Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature of improvisation and expertise more generally. We explore the activity of the jazz improviser against the theoretical backdrop of Dreyfus's account of expertise as well as of enactivist and 4E accounts of cognition and action. We argue that enactivist and 4E accounts provide a rich source of insights on improvisation that go beyond Dreyfus's notion of skilled coping, for example, through the central enactivist notion of "sense-making". At the same time, however, we see improvisation as suggesting an extension of enactivist theory. We see expert improvisers, in music and in life, as walking on a path of open-ended expansion of their mindful experiential relation with their doing. At the heart of an improviser's expertise (and of day-to-day living), we propose, lies a form of "higher-level inner sense-making" that spontaneously creates novel forms of agentive goal-directedness in the moment. Our account thus supplants Dreyfus's idea of the ego-less absorbed expert by that of an improviser enacting spontaneous expressions of a self, in music or in life.


Nitrogen-containing bisphosphonates (N-BPs), such as alendronate (Fosamax®), are the mostly widely prescribed medications for diseases involving bone1-3, with nearly 200 million prescriptions written annually. In the last few years, widespread use of N-BPs has been challenged due to the risk of rare but significant side effects such as atypical femoral fractures and osteonecrosis of the jaw4-7. N-BPs bind to and inhibit farnesyl diphosphate synthase (FDPS), resulting in defects in protein prenylation8-10. Yet it remains poorly understood what other cellular targets N-BPs might have. Herein, we perform genome-wide studies in cells and patients to identify the gene, ATRAID, that functions with FDPS in a novel pathway we name the TBONE (Target of Bisphosphonates) pathway. Loss of ATRAID function results in selective resistance to N-BP-mediated loss of cell viability and the prevention of alendronate-mediated inhibition of prenylation. ATRAID is required for alendronate inhibition of osteoclast function, and ATRAID-deficient mice have impaired therapeutic responses to alendronate in a model of postmenopausal osteoporosis. Our work adds key insight into the mechanistic action of N-BPs and the processes that might underlie differential responsiveness to N-BPs in people. One Sentence Summary The identification of the gene, ATRAID, essential for responses to the commonly prescribed osteoporosis (i.e., bone loss) drugs, nitrogen-containing bisphosphonates.


ORIGINAL ARTICLE Introduction: The Powdered Activated Carbon Treatment (PACT) has been proposed as an alternative in wastewater treatment and wastewater biomass protection against toxic substances. This study aims to evaluate PACT performance in treating dyes, acid orange, and remazol brilliant reactive blue. Materials and Methods: This empiricalapplied research was carried out in pilot scale in which different dye removal systems were tested: activated sludge, PAC, and the combined activated carbon–biomass system. The degradability of selected dyes was evaluated through Zahn-Wellens method. Also, tests continued by adding different concentrations of powdered activated carbon and it ' s effect on activated sludge in different operating conditions was investigated. American Dye Manufacture Institute (ADMI) method was utilized for determination of dye removal in samples. Results: Results revealed that dye removal in combined carbon–biomass system was faster and more efficient than activated sludge individually. So, in the wastewater with the dye concentration of 100 ppm, the dye removals through biological process alone were equal to 60 % and 12.5 % for acidic and reactive dyes, respectively. The best PAC efficiency in activated sludge process was obtained in 1500 mg/L PAC concentration. Hydraulic Retention Time (HRT) and the optimum temperature of dyes' removal were determined 28 hours and 30 °C, orderly; in these conditions the dye removal efficiency of 98.18 % was obtained. Also the dye removal using activated carbon–biomass system was adequately described by combining the kinetic equations. Conclusion: PACT could be considered as an acceptable and highly efficient method for removal of different dyes in textile industry. Article History: Received: 20 May 2016 Accepted: 29 August 2016


Passive optical networks (PONs) are being aggressively pursued as a means of delivering access network solutions. The cost benefits resulting from a reduction in the number of interfaces between nodes has enabled increasing deployment of a PON delivering fiber to the home and fiber to the curb. However, in many cases, the need for high split ratios or an extended-reach requires amplification to overcome additional losses. Erbium-doped amplifiers have a limited use in PONs since the operational wavelengths typically include backhaul at 1.3 mu m. Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) offer a cost-effective solution with a migration path toward integration; deployment options include its use as a preamplifier, booster, or midspan amplifier. We present a theoretical treatment that analyzes the amplified system operational requirements and justifies this analysis through the experiment. The analysis considers for the first time to our knowledge the dc offset that is introduced into the receiver as a result of the significant amplified spontaneous emission powers present in amplified PONs, where filter widths are typically 20 nm or greater.


The rise of optogenetics as a standard technique to non-invasively probe and monitor biological function created an immense interest in the molecular function of photosensory proteins. These photoreceptors are usually protein/pigment complexes that translate light into biological information and have become essential tools in cell biology and neurobiology as their function is genetically encoded and can be conveniently delivered into a given cell. Like for fluorescent proteins that quickly became invaluable as genetically encodable reporters in microscopy and imaging, variants of photosensory proteins with customized sensitivity and functionality are nowadays in high demand. In this ebook we feature reviews and original research on molecular approaches from synthetic biology and molecular spectroscopy to computational molecular modelling that all aspire to elucidate the molecular prerequisites for the photosensory function of the given proteins. The principle property of changing activity of biological function simply by application of light is not only very attractive for cell biology, it also offers unique opportunities for molecular studies as excitation can be controlled with high time precision. Especially in spectroscopy the usually fully reversible photoactivation of photosensory proteins allows researchers to to perform time resolved studies with up to femtosecond resolution. In addition, functional variants can be investigated and quickly screened in common biochemical experiments. The insights that are obtained by the here presented various yet complementary methods will ultimately allow us write the script for a molecular movie from excitation of the protein by a photon to activation of its biological function. Such deep understanding does not only provide unique insights into the dynamics of protein function, it will also ultimately enable us to rationally design novel optogenetic tools to be used in cell biology and therapy.


Software is becoming increasingly pervasive in business systems and everyday life. Software is the glue that holds together complex systems. It is impossible to talk about the quality of a software dependent system without discussing software quality. A software dependent system is a system that can't perform its intended function if the software doesn't work correctly. However, since software is invisible, systems developers often do not give it sufficient attention. Nevertheless, inadequate quality can put businesses and lives at risk. This paper provides a systematic overview of software quality in the context of a system. This includes static, dynamic, and customer/user perspectives. Quality standards have been widely adopted in recent years. However, these standards only address static aspects of quality, e.g., conformance to requirements. Moreover, the author's experience shows that these standards are often incompletely implemented. This is facilitated by a lack of appropriate feedback on the quality status of software products. As described here, objective measurements and independent in-process audits can be part of the solution.


A frequent problem when dealing with data gathered from multiple sources on the web (ranging from booksellers to Wikipedia pages to stock analyst predictions) is that these sources disagree, and we must decide which of their (often mutually exclusive) claims we should accept. Current state-of-the-art information credibility algorithms known as "fact-finders" are transitive voting systems with rules specifying how votes iteratively flow from sources to claims and then back to sources. While this is quite tractable and often effective, fact-finders also suffer from substantial limitations; in particular, a lack of transparency obfuscates their credibility decisions and makes them difficult to adapt and analyze: knowing the mechanics of how votes are calculated does not readily tell us what those votes mean, and finding, for example, that a source has a score of 6 is not informative. We introduce a new approach to information credibility, Latent Credibility Analysis (LCA), constructing strongly principled, probabilistic models where the truth of each claim is a latent variable and the credibility of a source is captured by a set of model parameters. This gives LCA models clear semantics and modularity that make extending them to capture additional observed and latent credibility factors straightforward. Experiments over four real-world datasets demonstrate that LCA models can outperform the best fact-finders in both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings.


Long-term ecological studies are critical for providing key insights in ecology, environmental change, natural resource management and biodiversity conservation. In this paper, we briefly discuss five key values of such studies. These are: (1) quantifying ecological responses to drivers of ecosystem change; (2) understanding complex ecosystem processes that occur over prolonged periods; (3) providing core ecological data that may be used to develop theoretical ecological models and to parameterize and validate simulation models; (4) acting as platforms for collaborative studies, thus promoting multidisciplinary research; and (5) providing data and understanding at scales relevant to management, and hence critically supporting evidence-based policy, decision making and the management of ecosystems. We suggest that the ecological research community needs to put higher priority on communicating the benefits of long-term ecological studies to resource managers, policy makers and the general public. Long-term research will be especially important for tackling large-scale emerging problems confronting humanity such as resource management for a rapidly increasing human population, mass species extinction, and climate change detection, mitigation and adaptation. While some ecologically relevant, long-term data sets are now becoming more generally available, these are exceptions. This deficiency occurs because ecological studies can be difficult to maintain for long periods as they exceed the length of government administrations and funding cycles. We argue that the ecological research community will need to coordinate ongoing efforts in an open and collaborative way, to ensure that discoverable long-term ecological studies do not become a long-term deficiency. It is important to maintain publishing outlets for empirical field-based ecology, while simultaneously developing new systems of recognition that reward ecologists for the use and collaborative sharing of their long-term data sets. Funding schemes must be re-crafted to emphasize collaborative partnerships between field-based ecologists, theoreticians and modellers, and to provide financial support that is committed over commensurate time frames.


