Chapter I: Literature review on the Temporomandibular joint (TMJ) and Temporomandibular disorders (TMD)
Chapter II: Systematic review of TMD in orthognathic patients
This review was conducted to investigate the prevalence of temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMD) in orthognathic patients and to determine the effect of the surgical intervention on the status of the temporomandibular joint (TMJ). A methodological process was applied for study selection, data management and quality assessment and meta-analyses were conducted where appropriate. This review identified 53 papers for inclusion and there was heterogeneity in the diagnosis and classification of TMD between the studies. Patients undergoing orthognathic treatment for the correction of dentofacial deformity and suffering from TMD appeared more likely to see an improvement in their signs and symptoms than deterioration, particularly with respect to pain related symptoms. This information should be given to prospective patients during the consent process, but it should be stressed that no guarantees can be made.
Chapter III: TMD in orthognathic patients and a control group with no skeletal discrepancies
Sixty eight orthognathic patients and 72 control subjects (with no anterior-posterior, vertical or transverse discrepancies) were recruited for this section of the PhD. Self-reported symptoms and clinical signs of TMD were recorded and compared between the two groups. A significant difference in TMD prevalence was observed between the controls (27.8%) and patients (44.1%), with the patients being more susceptible to TMD. However, although orthognathic patients appear more likely to suffer from TMD, whether treatment improves their TMJ condition is highly questionable. This issue should be highlighted in any informed consent process. Chapter IV: A longitudinal study of TMD in orthognathic patients
Twenty orthognathic patients were followed longitudinally throughout treatment to establish whether TMD signs and symptoms altered during the course of treatment. Although no significant differences were found when comparing the pre-treatment (T1) findings with those prior to surgery (T2), sufficient individual changes in TMD signs and symptoms were observed to question the suitability of the "prior to surgery" time point as a baseline for comparisons in future studies. When comparing pre (T1) and post-treatment (T3) TMD changes, no significant differences were observed. This study supports the theory that TMD is a dynamic condition and signs and symptoms are likely to fluctuate throughout treatment. However, the small sample size in this study was clearly a limiting factor.
Chapter V: TMJ information course: Comparison of the instructional efficacy of an internet-based TMJ tutorial with a traditional face-to-face seminar
A TMJ tutorial was developed on a virtual learning environment (VLE) to enable students to enhance their examination and diagnostic skills and a randomised cross-over trial was then conducted. Thirty postgraduate students were recruited as participants and the success of this mode of teaching was compared with a conventional face-to-face seminar. This study found that both modes of teaching were equally effective in delivering information to students but teaching the topic twice enhanced the retention of knowledge. In addition the students reported positive perceptions of VLE learning and the feedback for this mode of teaching was comparable with traditional methods of teaching.


Active network solutions have been proposed to many of the problems caused by the increasing heterogeneity of the Internet. These ystems allow nodes within the network to process data passing through in several ways. Allowing code from various sources to run on routers introduces numerous security concerns that have been addressed by research into safe languages, restricted execution environments, and other related areas. But little attention has been paid to an even more critical question: the effect on end-to-end security of active flow manipulation. This thesis first examines the threat model implicit in active networks. It develops a framework of security protocols in use at various layers of the networking stack, and their utility to multimedia transport and flow processing, and asks if it is reasonable to give active routers access to the plaintext of these flows. After considering the various security problem introduced, such as vulnerability to attacks on intermediaries or coercion, it concludes not. We then ask if active network systems can be built that maintain end-to-end security without seriously degrading the functionality they provide. We describe the design and analysis of three such protocols: a distributed packet filtering system that can be used to adjust multimedia bandwidth requirements and defend against denial-of-service attacks; an efficient composition of link and transport-layer reliability mechanisms that increases the performance of TCP over lossy wireless links; and a distributed watermarking servicethat can efficiently deliver media flows marked with the identity of their recipients. In all three cases, similar functionality is provided to designs that do not maintain end-to-end security. Finally, we reconsider traditional end-to-end arguments in both networking and security, and show that they have continuing importance for Internet design. Our watermarking work adds the concept of splitting trust throughout a network to that model; we suggest further applications of this idea.


We build an equilibrium model of commodity markets in which speculators are capital constrained, and commodity producers have hedging demands for commodity futures. Increases in producers' hedging demand or speculators' capital constraints increase hedging costs via price-pressure on futures. These in turn affect producers' equilibrium hedging and supply decision inducing a link between a financial friction in the futures market and the commodity spot prices. Consistent with the model, measures of producers' propensity to hedge forecasts futures returns and spot prices in oil and gas market data from 1979 to 2010. The component of the commodity futures risk premium associated with producer hedging demand rises when speculative activity reduces. We conclude that limits to financial arbitrage generate limits to hedging by producers, and affect equilibrium commodity supply and prices.


This study conducted a comparative analysis of benthic macroinvertebrate communities in the Fosu and Benya lagoons in Ghana, based on the anthropogenic effect on the two lagoons. Salinity, oxygen, temperature, conductivity, turbidity and pH were measured, invertebrate richness and species densities were determined. The AZTI Marine Biotic Index (AMBI) and multivariate statistics were used to determine the different responses of fauna to pollution. The fauna were categorized into five ecological groups based on the degree of tolerance of the different species to pollution: disturbancesensitive species; disturbance-indifferent species, disturbance-tolerant species, second-order opportunistic species; and first-order opportunistic species. The Fosu Lagoon supported more pollution tolerant species, whereas the Benya Lagoon had more species that were sensitive to organic enrichment under relatively unpolluted conditions. Chironomus sp., which is adapted to virtually anoxic conditions, was the most abundant in the Fosu Lagoon whereas Nemertea sp. was the most abundant in the Benya Lagoon. The numerical and relative abundance (%) of all 7 taxa in the Fosu Lagoon was 1,359 and 92.35%, respectively. The numerical and relative abundance (%) of all 34 taxa in the Benya Lagoon was 2,459 and 87.52%, respectively. Expectedly, the level of dissolved oxygen in the less saline Fosu Lagoon was higher than that in the more saline Benya Lagoon. The reduced photoperiod and photosynthetic activities of aquatic plants might account for this trend. There is a need to implement comprehensive monitoring and management initiatives for sustaining the ecological health of coastal lagoons in Ghana in order to support the many people that depend upon these ecosystems for their livelihood.


User review is a crucial component of open mobile app markets such as the Google Play Store. How do we automatically summarize millions of user reviews and make sense out of them? Unfortunately, beyond simple summaries such as histograms of user ratings, there are few analytic tools that can provide insights into user reviews. In this paper, we propose Wiscom, a system that can analyze tens of millions user ratings and comments in mobile app markets at three different levels of detail. Our system is able to (a) discover inconsistencies in reviews; (b) identify reasons why users like or dislike a given app, and provide an interactive, zoomable view of how users' reviews evolve over time; and (c) provide valuable insights into the entire app market, identifying users' major concerns and preferences of different types of apps. Results using our techniques are reported on a 32GB dataset consisting of over 13 million user reviews of 171,493 Android apps in the Google Play Store. We discuss how the techniques presented herein can be deployed to help a mobile app market operator such as Google as well as individual app developers and end-users.


Economics has firms maximizing value and people maximizing utility, but firms are run by people. Agency theory concerns the mitigation of this internal contradiction in capitalism. Firms need charters, regulations and laws to restrain those entrusted with their governance, just as economies need constitutions and independent judiciaries to restrain those entrusted with government. Agency problems distort capital allocation if corporate insiders are inefficiently selected or incentivized, and this hampers economic growth absent a legal system with appropriate constraints. However, political economy problems and agency problems in corporations may reinforce each other, compromising the quality of both corporate governance and government.


Cyanobacteria are ubiquitous prokaryotic microalgae, causing thick blooms and capable of producing lethal toxins and undesired malodorous metabolites. In aquatic systems used for recreation, tourism, aquaculture, or drinking purposes, proper identification of environmental isolates is essential to reconcile public– and ecosystem–health, social function, and business strategy. Objective. To isolate cyanobacteria from various sources, collect genetic information, identify novel genotypes, reconstruct phylogenetic relationships, and compare morphology– and DNA–based typing, to improve classification and identification.

Method. Cyanobacteria were isolated by serial dilutions, micromanipulation, sequential centrifugation, differential filtration, agar plate streaking. Microscopic identifications based on morphology, were compared to molecular results based on partial fragments of the small ribosomal subunit RNA gene (16S rDNA), the DNA-dependent RNA polymerase gene (rpoC1), and the phycocyanin operon (Cpc).

Results. Isolates belonged to the Nostocales (n=22), Chroococcales (n=7), and Oscillatoriales (n=6) subgroups. Morphological and molecular data were in agreement to the species– and genus–level for 26% and 37% of the isolates, respectively. For the remaining 40.0% of the strains, the consensus was at order–level or less. Of the 16S rDNA (n=31) and rpoC1 (n=19) sequences obtained, 32% were novel genotypes at each locus, showing respectively >1.2% or >5% genetic distance from previously known sequences.

Conclusions. This study confirms the extraordinary genetic diversity and morphological plasticity of cyanobacteria. Spontaneous or culture-induced pleomorphism, scarcity of reference sequences, and/or lateral gene transfer can hamper confident identification. This highlights the need for further collection of sequence data, improvement of classification, and combined microscopic/molecular approaches for management purposes or research.


