to the underlying cognitive task. We propose a simple and efficient algorithm for decoding the brain states by modelling the correlation patterns between the voxel time series. For each stimulus during the experiment, a separate functional connectivity matrix is computed in voxel level. The elements in connectivity matrices are then filtered out by making use of a minimum spanning tree formed using a global connectivity matrix for the entire experiment in order to reduce dimensionality. For a recognition memory experiment with nine subjects, functional connectivity matrices are computed for encoding and retrieval phases. The class labels of the retrieval samples are predicted within a k-nearest neighbour space constructed by the traversed entries in the functional connectivity matrices for encoding samples. The proposed method is also adapted to large scale functional connectivity tasks by making use of graphics boards. Classification performance in ten categories is comparable and even better compared to both classical and enhanced methods of multi-voxel pattern analysis techniques.


When a fluid or Ising-like magnet is confined between two parallel walls that are each completely wet by different bulk phases, the interface separating the phases is subject to large-scale fluctuations determined by the slit width. It was noted some time ago that, in two dimensions, the scaling expression for the probability distribution function describing the interfacial height across the slit shows remarkable similarities with predictions of conformal invariance. However, this local scale invariance appears to contradict the strongly anisotropic nature of (1 + 1)-dimensional interfacial fluctuations along and perpendicular to the interface, characterized by the wandering exponent. In this paper, we show that similarity with conformal invariance is not coincidental and can be understood explicitly as the projection of a local scale invariance for a wandering line in 2 + 1 dimensions.


The post-partum depression is a condition that affects 10 to 15% of the women in the post-partum period. These symptoms begin at some moment during the first year after delivery, occurring more frequently between the fourth and eighth week after parturition. It is generally expressed through a complexity of symptoms where there is a presence of irritability, frequent crying, feelings of abandonment and hopelessness, lack of energy and motivation, lack of sexual interest, disturbances in sleep and eating patterns, anxiety, and feelings of not being able to cope with new demands. The objective of this paper is to present a bibliographical revision regarding the post-partum depression. Conceptual and epidemiological aspects, risk factors associated with their occurrence as well as a few repercussions of the post-partum depression in the mother-child relation, and the development of the infant will be broached. The awareness of these aspects has become very important due to the harmful consequences suffered by the mothers as well as cognitive, social and emotional development of their infants.


Crowdsourcing platforms provide an easy and scalable access to human workforce that can, e.g., provide subjective judgements, tagging information, or even generate knowledge. In conjunction with machine clouds offering scalable access to computing resources, these human cloud providers offer numerous possibilities for creating new applications which would not have been possible a few years ago. However, in order to build sustainable services on top of this inter-cloud environment, scalability considerations have to be made. While cloud computing systems are already well studied in terms of dimensioning of the hardware resources, there still exists little work on the appropriate scaling of crowdsourcing platforms. This is especially challenging, as the complex interaction between all involved stakeholders, platform providers, workers and employers has to be considered. The contribution of this work is threefold. First, we develop a model for common crowdsourcing platforms and implement the model using a simulative approach, which is validated with a comparison to an analytic M[X]/M/c - ∞ system. In a second step, we evaluate inter-arrival times as well as campaign size distributions based on a dataset of a large commercial crowdsourcing platform to derive realistic model parameters and illustrate the differences to the analytic approximation. Finally, we perform a parameter study using the simulation model to derive guidelines for dimensioning crowdsourcing platforms, while considering relevant parameters for the involved stakeholders, i.e., the delay before work on a task begins and the work load of the workers.


The main target of everyone engineering work associated with minimally-invasive surgery is to provide adequate tool-tissue force information to the surgeons so that they can regain the sense of touch that has been lost through laparoscopic surgery. In this context the main objective of the work design novel family laparoscopic tools with better technical characteristics, and incorporation of force and other sensors and elements in construction of tools for restore sense of touch in the process of laparoscopy. Thus it is improving some technical side of this laparoscopic instruments. In contrast to daVinchi robots by Intuitive Surgical Incorporation which instruments are designed for manipulation and imaging we offer family tools with additional functions such as diagnosis and therapeutics tasks. Therefore we decide two main problems: i) we designed and produced an original construction of an adequate experimental module for robots, where was incorporated two force sensors to provide tool-tissue information (some of which was described and discussed at previous works); and ii) we realized hardware and program resources for control and monitoring of this module which is the object of this work. The computer program includes information about various measurements of the tip tool – surface contact interactions and data obtained from the experimental module that is used to find the difference between date from previous measuring and received information in real time. Another signification advantage of the proposed program solution is the graphical visualization of the measuring and comparing the results. Therefore, the surgeon can give the adequate command to force interaction between the instrument and tissue. For verification of the functionality and working capacity of the experimental module with force feedback capabilities for robots were conducted different experiments with the designed control system.