Introduction: Myocardial infarction (MI) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Taurine, an essential amino acid, plays a critical role in cardiovascular function. The present study was accomplished to investigate the beneficial role of taurine on atherogenesis and atherothrombosis indexes in patients with MI. Materials & Methods: In this semi-experimental study, 16 cases, 50 to 60 years old suffering from myocardial infarction were randomly classified into two experimental (taurine supplement) and placebo groups. The subjects of the experimental group took 3 supplement capsules containing 500 mg of taurine before the 3 daily meals. The placebo group took 3capsules containing starch, at the same time as the experimental members. Plasma blood sampling was carried out on the subjects at baseline level and after the modified Bruce protocol with and without taurine supplements or placebo in the same conditions. Findings: There were no statistically significant differences in the general data, such as age, weight, BMI and Vo2max between the taurine supplement group and the control (P less-than 0.05). Taurine supplementation caused significant decrease in the LDL-C/HDL-C ، TC/HDL-C، TG/HDL-C and Plate/HDL-C ratios in the supplementation and placebo groups at baseline level as well as after exhaustive exercise with modified Bruce protocol. Discussion & Conclusion: Our investigation results confirm the significance of dietary intervention in patients with MI. Taurine may be an essential candidate to enrich nutrition supports for critically ill patients, although more researches seem necessary to get at a conclusive consideration.


Experimental vibrational/electronic circular dichroism spectroscopic and theoretical studies of amino acid derivatives, i.e. N-acetyl-L-Asp, N-acetyl-L-Glu, and di-amino acid peptide/derivatives, i.e. L-Asp-L-Glu, a-N-acetyl-L-Asp-L-Glu, and s-N-acetyl-L-Asp-L-Glu are reported.

The calculated structures for N-acetyl-L-Asp and N-acetyl-L-Glu differ. The conformation of the trans amide moiety changes with the carbon chain length of the side chain of the amino acid derivatives. In the computed structures of N-acetyl-L-Asp and N-acetyl-L-Glu all backbone atoms are in-plane, except the side chain group; with respect to C2-C3 they both possess a staggered conformation. In addition both the N-acetyl and the side chain carboxylic acid groups are present in the anti-periplanar (i.e. anti- or trans-conformation). The amide I band occurs in the IR and Raman spectra of N-acetyl-L-Asp as a strong band at 1646 cm-1. In the case of N-acetyl-L-Glu it occurs as a weak, broad band at 1690 cm-1 in the solid state Raman spectrum; in the solution state Raman spectrum the amide I band is blue shifted, and presented at 1728 cm-1. The two different wavenumbers for C=O stretching vibrations, for both molecules, indicate that the two carboxylic acid groups are in different environments. According to DFT band assignments, the amide I bands are predicted at 1679 1682 cm-1 for N-acetyl-L-Asp and N-acetyl-L-Glu, respectively.

A band due to the trans amide II mode is found at ˜1545 cm-1 for N-acetyl-L-Asp in the IR spectrum and for N-acetyl-L-Glu at ˜1575 cm-1 in both solid state IR and Raman spectra. The amide II mode is not observed in the solid or solution state Raman spectra of N-acetyl-L-Asp. In the solution state Raman spectrum of N-acetyl-L-Glu, the amide II mode is blue shifted and occurs at 1647 cm-1. The calculated wavenumber value for the amide II mode is ˜1482 cm-1 for both amino acid derivatives. The amide III mode for N-acetyl-L-Asp is found at 1229 cm-1 in both solid state IR and Raman spectra. In the solution state Raman spectrum, this is found as a very weak band at 1238 cm-1. This mode is not observed in the solid state IR and solution Raman spectra of N-acetyl-L-Glu, but it appears at 1233 cm-1 in the solid state Raman spectrum. According to DFT calculations, the amide III mode is predicted at ˜1210 cm-1 for both acetyl derivatives.

The calculated vibrational spectra of L-Asp-L-Glu show a good fit with the experimentally recorded vibrational spectra. For example, the predicted and observed wavenumbers for amide I and amide II modes are similar i.e. observed values for amide I mode are at 1676 and 1692 cm-1 for solid state IR/Raman and solution state Raman spectra, respectively, and the predicted value is 1693 cm-1.


AbstractA numerical study of measured petrophysical properties was used to develop and demonstrate a workflow for monitoring CO2 sequestration in a subsurface reservoir. Amplitude versus offset (AVO) attributes can be sensitive discriminators for CO2 presence. The sensitivity of AVO attributes to CO2 saturation increased when an upscaling scheme that propagated the effects of small-scale heterogeneities was used. A global sensitivity analysis was then performed to study the importance of various rock properties that would be used as inputs in reservoir characterization. An extensive rock properties database for a carbonate reservoir containing natural variability was used. The various rock properties were ranked by their importance to the quality of the remote characterization. Defining and using the intrinsic correlations among petrophysical properties were essential to evaluating whether a particular reservoir was amenable (sensitive) to this AVO characterization method.


Short-term and long-term initiatives are different in nature; yet they are mutually interrelated and need to be combined. To provide a better understanding of this relationship, a classification model is proposed that is based on the observation that at any point in time different improvement initiatives are in progress. They have different owners, objects of study, and time horizons. Three types of initiatives will be introduced as a rather simple way of mapping parallel and serial improvement initiatives, and a few examples will show some of the implications of using this categorisation. A manufacturing vision may serve as a way of triggering new improvement initiatives, stopping existing ones, and orchestrating the portfolio of ongoing improvement and innovation activities. This will be discussed in view of an effort to involve managers and employees in a joint development process to the effect that the developed vision represents a shared mental picture of the company's future production. An industrial case example will demonstrate a company's improvement effort and the way in which it has orchestrated its various initiatives. The paper concludes with a set of propositions about aligning different improvement initiatives and about orchestrating industrial development.


The new ligand N,N′,N″,N″′-tetrakis[3-tert-butyl-5-(4-pyridinyl)salicylidene]-1,2,4,5-benzenetetraamine (bisSalen) containing four pyridyl groups in its periphery was prepared and subsequently used as an organic linker for a Zn–bisSalen MOF. A 2D undulated sheet structure was determined from single-crystal X-ray diffraction studies. The bisSalen ligands bridge two ZnII ions, and one of the pyridyl groups on each side of the bisSalen ligand further coordinates to a bisSalen-coordinated ZnII ion to provide a 2D sheet structure. The undulated 2D sheets are stacked closely together to form a 3D-like structure containing well-defined 1D channels, the orientation of which is perpendicular to the 2D sheets. The geometry of the bisSalen in the MOF is not planar. The remaining uncoordinated pyridyl groups point toward the 1D channels. Because of these openly accessible pyridyl groups in the channels, the Zn–bisSalen MOF is a very active catalyst for transesterifications.


Two newly introduced information technology products from the same firm were expected to do well, yet one product failed while the other thrived. Why? To answer this question, we built a firm-level system dynamics model of the adoption of information technology products with a focus on firm-level allocation of investments to marketing, technology and to the reduction of other switching costs. We also modeled the firm's ability and rate of learning from customers. The firm-level model was validated against revenue data and management interviews. We identified implications of designing a positive user experience and of adopting a culture of relentless and rapid business experimentation. The various scenarios supported by the model illustrated that, in order to survive and compete in the digital economy, information technology firms need to shed a comfortable yet myopic focus on existing capabilities and develop business strategies validated through "fail fast, learn fast" experiments. Furthermore, in order to thrive and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, these firms also need to effectively disseminate the knowledge gained through business experiments throughout the organization.


Genetic differences in gene expression contribute significantly to phenotypic diversity and differences in disease susceptibility. In fact, the great majority of causal variants highlighted by genome-wide association are in non-coding regions that modulate expression. In order to quantify the extent of allelic differences in expression, we analyzed liver transcriptomes of isogenic F1 hybrid mice. Allele-specific expression (ASE) effects are pervasive and are detected in over 50% of assayed genes. Genes with strong ASE do not differ from those with no ASE with respect to their length or promoter complexity. However, they have a higher density of sequence variants, higher functional redundancy, and lower evolutionary conservation compared to genes with no ASE. Fifty percent of genes with no ASE are categorized as house-keeping genes. In contrast, the high ASE set may be critical in phenotype canalization. There is significant overlap between genes that exhibit ASE and those that exhibit strong cis expression quantitative trait loci (cis eQTLs) identified using large genetic expression data sets. Eighty percent of genes with cis eQTLs also have strong ASE effects. Conversely, 40% of genes with ASE effects are associated with strong cis eQTLs. Cis-acting variation detected at the protein level is also detected at the transcript level, but the converse is not true. ASE is a highly sensitive and direct method to quantify cis-acting variation in gene expression and complements and extends classic cis eQTL analysis. ASE differences can be combined with coding variants to produce a key resource of functional variants for precision medicine and genome-to-phenome mapping.


Livestock production is limited on upland forested sites in the Southeast by the low quality of native range. Supplemental feeding in the form of improved pastures has dramatic effects on herd production and individual animal performance. Similar relrtionships probably exist for wild herbivores; and food plots with highly palatable, high quality forages might improve animal performance for wild as well as domestic herbivores. Sixteen American johttvetch (Aesclyrrouzeue umericanu) plots (E f SE = 0.21 f 0.02 ha) were established in pastures adjacent to mixed pine (Pfuus spp.)hardwood habitat on a 980-ha tract in southeast Louisiana to estimate the infhtence of summer-fall food plots on diets of freeranging white-tailed deer (Odocoikus Virgo). American jointvetch accounted for 32.4% of the dry matter in deer diets and occurred hr 90.7% of fecal pellet groups. Individual deer consumed about 0.45 kg (ovendry weight) of American jointvetch per day over 2 growing seasons. For all sampling periods, crude protein, phosphorus, in vitro digestible dry matter, and calcium levels were higher (p10.006) in supplemented diets compared to native diets. Calcium:phosphorus ratios in supplemented diets were lower (p10.0001) (improved) compared to ratios in native diets. Dietary crude protein, phosphorus, in vitro digestible dry matter, and calcium were positively associated (p10.0001) with proportions of American jolntvetch in deer diets. Warm-season food plots should be considered as viable options for intensive deer management programs in parts of the southeastern United States.