Background and Purpose— Rates of cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) misdiagnosis in the emergency department and outcomes associated with misdiagnosis have been underexplored. Methods— Using administrative data, we identified adults with CVT at New York, California, and Florida hospitals from 2005 to 2013. Our primary outcome was probable misdiagnosis of CVT, defined as a treat-and-release emergency department visit for headache or seizure within 14 days before CVT. In addition, logistic regression was used to compare rates of clinical outcomes in patients with and without probable CVT misdiagnosis. We performed a confirmatory study at 2 tertiary care centers. Results— We identified 5966 patients with CVT in whom 216 (3.6%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.1%–4.1%) had a probable misdiagnosis of CVT. After adjusting for demographics, risk factors for CVT, and the Elixhauser comorbidity index, probable CVT misdiagnosis was not associated with in-hospital mortality (odds ratio, 0.14; 95% CI, 0.02–1.05), intracerebral hemorrhage (odds ratio, 0.97; 95% CI, 0.57–1.65), or unfavorable discharge disposition (odds ratio, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.61–1.32); a longer length of hospital stay was seen among misdiagnosed patients with CVT (odds ratio, 1.62; 95% CI, 1.04–2.50). In our confirmatory cohort, probable CVT misdiagnosis occurred in 8 of 134 patients with CVT (6.0%; 95% CI, 2.6%–11.4%). Conclusions— In a large, heterogeneous multistate cohort, probable misdiagnosis of CVT occurred in 1 of 30 patients but was not associated with the adverse clinical outcomes included in our study.


From the Publisher:
Cocoa is an object-oriented development environment available in Apple's Mac OS X environment. Mac OS X, a unified operating system and graphical operating environment, is the fastest growing Unix variant on the market today. Hard-core Unix programmers, developers who cut their teeth on classic Mac operating systems, and developers who cherished NeXTSTEP, the decade-old system on which today's Cocoa is based — all are flocking to Cocoa, and they need a lot more practical information than is currently available from Apple. There is a lot to learn. Building Cocoa Applications is an ideal book for serious developers who want to write programs for the Mac OS X using Cocoa. It's a no-nonsense, hands-on text that's filled with examples — not only simple and self-contained examples of individual Cocoa features, but extended examples of complete applications with enough sophistication and complexity that readers can put them to immediate use in their own environments. Building Cocoa Applications takes a step-by-step approach to teaching developers how to build real graphics applications using Cocoa. By showing the basics of an application in one chapter and then layering additional functionality onto that application in subsequent chapters, the book keeps readers interested and motivated. Readers will see immediate results, and then go on to build onto what they've already achieved. The book is divided into four major parts: Part I introduces the Mac OS X graphical user interface (Aqua) from a developer's point of view, Cocoa developer tools (such as the Interface Builder, Project Builder, and gdb debugger), object-oriented concepts, the Objective-C language inwhich Cocoa is written, and the basics of Cocoa programming itself. Part II focuses on building the first complete application, Calculator, a simple four-function calculator. The chapters in this part of the book extend the application, piece by piece, by introducing such features as nibs, icons, delegation, resizing, events, and responders. Part III focuses on building an application called MathPaper, which is similar to a word processor but which instead solves mathematical expressions the user supplies. The chapters in this part of the book extend MathPaper by developing both the front and back ends using a variety of Cocoa classes and methods. They introduce Cocoa'sdocument-based architecture, tasks, pipes, Rich Text format, handling document files, and using Quartz to draw in windows. Part IV focuses on building the GraphPaper application, a more complex multithreading application that graphs mathematical functions in multiple dimensions and that uses mouse-over capabilities to identify graph points. The chapters in this part of the book add more advanced Mac OS X features such as multithreading, color, mouse events, zoom buttons, pasteboards, services, preferences, and the defaults database. By the end of the book, readers who have built the applications as they have read will have a solid understanding of what it really means to develop complete and incrementally more complex Cocoa applications. The book comes with extensive source code available for download from the O'Reilly web site, along with an appendix listing additional resources for further study.


In this paper, the challenges of translating Arabic into Bangla and finding any possible means are tried to some great extent. Translation is at all times a very tough task and confronted with various issues. Since translation is one of the most intricate and subtle areas of language studies, translators must be aware of both the surface and underlying relations of language. The characteristic elements are also transferred from one language into the other through translation. Translation from Arabic to Bangla or vice versa creates a lot of difficulties because these two languages are of different and distant origins though translation between two languages from the same origin has fewer difficulties. The problems of translation falls under five major areas of language: syntactic, semantic, stylistic, phonological and usage. So, this research paper focuses on some need-based discussion regarding translating the Arabic text, specially the language, into Bangla. To help the non-native users of the two languages understand better, the IPA transcription as well as English meaning is also provided where necessary.


Key issue in time series forecasting with Neural Networks (NN) is the selection of the relevant input variables, which is often the result of data exploration by human experts, leading to dataset specific solutions and limiting forecasting automation. This becomes even more important in heterogeneous datasets, where each time series requires special modeling and can exhibit a different variety of stochastic and deterministic components of different unknown frequencies. Fully automated forecasting with NNs requires a methodology that can address these issues in an entirely data driven approach. This paper proposes a fully automated input selection methodology based on a novel iterative NN filter that automatically identifies for each time series the seasonal frequencies, if such are present, the dynamic structure of the time series, distinguishing between stochastic and deterministic components, ultimately producing a parsimonious set of input variables. The robustness and performance of the algorithm are evaluated against established time series forecasting methods.


Recently, brain-inspired spiking neuron networks (SNNs) have attracted widespread research interest because of their event-driven and energy-efficient characteristics. Still, it is difficult to efficiently train deep SNNs due to the non-differentiability of its activation function, which disables the typically used gradient descent approaches for traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). Although the adoption of surrogate gradient (SG) formally allows for the back-propagation of losses, the discrete spiking mechanism actually differentiates the loss landscape of SNNs from that of ANNs, failing the surrogate gradient methods to achieve comparable accuracy as for ANNs. In this paper, we first analyze why the current direct training approach with surrogate gradient results in SNNs with poor generalizability. Then we introduce the temporal efficient training (TET) approach to compensate for the loss of momentum in the gradient descent with SG so that the training process can converge into flatter minima with better generalizability. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that TET improves the temporal scalability of SNN and induces a temporal inheritable training for acceleration. Our method consistently outperforms the SOTA on all reported mainstream datasets, including CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet. Remarkably on DVS-CIFAR10, we obtained 83$\%$ top-1 accuracy, over 10$\%$ improvement compared to existing state of the art. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/Gus-Lab/temporal_efficient_training}.


Land degradation is widespread and a serious threat affecting the livelihoods of 1.5 billion people worldwide of which one sixth or 250 million people reside in drylands. Globally, it is estimated that 10–20% of drylands are already degraded and about 12 million ha are degraded each year. Driven by unsustainable land use practices, adverse climatic conditions and population increase, land degradation has led to decline in provision of ecosystem services, food insecurity, social and political instability and reduction in the ecosystem's resilience to natural climate variability. Several global initiatives have been launched to combat land degradation, including rehabilitation of degraded drylands. This review aimed at collating the current state-of-knowledge about rehabilitation of degraded drylands. It was found that the prospect of restoring degraded drylands is technically promising using a suite of passive (e.g. area exclosure, assisted natural regeneration, rotational grazing) and active (e.g. mixed-species planting, framework species, maximum diversity, and use of nurse tree) rehabilitation measures. Advances in soil reclamation using biological, chemical and physical measures have been made. Despite technical advances, the scale of rehabilitation intervention is small and lacks holistic approach. Development of processbased models that forecast outcomes of the various rehabilitation activities will be useful tools for researchers and practitioners. The concept of forest landscape restoration approach, which operates at landscape-level, could also be adopted as the overarching framework for rehabilitation of degraded dryland ecosystems. The review identified a data gap in cost-benefit analysis of rehabilitation interventions. However, the cost of rehabilitation and sustainable management of drylands is opined to be lower than the losses that accrue from inaction, depending on the degree of degradation. Thus, local communities' participation, incorporation of traditional ecological knowledge, clear division of tasks and benefits, strengthening local institutions are crucial not only for cost-sharing, but also for the long-term success of rehabilitation activities.


"What makes for a good model?" In various forms, this question is a question that, undoubtedly, many people, businesses, and institutions ponder with regards to their particular domain of modeling. One particular domain that is wrestling with this question is the multidisciplinary field of environmental modeling. Examples of environmental models range from models of contaminated ground water flow to the economic impact of natural disasters, such as earthquakes. One of the distinguishing claims of the field is the relevancy of environmental modeling to policy and environment-related decision-making in general. A pervasive view by both scientists and decision-makers is that a "good" model is one that is an accurate predictor. Thus, determining whether a model is "accurate" or "correct" is done by comparing model output to empirical observations. The expected outcome of this process, usually referred to as "validation" or "ground truthing," is a stamp on the model in question of "valid" or "not valid" that serves to indicate whether or not the model will be reliable before it is put into service in a decision-making context. In this paper, I begin by elaborating on the prevailing view of model validation and why this view must change. Drawing from concepts coming out of the studies of science and technology, I go on to propose a contextual view of validity that can overcome the problems associated with "ground truthing" models as an indicator of model goodness. The problem of how we talk about and determine model validity has much to do about how we perceive the utility of environmental models. In the remainder of the paper, I argue that we should adopt ideas of pragmatism in judging what makes for a good model and, in turn, developing good models. From such a perspective of model goodness, good environmental models should facilitate communication, convey  not bury or "eliminate"  uncertainties, and, thus, afford the active building of consensus decisions, instead of promoting passive or self-righteous decisions.