Labeling data for modern machine learning is expensive and time-consuming. Latent variable models can be used to infer labels from weaker, easier-to-acquire sources operating on unlabeled data. Such models can also be trained using labeled data, presenting a key question: should a user invest in few labeled or many unlabeled points? We answer this via a framework centered on model misspecification in method-of-moments latent variable estimation. Our core result is a bias-variance decomposition of the generalization error, which shows that the unlabeled-only approach incurs additional bias under misspecification. We then introduce a correction that provably removes this bias in certain cases. We apply our decomposition framework to three scenarios -- well-specified, misspecified, and corrected models -- to 1) choose between labeled and unlabeled data and 2) learn from their combination. We observe theoretically and with synthetic experiments that for well-specified models, labeled points are worth a constant factor more than unlabeled points. With misspecification, however, their relative value is higher due to the additional bias but can be reduced with correction. We also apply our approach to study real-world weak supervision techniques for dataset construction.


Abstract Purpose: Currently available hyperthermia technology is not well suited to treating cancer malignancies in the intact breast. This study investigates a microwave applicator incorporating multiple patch antennas, with the goal of facilitating controllable power deposition profiles for treating lesions at diverse locations within the intact breast. Materials and methods: A 3D-computational model was implemented to assess power deposition profiles with 915 MHz applicators incorporating a hemispheric groundplane and configurations of 2, 4, 8, 12, 16 and 20 antennas. Hemispheric breast models of 90 mm and 150 mm diameter were considered, where cuboid target volumes of 10 mm edge length (1 cm3) and 30 mm edge length (27 cm3) were positioned at the centre of the breast, and also located 15 mm from the chest wall. The average power absorption (αPA) ratio expressed as the ratio of the PA in the target volume and in the full breast was evaluated. A 4-antenna proof-of-concept array was fabricated and experimentally evaluated. Results: Computational models identified an optimal inter-antenna spacing of 22.5° along the applicator circumference. Applicators with 8 and 12 antennas excited with constant phase presented the highest αPA at centrally located and deep-seated targets, respectively. Experimental measurements with a 4-antenna proof-of-concept array illustrated the potential for electrically steering power deposition profiles by adjusting the relative phase of the signal at antenna inputs. Conclusions: Computational models and experimental results suggest that the proposed applicator may have potential for delivering conformal thermal therapy in the intact breast.


This paper is a defense of substantive explanations in semantics. It begins by offering a diagnosis of why the view that semantic theories are merely descriptive has been widely accepted in philosophy and suggests that these grounds are not compelling. Then it argues that semantic explanations don't have a uniform direction—upwards or downwards the syntactic tree. There is an explanatory division within the lexicon: the meanings of content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) are semantically fundamental, while the meanings of function words (auxiliaries, connectives, copulas, derivational morphemes, determiners, expletives, prepositions, etc.) are derivative.


Six conjugated polymers based on thienoisoindigo (TII) and thiophene-flanked diketopyrrolopyrrole (TDPP) units bearing either branched-alkyl or siloxane-terminated alkyl solubilizing groups have been synthesized. We report the impact of backbone selection and side chain engineering on the optical, electrochemical, and solid state packing, as well as carrier transport properties, for this set of polymers. The optical bandgap of the polymers is shown to systematically decrease on TII unit incorporation into the polymer chain. TII homopolymers absorb near infrared wavelengths and have extremely narrow optical band gaps below 0.60 eV, mainly as a result of the contribution of the flat and rigid π-frameworks corroborated with a strong quinoidal character of the TII unit. The theoretical calculations and Raman spectra measurements well demonstrate that the presence of a TII unit contributes to π-delocalization inducted by quinoidal resonance. Our X-ray analyses indicate that the TII unit prefers face-on lamellar orientations compared with the TDPP unit, and the largely separated branching point over the undecyl spacer of siloxane-terminated chains reinforces π–π interchain interactions in a crystalline film.