Background and purpose: In Iranian Traditional Medicine (ITM), human body is composed of substances called humors. Any change in quantity or/and quality of these humors causes many diseases and their treatment requires purgation of pathogenic substances. Among the drugs introduced in ITM, 'Maoljobon' is considered with wide uses. This drug with nutritional benefits is used both alone and in combination with other drugs. Purification of the body from wastes is its obvious therapeutic effect and some physicians opt it for its features in order to abstain from potent drugs that have harmful effects on human body. Maoljobon is derived from milk. Type of milk and making procedure affect its temperament (Mizaj), but it is considered to be mainly warm and somewhat wet. Consumption of laxatives is not recommended in hot seasons, but Maoljobon can be used in every season, especially in spring while following the principles. In ITM, therapeutic effects of Maoljobon is mentioned in many diseases such as stroke, amnesia, headache, obsession, cancer, joint diseases, kidney and bladder stones, varices, and hemorrhoid. Recent studies also showed its various properties including anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, anti-hypertension, anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties. Perception of the nature and effects of Maoljobon in addition to accurate and reference-based clinical usages can underlie widespread researches


Linked data structure (LDS) accesses are critical to the performance of many large scale applications. Techniques have been proposed to prefetch such accesses. Unfortunately, many LDS prefetching techniques 1) generate a large number of useless prefetches, thereby degrading performance and bandwidth efficiency, 2) require significant hardware or storage cost, or 3) when employed together with stream-based prefetchers, cause significant resource contention in the memory system. As a result, existing processors do not employ LDS prefetchers even though they commonly employ stream-based prefetchers. This paper proposes a low-cost hardware/software cooperative technique that enables bandwidth-efficient prefetching of linked data structures. Our solution has two new components: 1) a compiler-guided prefetch filtering mechanism that informs the hardware about which pointer addresses to prefetch, 2) a coordinated prefetcher throttling mechanism that uses run-time feedback to manage the interference between multiple prefetchers (LDS and stream-based) in a hybrid prefetching system. Evaluations show that the proposed solution improves average performance by 22.5% while decreasing memory bandwidth consumption by 25% over a baseline system that employs an effective stream prefetcher on a set of memory- and pointer-intensive applications. We compare our proposal to three different LDS/correlation prefetching techniques and find that it provides significantly better performance on both single-core and multi-core systems, while requiring less hardware cost.


Unlike standard object classification, where the image to be classified contains one or multiple instances of the same object, indoor scene classification is quite different since the image consists of multiple distinct objects. Furthermore, these objects can be of varying sizes and are present across numerous spatial locations in different layouts. For automatic indoor scene categorization, large-scale spatial layout deformations and scale variations are therefore two major challenges and the design of rich feature descriptors which are robust to these challenges is still an open problem. This paper introduces a new learnable feature descriptor called "spatial layout and scale invariant convolutional activations" to deal with these challenges. For this purpose, a new convolutional neural network architecture is designed which incorporates a novel "spatially unstructured" layer to introduce robustness against spatial layout deformations. To achieve scale invariance, we present a pyramidal image representation. For feasible training of the proposed network for images of indoor scenes, this paper proposes a methodology, which efficiently adapts a trained network model (on a large-scale data) for our task with only a limited amount of available training data. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated through extensive experiments on a number of data sets, including MIT-67, Scene-15, Sports-8, Graz-02, and NYU data sets.


The development and implementation of a drought policy is intended to alter a nation's approach to drought management. A national drought policy should establish a clear set of principles or operating guidelines to govern the management of drought and its impacts. The policy should be consistent and equitable for all regions, population groups, and economic sectors and consistent with the goals of sustainable development. The overriding principle of drought policy should be an emphasis on risk management through the application of preparedness and mitigation measures. The policy must reflect regional differences in drought characteristics, vulnerability, and impacts. The goal of the policy is to reduce risk by developing better awareness and understanding of the drought hazard and the underlying causes of societal vulnerability. Climate change and projected changes in climate variability will likely increase the frequency and severity of drought and other extreme climatic events. In the case of drought, the duration of these events may also increase. Therefore, it is imperative for all drought-prone nations to adopt a more risk-based approach to drought management in order to increase resilience to future episodes of drought. To provide guidance in the preparation of national drought policies and planning techniques, it is important to define the key components of drought policy, its objectives, and steps in the implementation process. This paper presents an overview of drought planning and policy that can provide a model for nations to use to improve their level of preparedness for drought with the ultimate goal of reducing societal vulnerability to this pervasive natural hazard


Binomial coordinate compounds like English give and take are frequent in Khmer. Once the semantic motivation of these is opaque, the ones that survive are predominantly those which manifest some formal symmetry in the structure of their conjoined roots. The result is that Khmer has an enormous number of words like pell mell or zigzag, but, unlike the English examples, these have neither playful nor pejorative connotations. Moreover, the structural basis of their symmetry is neither rhyme, as in pell mell, nor ablaut, as in zigzag, but alliteration. A cursory survey of some other languages in which symmetrical reduplicative compounds exist reveals that alliteration is extremely rare outside of Southeast Asian languages. At the very least, the abundance of compounds of the spic and span type is an areal feature. But it may be that it correlates with an even more restricted typological feature as well. Khmer, like Thai, is an exclusively prefixing language. There is a well-known cognitive basis for preserving parallelism or symmetry in the backgrounded rather than the focussed portions of things that are brought together. It may be that this principle can account for the tendency to mark symmetry in the initial portion of words in a prefixing language.


Extracting knowledge by performing computations on graphs is becoming increasingly challenging as graphs grow in size. A standard approach distributes the graph over a cluster of nodes, but performing computations on a distributed graph is expensive if large amount of data have to be moved. Without partitioning the graph, communication quickly becomes a limiting factor in scaling the system up. Existing graph partitioning heuristics incur high computation and communication cost on large graphs, sometimes as high as the future computation itself. Observing that the graph has to be loaded into the cluster, we ask if the partitioning can be done at the same time with a lightweight streaming algorithm.
 We propose natural, simple heuristics and compare their performance to hashing and METIS, a fast, offline heuristic. We show on a large collection of graph datasets that our heuristics are a significant improvement, with the best obtaining an average gain of 76%. The heuristics are scalable in the size of the graphs and the number of partitions. Using our streaming partitioning methods, we are able to speed up PageRank computations on Spark, a distributed computation system, by 18% to 39% for large social networks.


Great ape tourism, if well implemented, can serve to conserve the species but it can also have considerable negative impacts if it is not based on sound conservation principles. These guidelines have been developed for both existing and potential great apes tourism sites that wish to improve the degree to which their programme contributes to the conservation rather than the exploitation of great apes. This publication should be viewed as an essential part of the toolkit for any site practising or considering great ape tourism as part of its conservation programme.


Using intact frog-eye preparations (Rana pipiens and Rana catesbiana) the back of the eyeball was exposed and a microelectrode inserted into the retina. Both the intraretinal electroretinogram (ERG) and the responses of single-ganglion cells were recorded when the eye was stimulated with light flashes in the range of 0.3- to 1.5-sec duration. The responses in the test eye were compared when this eye alone was stimulated and when both eyes were stimulated. The basic experimental design was to alternate binocular and monocular stimulation, always recording the response to the test eye. It was found that under certain circumstances the magnitude of the negative intraretinal ERG was reliably increased when stimulation to the contralateral eye accompanied the test-eye response. Control procedures indicate that this effect is the result of neural interaction between the two eyes, since it cannot be attributed to the consensual pupillary response or to such experimental artifacts as light scatter or of direct response potentials from one eye to the other.With respect to the single-unit responses, no units were found that showed responses to contralateral stimulation alone. While there were some units that appeared to show altered response patterns as a result of concurrent contralateral stimulation, no reliable changes across units could be found in the limited sample tested.


Recent studies have identified coactivators that function with the nonsteroid nuclear hormone receptors. These proteins have histone acetyltransferase activity and appear to contribute to transcriptional regulation by nuclear receptors through remodeling of chromatin. However not all nuclear receptors activate genes that contain DNA elements that they recognize. Such specificity seemed not to come from known coactivators because the coactivators appear to interact with all active nuclear hormone receptors. Now, Li et al. have identified a new coactivator they call NRIF3 (for nuclear receptor-interacting factor 3) that has very little sequence similarity to previously identified coactivators. And unlike other coactivators, NRIF3 potentiates only transcription mediated by thyroid hormone receptors and retinoid X receptors, not that induced by other nonsteroid receptors. Thus, NRIF3 may represent a new class of coactivators that work together with the receptors and general coactivators to generate receptor-specific regulation. Li D., Desai-Yajnik V., Lo E., Schapira M., Abagyan R., and Samuels H.H. (1999) NRIF3 is a novel coactivator mediating functional specificity of nuclear hormone receptors. Mol. Cell. Biol. 19:7191-7202. [Abstract]


The inland waters of Madagascar and the Indian Ocean islands hotspot support a high diversity of aquatic species with high levels of endemism. The information presented in this report will help support implementation of multilateral Environmental Agreements in Madagascar, such as the Ramsar Convention and the Convention on Biological Diversity, guiding conservation planning and priority setting at national level. In addition, this new information will help efforts to achieve targets of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).