Nationalism, untempered by limits, is a claim of right to power. By the end of the eighteenth century, the revolutionaries of America and France had replaced the sacred authority of the divine right of kings with that of"the people." Allying themselves to this new democratic authority, nineteenthcentury nationalists asserted the right to power over specified territories and districts. In many places, and especially in eastern and central Europe, imperial history left an irregular settlement pattern with communities of different languages and histories living in close proximity. As bureaucracy and literacy spread, the fight to control the language or religious content of public education and public service became the lightning conductors that galvanized whole populations into different political nations. The only possible outcome was a web of interconnected and competing claims to authority, each asserting a claim whose right was understood to be absolute and non-negotiable. Nationalism in these circumstances is not just like religion, it is religion


Polygodial, a drimane sesquiterpenoid dialdehyde isolated as a pungent component of the water pepper Persicaria hydropiper, exhibits antifeedant, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory and anticancer effects. Polygodial also activates transient receptor potential vanilloid subtype 1 (TRPV1) channels. Previously, we described the synthesis of a C12-Wittig derivative of polygodial, termed P3, with significant antiproliferative effects against multiple cancer types including oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). In the present study, a more potent derivative, P27, with superior anti-proliferative effects in vitro and antitumor effects in Cal-27 derived xenografts is described. Polygodial, P3, and P27 all significantly decreased OSCC tumor growth, with P27 being equipotent with polygodial and P3 being the least efficacious. However, neither analog elicited the adverse effect observed with polygodial: Profound transient inflammation. Although P3 and P27 pharmacophores are based on polygodial, novel effects on OSCC cell cycle distribution were identified and shared anticancer effects that are independent of TRPV1 activity were observed. Polygodial elicits an S-phase block, whereas P3 and P27 lead to G2/M phase arrest. Pretreatment of OSCC cells with the TRPV1 antagonist capsazepine does not affect the antiproliferative activity of P3 or P27, indicating that TRPV1 interactions do not regulate OSCC cell proliferation. Indeed, calcium imaging studies identified that the analogs neither activate nor antagonize TRPV1. Behavioral studies using a rat model for orofacial pain confirmed that these analogs fail to induce nocifensive responses, indicating that they are non-noxious in vivo. All compounds induced a significant concentration-dependent decrease in the mitochondrial transmembrane potential and corresponding apoptosis. Considering that P27 is equipotent to polygodial with no TRPV1-associated adverse effects, P27 may serve as an efficacious novel therapy for OSCC.


This paper describes a system where Internet-enabled sensor technology was integrated into a context-aware platform to give viewers of sport events an enriched media experience. The system was developed as a proof of concept and was evaluated during real-life use at the Vasaloppet crosscountry ski event. Using Bluetooth wireless ad-hoc networking and GPRS technology, sensor data was transmitted from contestants to the context-aware platform Alipes, which in turn presented the sport event viewer with a personalized, context-aware view. In this paper, we discuss the system architecture and integration of components. The system was evaluated both from technical and user perspectives, where the evaluation results confirm our approach to be technically feasible and that the system provide an enriched media-experience for the majority of viewers.


Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a condition that can be diagnosed and for which medication and treatment are often prescribed, with the implication that a person can be 'made better'. However, the problems and challenges facing children with ADHD may not be overcome and may continue into adulthood, affecting life chances. In this paper we take a narrative research approach and present the life experiences of a young adult, Jake, who was diagnosed with ADHD at a very young age and prescribed medication. Following a Statement of Educational Need, Jake received support, with varying degrees of understanding, at primary school. Secondary school provided a different set of challenges for Jake, with a variable level of support from both peers and educational professionals. Since leaving school he found both success and difficulty in managing life on a daily basis. Jake's story illustrates that although UK support systems for children and young people may have evolved, such systems do not always support young adults. Young adults with ADHD do not seem to elicit the levels of support or indeed care that are appropriate to the challenges of living a life as an adult with ADHD.


Objectives: To compare the effectiveness of two treatment methods of 'combination pharmacological treatment and treadmill training' and 'pharmacological treatment' on management of multiple sclerosis (MS) female patients. Methods: In this quasi experimental and interventional study a sample of 20 MS patients (mean age: 36.75 years) with Expanded Disability Status Scale scores (EDSS) 1.0 to 4.0 were randomly assigned to a 'pharmacologic treatment' (Ph) group and a combination group of 'pharmacologic treatment& treadmill training' (PhTT). All these individuals used the drugs of choice 'Rebif' and 'Avonex'. The intervention consisted of 8-weeks (24 sessions) of treadmill training (30 minutes each), at 40 - 75% of age-predicted maximum heart rate for the PhTT group. The Ph group followed their own routine treatment program. Balance, speed and endurance of walking, quality of life and fatigue were measured by Berg Balance Score, 10 meter timed walk test, 2 minute walk test, and Fatigue Severity Scale (FFS).Data were analyzed by paired t test and one way ANOVA. Results: Comparison of results indicated that pre and post intervention led to significant improvements in the balance score (P=0.001), 10m walk time (P=0.001), walking endurance (P=0.007), and FFS (P=0.04) in the PhTT group. In contrast, no significant changes were observed in the Ph group's balance score, 10m timed walk and fatigue, while there was a significant decrease in the 2min walking distance (P=0.015) in this group. Conclusion: These results suggest that treadmill training in combination with pharmacological treatment improve balance and walking capacity and level of fatigue in women with mild to moderate MS.


This paper studies the evaluation of policies that recommend an ordered set of items (e.g., a ranking) based on some context---a common scenario in web search, ads, and recommendation. We build on techniques from combinatorial bandits to introduce a new practical estimator that uses logged data to estimate a policy's performance. A thorough empirical evaluation on real-world data reveals that our estimator is accurate in a variety of settings, including as a subroutine in a learning-to-rank task, where it achieves competitive performance. We derive conditions under which our estimator is unbiased---these conditions are weaker than prior heuristics for slate evaluation---and experimentally demonstrate a smaller bias than parametric approaches, even when these conditions are violated. Finally, our theory and experiments also show exponential savings in the amount of required data compared with general unbiased estimators.


This brief review addresses the existing systems and challenges and provides future recommendations on computer- and biosensor-assisted rehabilitation systems for physically disabled patients. We further list the types of sensors, technical issues, and different software and hardware technologies that are currently used in rehabilitation systems to make the whole process dynamic and real-time. The review focused on 36 consolidated studies that were found using the following keywords: rehabilitation system, sensor, and computer. The electronic databases PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar were searched for relevant articles that were published from 2007 through 2012. These published articles included discussion of several biosensors, automated rehabilitation systems, and the application of these systems in the affected body parts of the individuals. We found that 54 types of biosensors have been used for real-time and computer-assisted rehabilitation systems. The findings suggest that there are still some body parts (such as the muscle tendons area and abdomen) and application areas (e.g., post- and pre-pregnancy) that have not yet been targeted by biosensor-supported medical rehabilitation systems aided by suitable hardware, software, and other assistive technologies.


First-principles design and directed evolution expand the role of enzymes in chemical synthesis. The versatility and proficiency of enzymes makes them promising catalysts for the laboratory and for industrial synthesis of organic molecules, yet natural biocatalysts often do not meet the scientists and engineers' expectations in regards to stability, selectivity, and specificity. On pages 309 and 305 of this issue, two different approaches show how enzymes can be engineered to make them part of the organic chemist's toolkit. Using a first-principles approach, Siegel et al. (1) applied the Rosetta design software to create an enzyme that performs the stereoselective, intermolecular Diels-Alder cycloaddition, a reaction of great value to organic synthetic chemistry. In contrast, Savile et al. (2) used structure-based rational design and directed evolution to reprogram the substrate specificity and stability of a native transaminase to replace a rhodium-based hydrogenation catalyst in the production of an antidiabetes compound, sitagliptin.


In many collaborative systems, researchers are interested in creating representative user profiles. In this paper, we are particularly interested in using social labeling and automatic keyword extraction techniques for generating user profiles. Social labeling is a process in which users manually tag other users with keywords. Automatic keyword extraction is a technique that selects the most salient words to represent a user's contribution. We apply each of these two profile generation methods to highly active Wikipedia editors and their contributions, and compare the results. We found that profiles generated through social labeling matches the profiles generated via automatic keyword extraction, and vice versa. The results suggest that user profiles generated from one method can be used as a seed or bootstrapping proxy for the other method.


The shared cloud-based computing paradigm has experienced enormous growth. Multitenant clouds are conventionally built atop datacenters that utilize commodity hardware connected hierarchically with standard network protocols. Piton is a 25-core manycore processor that takes a different perspective, rethinking the architecture of datacenters and specializing processor architecture for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. The tile-based manycore processor is designed not only as a single chip, but as a large-scale system. Up to 8,192 chips (204,800 cores) can be seamlessly connected in a flat topology, maintaining a packet-switched network fabric both on and off chip. Shared memory is supported across arbitrary cores in the system, both intrachip and interchip, enabling flexibility and fine-grained resource allocation in shared systems. Piton also targets energy efficiency, critical to datacenters, using a modified multithreaded OpenSPARC T1 core enhanced with an energy-efficient drafting mode. To further facilitate sharing and increase utility for IaaS users and providers, a novel memory traffic shaper partitions bandwidth among cores or applications. Piton reimagines the datacenter architecture, breaking down barriers between chips, nodes, and racks, and enables flexibility, performance, and energy efficiency at scale. Piton has also been open sourced as a research platform called OpenPiton to enable practical full-system manycore research.