This essay provides an overview of the ongoing quantitative and qualitative changes in Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and their impact on deterrence stability vis-à-vis India. Prominent among these trends is a major expansion in fissile material production that enables the manufacture of lighter and more compact warheads optimized for battlefield missions; the development of cruise missiles and shorter-range ballistic missiles possessing dual-use capabilities; and a greater emphasis in doctrinal pronouncements on the need for strike options geared to all levels of conflict. Although these trends pose problematic ramifications for the risks of unauthorized and inadvertent escalation, deterrence stability in South Asia is not as precarious as many observers fear. The challenges of fashioning a robust nuclear peace between India and Pakistan cannot be lightly dismissed, however, and policy makers would do well to undertake some reinforcing measures.


The objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the environmental efficiency and farm commercialisation in selected EU NMS (Bulgaria, Romania and Poland). Using a cross- section of agricultural households, environmental technical efficiency scores are calculated using hyperbolic distance function approach. The results indicate there is a negative relation between the increase in commercialisation of small farms and the production of negative externalities, like nitrogen surplus.


Primary malignant melanoma of the oral cavity is a rare malignancy with an incidence of 0.2 to 8% of all melanomas. Melanoma arises from the malignant transformation of the melanocyte and cutaneous melanomas are the most common followed by ocular, mucosal and melanoma of unknown primary site. Here we present a case of a 54 year old male who presented with a pigmented lesion on the palate, a type of mucosal melanoma. Due to the rarity of this disease, it is infrequently studied. Hence, epidemiology, etiology, pathogenesis and prognosis still remains to be less understood than cutaneous melanoma. Early diagnosis is warranted as therapeutic options are limited for advanced and metastatic disease. Surgery is the primary therapeutic management and complete resection is the main goal. If not feasible, radiotherapy may also be employed to achieve local control and enhance locoregional response. Prognosis is generally poor for metastatic disease and there are no guidelines yet on the use of systemic therapy.


This paper focuses on the image of the Soviet people – builders of communism. The object of the study is a series of Soviet posters in different years. In this paper semiotic approach has been used to consider posters as signs. Each poster is a product of the ideology on a denotative and connotative level of the sign. For semiotics verbal messages, color, perspective, the value of the figures, postures, gestures and facial expressions are important. Poster is a complex of the two-roots system. It combines verbal and iconic messages. Images of the Soviet human were constructed from various combinations of the elements from these levels.


Although commonly thought to unify cultures, translation can also be used in order to create separate cultural identities. This functional complexity can be seen in the case of translation into English in the state of Gujarat, India. Although translations into English were previously seen as an index of cultural inequality, different social agents now view them in positive terms. Official policy sees translation into English as a way of projecting Gujarati culture beyond its borders; a wide range of expatriates use those translations as a means of keeping in touch with "home"; educational institutions use translation as a way of opening new subject areas in literary studies; publishers use it as a means of tapping new markets. Translation into English thus means different things to different social agents, enabling a wide consensus to emerge in its favor.


The objective of research is to improve the creativity and classic Indonesian history learning achievement through optimizing the creative problem solving model in teaching-learning process in History Study Program of FKIP UNS. This study was carried out using classroom action research. The research contains the action aiming to improve a system's quality and the practice within the system. In this research, the intended system is the teaching learning process of Indonesian Classic history carried out in Social Science Education Department of History Education Study Program of Training and Education Faculty of Sebelas Maret University addressed in Ir. Sutami Street No. 36 A Surakarta. The subject of research was the students of History Study Program attending classing Indonesian history course. Meanwhile the object was the teaching-learning process activity, including: lecturer's teaching activity, students' creativity and learning achievement. This research was carried out using collaborative participative approach between the incharge-of lecturer, assisting lecturer (researcher), and the student so that sharing occurs in each stage of activity. This research was done using cyclical analysis process encompassing four stages of activity: planning, acting, observing, and reflection. This research was implemented in two cycles: cycle I as the implementation of action, and cycle II as improvement. In line with the objective above, the problem in this research was the students' low creativity and learning achievement. It is characterized by: the student's low discipline, participation, and capability of accom-plishing task. In order to improve the students' creativity and learning achievement, this research, the researcher carries out action in the form of creative problem solving model application in Indonesian classic history. Before the activity is carried out: the concept of history learning quality is instilled, the training of learning implementation plan arrangement is done, and peer teaching is intended to improve the lecturer's capability in applying the creative problem solving model. Having carried out those activities and implemented the result into the teaching learning process, it can be seen that from one cycle to another the student's creativity and learning achievement improves. It is reflected fiom: the improvement of students discipline in utilizing learning time, capability of looking for and collecting the source, capability of identifying, formulating, and solving the problem, idea generation, students' idea.