Australia's decision to implement Internet censorship using technological means creates a natural experiment: the first Western democracy to mandate filtering legislatively, and to retrofit it to a decentralized network architecture. But are the proposed restrictions legitimate? The new restraints derive from the Labor Party's pro-filtering electoral campaign, though coalition government gives minority politicians considerable influence over policy. The country has a well-defined statutory censorship system for on-line and off-line material that may, however, be undercut by relying on foreign and third-party lists of sites to be blocked. While Australia is open about its filtering goals, the government's transparency about what content is to be blocked is poor. Initial tests show that how effective censorship is at filtering prohibited content - and only that content - will vary based on what method the country's ISPs use. Though Australia's decisionmakers are formally accountable to citizens, efforts to silence dissenters, outsourcing of blocking decisions, and filtering's inevitable transfer of power to technicians undercut accountability. The paper argues Australia represents a shift by Western democracies towards legitimating Internet filtering and away from robust consideration of the alternatives available to combat undesirable information.


With the growth of the distributed power generation market and the increasing integration of energy systems, more and more low carbon technologies are being installed at the domestic building level to optimise daily energy cost and reduce carbon emissions. The objective of this thesis is to optimise domestic building daily energy cost, and to identify ways of reducing the installation and maintenance costs of all domestic energy infrastructures. In this thesis, general energy conversion, storage and transmission in domestic buildings are considered. The first key part of this thesis is to size a combined heat and power (CHP) unit based on the Maximum Rectangle (MR) method and use the Genetic Algorithm (GA) method to optimize daily energy cost for a building without an energy storage system. The second key part of the thesis is to size a hybrid energy storage system (HESS) and develop a new rule-based energy control rule to optimise energy cost for a building with an energy storage system. The results show that after sizing the HESS, the daily benefit-cost ratio of the HESS is increased by approximately a factor of two over previous work. Additionally, the proposed rule based energy control model can yield up to 19.8% energy cost saving compared to a system dependent solely on electricity from the grid and using a boiler to generate heat. This ratio is almost equal to the previous work, but the present work increases customers' comfort level by treating all load as critical. In addition, the optimization approach in this thesis is more real-world feasible, because it is not possible for exact loads to be known in advance. The results also show that daily energy cost saving for a building with HESSs and the appropriate control rule is approximately 47% higher than a building with a well-sized CHP but no HESS; and the capacity of CHP can also be reduced when the HESS is installed. Thus, the installation and maintenance costs of HESSs can be offset by reducing the capacity of CHP to some extent. In addition, the proposed control algorithm and HESSs have outstanding performance in improving the effective CHP output efficiency and average CHP input to output ratio. This proves the combination of HESS and the proposed rule-base control algorithm can reduce carbon emissions and make full use of CHP capacity. Page | iii However at present, the benefit to cost ratios of case studies of such domestic energy systems are always lower than 11% giving a negative return on investment. This figure is mainly limited by the high manufacturing price of HESSs and CHP. In the medium to long term future, the downward trend in battery and CHP manufacturing costs, coupled with changing energy tariffs are likely to lead to overwhelmingly positive cost benefit for this technology.


Sphingolipids are important membrane constituents in all eukaryotic cells. Ongoing sphingolipid synthesis is required for a variety of cellular processes including response to heat shock. During heat stress, de novo sphingolipid synthesis is upregulated and mutants defective in the biosynthesis of sphingolipids show a significantly greater loss of viability. To dissect the mechanisms of sphingolipid functions during heat stress we made use of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae lcb1-100 mutant. This mutant is conditionally impaired in serine palmitoyltransferase activity, the first committed step in sphingolipid biosynthesis. lcb1-100 cells are highly sensitive to heat shock and die at elevated temperatures. In this study we could show that the increased sensitivity to heat stress in lcb1-100 cells correlated with a lack of induction of the major heat shock proteins at high temperature. This defect could be restored by the overexpression of ubiquitin, a situation that increased turnover of proteins and prevented accumulation of protein aggregates in lcb1-100 cells. These data showed that the essential function of heat shock protein induction is the removal of misfolded or aggregated proteins. Furthermore it suggested that heat stressed cells do not die because of the loss of protein activity due to their denaturation, but because of the inherent toxicity of the denatured and/or aggregated proteins. In addition we tried to explain the lack of induction of heat shock proteins in lcb1-100 cells. We could show that transcription and nuclear export of heat shock protein mRNA was not affected in these cells. Under heat stress conditions, lcb1-100 cells exhibit a strong decrease in protein synthesis and polysome analyses demonstrated a defect in translation initiation. Furthermore we demonstrate that efficient translation under these conditions relies upon the synthesis of sphingoid base. Deletion of the eIF4E binding protein Eap1p partially restores translation initiation and the synthesis of heat shock proteins in lcb-100 cells. Thus, sphingoid bases signal to the cap-dependent translation initiation apparatus to enhance heat shock protein synthesis. In addition, ubiquitin overexpression in the lcb1-100 mutant allowed recovery of translation, but not at the initial phase where heat shock proteins are made. Therefore the recovery process seems to be dependent upon the function of the heat shock proteins that are made during the initial phase of heat stress. Altogether we have uncovered a new function for sphingoid bases and provide an explanation for the sphingoid base synthesis requirement for survival during heat stress.


Negative risk-decoupling, otherwise known as empty voting, is a popular strategy amongst hedge funds and other activist investors. In short, it is the attempt to decouple the economic risk from the share's ownership position, retaining in particular the voting right without risk. This paper uses three perspectives to analyse the problems created by negative risk-decoupling: an agency costs approach, an analysis of information costs, and a perspective from corporate finance. It shows how risk-decoupling is a type of market behaviour that creates significant costs for market participants, in particular existing shareholders and potential investors. The paper then develops regulatory responses, envisaged particularly for EU level lawmaking, but also raises underlying issues on a more general level. Whilst several proposed regulatory tools are rejected, the paper prefers a solution that uses continuous transparency as the cornerstone. In addition, it suggests that in certain individual cases, national regulators should be empowered to suspend activists' voting rights. The paper concludes by offering a concrete legislative proposal, amending the European Transparency Directive.


A guide to finding and using alternative serials collections in the Tamiment Library, a special collection at Bobst Library focusing on Labor and the Left.


The main aspects of reproduction - namely times of ovarian maturation, brooding and hatching, sizes of maturation and fecundity - were studied in female Norway lobsters in seven areas of the Mediterranean biogeographic subprovince: the Algarve Sea, the Alboran Sea, the Catalan Sea, the Ligurian Sea, the Northern Tyrrhenian Sea, the Adriatic Sea and the Gulf of Euboikos. These included both shelf and slope populations within a latitudinal range of 8°. The reproduction showed clear seasonality with some small differences between areas: maturation delayed by 1-2 months in northern areas (Ligurian, N. Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Seas) compared to southern areas; absence of embryos for periods of 4-5 months in slope females and for less clearly defined periods in shelf females. The case study of the Ligurian Sea was used to illustrate the ovarian cycle and to describe the pre- and post-puberal growth of the female. First mating occurs at an average size of 32 mm CL, which corresponds to age 3+ of the female and the hatching of the first brood corresponds to age 4. Differences were registered in reproductive sizes in the study areas, with a range of 23-30 mm CL for the smallest berried females and a range of 30-36 mm CL in the 50% maturity size. These differences were ascribed to local factors, whereas ages of the basic steps of reproduction were assumed to be unchanged. Females of age 2 formed the most abundant share of the fished stock. An estimate of fecundity was made in terms of brood size (embryos were counted at an early stage of development): the range was 1119-1834 embryos in a standard female of 35 mm CL. Reproductive potential, calculated on the basis of a virtual population analysis, was strongly influenced by the size structure of the female population in each area and there was a ratio of about 14:1 between the least (Ligurian) and the most exploited (Catalan) fishing grounds.