Paid and volunteer crowd work have emerged as a means for harnessing human intelligence for performing diverse tasks. However, little is known about the relative performance of volunteer versus paid crowd work, and how financial incentives influence the quality and efficiency of output. We study the performance of volunteers as well as workers paid with different monetary schemes on a difficult real-world crowdsourcing task. We observe that performance by unpaid and paid workers can be compared in carefully designed tasks, that financial incentives can be used to trade quality for speed, and that the compensation system on Amazon Mechanical Turk creates particular indirect incentives for workers. Our methodology and results have implications for the ideal choice of financial incentives and motivates further study on how monetary incentives influence worker behavior in crowdsourcing.


Sornette et al. (1996), Sornette and Johansen (1997), Johansen et al. (2000) and Sornette (2003a) proposed that, prior to crashes, the mean function of a stock index price time series is characterized by a power law decorated with log-periodic oscillations, leading to a critical point that describes the beginning of the market crash. This paper reviews the original Log-Periodic Power Law (LPPL) model for financial bubble modelling, and discusses early criticism and recent generalizations proposed to answer these remarks. We show how to fit these models with alternative methodologies, together with diagnostic tests and graphical tools to diagnose financial bubbles in the making in real time. An application of this methodology to the Gold bubble which busted in December 2009 is then presented.


Securities regulation wears two hats: Its "upstream" side governs firms in connection with their obtaining financing in the securities markets. That is, it regulates firms' — issuers' — offers and sales of securities, whether in public offerings to retail investors or in private offerings to institutional investors. Its "downstream" side, by contrast, governs financial services providers, who assist with investors' activities in those markets: Their services include providing advice as to securities investments, as investment advisers do; aggregating investors' assets for purposes of enabling those investors to invest their assets collectively, as mutual funds do; and acting as "middlemen" between buyers and sellers of securities, as broker-dealers do. Yet neither scholars nor policymakers have adequately understood that the regulation of financial services providers under the securities laws is substantively different from the regulation of issuers. They have not, in other words, adequately understood downstream securities regulation.The problems arising from this oversight are evident in laws and rules designed to protect investors from the excesses of brokerage firms, fraudulent conduct in the mutual fund industry, and hedge-fund managers' self-interested conduct, as well as in those enacted in the wake of Enron's bankruptcy and other corporate scandals. Moreover, the harm to investors is real: Brokerage firm customers have struggled for the return of their deposited funds after the firm's bankruptcy; mutual fund shareholders have suffered from market timing scandals; when tasked with remedying harms to shareholders of financial services firms, the potency of antifraud statutes has been muted. This Article is the first scholarly work to articulate how securities regulation encompasses two distinct spheres of regulation, each of which is based on its own core principles — and, importantly, each of which necessitates its own regulatory approaches. The Article contends that policymakers' longstanding failure to recognize that securities regulation is bimodal has produced a securities regulatory regime scattershot with flaws and vulnerabilities. Securities regulation could become substantially better with a more complete understanding of how it works — how all parts of it work.


This study examines Old English terms for ships and parts of ships, i.e. it deals with any type of ship which was spoken about in Anglo-Saxon England. This includes well-known seagoing ships as well as inland craft, native boats as well as the ships of foreign traders and raiders. The study revives the old German tradition of 'word-and-object' study in order to contribute to a holistic understanding of the shipbuilding and seafaring traditions of the period. The main emphasis lies on the linguistic analysis of the terms, which are then compared with the documentary, material and iconographic record. The author hopes that this may help to close gaps in our understanding of the evidence and that it may bring some more light into the English "Dark Ages".


Charles Otis Whitman [5] was an extremely curious and driven researcher who was not content to limit himself to one field of expertise. Among the fields of study to which he made significant contributions were: embryology [6]; morphology [7], or the form of living organisms and the relationships between their structures; natural history [8]; and behavior. Whitman served as director of several programs and institutions, including the Biology Department at the University of Chicago [9], where he helped establish a new style of biology and influenced the work of many researchers of his generation, as well as future ones. He also served as first director of the Marine Biological Laboratory [10] (MBL) in Woods Hole [11], MA. Besides his considerable achievements with his own scientific research, Whitman was a tireless mentor who had many students who went on to achieve great success in the field of embryology [6].


World authority on astrophysics, Sir Martin Rees, takes us on a journey through all the things which could wipe out mankind in the near future. From asteroids to disease to scientific discoveries gone wrong (from nanobots to the large Hadron collider) these are scenarios from disaster movies, analysed with a serious scientific eye. Some of these things definitely won't happen, some genuinely might - this is one book you won't be able to put down and which you'll never forget.


This determinates Zinc (II) ion in variably samples by using methods flow injection and sequential injection systems which laboratory. The FIA and SIA systems depend on the base reaction of Zinc (II) ion with dithizone complex in aqueous phase in the presence of SDS anionic (sodium dodecyl sulphate) at pH=5 with absorption maximum at 565 nm. The factors (physical and chemical) effecting on the determination such as flow rats, reaction coil length, the volume of reagent (dithizone), the volume of sample, interference, the concentration of dithizone also. Attended the calibration curve and studied dispersion coefficient, reproducibility, application. Compared results methods FIA and SIA consecutively for determination of Zinc (II) by dithizone, the linear range was (2-10 mg/l), (1-15 mg/l), at sampling rate 70, 64 sample per hour, the detection limits (1.6746 mg/l), (0.1934 mg/l) for FIA and SIA respectively. Relative standard deviation for (10 mg/l), n=10 were found (0.8491 mg/l) for FIA and for SIA (0.5089 mg/l). Dispersion coefficient also has been studied in these methods.


Enterocytozoon bieneusi is most common of microsporidian species that infects many types of cells including human and animals. These organisms are causing long lasting diarrhea primarily in immunocompromised patients but microsporidiosis is also higher in immunocompetent individuals. The previous study of microsporidial infection is mostly focused on immunodeficiency or immunosuppressive individuals. Information regarding microsporidial infections among immunocompetent individuals is lacking. Hence, this cross sectional study was carried out to determine prevalence of E. bieneusi infection and to find out the occurrence of E. bieneusi according to age group and gender among the Proto-Malay and Senoi tribes in Sungai Lembing, Pahang, Malaysia. Stool samples were collected from 209 voluntary participants; 96 males and 113 females that aged between one to 85 years old. Demographic data, socioeconomic, environmental, and behavioral information was collected by using pre-tested questionnaire. Overall prevalence of E. bieneusi infection was 3.83 % (8/209). From the observation, majority of individual infected with E. bieneusi was male (8.33 %) can be observed in those aged ≥15 years old. These samples were detected Small Subunit rDNA gene by using Polymerase chain reaction amplification with specific primer EBIEF1 and EBIER1, as demonstrated by an amplicon of 607-bp. This is the first report of E. bieneusi in Malaysia. It is hoped that these findings will allow greater emphasis from public health authorities through public education on personal hygiene and the consumption of boiled or filtered water in order to reduce the infection.


Abstract. Particle extinction-to-backscatter
ratio (lidar ratio) is a key parameter for a correct interpretation of
elastic lidar measurements. Of particular importance is the determination of
the lidar ratio of the Saharan Air Layer mineral dust transported into the
free troposphere over the North Atlantic region. The location of the two sun
photometer stations managed by the Izaña Atmospheric Research Centre
(IARC) on the island of Tenerife and a decade of available micropulse lidar
(MPL) data allow us to determine the lidar ratio under almost pure-dust
conditions. This result can be considered representative of the Saharan dust
transported westward over the North Atlantic in the subtropical belt. Three different methods have been used to calculate the lidar ratio in this
work: (1) using the inversion of sky radiance measurements from a sun–sky
photometer installed at the Izaña Observatory (2373 m a.s.l.) under
free-troposphere conditions; (2) the one-layer method, a joint determination using
a micropulse lidar sited at the Santa Cruz de Tenerife sea-level station and
photometric information considering one layer of aerosol characterized by a
single lidar ratio; and (3) the two-layer method, a joint determination using the
micropulse lidar and photometric information considering two layers of
aerosol with two different lidar ratios. The one-layer method only uses data from
a co-located photometer at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, while the two-layer
conceptual approach incorporates photometric information at two heights from
the observatories of Izaña and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The almost pure-dust
lidar ratio retrieval from the sun–sky photometer and from the two-layer
method give similar results, with lidar ratios at 523 nm of 49 ± 6 and
50 ± 11 sr. These values obtained from a decade of data
records are coincident with other studies in the literature reporting
campaigns in the subtropical North Atlantic region. This result shows that
the two-layer method is an improved conceptual approach compared to the
single-layer approach, which matches the real lower-troposphere
structure well. The two-layer method is able to retrieve reliable lidar ratios and
therefore aerosol extinction profiles despite the inherent limitations of
the elastic lidar technique. We found a lack of correlation between lidar ratio and Ångström
exponent (α), which indicates that the dust lidar ratio can be
considered independent of dust size distribution in this region. This finding
suggests that dust is, under most atmospheric conditions, the predominant
aerosol in the North Atlantic free troposphere, which is in agreement with
previous studies conducted at the Izaña Observatory.