A series of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of different pregelification mixtures representing intermediate stages of the sol-gel process were set up to gain insight into the molecular imprinting process in xerogels, namely, to assess the template-gel affinity and template self-aggregation. The physical plausibility of the parametrization was checked, confirming the reliability of the simulations. The simulated mixtures differed in the water/methanol ratio (1:3, 5:3, and 5:1) and in the absence/presence of an organic functional group (phenylaminopropyl-) in the silicate species. The simulation results, expressed mainly by the radial distribution functions and respective coordination numbers, showed that the affinity of the template molecule, damascenone (a hydrophobic species), for the gel backbone would not be attained without the tested functional group, phenylaminopropyl-. The affinity, related to the capability to trap the template within the gel network, was derived mostly from the hydrophobic interaction. It was also inferred from MD simulations that lower water contents (methanol-richer mixtures) would facilitate a better dispersion of both the functional group and the template within the final gel, therefore favoring the imprinting process. From the experimental counterparts of the simulated mixtures, a series of imprinted and nonimprinted xerogels were obtained. There was only one xerogel exhibiting the imprinting effect, namely, the one containing the organic group obtained at the lower water/methanol ratio (1:3), in agreement with predictions from the MD simulations. Such congruence demonstrates the ability of MD simulations to provide information regarding the fine aspects of molecular interactions in pregelification mixtures for imprinting.


Bees have a crucial role in pollination; therefore, it is important to determine the causes of their recent decline. Fipronil and imidacloprid are insecticides used worldwide to eliminate or control insect pests. Because they are broad‐spectrum insecticides, they can also affect honeybees. Many researchers have studied the lethal and sublethal effects of these and other insecticides on honeybees, and some of these studies have demonstrated a correlation between the insecticides and colony collapse disorder in bees. The authors investigated the effects of fipronil and imidacloprid on the bioenergetic functioning of mitochondria isolated from the heads and thoraces of Africanized honeybees. Fipronil caused dose‐dependent inhibition of adenosine 5′‐diphosphate–stimulated (state 3) respiration in mitochondria energized by either pyruvate or succinate, albeit with different potentials, in thoracic mitochondria; inhibition was strongest when respiring with complex I substrate. Fipronil affected adenosine 5′‐triphosphate (ATP) production in a dose‐dependent manner in both tissues and substrates, though with different sensitivities. Imidacloprid also affected state‐3 respiration in both the thorax and head, being more potent in head pyruvate‐energized mitochondria; it also inhibited ATP production. Fipronil and imidacloprid had no effect on mitochondrial state‐4 respiration. The authors concluded that fipronil and imidacloprid are inhibitors of mitochondrial bioenergetics, resulting in depleted ATP. This action can explain the toxicity of these compounds to honeybees. Environ Toxicol Chem 2014; 33:2070–2075. © 2014 SETAC