As habitat loss, predators (human and non-human) and disease epidemics threaten species worldwide, protected sanctuaries have become vital to species conservation. Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park (HiP) in South Africa is at the centre of one of the world's greatest conservation success stories. The formal proclamation of HiP in 1895 prevented the extinction of the south-central black rhino (Diceros bicornis minor) population. In recent times HiP has been a strategic source population for the D. b. minor range expansion program, facilitating an 18-fold population increase across southern Africa. However, HiP's own black rhino population appears to be in decline. Evidence for decline is most often attributed to overpopulation and poor habitat quality that is driving apparently significant increases in the average home range sizes, poor growth rates (i.e., low calf recruitment) and poor body condition of black rhino. Other factors such as non-human calf predation and parasitism have also been raised as potential causes of decline but remain untested. HiP does have some of the highest densities of lion (Panthera leo) and spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta). HiP's black rhino population also suffers from remarkably severe chronic haemorrhaging lesions caused by a filarial parasite (Stephanofilaria dinniki). Empirical evidence if or indeed why the HiP black rhino population might be in decline is lacking. Investigating this population's true status and any potential causes of an apparent decline is urgently needed.  This thesis therefore aimed to test three hypotheses for poor performance that included: (1) investigations of the average black rhino home range size, (2) confirmation of black rhino calf predation and (3) the relationship between filarial lesions and black rhino body condition. I inserted horn-implant VHF radio transmitters into 14 adult (i.e., >5 years) female black rhino in HiP and regularly monitored them on-foot over a three-year period. I found that average home range estimates (9.77 km2) were not significantly dissimilar to estimates using a similar technique obtained forty years prior (i.e., 7.5 km²). I also established the first confirmed link between predation attempts and tail amputation during a lion attack on a black rhino calf. Black rhino body condition, while significantly inversely and temporally correlated to lesion severity, did not appear to be driven by lesion severity itself and highlights the need for further research.  An additional research focus for my thesis developed while in the field. I regularly witnessed red-billed oxpeckers (Buphagus erythrorynchus) feeding at black rhino filarial lesions while also alarm calling to alert them to my presence. Studies have found it difficult to empirically show how oxpecker-host interactions have net positive benefits that make it a mutualism. Thus, two chapters were designed to determine if red-billed oxpeckers were predominately mutualistic or parasitic when visiting black rhino. Determining this depended on whether I could identify net positive benefits or net costs to black rhino. Oxpeckers provide rhino with two possible benefits i.e., benefit 1 is cleaning ectoparasites and benefit 2 is increasing vigilance, and one cost i.e., lesion parasitism. More than 50 hours of behavioural observations established that oxpeckers favoured haemorrhaging filarial lesions over sites of tick attachment on black rhino. Moreover, black rhino appeared to be completely tolerant of oxpeckers that fed at lesions. To test whether oxpeckers increased rhino's anti-predator vigilance, I conducted 84 human approach trials towards black rhino both with and without oxpeckers present. Results showed that rhino were immediately responsive to oxpecker alarm calls and benefitted from more than a two-fold increase in human detection rate and detection distance. Rhino predominately orientated to face towards their sensory blind spot (i.e., downwind) after an oxpecker alarm call. The traditional name (Askari wa kifaru) of the red-billed oxpecker, which translates as the rhino's guard, appears to be validated. However, future research will need to confirm whether black rhino's tolerance of parasitic oxpeckers is directly related to vigilance benefits.  In summary, black rhino managers in HiP can be confident that the average home range sizes have not increased significantly. Further, predation of calves might be a greater problem than previously realised and requires further investigation. Monitoring changes in the filarial lesion severity of black rhino might be a useful tool for detecting impending changes in a rhino's condition. Finally, black rhino are clearly eavesdropping and benefitting from oxpecker alarm calls – a co-evolution that has implications for conserving oxpecker populations as well.


For many people at the turn of the millennium, human rights have become the new language of faith resonate with great meaning and profound value. However, like all traditional religions, human rights embody great complexity. Neither coherent nor consistent, human rights cannot overcome the fallibility of its human creators. When we attempt to use rights as absolute values - Dworkin's trump cards against infringement - we find ourselves confronting the contradictions inherent in equally valued rights when they come in conflict. As noted by many authors, nowhere is this conflict more pronounced than the conflict between women's rights and the rights of freedom of conscience/religion present in many international human rights instruments. Lest this be thought a problem of Western privilege, where women can afford the luxury of seeking political parity with men, in this paper I will confront human rights conflicts that have a direct impact on women's health. This will include both reproductive health concerns and female circumcision/female genital mutilation. In attempting to address these conflicts, I will begin by analyzing the nature of human rights to health and the particular rights of women to health - with the problems created by their separation from non-gendered rights. Next, I will begin my principled argument by arguing against both an absolutist understanding of rights, and a "strict equality" standard of interpretation that seeks to recognize a hierarchy of rights. Such an approach fails as a matter of law, as a matter of philosophy (under the foundationalist challenge), and in the face of history. Instead, I argue that while a principled interpretation of rights can provide some guidance, its utility is limited. Instead, it is imperative to consider rights within their political context. Human rights do not stand outside politics, but instead reflect aspects of that politics. Ultimately, the goal of any rights analysis is not to determine which rights take precedence, but how to find a synthesis respectful of each.


A series of composites with nominal compositions of BaCe0.8Sm0.2O3-δ (BCS)-Ce0.8Sm0.2 O1.9 (SDC) (20:80, 35:65, 50:50, 65:35 wt.%) are synthesized by a modified citric acid-nitrate sol-gel combustion method and evaluated as the electrolytes for low-temperature solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). The TEM results show that doped BaCeO3 decorated SDC particles are formed after calcining at 1000 °C for 3 h. X-ray diffraction results reveal that the composites are only composed of BaCeO3-based and SDC phases without any other impurity phases. Besides, BaCeO3-based phase is uniformly distributed in the sintered electrolytes according to EDS element mapping. The open cell voltages (OCVs) of the single cells increase gradually with increasing the proportion of BaCeO3-based phase, and are higher than those for bare SDC-based cells. Besides, the power performances of the cells are superior to SDC-based cells when BaCeO3-based phase is lower than 35 wt.%. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy analysis indicates that, in addition to blocking electronic current leakage, BaCeO3-based phase would induce higher ohmic and polarization resistance, which is detrimental to power performance. Further specific effort should be focused on synthesizing uniform SDC@BCS core-shell electrolyte powders and minimizing the proportion of BCS phase towards highperformance SOFCs with high OCVs. Disciplines Engineering | Physical Sciences and Mathematics Publication Details Gong, Z., Sun, W., Cao, J., Shan, D., Wu, Y. & Liu, W. (2017). Ce0.8Sm0.2O1.9 decorated with electronblocking acceptor-doped BaCeO3 as electrolyte for low-temperature solid oxide fuel cells. Electrochimica Acta, 228 226-232. Authors Zheng Gong, Wenping Sun, Jiafeng Cao, Duo Shan, Yusen Wu, and Wei Liu This journal article is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/aiimpapers/2424


Inadequate oral hygiene practices lead to gingivitis, periodontitis, and tooth decay. There are numerous oral care products on the market which aim to assist the general public to improve plaque removal efficacy at home, such as disclosing tablets, mouth rinses, and toothpastes containing antimicrobials. Plaque-A-Way (TJA Health, Joliet, IL) is a newly developed dentifrice which incorporates a disclosing agent into the formulation. The purpose of this study was to compare the plaque removal efficacy of Plaque-A-Way to that of a placebo toothpaste.
There are several methods for measuring plaque in the oral cavity. These include conventional plaque indices, which measure the presence, absence, or amount of plaque in designated tooth locations; planimetry, which maps the outline of plaque and calculates the percentage of coverage; quantitative light-induced fluorescence (QLF), which illuminates the oral cavity with ultraviolet light that results in red auto-fluorescence of plaque deposits; and digital plaque imaging analysis (DPIA), which discloses plaque with fluorescein causing deposits to glow yellow-green when exposed to ultraviolet light followed by a computerized photo analysis.
Thirty-five subjects completed this study. After a period of refraining from oral hygiene, subjects were asked to brush their teeth with either the test toothpaste (Plaque-A-Way) or a placebo toothpaste at two separate appointments. No special brushing instructions were given to the subjects. A rinse sequence was completed using fluorescein to disclose any remaining plaque after brushing. An
intraoral photo was captured and analyzed for percentage plaque coverage using custom made DPIA software.
The changes of plaque percentages between appointments for the control and test groups were calculated and there were no statistically significant differences found between the two. This suggests that the use of Plaque-A-Way did not result in a significant amount of plaque removal compared to the placebo with the testing protocol used. This may have been due to several limitations to this study including: non-specific brushing instructions, small sample size, inconsistent lighting parameters, and investigator subjectivity during photo processing. Despite inconclusive results obtained from the present study, the test toothpaste (Plaque-A-Way) demonstrates potential as a valuable over-the counter (OTC) oral hygiene aid for the general public.


Health care reform has dominated public discourse over the past several years, and the recent passage of the Affordable Care Act, rather than quell the rhetoric, has sparked even more debate. Donald A. Barr reviews the current structure of the American health care system, describing the historical and political contexts in which it developed and the core policy issues that continue to confront us today. This comprehensive analysis introduces the various organizations and institutions that make the U.S. health care system work-or fail to work, as the case may be. A principal message of the book is the seeming paradox of the quality of health care in this country-on the one hand it is the best medical care system in the world, on the other it is one of the worst among developed countries because of how it is organized. Barr introduces readers to broad cultural issues surrounding health care policy, such as access, affordability, and quality. He discusses specific elements of U.S. health care, including insurance, especially Medicare and Medicaid, the shift to for-profit managed care, the pharmaceutical industry, issues of long-term care, the plight of the uninsured, medical errors, and nursing shortages. The latest edition of this widely adopted text updates the description and discussion of key sectors of America's health care system in light of the Affordable Care Act.


Qatar is an emerging renewable energy market in the MENA region and has made progress in recent years. The natural gas-rich state has abundant solar energy resources and a national vision to generate 2% of its electricity from solar energy by 2020. A number of green businesses in Qatar are operating at different segments of the solar value chain. However, deployment of residential and commercial solar PV in Qatar still remains very low. One reason for this is the lack of incentives for the public and businesses to adopt solar energy technologies because of the high capital cost and high per kWh price as compared to the utility power. This study proposes the use of the roof rental business model by green businesses in Qatar as a method for increasing public support for solar in Qatar and generating income for green businesses. The study reviews the current status of solar energy deployment in Qatar and the major business players in the solar value chain. The roof rental business model is discussed in detail and recommendations are given on how to implement it. The study also addresses the feed-in-tariff incentive as an essential pillar in the roof rental business model. Finally, this study concludes that the roof rental business model can create massive public support for solar energy in Qatar provided that the feed-in-tariff policy is implemented.