The marriage of analytic power to geometric intuition drives many of today's mathematical advances, yet books that build the connection from an elementary level remain scarce. This engaging introduction to geometric measure theory bridges analysis and geometry, taking readers from basic theory to some of the most celebrated results in modern analysis. The theory of sets of finite perimeter provides a simple and effective framework. Topics covered include existence, regularity, analysis of singularities, characterization and symmetry results for minimizers in geometric variational problems, starting from the basics about Hausdorff measures in Euclidean spaces and ending with complete proofs of the regularity of area-minimizing hypersurfaces up to singular sets of codimension 8. Explanatory pictures, detailed proofs, exercises and remarks providing heuristic motivation and summarizing difficult arguments make this graduate-level textbook suitable for self-study and also a useful reference for researchers. Readers require only undergraduate analysis and basic measure theory.


The tendency of capitalist modernity to impose predictable, homogenous and linear representations of time for economic productivity has made it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to effectively respond to catastrophic environmental changes that are emergent, sudden, non-linear and unpredictable. A confusion between the actions and consequences of environmental change, and socialized representations of time and space within which humans must respond to such changes, not only paralyses possible solutions within fixed imaginaries but is also out of synch with the perpetual coming-into-being of socionature entanglements. The multiple temporalities coordinating interactions of humans and non-human natures are instead fetishized and made governable, commensurable and reproducible through the mechanistic intervals of the clock. We argue that the desire for transformative system change can be found in temporal desynchronizations to clock Time (capital T) and that political strategies to responding to socio-ecological crises reside in alter-temporalities (lower t time) of emergent socionature relations. Through an example of the desynchronized temporalities of tinawon rice production, we show how alter-temporalities emerge to reclaim cultural and food sovereignty from the otherwise flattening effects of modernity. We highlight the futuring potentials of such temporalities and their implication within ongoing debates between ecomodernists and those advocating limits to growth. Given that continuing to act in the Time of capital evidently fails to bring about system change and even aids in perpetuating our crises, we claim that responding in time (lower t) is itself a political act in raising the possibility for more convivial and life-affirming futures.


This report has been prepared to present the case study project conducted by the
author for the final semester course of his UPM/YPM off-campus program for the degree
of Master in Business Administration (MBA). The two-year program was jointly
organised by the Faculty of Economics and Management, Universiti Putra Malaysia and
Yayasan Pe1ajaran Mara.
As the core subject of this case study, the author attempts to demonstrate the importance
of quality customer service to the performance of a business organization. The work
focusses on how customer service can be exploited as a strategic tool by a company to
gain competitive advantage in the open market environment.
For the case analysis, SWOT strategic analytical technique has been used to identify the
company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the formulation of various
alternative strategies as probable solutions to the problem. To verify the validity of the
alternative solution, another strategic analysis methodology called the SPACE Model was
used.
The evaluation and selection of the best alternative strategy was based on a qualitative
and quantitative methodology by using the Cost-Benefit analysis. In view of the current
economic scenario where most of the Asian countries are experiencing a sudden
downturn due to speculative attacks on their currencies, it become more difficult for
management to forecast the market outlook both in the short and long term perspective.In today's open market environment where globalization and liberalization were the rules
of the game in most of the world economics, a company regardless of its size, could not
afford to stay within its domestic shores in order to survive and excell in the ever
increasing competition
Despite the prevailing market instability, managers could strive to improve and maintain
the perfonnance of their company's businesses strategically through the promotion and
enforcement of quality customer service. Without good customer service, a company
would not be able to keep its competitive advantage even if the products offered are of
high quality standard.
Customer service would be the key focus in any business organization - today and the
future. The importance of its role is unarguable because it is the primary factor towards
achieving customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers will stay loyal to a company's
products and services and would be less likely to be influenced by the competitors.


I. Background Articulatory modeling is used to incorporate speech production information into automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. It is believed that solutions to the problems of co-articulation, pronunciation variations, and other speaking style related phenomena rest in how accurately we capture the production process. II. Objective In this work we present a novel approach for speech recognition that incorporates knowledge of the speech production process. We discuss our contribution on going from a purely statistical speech recognizer to one that is motivated by the physical generative process of speech. III. Methods We follow an analysis-by-synthesis approach. Firstly, we attribute a physical meaning to the inner states of the recognition system pertaining to the configurations the human vocal tract takes over time. We utilize a geometric model of the vocal tract, adapt it to our speakers, and derive realistic vocal tract shapes from electromagnetic articulograph (EMA) measurements in the MOCHA database. Secondly, we synthesize speech from the vocal tract configurations using a physiologically-motivated articulatory synthesis model of speech generation. Thirdly, the observation probability of the Hidden Markov Model (HMM), which is used for phone classification, is a function of the distortion between the speech synthesized from the vocal tract configurations and the real speech. The output of each state in the HMM is based on a mixture of density functions. Each density models the distribution of the distortion at the output of each vocal tract configuration. During training, we initialize the model parameters using ground-truth articulatory knowledge. During testing, only the acoustic data is used. IV. Results and conclusion We present phone classification results using our novel dynamic articulatory model and following our adaptation procedure. The table below shows phone error rates (PER) for a female and a male speaker. We use a three-state HMM with different observation densities and initialization techniques. We combine the probabilities of the baseline topology with the new ones. Our novel framework provides a 10.9% relative reduction in phone error rate over our baseline which uses MFCC features. This is achieved using the distortion features with linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and cepstral mean normalization (CMN). We conclude that incorporating articulatory knowledge in the combined statistical framework we devised contributes to lowering the error rates in speech recognition. Features (dimension) Topology Observation Prob / Initialization Female PER Male PER Both PER Improvement Baseline Features MFCC + CMN (13) 3S-128M-HMM Gaussian/VQ 61.6% 55.9% 58.8% Distortion Features (1024) (Prob. Combination with MFCC, α = 0.2) 3S-1024M-HMM Exponential/Flat Sparsity = 21% 57.6% 53.7% 55.7% 5.3% Distortion Features (1024) (Prob. Combination with MFCC, α = 0.2) 3S-1024M-HMM Exponential/EMA Sparsity = 51% 58.3% 53.9% 56.1% 4.6% Adapted Distortion Features (1024) (Prob. Combination with MFCC, α = 0.25) 3S-1024M-HMM Exponential/EMA Sparsity = 51% 58.4% 53.1% 55.7% 5.3% Distortion Features + LDA + CMN (20) (Prob. Combination with MFCC, α = 0.6) 3S-128M-HMM Gaussian/VQ Sparsity = 0% 54.9% 49.8% 52.4% 10.9%


EFSA is requested to assess the safety of a broad range of biological agents (including microorganisms and viruses) in the context of notifications for market authorisation as sources of food and feed additives, enzymes and plant protection products. The qualified presumption of safety (QPS) concept was developed by EFSA for its own use to provide a generic risk assessment approach applicable across EFSA's scientific Panels, for biological agents notified for intentional use in the whole food chain. The safety of unambiguously defined biological agents at the highest taxonomic unit that is appropriate for the purpose for which an application is intended are assessed, considering if the body of knowledge is sufficient. Identified safety concerns for a taxonomic unit could be reflected as 'qualifications' when considered appropriate for an inclusion on the QPS list. The list of QPS recommended biological agents is reviewed and updated annually. The 2010 update reviews the previously assessed microorganisms including bacteria, yeasts, filamentous fungi and viruses used for plant protection purposes. The recommendations of biological agents of the previous year were confirmed in the current update. Qualifications relating to the agents recommended for QPS were reviewed, clarified and updated where necessary. Specific sections dealing with antibiotic resistance relevant for QPS recommended microorganisms and yeast were included. The methodology used for carrying out the annual review of the list of QPS recommended biological agents was detailed. A list of microbial species from previous notifications and as notified to EFSA, annexed in this opinion, includes information on taxonomic units which are or are not recommended for the QPS list. This list of notifications aims to summarize and maintain important information for future assessments and updates


Synthetic fibers, such as glass fibers, in the form of fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composites have been extensively used for the repair and strengthening of existing concrete structures in the past three decades. As glass fibers come from a non-renewable resource, this research was conducted on flax fibers as a natural plant-based material and a potential replacement to glass fibers. The element of durability is a major concern with natural materials such as flax fibers. In this study, durability tests were conducted in order to investigate the long-term behavior of both glass and flax FRPs externally bonded to concrete beams. A total of 100 plain small-scale concrete beams (75×100×400mm) were prepared and bonded with flax and glass FRPs made of vinyl-ester resin. The test specimens were immersed into water solution and tested after 21, 42, and 63 days. There were also specimens kept in dry conditions and were used as control specimens. The temperature of the solutions were controlled at 20 and 60 °C. Five identical specimens were prepared and tested for each condition. The durability of the bond between the FRP and the concrete were studied under three-point bending. The weight of the specimens and the pH and temperature of the solutions were also observed. In general, the test results showed that the bond strength of the control specimens bonded with flax FRP was 20% weaker than their counterparts with glass FRP in air dry condition. After 63 days in water at 60 °C, the residual bond strength of the specimens bonded with flax FRP was 84% and with glass FRP was 90%; which were compatible with the overall moisture absorption of 2.79% and 2.35%, respectively.


The widespread practice of intervention by outside actors aimed at building 'sustainable peace' within societies ravaged by war has been a striking feature of the post-Cold War era. But, at a time when more peacekeepers are deployed around the world than at any other point in history, is the international will to intervene beginning to wane? And how capable are the systems that exist for planning and deploying 'peacebuilding' missions of fulfilling the increasingly complex tasks set for them? In Building Peace After War, Mats Berdal addresses these and other crucial questions, examining the record of interventions from Cambodia in the early 1990s to contemporary efforts in Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The book analyses the nature of the modern peacebuilding environment, in particular the historical and psychological conditions that shape it, and addresses the key tasks faced by outside forces in the early and critical 'post-conflict' phase of an intervention. In doing so, it asks searching questions about the role of military force in support of peacebuilding, and the vital importance of legitimacy to any intervention. Berdal also looks critically at the ways in which governments and international organisations, particularly the UN, have responded to these many challenges. He highlights the pivotal role of politics in planning peacebuilding operations, and offers some sober reflections on the future prospects for post-conflict intervention.


