One of the functions of the tumor suppressor p53 is as a transcriptional regulator, and this activity is stimulated in response to DNA damage. Among the many types of posttranslational modifications that control p53's various functions is the addition of poly(ADP-ribose), mediated by poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase 1 (PARP-1), the activity of which is stimulated by DNA damage. Kanai et al. identified the residues in mouse p53 that were the major sites of poly(ADP-ribosyl)ation as Glu255, Asp256, and Glu268 and then studied how expression of a p53 fusion protein in which these residues were changed to alanine (GFP-p53EDE/A) influenced the localization and transcriptional activity of the protein compared with expression of a wild-type GFP p53 fusion protein (GFP-WT p53) in mouse embryo fibroblasts (MEFs) deficient for p53. In p53–/– MEFs, GFP-WT p53 was predominantly nuclear, whereas GFP-p53EDE/A was predominantly cytosolic, even when the cells were subjected to the DNA-damaging agent doxorubicin, which suggests that poly(ADP-ribosyl)ation is important for nuclear accumulation of p53. In response to DNA damage, cells expressing GFP-WT p53 showed increased abundance of p21, which is encoded by a p53-target gene, whereas cells expressing GFP-p53EDE/A did not. Consistent with PARP-1 as the enzyme responsible for the poly(ADP-ribosyl)ation of p53, MEFs deficient for PARP-1 showed decreased stability of p53 and failed to up-regulate p21 in response to DNA damage. In cells in which nuclear export was pharmacologically inhibited, the GFP-p53EDE/A mutant increased the abundance of p21 as effectively as WT p53, thus showing that poly(ADP-ribosyl)ation was not required for transactivation activity but that its effect on transactivation activity of p53 was due to decreased accumulation of p53 in the nucleus. The interaction of tagged Crm1, a nuclear export receptor, with tagged p53 or p53EDE/A was enhanced for the p53EDE/A mutant, suggesting that poly(ADP-ribosyl)ation interferes with the binding of p53 with Crm1. In vitro binding assays with poly(ADP-ribosyl)ated p53 and nonmodified p53 and Crm1 supported this interpretation. Thus, the authors propose a model whereby DNA damage promotes the hyperactivation of PARP-1, which targets p53, and poly(ADP-ribosyl)ated p53 then accumulates in the nucleus because it fails to interact with the nuclear export receptor Crm1. M. Kanai, K. Hanashiro, S.-H. Kim, S. Hanai, A. H. Boulares, M. Miwa, K. Fukasawa, Inhibition of Crm1-p53 interaction and nuclear export of p53 by poly(ADP-ribosyl)ation. Nat. Cell Biol. 9, 1175-1183 (2007). [PubMed]


We find that 36 of the 505 fault-plane solutions (M ≥ 3.0, 1981–1990) in southern California have a nodal plane dipping no more than 30 °. With the assumption of the low-angle nodal planes being the fault planes, four cross sections are constructed to show the possible horizontal faults in the middle and upper crust. More than half of these low-angle faults are located within or adjacent to the Transverse Ranges. The focal depths vary from 1 km in the southern end of the Sierra Nevada and the southwestern Mojave Desert to 20 km in the Transverse Ranges. The slip directions are also diverse. In general, east-west extensional movements are dominant in the boundary between the southern Sierra Nevada extending to the San Emigdio Mountains and the western Mojave Desert, whereas north-south compressional movements are dominant in the Transverse Ranges. In the Peninsular Ranges and the Salton Trough, both the slip directions and focal depths vary. These features suggest that seismically active low-angle faults in southern California may exist at different depths and slip in various directions. Our data do not support the existence of a regional-scale seismically active detachment in southern California. Only in the western Transverse Ranges is there some suggestion of a large detachment surface at a depth of about 13 to 14 km.