Hydrogels have been increasingly used in the treatment of skin and soft tissue wounds in recent years due to their superb water holding and cell-growth promoting properties. When impregnated with antibiotics, they can also treat or prevent bacterial infections. Due to the global increase in antibiotic resistance, antibiotics are now becoming less effective and bacteriophage (viruses able to kill bacteria) offer a new alternative. Triggered release mechanisms also slow resistance development, as bacteria are not continually exposed to sub-lethal levels of therapeutic. Here, Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) was focussed on as it is the most common pathogen present in skin and soft tissue infections. The main aim of this work was to form biocompatible hydrogel systems which were able to give passive or triggered release of bacteriophage particles by S. aureus virulence factors. Micropatterned hydrogels were also investigated to assess the response in eukaryotic systems. This study found that Bacteriophage K was highly infective against S. aureus, with 94% strains (out of 86 strains) showing complete or intermediate sensitivity. Bacteriophage were immobilised into PVA and agarose hydrogel systems without a significant loss in concentration or efficacy. A photocrosslinkable polymer, HAMA (hyaluronic acid methacrylate) was also investigated which could be crosslinked in situ into a robust hydrogel; this hydrogel was sensitive to hyaluronidase (HAase), an enzyme secreted by the majority of S. aureus strains. On incubation with purified HAase and S. aureus supernatant, hydrogel degradation was recorded (Carbazole assay and SEM imaging) compared to buffer and HAase – negative S. aureus strains. When combined into a bilayered hydrogel system, 2% agarose/HAMA hydrogels gave triggered release of bacteriophage by pure HAase and HAase positive bacterial supernatant. However, in live culture triggered killing was not possible. HAMA could also be successfully printed, and NIH-3T3 fibroblasts showed directed aggregation but no adhesion to HAMA hydrogels. In general, hydrogel systems which gave triggered release of Bacteriophage K only in the presence of S. aureus HAase were successfully formed. However, the passive leakage of bacteriophage into the wider environment was seen in live culture. This could be remedied by direct coupling of the bacteriophage to the polymer network, and is a possible avenue for future work. This system was significant as it proved that S. aureus HAase can be used as a trigger for bacteriophage release from hydrogel systems. In eukaryotic cells, HAMA hydrogels did not promote cell growth, although some promise was seen in gelatin-based gels.


Extra energy devoted to resource acquisition speeds metabolic rate, but reduces the net yield of energy. In direct competition, microbial strains with high rates of resource acquisition often outcompete strains with slower resource acquisition but higher yield, reducing the net output of the group. Here, I use mathematical models to analyse the genetic and demographic factors that tip the balance toward either rate or yield. My models clarify the widely discussed roles of kin selection and the spatial structure of populations. I also emphasize the strong effect of two previously ignored factors: demographic aspects of colony survival and reproduction strongly shape the design of metabolic rate and efficiency, and competitive mutants within long‐lived colonies favour rate over yield, degrading the efficiency of the population.


This study examines the role of social media and mechanisms through which it can mobilize citizens to participate in protests. Focusing specifically on Facebook as a social media platform, this study uses survey data collected in South Korea during the 2016 candlelight vigils ( N = 922). Findings suggest that the frequency of Facebook use was strongly and positively associated with protest activity. Yet, further path analysis reveals no direct effect of Facebook use on protest participation. Instead, Facebook use facilitated purposeful news consumption and political expression on the site, which in turn facilitated protest participation. Despite the prevalence of incidental exposure to news on Facebook, incidental exposure did not breed further political action, such as expressing political opinions on Facebook.


Abstract Public spaces are often contested sites involving the political use of socio-material arrangements to check, control and filter the flow of people. In Sweden, the recently established police project (REVA) in is an attempt to strengthen 'internal border' controls. This paper discusses the emergence of practices in which activist groups organized and performed resistance through the use of counter technologies in the transport sector. We explain how a hybrid alliance of human and nonhuman others generated new virtual and urban spaces and provided temporary autonomous zones, to groups of undocumented immigrants. REVA Spotter, for example, was a tool, a manifesto and a peaceful means of resistance to the REVA policing methods through continuous Facebook status updates on identity checks at metro stations in Stockholm. The technology enabled reports on location and time of ticket controls to warn travellers in real time. Attempts by authorities to exert control over the 'spatial' underground were thereby circumvented by the effective development of an alternative infrastructural 'underground' consisting of assemblages of technologies, activists, undocumented immigrants, texts and emails, smart phones and computers. Based on 'netnographic observations' and interviews, the paper utilizes the case of the REVA to illustrate processes and practices that simultaneously configure the powerful surveyor, the discriminated and those who contest these politics through hybridities of cyber/material, human/nonhuman and urban/virtual space. The paper argues that by configuring such hybrid alliances, activists provided cyber-material autonomy to undocumented immigrants and other travellers in the metro, thereby creating new virtual and urban spaces for mobility and flows.


Simon Powell, MB BS, PhD, a cancer physician-scientist from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, has been appointed head of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "Simon is a talented research scientist who has done much to uncover the molecular mechanisms that allow normal tissues and cancer cells to repair their DNA after exposure to ionizing radiation," says Larry J. Shapiro, MD, dean of the School of Medicine and executive vice chancellor for medical affairs. "He possesses the leadership skills and vision to move our Department of Radiation Oncology forward in a continued effort to achieve excellence in all of its missions." Powell is a leader in research into BRCA1 and BRCA2, two genes that can sharply increase a woman's risk of developing breast cancer. Among other accomplishments, Powell developed new tests that let doctors interpret formerly ambiguous results from tests for the risk-enhancing forms of BRCA1 and BRCA2. Powell, who is originally from England, was head of the breast cancer service and clinical director of the Gillette Women's Cancer Center Program at Massachusetts General, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He earned both his medical degree and doctorate in cell and molecular radiation biology at the University of London. Powell trained at the Royal Marsden Hospital and the Institute of Cancer Research in England before coming to the United States in 1991 as a clinical oncology fellow at Harvard. Powell also will become a professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology. As department head, he succeeds Carlos A. Perez, MD, who led the department since it was founded in September 2001. "Replacing a colleague like Carlos Perez was not easy, but I think in Simon we are incredibly fortunate to have someone with solid leadership capability and outstanding clinical and research skills," says Timothy J. Eberlein, MD, the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin professor and director of the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center. Powell currently is principal investigator or co-principal investigator for six federal research grants and has served on various committees for the National Institutes of Health, including site visit committees that have reviewed major cancer-related grants at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina and MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was associate editor of the International Journal of Cancer for eight years and currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Radiation Research and Cancer Biology and Therapy. Powell says his goals include creation of a center for molecular targeted radiotherapy that will work to "combine the latest biology with the best technology." "We plan to encourage this attitude in the teaching of residents, the recruitment of new faculty and the development of clinical trials within the Siteman Cancer Center," he says. "The opportunity clearly exists to make Washington University's Department of Radiation Oncology the premier radiation oncology department in the country." The department employs more than 200 faculty and staff at Washington University and is composed of four divisions. The clinical division provides treatment for patients and conducts clinical trials; the cancer biology division studies the effects and interactions of radiation, heat and cytotoxic agents on cells; the physics division explores the physics of radiation oncology, plans treatment, and researches and develops new treatment equipment; and the administration and information systems division maintains computer services and information systems. Department member Joseph L. Roti Roti, PhD, professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of cell biology and physiology, notes that radiation oncology includes a unique mixture of applied medical research, basic biological research and physics research. These three areas focus on different aspects of one question: how best to use radiation to destroy tumor cells while minimizing damage to regular tissues. "Radiation damages DNA, and how well cells can repair that damage is one of the main determinants of how well they survive after radiation treatments," says Roti Roti. "Simon has a solid record of achievements in DNA repair research, and that experience is going to be essential to improving our ability to make it tougher for tumor cells to recover while reducing damage to normal tissues." Powell assumes his duties as department head and professor at Washington University on Oct. 1. "Simon is committed to the best possible patient care, to providing superb training and education, to continuing the development of the scientific basis of radiation oncology and to translating new discoveries into meaningful clinical advances," says Shapiro. For more information please contact: Michael C. Purdy; Tel.: 314.286.0122; Email: firstname.lastname@example.com


For enveloped viruses, genome entry into the target cell involves two major steps: virion binding to the cell-surface receptor and fusion of the virion and cell membranes. Virus-cell membrane fusion is mediated by the virus envelope complex, and its fusogenicity is the result of an active virus-cell interaction process that induces conformation changes within the envelope. For some viruses, such as influenza, exposure to an acidic milieu within the cell during the early steps of infection triggers the necessary structural changes. However, for other pathogens which are not exposed to such environmental stress, activation of fusogenicity can result from precise thiol/disulfide rearrangements mediated by either an endogenous redox autocatalytic isomerase or a cell-associated oxidoreductase. Study of the activation of HIV envelope fusogenicity has revealed new knowledge about how redox changes within a viral envelope trigger fusion. We discuss these findings and their implication for anti-HIV therapy. In addition, to compare and contrast the situation outlined for HIV with an enveloped virus that can fuse with the cell plasma membrane independent of the redox status of its envelope protein, we review parallel data obtained on SARS coronavirus entry.