The term "politically correct" (PC) has the connotation of superior social and moral virtues over other political points of view. Stark and Favreau both reinforce this claim in different ways, Favreau by describing PC as "prosocial", Stark by describing PC as promoting "courtesy, respect, fairness, openness," etc. Were PC merely a self-righteous political position, we might tolerate it as a tedious fact of life. Unfortunately, that is not the case. What especially marks the PC philosophy and deservedly brings it under attack is its extreme intolerance for other positions, to the point of not allowing them to be heard. The fact that "zero tolerance" has been gleefully adopted as a slogan by many PC activists is a truer indication of the PC agenda than is its claims to the higher moral ground.To ensure that alternative viewpoints are not heard, PC activist groups have successfully installed in most academic institutions, tribunals which should horrify us. Under the guise of protecting persons from discrimination and harassment (who would argue against such laudable aims?), Race Relations and Sexual Harassment policies and the like have been passed and are being used as clubs to dictate how we should speak, how normal male-female interactions may occur, and so on. Dobson appears to suggest that the mere existence of such policies (most of which are in conflict with respected legal traditions), is a sufficient basis for adhering to them. However, the controversy surrounding these tribunals indicates that they pose a serious threat to academic freedom.Favreau's claim that recently publicized "isolated extreme" events at universities, where faculty have been unjustly charged, chastised and even dismissed are unfairly connected to PC philosophy, is disingenuous. Such events have in nearly all cases stemmed directly from the imposition of PC principles through extra-legal tribunals. So far from these being isolated events (see Furedy and Klatt for examples), they represent only the tip of the iceberg. Many similar less media-attracting events go on every day. The effect on professors who are not yet charged inevitably is to stifle free expression and discussion. Moreover, in the opinion of some, such policies, by nature of their intolerance and their vague wording, and when combined with unfair equity practices, have caused a deterioration in the collegial relations between men and women.Virtues like "merit" "honesty" "objectivity" "dedication", etc., do not seem to appear in the PC catalogue. Yet the stated purpose of universities is the pursuit, creation and dissemination of knowledge. These aims can be achieved by individuals who are not especially "prosocial" or "courteous", but they cannot be achieved without intelligence, hard work and a dedication to searching out the truth. Whatever the priorities prevailing outside the university, within it the chief aim and test of success is whether knowledge has been advanced, not whether the atmosphere is warm or chilly. A critical factor in such success must be the selection and rewarding of individuals who do this best, disregarding sex or race. …


I argue for the following four theses. (1) Denial is not to be analysed as the assertion of a negation. (2) Given the concepts of assertion and denial, we have the resources to analyse logical consequence as relating arguments with multiple premises and multiple conclusions. Gentzen's multiple conclusion calculus can be understood in a straightforward, motivated, non-question-begging way. (3) If a broadly anti-realist or inferentialist justification of a logical system works, it works just as well for classical logic as it does for intuitionistic logic. The special case for an anti-realist justification of intuitionistic logic over and above a justification of classical logic relies on an unjustified assumption about the shape of proofs. Finally, (4) this picture of logical consequence provides a relatively neutral shared vocabulary which can help us understand and adjudicate debates between proponents of classical and non-classical logics.


Petroleum hydrocarbons, notably diesel oil, are the main energy source for running amenities in the Antarctic region and are the major cause of pollution in this area. Diesel oil spills are one of the major challenges facing management of the Antarctic environment. Bioremediation using bacteria can be an effective and eco-friendly approach for their remediation. However, since the introduction of non-native organisms, including microorganisms, into the Antarctic or between the distinct biogeographical regions within the continent is not permitted under the Antarctic Treaty, it is crucial to discover native oil-degrading, psychrotolerant microorganisms that can be used in diesel bioremediation. The primary aim of the current study is to optimize the conditions for growth and diesel degradation activity of an Antarctic local bacterium, Arthrobacter sp. strain AQ5-05, using the Plackett-Burman approach and response surface method (RSM) via a central composite design (CCD) approach. Based on this approach, temperature, pH, and salinity were calculated to be optimum at 16.30 °C, pH 7.67 and 1.12% (w/v), respectively. A second order polynomial regression model very accurately represented the experimental figures' interpretation. These optimized environmental conditions increased diesel degradation from 34.5% (at 10 °C, pH 7.00 and 1.00% (w/v) salinity) to 56.4%. Further investigation of the kinetics of diesel reduction by strain AQ5-05 revealed that the Teissier model had the lowest RMSE and AICC values. The calculated values for the Teissier constants of maximal growth rate, half-saturation rate constant for the maximal growth, and half inhibition constants (μmax, Ks, and Ki), were 0.999 h−1, 1.971% (v/v) and 1.764% (v/v), respectively. The data obtained therefore confirmed the potential application of this cold-tolerant strain in the bioremediation of diesel-contaminated Antarctic soils at low temperature.


Temporal data clustering provides underpinning techniques for discovering the intrinsic structure and condensing information over temporal data. In this paper, we present a temporal data clustering framework via a weighted clustering ensemble of multiple partitions produced by initial clustering analysis on different temporal data representations. In our approach, we propose a novel weighted consensus function guided by clustering validation criteria to reconcile initial partitions to candidate consensus partitions from different perspectives, and then, introduce an agreement function to further reconcile those candidate consensus partitions to a final partition. As a result, the proposed weighted clustering ensemble algorithm provides an effective enabling technique for the joint use of different representations, which cuts the information loss in a single representation and exploits various information sources underlying temporal data. In addition, our approach tends to capture the intrinsic structure of a data set, e.g., the number of clusters. Our approach has been evaluated with benchmark time series, motion trajectory, and time-series data stream clustering tasks. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach yields favourite results for a variety of temporal data clustering tasks. As our weighted cluster ensemble algorithm can combine any input partitions to generate a clustering ensemble, we also investigate its limitation by formal analysis and empirical


Dengue fever has been a serious health threat in Malaysia and more than 50 other countries which are located in tropical and subtropical regions. It is a vector-borne disease and its main vector is the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Understanding the spread of this disease will certainly help in controlling it and this can be done with the help of mathematical models. In order to come up with a suitable model, an in depth study on the role of temperature and amount of rainfall in contributing to the number of dengue fever cases was done. In this study, two main parts of modeling were done, one was the modeling of the population dynamics of the vector, and another was on the modeling of the epidemic. In the modeling of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, a stage-structured model was constructed based on the temperature and rainfall of Shah Alam. A simulation was done and verified with the surveillance data collected by Majlis Bandaraya Shah Alam. The result obtained was tabulated and represented as a cosine function. For the epidemic model, the vector population was divided into two stages, before and after first egg-laying. This was done because it was found that the biting rates for these two groups of vectors vary and affect the modeling result. Result from the modeling of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes was used as the recruitment rate for vectors in the construction of the vector-host epidemic model. In the process of modeling, the classic SIR epidemic model was also explored and a method of parameter identification was obtained. This method was known as the multistage Adomian decomposition method and it was used to compute the transmission rate. One of the results obtained in the modeling of the Aedes aegypti mosquito is the identification of the conditions (temperature and amount of rainfall) that contributed to the abundance of Aedes population. In this study, a climate-dependent stagestructured model of the population of Aedes aegypti was constructed. It was found that the peak of infected cases of dengue fever was observed after about 4 weeks of the peak of mosquito abundance. Secondly, the transmission rates estimated from the SIR helped in studying how the basic reproduction number varied throughout the year 2008, instead of only one value for the whole year. Lastly, the one-stage and two-stage vector host epidemic models constructed and simulated. Their results were compared and the two-stage model gave a better representation of the actual dengue fever cases in Shah Alam for the year 2008.


AbstractAtmospheric rivers (ARs) have, in recent years, been recognized as the cause of the large majority of major floods in rivers all along the U.S. West Coast and as the source of 30%–50% of all precipitation in the same region. The present study surveys the frequency with which ARs have played a critical role as a common cause of the end of droughts on the West Coast. This question was based on the observation that, in most cases, droughts end abruptly as a result of the arrival of an especially wet month or, more exactly, a few very large storms. This observation is documented using both Palmer Drought Severity Index and 6-month Standardized Precipitation Index measures of drought occurrence for climate divisions across the conterminous United States from 1895 to 2010. When the individual storm sequences that contributed most to the wet months that broke historical West Coast droughts from 1950 to 2010 were evaluated, 33%–74% of droughts were broken by the arrival of landfalling AR storms. In the Pa...


The assessment of gustatory sensibility to salt is applied both in healthcare and in sensory analysis in the area of Food Science and Technology, to evaluate the taste and identify several origins of ageusia and hypogeusia, and notably to identify individuals at risk or who present a high salt intake. The adoption of an accurate and reproducible method to evaluate the taste threshold for salt would contribute to its widespread use. This integrative review aims to describe the methodologies employed to assess the detection threshold and recognition of sodium chloride. The databases used were CINAHAL, LILACS and MEDLINE and the keywords: taste threshold, sodium chloride and salt. Twenty-seven articles from 1985 to 2009 were identified and 29 tests were used to analyze the threshold. The majority of the articles used stimulation of the whole mouth (75.9%), followed by topical application on the tongue (24.1%), applying the solution to parts of the tongue (10.3%), electrogustometry (6.4%), impregnated disc (3.4%) and vacuum application (3.4%). There was considerable variability in the methodological procedures and important information was missing in some of them. The articles did not present the basis for the sample size, and the selection criteria for the panellists were extremely varied. Thus reproducibility of the studies and comparison of the articles was difficult. Benchmarking between different methods of evaluation of the taste threshold for salt with respect to their reproducibility could provide benefit in the choice of the most appropriate method to be employed in research and clinical practice.