Inverse geodynamo modelling seeks to estimate the dynamic state of Earth's core from geo-magnetic data and the statistical information brought by a prior self-consistent, 3-D numerical model of the geodynamo. The method rests on the use of least-squares inversions under constraints and estimates hidden quantities by taking advantage of linear relations and long-range statistical correlations with the magnetic observations. The data, together with their error statistics, are provided by geomagnetic field models COV-OBS, gufm-sat-Q3 and CM4, covering epochs 1840–2010. The prior numerical model is the recently published coupled Earth dynamo, the output of which presents a high degree of morphological semblance to the geomagnetic field while reproducing the main features of its secular variation. An analysis of the inversion misfits to the data shows that the prior model generally accounts well for the main field and secular variation data within their specified errors, throughout the investigated time period. Inverted core flows are confirmed to be mainly organized in columns parallel to the Earth's rotation axis. A previously observed giant eccentric columnar gyre of westward-drifting flow is found to be present from epoch 1870 onwards, and its structure is shown to slowly rotate westwards at a rate up to 0.1 • yr −1 , confirming an earlier prediction based on direct numerical modelling. Temporal variations in the axisymmetric part of the gyre accurately account for observed variations of the length of the day in recent epochs. Inverted magnetic structures support a mechanism of azimuthal flux expulsion by convective columns to explain the origin of low-latitude magnetic flux patches existing beneath the Atlantic. The 1840–2010 time average of the inverted density anomaly field has a longitudinal hemispheric structure, with most of the buoyancy in the Eastern hemisphere, consistent with rapid surges of convective columns imaged in this hemisphere, with earlier proposals of a faster inner core freezing there, and with a possible east-to-west convective translation of the solid inner core. The typical timescales of flow variation observed in the inversions are two to three times shorter than those naturally produced by a direct simulation of the prior model, underlining its limits in fully rendering the Earth's core short timescale dynamics.


The rise of the 'tech giants' is, of course, a significant commercial threat to more traditional media, but it also raises some potentially important issues of public policy. These companies have variously been accused of facilitating the spread of 'fake news' and extremist material, dodging taxes, and exploiting their market dominance. In reality, 'fake news' is nothing new, nor is it as influential as many assume. Most people rely on multiple sources for information. Television and newspapers are still trusted far more than online platforms. The market is also coming up with its own checks and balances, such as fact-checking services. The internet may have provided more channels for 'fake news', but new technology has also made it easier to find the truth. The UK newspaper industry itself shows how self-regulation can be effective, especially when supported by the backstops of existing criminal and civil law. The internet is not the regulation-free zone that some suppose. But, in any event, the tech companies have a strong economic interest in protecting their brands and being responsive to the demands of their customers and advertisers. It may be worth considering some ways in which these pressures could be strengthened, such as obliging new platforms to publish a code of practice like those adopted by newspapers. However, most already do, and the rest will surely follow. The taxation of tech giants raises many issues relevant to any multinational company. It seems reasonable to expect firms to explain clearly what tax they pay. But an additional levy on the activities of tech companies would be inconsistent with the general principles of fair and efficient taxation.


Background Males and females exhibit different health responses to air pollution, but little is known about how exposure to air pollution affects juvenile respiratory health after analysis stratified by allergic predisposition. The aim of the present study was to assess the relationship between air pollutants and asthmatic symptoms in Chinese children selected from multiple sites in a heavily industrialized province of China, and investigate whether allergic predisposition modifies this relationship. Methodology/Principal Findings 30139 Chinese children aged 3-to-12 years were selected from 25 districts of seven cities in northeast China in 2009. Information on respiratory health was obtained using a standard questionnaire from the American Thoracic Society. Routine air-pollution monitoring data was used for particles with an aerodynamic diameter ≤10 µm (PM10), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxides (NO2), ozone (O3) and carbon monoxide (CO). A two-stage regression approach was applied in data analyses. The effect estimates were presented as odds ratios (ORs) per interquartile changes for PM10, SO2, NO2, O3, and CO. The results showed that children with allergic predisposition were more susceptible to air pollutants than children without allergic predisposition. Amongst children without an allergic predisposition, air pollution effects on asthma were stronger in males compared to females; Current asthma prevalence was related to PM10 (ORs = 1.36 per 31 µg/m3; 95% CI, 1.08–1.72), SO2 (ORs = 1.38 per 21 µg/m3; 95%CI, 1.12–1.69) only among males. However, among children with allergic predisposition, more positively associations between air pollutants and respiratory symptoms and diseases were detected in females; An increased prevalence of doctor-diagnosed asthma was significantly associated with SO2 (ORs = 1.48 per 21 µg/m3; 95%CI, 1.21–1.80), NO2 (ORs = 1.26 per 10 µg/m3; 95%CI, 1.01–1.56), and current asthma with O3 (ORs = 1.55 per 23 µg/m3; 95%CI, 1.18–2.04) only among females. Conclusion/Significance Ambient air pollutions were more evident in males without an allergic predisposition and more associations were detected in females with allergic predisposition.