Within the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs boson can decay to a pair of W bosons which decay leptonically. Despite its relatively large branching ratio, this is a challenging channel in which to search for the Higgs boson since we cannot detect neutrinos directly with the ATLAS detector. The matrix element method is a rst principles approach that allows for better separation of signal and background by responding to subtle di erences in the measured event kinematics. A straightforward implementation of the method is to assume that the Higgs boson is produced at rest in the transverse plane. However, this is often not the case due to next-to-leading order e ects like initial state radiation. In order to improve the sensitivity of the matrix element analysis, we developed an estimator for the transverse momentum of the Higgs boson that allows us to boost it into its transverse rest frame. Using a regression tree algorithm to estimate the transverse kinematics of the Higgs boson on an event-by-event basis, we observe a 15% improvement in sensitivity. The application of this technique to Higgs boson property measurements, such as the determination of its spin, is also explored.


Compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) is a technique aimed at accelerating the data acquisition of MRI. While down-sampling in k-space proportionally reduces the data acquisition time, it results in images corrupted by aliasing artifacts and blur. To reconstruct images from the down-sampled k-space, recent deep-learning based methods have shown better performance compared with classical optimization-based CS-MRI methods. However, they usually use deep neural networks as a black-box, which directly maps the corrupted images to the target images from fully-sampled k-space data. This lack of transparency may impede practical usage of such methods. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based method to reconstruct the corrupted images with meaningful pixel-wise operations (e.g. edge enhancing filters), so that the reconstruction process is transparent to users. Specifically, MRI reconstruction is formulated as Markov Decision Process with discrete actions and continuous action parameters. We conduct experiments on MICCAI dataset of brain tissues and fastMRI dataset of knee images. Our proposed method performs favorably against previous approaches. Our trained model learns to select pixel-wise operations that correspond to the anatomical structures in the MR images. This makes the reconstruction process more interpretable, which would be helpful for further medical analysis.


The discovery of plesiosaurian remains in the Lower Callovian (Middle Jurassic) sediments of Skye, Scotland, represents the most northerly occurrence from the Hebrides. Other Hebridean localities from which Jurassic plesiosaurian remains have been recorded include the famous Hugh Miller's Reptile Bed from the Upper Bajocian to Bathonian (Middle Jurassic) sediments of Eigg, and a more recent discovery from the Liassic (Lower Jurassic) of Raasay (Martill 1985). Plesiosaurian remains have also been found from the northeast of Scotland at Elgin (Upper Triassic) (Taylor and Cruickshank in press), Brora (Late Callovian to Early Oxfordian, Middle to Upper Jurassic) (Clark in press), and Eathie (Kimmeridgian, Upper Jurassic) (Paton 1975). On 2nd July 1992 N.C. was contacted by Dr. S. Rigby to inform him of the discovery (by F.N.) of vertebrate remains on Skye. As the bones were found on a loose boulder on the foreshore near Flodigarry [NG472 708], it is difficult to provide a precise lithostratigraphical position. A comparison between the faunal content (the abundance of bivalves and belemnites) and sedimentological characteristics of the boulder, suggests that it may correlate lithologically within the Belemnite Sands (Lower Callovian) of the Staffin Bay Formation (Hudson and Morton 1969). Lithostratigraphy The boulder was found close to locality 3, excursion 21 of Bell and Harris (1986) where the succession youngs to the west. The Staffin Bay Formation is well exposed at this locality allowing much detail of the section to be recorded (Fig. 1). The boulder consisted of a 60 cm-thick medium to coarse-grained sandstone containing. . .


We analyse impacts of the rising labor force participation of women on the gender wage gap. We formulate and structurally estimate an equilibrium model of the labor market in which the elasticity of substitution between male and female labor is allowed to vary depending on the task content of occupations. We find that the elasticity of substitution is higher in high- paying occupations that are intensive in abstract and analytical tasks than in low-paying manual and routine occupations. Consistent with this we find a narrowing of the gender wage gap towards the upper end of the wage distribution and an increase in the gender wage gap at the low end. Demand side trends favoured women and this attenuated the supply-driven downward pressure on women's wages in low-paying occupations, and fully counteracted it in high-paying occupations. The paper contributes new evidence on the distribution of the gender wage gaps, and contributes to a wider literature on technological change, occupational sorting, wage inequality and polarization.


In this article, I argue against Dominic McIver Lopes's claim that nobody needs a theory of art. On the one hand, I will demonstrate that Lopes's alternative to theories of art – namely, the buck-passing theory of art– is neither more viable nor more fruitful: it is likewise incapable of resolving disagreement over the status of certain artefacts and of being fruitful for the broader field of the arts. On the other hand, I will defend the view that we are in need of a viable theory of art. The concept of art has a profound impact on our cultural practices. Concepts of art in use now showcase biased and arbitrary features. Correspondingly, certain artefacts and practices are excluded from the domain of art without adequate justification. Therefore, I will argue, it is unwarranted to abandon the search for a viable theory of art.


A clinical isolate of Campylobacter jejuni, previously found to produce a toxin active in cell culture assays, was used for identification and characterisation of a cytotoxic porin-lipopolysaccharide (LPS) complex. This cytotoxic complex was isolated by high-performance liquid chromatography of crude concentrated culture supernate and DEAE-anion exchange chromatography. The complex had a toxic activity of 20.1 tissue culture dose50 (TCD50)/microg of protein for HEp-2 cells, 7.49 TCD50/microg of protein for HeLa cells and 1.87 TCD50/microg of protein for Chinese hamster ovary cells. Analysis by SDS-PAGE revealed a single protein band of 45 kDa and a high mol. wt carbohydrate moiety. The complex gave a positive result in the Limulus amoebocyte lysate test, indicating that the co-purifying carbohydrate was LPS, and had specificity for the lectins Galanthus nivalis agglutinin, Maackia amurensis agglutinin and Datura stramonium agglutinin. The cytotoxic activity associated with the complex was heat-labile at 70 degrees C, resistant to inactivation with trypsin and retained activity after treatment with sodium metaperiodate and the glycosidases neuraminidase and N-glycosidase F. Sequencing of the N-terminus of the protein component of the complex revealed 97% homology with the major outer-membrane porin protein from C. jejuni. The cytotoxic activity of the complex was neutralised by a polyclonal, homologous antiserum, which reacted on Western blot with the 45-kDa protein, but not by polyclonal antisera raised against a number of other bacterial toxins.


The first permanent molar (FPM) plays an essential role in the masticatory function by contributing to the implementation and the maintenance of the occlusion. However, it is considered as the most frequently affected and the earliest affected tooth by caries; 27.4% of the 6–8 years old children have developed at least one cavity on one of the four first permanent molars, according to a study conducted among 3276 school children in Casablanca .Therefore, the FPM should benefit from special vigilance on the part of the practitioner to ensure that any early carious lesion is intercepted. In addition, the FPM, due to its period of mineralization coinciding with early childhood diseases, can erupt with a structural abnormality. Molar incisor hypomineralization (MIH) is considered to be the most common defects observed on first permanent molars among children. A study conducted among 1077 children aged 7–10 years enrolled in schools in Casablanca showed that 7.9% of children were affected with MIH. About 84.7% of the children had the four molars affected. Children with HIM had a significantly higher prevalence of caries: 78.8 versus 33.5%.These structural abnormalities of the enamel must be carried out earlier to ensure that the coronary anatomy is the least compromised.


An extensive update, this edition of "Amphibians and Reptiles in Kansas" includes, for the first time, 96 colour photographs of salamanders, frogs and toads, turtles, lizards and snakes, as well as a collection of black-and-white photographs. Also new in this edition is information on a snake recently discovered in Kansas, the Cottonmouth, and three more amphibians and reptiles. For each amphibian and reptile, the guide lists the standardised common name and the most current scientific name and information about identification, size, range in Kansas, habits and habitats, breeding, food and endangered or threatened status when relevant. A bibliography with more than 1,300 entries and a complete identification key are also included.


This study was conducted to provide insightsregarding the possible gender differences in the male and female students at tertiary level in term of information and communication technology use. The research was a descriptive in its nature. The objective of the study was to analyze the opportunities of access to Information and communication Technology (ICT) for male and female students at the university level. The population was the male and female students of the public sector universities of Pakistan. The purposive sampling technique was used to gather data from the faculty of social sciences of two public sector universities. Data were collected by administering a questionnaire based on aLikert- five point scale. The data were tabulated, analyzed and interpreted. The percentage, Chi Square and mean were applied to analyze the data. The results of the analyzed data revealed that gender differences existed regarding access to ICT among university students. Provision of necessary support for equal access to female students in ICTs through expansion of ICT infrastructure in the educational institutions particularly in universities, Computer Assisted Instructions (CAI) system and awareness about the use of ICTs is essential to overcome the identified gender inequality.


This study analyzes the different layers of the ''boundary work'' within Turkish private households employing migrant domestic workers originating from the Former Soviet Union countries. I suggest that in the specific encounter of these two categories, Turkish employers and female domestic workers from the Formet Soviet Union countries, symbolic boundaries are more determinative of employer/ employee relations in comparison to physical boundaries. The relative modesty of migrant domestic workers' wages entails a 'democratization' of the possibility of hiring migrant domestic workers. Hence, in many of these middle-class households, physical boundaries are either insufficient or inexistant. In addition, in some of the cases, we witness a contradictory class mobility. The situation is rendered even more complicated due to the incommensurability of cultural capitals acquired in different settings. Based on in-depth interviews with ten employers, and fourteen migrant domestic workers, this paper signals the emergence of a more interactive and dynamic employer/employee relationship in contemporary times. The possibility of transformation is due to the flexible nature of the new category of boundaries, i.e. symbolic boundaries. Depending on the quality/quantity of the interaction between the inside and the outside, the roles of both parties are constantly redistributed within the private households. In this sense, the substition of physical boundaries by symbolic boundaries can be interpreted both as a source of tension and a source of hope.