Background: Child abuse is a serious and devastating problem rooted within our communities. According to the South African Police Services (SAPS) crime statistics of 2006 & 2007, the four most common crimes committed (and attempted) against children were rape, common assault, and assault with attempt to do grievous bodily harm. Because this problem has its roots within our homes and communities it must be unpacked from a community level.

Aim and objectives: This study aims to describe the patterns of child abuse in the Northern Suburbs of Cape Town and to gain insight into the knowledge and perceptions of the Ravensmead Community regarding child physical and sexual abuse.

Methods: This was done by exploring the knowledge and perceptions of the Ravensmead community on various aspects of child physical and sexual abuse including perceptions of victim and perpetrator profiles, responses to victims of child physical and sexual abuse, their knowledge of and access to avenues of help. The study also describes the patterns of child abuse in the Northern Suburbs of Cape Town as documented in the case record reviews of children presenting to the Karl Bremer Hospital at the Rape crises Centre. In order to explore the knowledge of the Ravensmead community of child physical and sexual abuse, the researcher designed a structured questionnaire and conducted a door-to-door survey. A total of 279 respondents were obtained. Specific areas of enquiry included knowledge of definitions, perceptions of perpetrators, perceptions of predisposing circumstances and perception of avenues for help and where education programs should be aimed. Patterns of Child physical and sexual abuse presenting at the Rape Crises Centre at Karl Bremer Hospital was determined by conducting a case record review. Information regarding victim and perpetrator profiles, injuries sustained and home circumstance as documented in these case records was described. An in-depth interview conducted at the Rape Crises centre with parents of child victims of physical and sexual abuse provided qualitative information relating to patterns and perceptions of child physical and sexual abuse. Data from these three methods was then triangulated.

Study design: The researcher has chosen to do a descriptive study using methodological triangulation. The aim of the research is to describe the patterns of child abuse (physical and sexual) and to gain further insight into the perceptions and knowledge of the Ravensmead Community regarding child sexual and physical abuse. This was undertaken using a descriptive study design. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was used to enhance the overall validity of the results.

Setting: Ravensmead is an impoverished community in the Northern Suburbs of the Western Cape. The high rate of crimes committed against children in this community is a reflection of the situation in the rest of the country. The Karl Bremer hospital Rape Crisis Center is the centre to which all cases of child sexual abuse and child physical abuse occurring in the northern suburbs of Cape Town presents. Staff is trained in offering the necessary medical, medico legal and psychological support to victims of abuse.

Results: Only 15% of respondents to the questionnaire survey demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of what constitutes child abuse. Although respondents demonstrated understanding of some characteristics relating to victim and perpetrator profiles they failed to recognize certain circumstances that predisposes to child abuse. The In-depth interviews also found that most families of victims of child sexual abuse did not suspect that the abuse could occur under the circumstance, which it did. The perception that children are sometimes to blame for the abuse is still held by some members of the community although they are in the minority. Few respondents were able to identify avenues for help other than the police station. However, the in-depth interviews demonstrate that several fears exist regarding reporting abuse to the police, reducing the practical accessibility of this service. The mean age of victims presenting to the Karl Bremer Hospital Rape Crises centre was 6.18yrs and 36% of cases presented was during the period from November to January. Absence of visible injuries could not exclude the diagnosis of sexual or physical abuse. Information relating to home circumstances and perpetrator profiles was lacking.

Conclusion: The research suggests that knowledge regarding child physical and sexual abuse in the Ravensmead community is lacking. Barriers exist to accessing avenues for help within the community. Greater community empowerment is required in order to effectively combat the problem of child physical and sexual abuse.


An examination of student mental health was conducted using the five item Mental Health Index (MHI), a subscale of the widely used SF-36 (Short Form Health Survey). Results support the use of the MHI, which was found to be to be a valid and reliable measure of mental health in Irish third-level students. As anticipated, females reported significantly higher levels of symptoms than males on the MHI. It was also noted that final year students report significantly worse mental health than other students. Comparison with a general population mean for a corresponding age group indicate significantly lower mental health status being recorded by the students in this study. Suggestions for further research are made.


This review provides a comprehensive description of the atropisomerism of meso-di- and tetraarylporphyrins with substituents in ortho-positions of the aryl ring, as well as in corroles and in conveniently substituted phthalocyanines. Different methods of study were examined: X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy (both static and dynamic aspects), classical kinetics, HPLC and theoretical calculations. Then the four atropisomers, the tautomerism of the inner protons, the 'picket fence' concept, conformationally restricted meso-tetraarylporphyrins and the influence of the metal on the conformation were discussed based on 250 references.


In this paper I suggest that a theory of self-organization can be used as a consistent background theory for explaining the dynamics and logics of globalization. Globalization is not confined to the human realm, it is an attribute of all complex, self-organizing systems. Globalization in a synchronous sense means a micro-macro-link where bottom-up-emergence of new qualities in the self-reproduction of complex systems takes place, it is accompanied by a macro-micro-link of top-down-localization. A dynamic interaction between a global and a local level (glocalization) results in the permanent overall self-reproduction of the system. Globalization in a diachronic sense means the emergence of a new, higher level of self-organization during a phase of instability and heavy fluctuations by order through fluctuation. Globalization is shaped by a dialectic of change and continuity: in the hierarchy that stems from emergent evolution there are both general aspects of globalization and aspects that are specific for each organizational level. Applying this general notion of globalization to society means that human globalization is both a general process that can be found in all societies and a specific process with emergent qualities in concrete phases of societal development. Globalization processes in modern society are based on structural antagonisms that result in uneven developments in the technosphere, the ecosphere, the economy, polity, and culture. The transition to Postfordist, informational capitalism has been a consequence of the development of the structural antagonisms of Fordism and has been accompanied by a new phase of globalization that has transformed the subsystems of society and has resulted in new antagonism that are an expression of general antagonisms that shape modern societies. Hence we find antagonistic tendencies of contemporary globalization in all subsystems of society that result in both risks and opportunities. Human beings have the ability to actively shape society in such a way that an alternative sustainable form of globalization can be achieved.


For years, bear hunters have provided an unknown amount of food to black bears (Ursus americanus) in Virginia, supplementing their natural food supply. Possible effects of feeding bears can be negative, such as food conditioning and habituation to people, or positive, such as enhanced or sustained reproductive rates, especially in years of mast crop failure. In July 1999, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF) adopted a regulation recommendation that prohibited the feeding of wildlife on national forest and department-owned lands. We mailed a survey to all members of the Virginia Bear Hunters Association (VBHA, n = 459) to determine the amount of food provided to bears by bear hunters in Virginia between 1 July 1998 and 30 June 1999. Survey response rate was 52%. One hundred thirteen of 238 (47.5%) survey respondents spent over $18,000 on supplemental food in one year, averaging $163/person. One hundred twenty-eight respondents reported cumulatively providing nearly 3 million kilograms of food to bears between 1 July 1998 and 30 June 1999. Whole-shelled corn, pastries, and grease accounted for 58% of the total food by weight; however, wholeshelled corn, pastries, and bread were the 3 most common foods offered. Feeding occurred in 25 counties in Virginia, primarily during July, August, and September. Rockingham County had the highest proportion of feeders (47%), followed by Giles (15%), Augusta (14%), Craig (9%) and Montgomery (9%) Counties. Accordingly, Rockingham County received the highest proportion of food (42%), followed by Craig (8%), Giles (7%), Montgomery (6%), and Tazewell (6%) Counties. The low survey response rate, coupled with the fact that 48% of sampled nonrespondents fed bears, suggests that the total amount of annual feeding in Virginia may exceed the total determined during this study. However, the possibility of an avidity bias, in which a higher response by the more avid feeders would erroneously inflate a total estimate extrapolated to include feeding by nonrespondents, cannot be eliminated. Little work has been done pertaining to digestibilities of black bear foods, particularly those in the eastern United States. We determined digestibilities for several important eastern black bear foods, including northern red oak (Quercus rubra), white oak (Q. alba), and chestnut oak acorns (Q. prinus), squawroot (Conopholis americana), high-protein dogfood, shelled corn, and doughnuts. All diets were evaluated for nutrient content as well as percent dry matter digestibility of crude protein, ether extract (a measure of fat), and gross energy. Diets we suspected were high in fiber were additionally evaluated for neutral detergent fiber or acid detergent fiber content and digestibility. Feeding trials were conducted with 1 male and 4 female captive bears during fall 1998, and 5 female captive bears during fall 1999, at the Center for Ursid Research, Blacksburg, Virginia. Acorns and squawroot were high in fiber (45-62%) and moderate to low in protein (5-7%). Fat content was high in doughnuts (24.7) and northern red oak acorns (12%), moderate in dogfood (8.2%) and white oak acorns (4.7%), and relatively low in shelled corn, chestnut oak acorns, and squawroot (1.33.5%). Crude protein was high in dogfood (29%) and moderate in all other diets (4.78.8%). Neutral detergent fiber content was high in squawroot and all acorn types (4562.4%). Acid detergent fiber was high in squawroot (47%) and moderate in dogfood (9%). In 1998, crude protein digestibility was high in doughnuts (86%), moderate in shelled corn and white oak acorns (50-64%), and negligible in northern red oak acorns (39%). Ether extract digestibility was high in doughnuts, red oak acorns, and white oak acorns (80-97%), and moderate in shelled corn (67%). Fiber digestibility was tested only on northern red oak and white oak acorns, and was moderate (62% and 68%, respectively). In 1999, crude protein digestibility was high in dogfood, dogfood mixed with squawroot, and doughnuts (75-85%); moderate in shelled corn, squawroot, and white oak acorns (43-58%); and low to negligible in chestnut oak and northern red oak acorns (-13-6%). Ether extract digestibility was moderate in shelled corn (64%) and squawroot (60%), and high in all other diets (79-97%). Neutral detergent fiber digestibility was moderately high in all acorn types (54-71%). Acid detergent fiber digestibility was moderate for dogfood (66%), and associative effects occurred between the fiber in squawroot and dogfood, resulting in negative fiber digestibility in squawroot determined by difference (-19%). A luxury not always realized in wildlife management is the ability to investigate possible effects of management or policy changes prior to their employment. The amount of food provided to bears by bear hunters in Virginia may have been more substantial than previously believed, and likely provided bears with a high energy, stable food source that supplemented their natural food supply. We did not have the opportunity to study the effects of removing that food source on public lands prior to the regulation change; however, the opportunistic feeding strategy of bears, coupled with sufficient mast production at the time of the regulation change, likely softened any negative effects that may have occurred as a result of the removal of supplemental food as a regular food source for some bears.