As your parents doubtless told you, money can't buy everything. Nearly all cultures reserve certain items, activities, and entitlements as inalienable for profit. It would be incorrect to assume, however, that the individual mental accounting, social norms, and laws regarding the proper scope of commercial activity are universal, preordained, or inflexible. In fact, researchers across disciplines have demonstrated both the malleability and context-dependency of individual mental accounting, and the socially constructed nature of relational boundaries and the accepted means of exchange within them, which vary across time and cultures. Moreover, technological innovation, social or political change, or other developments may create previously unknown circumstances for which there are no existing rules of accepted exchange, causing social strain.The contributors to this volume consider at length the consequences of making - and restricting - markets in various types of traditionally forbidden or contested exchange, including human blood, organs, eggs, sperm, reproductive services, and labor. What are the problems with, objections to, defenses of, impediments for, developments in, and challenges facing markets in these traditionally forbidden or contested areas of commercial exchange? What is the effect of prohibiting or impeding commercially-motivated transactions in these areas? As we move toward greater market-based exchange in some of these items and activities, what outcomes might we expect? What must those markets look like, who will intermediate them, and how must the legal regime governing the market participants be structured in order to guard against our traditional fears of market-based approaches to exchange in certain areas of life? Here, Rene Almeling, David E. Bernstein, Clark C. Havighurst, Melissa B. Jacoby, Kimberly D. Krawiec, Thomas C. Leonard, Julia D. Mahoney, Hugh V. McLachlan, Elizabeth S. Scott, and J. Kim Swales seek, if not answers, at least insight to these questions.


Purpose - – The aim of this study is to define land use policy sources of barriers to community-based housing options in practice. Design/methodology/approach - – The paper accentuated the need to tackle land use sources of barrier to Community Land Trust (CLT) performance, through text analysis of semi-structured interview responses from key stakeholders. Findings - – This study found out that there is a need to ameliorate stakeholder approach to community-based housing (CBH), which is hampered by restrictive land use sources of barriers that occur in an urban and rural context. These barriers were found to include both planning inadequacies and a systemic inefficient network of knowledge transfer practices between stakeholders. Recommendations include the need for drastic policy intervention through the political willingness to address Section 106 shortcomings in the choice of affordable housing supply models, and the inaccessibility of land below market rate in an endogenous prescriptive planning system. Practical implications - – This paper highlights the subjective limitations of the CLT model in regards to grey areas between setting boundaries to what is an acceptable level of concessions to CBH and the socio-economic impact or benefits of a completely deregulated social housing system. These boundaries do vary from system to system, hence the need for UK housing institutions to address identified inherent barrier sources and their reconciliation with international best practices. Therefore, greater roles can be accorded to the CLT model in the UK affordable housing dynamics based on its confirmed strengths and merits. Originality/value - – This paper adds to literature through the practical identification and interpretation of various key stakeholder perspectives on sources of CLT barriers and an idealised strategy to tackling them accordingly. This contributes to the housing affordability debate on the viability of CBH options, and how it could be invariably hampered by direct and indirect effects of planning and restrictive land use policies in practice.


We present the architecture of a broad-band polarization mode dispersion (PMD) compensator in a feedforward PMD compensation scheme. It is comprised of four stages. The net effect of the first two stages is equivalent to a frequency dependent polarization rotation that aligns all PMD vectors into a common direction. The third stage compensates the frequency dependent variable differential group delay (DGD) and the last stage compensates for the isotropic dispersion created by the first three stages. In Stokes space formulation, we describe the algorithm to find the required rotation angles of each stage using the PMD concatenation rule, and show that these rotation angles can be synthesized using all-pass filters (APF) in a compact integrated optics circuit. Through numerical simulations, we show significant improvement of the signal quality as a result of the compensation.


This paper is divided in two parts. In the first part we consider irregular singular analytic q-difference equations, with q ∈]0, 1[, and we show how the Borel sum of a divergent solution of a differential equation can be uniformly approximated on a convenient sector by a meromorphic solution of such a q-difference equation. In the second part, we work under the assumption q ∈]1, +∞[. In this case, at least four different q-Borel sums of a divergent solution of an irregular singular analytic q-difference equations are spread in the literature: under convenient assumptions we clarify the relations among them.


This paper describes the profile of 95 crack cocaine users attending three community mental health services (CAPS) in Greater Metropolitan Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil, from August 2009 to March 2010. The instruments employed were questionnaires developed by the team, the Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20), and inventories of criteria for dependence and abuse (SAMHSA). The data depict a group of users consisting predominantly of young males with elementary schooling, without regular employment but reporting individual income, none of whom living on the streets. They were currently addicted, with heavy daily use of crack for more than two years, and with high SRQ-20 score. This group's characteristics showed that the community mental health services are attended by crack users that suffer losses resulting from their addiction, but also some possible selection process in the supply of these health services (based mainly income, schooling, or primary support network).