This paper investigates whether education is used as a signaling device for worker productivity in developing countries. To do such we employ a simple test of employer learning on Ghana manufacturing data. We find no evidence of educational signaling for individuals who were hired through direct contacts in the firm, and thus for workers for which employers arguably have more information about their true abilities. In contrast, education acts as signal for workers who were hired through more formal channels, although only for those that do not receive on-the-job-training.


This protocol is designed mainly for people working to reduce crime and improve justice in Latin America, but it discusses principles that can be used anywhere in the world. Those principles can be summarized as evidence-based crime prevention, a process by which good evidence on the facts of crime and its prevention is at the heart of theories and programs for promoting citizen security. "Evidence" in this sense is broadly defined as systematic factual observations of all kinds, not just as the forensic details of a criminal case. Evidence is the data developed by scientific methods to observe and predict any kind of truth, including facts about health, education, crime, and justice. A few key principles of evidence-based crime prevention are the following: crime must be measured reliably and precisely by well-audited systems; crime should be classified in whatever way supports crime prevention; and crime should be analyzed in multiple units or categories, including offenders, criminal networks, victims, micro-places (hot spots), communities, times, days of the week, and other categories.


Online communities have been proactive in producing collaborative creative content such as music, games and other social interactions. Online collaboration has enabled contributors to peer produce and share masses of creative content. Examples range from information sharing such as Wikipedia to open source software and other specific art projects. Software vendors have recently introduced low cost 2D and 3D content authoring tools allowing user communities to generate and share creative content. Emerging networking programming interfaces available inside modern game engines allow contributors to implement multiplayer or multiuser interaction relatively easily. This paper presents a 3D art creation framework to be used over networked infrastructure in a multiuser environment. Contributors will be able to create 3D sculptures at runtime, share with other users in a common networked working environment and critique each other's work.


ABSTRACT: Nutrient data from all available sources for the lower Mississippi River were examined for potential differences among sampling agencies and geographic locations for the period between 1960 and 1998. Monthly means grouped by parameter, sampling location and agency, were calculated and compared as paired sets, excluding those months where data were not available for both sets. Some significant differences were found between various agencies collecting nutrient data on the river, as well as between various stretches of river, especially in the case of phosphorus nutrient data. Results were used to synthesize data sets from which a history of nutrient loading in the Mississippi River was determined. General trends in nitrate+nitrite, total Kjeldahl nitrogen, orthophosphate, total phosphorus and silica loads, as well as changes in nutrient proportions and the specific limiting nutrient (by month) are reported. This study provides a useful summary of contemporary and historical nutrient data that may assist in the evaluation of Mississippi River water quality and its potential effect on the Gulf of Mexico.


Large retail companies operate large-scale systems which may consist of thousands of stores. These retail stores and their suppliers, such as warehouses and manufacturers, form a large-scale multi-item multi-echelon inventory supply network. Operations of this kind of inventory system require a large number of human resources, computing capacity, etc. In this research, three kinds of grouping techniques are investigated to make the largescale inventory system "easier" to manage. The first grouping technique is a network based ABC classification method. A new classification criterion is developed so that the inventory network characteristics are included in the classification process, and this criterion is shown to be better than the traditional annual dollar usage criterion. The second grouping technique is "NIT" classification, which takes into consideration the supply structure of the inventory item types. In order to have similar operations-related attributes for items within the same group, a network based K-Means clustering methodology is developed to cluster items based on distance measures. It is believed that there is no single best model or approach to solve the problems of the complex multi-item multi-echelon inventory systems of interest. Therefore, some combinations of different grouping techniques are suggested to handle these problems. The performance of the grouping techniques are evaluated based on effectiveness (grouping penalty cost and Sum of Squared Error) and efficiency (grouping time). Extensive experiments based on 1,024 different inventory system scenarios are carried out to evaluate the performance of the ABC classification, NIT classification, and the K-Means clustering techniques. Based on these experimental results, the characteristics of the 3 individual grouping techniques are summarized, and their performance compared. Based on the characteristics and performance of these grouping techniques, suggestions are made to select an appropriate grouping method.


A big technological change is inspiring fear and loathing in the masses. The peril is not a vaccine, a new variant of E. coli, or mishandled nuclear reactors. The peril is the smart meter. Just as activists once cried, "Ban the bomb!" they are now crying, "Ban the smart meter!"


1Considerable within-population variability of locomotor performance traits has been shown to exist in several species of squamate reptiles. In general, high values for speed and endurance are thought to have positive effects on the ability to capture prey, escape from predators, compete with conspecifics and acquire mates. On the other hand, variation in performance might trade-off with other components of fitness such that the net effect on Darwinian fitness is unpredictable.
2Gravid females of the common lizard (Lacerta vivipara) were captured and several phenotypic traits of their offspring measured immediately following birth. These were endurance, body length and body mass. Offspring were marked for individual identification, released into the field, and correlations between the phenotypic traits and their subsequent growth, activity and survival rate over the next months were then tested for. Parasitism by hematozoa was monitored and predation risk by tail losses estimated.
3It was found that individuals with a low endurance at birth tended to have reduced activity and growth rate, and higher parasite load; on the positive side, however, they experienced lower predation risk as assessed by tail losses. Conversely, individuals with a high endurance at birth had high activity and growth rates, low parasite load, but higher incidence of broken tails. Finally, endurance at birth was not correlated with survivorship up to the age of sexual maturity. Thus, individuals with varying locomotor endurance seem to exhibit behaviours that may result in the same level of Darwinian fitness.
4The possibility that our results reveal a trade-off between the risk of becoming infected with parasites when lizards are less active (which is related to having lower endurance) vs the risk of being predated when the lizards are more active (higher endurance) is discussed.


This document discusses security threats to network-based localized
mobility management. Threats may occur on two interfaces: the
interface between a localized mobility anchor and a mobile access
gateway, as well as the interface between a mobile access gateway and
a mobile node. Threats to the former interface impact the localized
mobility management protocol itself. This memo provides information
for the Internet community.


Climate models play a crucial role in understanding the effect of environmental and man-made changes on climate to help mitigate climate risks and inform governmental decisions. Large global climate models such as the Community Earth System Model (CESM), developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, are very complex with millions of lines of code describing interactions of the atmosphere, land, oceans, and ice, among other components. As development of the CESM is constantly ongoing, simulation outputs need to be continuously controlled for quality. To be able to distinguish a "climate-changing" modification of the code base from a true climate-changing physical process or intervention, there needs to be a principled way of assessing statistical reproducibility that can handle both spatial and temporal high-dimensional simulation outputs. Our proposed work uses probabilistic classifiers like tree-based algorithms and deep neural networks to perform a statistically rigorous goodness-of-fit test of high-dimensional spatio-temporal data.


Notice This document is disseminated under the sponsorship of the Department of Transportation in the interest of information exchange. The United States Government assumes no liability for its contents or use thereof. This report does not constitute a standard, specification, or regulation. The United States Government does not endorse products or manufacturers. Trade and manufacturers' names appear in this report only because they are considered essential to the object of the document.


Colour is an important factor in determining the aesthetic value, and hence the
economic value of flowers. Thus there is active research and development in
chemistry of colour pigments especially in flowers and in the breeding of cultivars for
preferred colors. Understanding the chemistry of colour pigments, especially the
changes in their composition and concentration as the flower develops, is essential as
a background for any attempt at genetic manipulation of flower colour. It is
important to know which pigments are normally present so that specific steps in their
synthesis can be targeted.
In this study the concentration of flavonoids in the flower of the orchid Oncidium
Taka, as it develops fiom the bud stage to the mature flower, was determined. Four
stages of flower development were arbitrarily selected, viz. the bud stage, partially
open flower, fully opened flower and the mature flower. The flavonoids were
extracted using methanol and the extract concentrated to dryness. The separation step
was by TLC followed by analysis using HPLC and UV Vis spectrophotometer. The
standard compounds for flavonoids were kaempferol, luteolin, naringenin and
myricetin.
The HPLC analysis result showed that kaempferol, luteolin and myricetin were
detected in at the level of 14.54 * 3.86, 1.80 0.27 and 3.04 * 1.51 pglg FW
respectively at the bud stage. Throughout the experiment, kaempferol concentration
decreased as the flower developed to maturity (0.12 0.03 pg/g FW). The same trend
was also observed for myricetin (0.24 * 0.1 1 pglg FW) at the third stage but
increased at the fourth stage. Luteolin on the other hand remained consistent at
approximately 1.35 * 0.44 pg/g FW throughout the development of the flower fiom
the bud to the mature stage. Naringenin could not be detected using HPLC at all
stages of flower development.
The qualitative analysis using TLC and W Vis spectrophotometer also indicated the
presence of kaempferol, luteolin and myricetin in Oncidium Taka petals extract.
Naringenin was only detected using TLC technique with solvent A (chloroform:acetic
acid:water (90:45:6 vlvlv)) and solvent C (chloroform:methanol(100:20 vlv)). All the
TLC plates were fumed with iodine vapour.