Background/Aims Achalasia is a chronic, progressive motility disorder of the esophagus. The sigmoid-type achalasia is an advanced stage of achalasia characterized by severe dilatation and tortuous angulation of the esophageal body. Peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) has been reported to provide excellent clinical outcomes for achalasia, including the sigmoid type, but the restoration of esophageal morphology and function remain poorly described. The aim of our study is to investigate esophageal restoration after POEM for sigmoid-type achalasia. Methods From 98 patients with achalasia who underwent POEM in the Yonsei University Health System from 2013 to 2018, we recruited 13 patients with sigmoid-type achalasia (7 male; mean age 53.3 years) and assessed morphological and manometric changes in the esophagus. Results Clinical success (Eckardt score < 3) was achieved in all cases. After POEM, the average angle of esophageal tortuosity became more obtuse (91.5° vs 114.6°, P = 0.046), esophageal body diameter decreased (67.6 vs 49.8 mm, P = 0.002), and esophagogastric junction opening widened (6.4 vs 9.5 mm, P = 0.048). Patients whose esophageal tortuosity did not improve had longer durations of symptoms than patients with improvement (80.2 vs 636 months, P < 0.001). An absence of peristalsis was observed in all patients pre- and post-POEM. Conclusions POEM resulted in excellent clinical outcomes and morphologic improvement in sigmoid-type achalasia. These results suggest that the improvement of esophageal tortuosity through POEM reflects a reduced esophageal burden.


The main objective of this study was to investigate the effect of t wo different stocking densities (11 birds / m 2 and 17 birds / m 2 ) on deviation from bilateral symmetry in broiler chickens. For this purpose, the weekly body weight, left and right shank length, shank width, wing length, face width and face length of the same birds were measured on from 7 th to 42 nd days of age. Repeated measurements analysis of variance was used to investigate the effect of stocking densities and ages (week) on relative asymmetry. Binary logistic regression analysis was used to determine the most important morphological character influencing the deviation from ideal slaughter weight of 1800 g. The overall relative asymmetry mean for shank width was significantly greater in control group (2.42±0.41) than in treatment group (1.87±0.43). The results of binary logisti c regression analysis showed that only increase in difference of width in left and right shank caused significant change (p=0.0148) in slaughter weight. In this study, the deviation from the bilateral symmetry was mostly found in fluctuating asymmetry for the measured characters in treatment group (11 birds per m 2 ), and the low fluctuating asymmetry level was generally indicated higher welfare level and lower developmental instability for this group than that of the control group (17 birds per m 2 ). Stocking density can be stated as one of the most important


Acetylcholine (ACh) regulates a diverse array of physiological processes throughout the body, yet cholinergic transmission in the majority of tissues/organs remains poorly understood due primarily to the limitations of available ACh-monitoring techniques. We developed a family of G-protein-coupled receptor activation-based ACh sensors (GACh) with sensitivity, specificity, signal-to-noise ratio, kinetics and photostability suitable for monitoring ACh signals in vitro and in vivo. GACh sensors were validated with transfection, viral and/or transgenic expression in a dozen types of neuronal and non-neuronal cells prepared from several animal species. In all preparations, GACh sensors selectively responded to exogenous and/or endogenous ACh with robust fluorescence signals that were captured by epifluorescent, confocal and/or two-photon microscopy. Moreover, analysis of endogenous ACh release revealed firing pattern-dependent release and restricted volume transmission, resolving two long-standing questions about central cholinergic transmission. Thus, GACh sensors provide a user-friendly, broadly applicable toolbox for monitoring cholinergic transmission underlying diverse biological processes.


In this paper, we compare the performance of three different digital-signal-processing-based directly detected 100 Gb/s transmission schemes, namely, optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, optical single-carrier frequency domain equalization, and optical discrete Fourier transform spread orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. The performances of these systems are characterized with different link parameters, including laser linewidth, modulation formats, RF frequency, modulator drive power, and so on. Simulation results suggest that at optimum operating conditions, receivers' sensitivities of these systems may not exhibit any significant difference with respect to each other, confirming their suitability for next-generation 100 Gb/s short-reach optical links.


Significance We present a study to model the spread of ancestry in ancient genomes through time and space and a geostatistical framework for comparing human migrations and land-cover changes, while accounting for changes in climate. We show that the two major migrations during the European Holocene had different spatiotemporal structures and expansion rates. In addition, we find that the Yamnaya expansion had a stronger association with vegetational landscape changes than the earlier Neolithic farmer expansion. Our approach paves the way for future work linking paleogenomics with other archaeometric datasets in the study of the past. The European continent was subject to two major migrations of peoples during the Holocene: the northwestward movement of Anatolian farmer populations during the Neolithic and the westward movement of Yamnaya steppe peoples during the Bronze Age. These movements changed the genetic composition of the continent's inhabitants. The Holocene was also characterized by major changes in vegetation composition, which altered the environment occupied by the original hunter-gatherer populations. We aim to test to what extent vegetation change through time is associated with changes in population composition as a consequence of these migrations, or with changes in climate. Using ancient DNA in combination with geostatistical techniques, we produce detailed maps of ancient population movements, which allow us to visualize how these migrations unfolded through time and space. We find that the spread of Neolithic farmer ancestry had a two-pronged wavefront, in agreement with similar findings on the cultural spread of farming from radiocarbon-dated archaeological sites. This movement, however, did not have a strong association with changes in the vegetational landscape. In contrast, the Yamnaya migration speed was at least twice as fast and coincided with a reduction in the amount of broad-leaf forest and an increase in the amount of pasture and natural grasslands in the continent. We demonstrate the utility of integrating ancient genomes with archaeometric datasets in a spatiotemporal statistical framework, which we foresee will enable future studies of ancient populations' movements, and their putative effects on local fauna and flora.


S. Lin, D. Jiang & P. F. Williams write: Transpression and transtension are common geological processes that have been the focus of many recent studies. The international conference on 'Continental Transpressional and Transtensional Tectonics' held in London, England in March 1997 and the Geological Society, London, Special Publication No. 135 with the same title, arising from the conference, are both very timely. We commend the conveners and editors (R. E. Holdsworth, J. F. Dewey & R. A. Strachan) for the success of both the conference and the Special Publication. We presented a paper at the conference, which is included in the Special Publication (Lin et al. 1998), discussing oblique transpression/transtension (in the sense that the relative displacement across the zone has a dip-slip component) and the resultant general triclinic kinematics within such zone. The Special Publication contains two additional papers not presented at the conference (Dewey et al. 1998; Jones & Holdsworth 1998), which include discussion of triclinic kinematics. We welcome these additions since they provide an opportunity to discuss further triclinic kinematics, which we believe is probably common in nature and important in understanding fabric development (Lin et al. 1998; Jiang & Williams 1998). The paper by Dewey et al. 1998 is concerned with many fundamental aspects of transpression and transtension that we consider to be important for future studies. The paper includes a summary of monoclinic transpression/transtension theory and some statements derived from modelling of triclinic transpression/transtension. Unfortunately, it is not always clear which statements apply to


Provable data possession (PDP) is a technique for ensuring the integrity of data in storage outsourcing. In this paper, we address the construction of an efficient PDP scheme for distributed cloud storage to support the scalability of service and data migration, in which we consider the existence of multiple cloud service providers to cooperatively store and maintain the clients' data. We present a cooperative PDP (CPDP) scheme based on homomorphic verifiable response and hash index hierarchy. We prove the security of our scheme based on multi-prover zero-knowledge proof system, which can satisfy completeness, knowledge soundness, and zeroknowledge properties. In addition, we articulate performance optimization mechanisms for our scheme, and in particular present an efficient method for selecting optimal parameter values to minimize the computation costs of clients and storage service providers. Our experiments show that our solution introduces lower computation and communication overheads in comparison with non-cooperative approaches.