Abstract Purpose: Timeliness of corporate financial reports is a crucial factor it which affects the usefulness of information made available to stakeholders or external users, especially for investors. The aim of this study was to examine whether financial performance with profitability, company size, liquidity, leverage can affect the timeliness of financial reporting. Research methodology: A causal relationship and quantitative research methods. This population was taken from industrial manufacturing companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange. The total samples of this study are 30 manufacturing companies from the year 2016 to 2019. This research obtains 84 observation data and uses purposive sampling as a method to get the samples. The statistical with logistic regression for data analysis, used for this research method. Result: We found in this research that profitability, company size, liquidity, and leverage have no significant effect on the timeliness of financial reporting. Limitation: This finding has a weakness, namely, the coefficient of determination is low only 9.9 percent so the statistical result on this research is not able to generalize general results on the timeliness of financial reporting Contribution: This study is useful in highlighting the timeliness of financial reporting should focus to aid in decision making by users and to avoid a company risk.


The geodynamic evolution of the Kaoko belt, northwest Namibia, which is part of the late Neoproterozoic mobile belt system of western Gondwana, is considered to be the result of collision between the Congo (Africa) and Rio de la Plata (South America) cratons. In the coastal area of this belt, Pan-African dioritic to granitic melts intruded at ~650 Ma and between ~580 and ~550 Ma into sedimentary sequences of the Kuiseb Formation. Field observations suggest that the later intrusive episode coincided with the peak of high-grade metamorphism in this region, which is characterised by granulite facies conditions and anatexis. Franz et al. (1999) state that both intrusive episodes can be connected with high-grade metamorphic events.

The δ18O values of the Pan-African granitoids range from +8.5 to +10.3‰ and tend to be slightly higher than those of the Palaeoproterozoic and late Archaean basement gneisses (+7.6 to +9.9‰ and +7.4 to +9.0‰, respectively). The Pan-African granitoids have low to moderate initial 87Sr/86Sr ratios between ~0.7036 and ~0.7121. Sm-Nd isotopic data of the Pan-African granitoids have moderate initial ϵNd values ranging from −1.2 to −6.8. They are distinct from Palaeoproterozoic as well as late Archaean orthogneisses from the adjacent Congo Craton, which reveal much lower ϵNdvalues between −18 and −28 during the time of emplacement of the Pan-African granitoids. Thus, the derivation of these granitoid melts exclusively from much older crust can be precluded. Although the Pan-African granitoids and the Pan-African high-grade metasedimentary rocks have similar initial ϵNd values of −1.2 to −6.8 and also similar mean crustal residence ages between 1.2 and 1.6 Ga, the derivation of the granitoids from these metasedimentary rocks alone seems also improbable since the granitoids reveal significantly lower initial 87Sr/86Sr ratios than the metasediments. It is here suggested that the Nd, Sr and O isotopic features of the Pan-African granitoids reflect mixing between upper crustal material (metasediments) and remelted basement gneisses from lower crustal levels.


This first volume of the National Assessment of Educational Achievement series describes the main features of national and international assessments, both of which became extremely popular tools for determining the quality of education in the 1990s and 2000s. This increase in popularity reflects two important developments. First, it reflects increasing globalization and interest in global mandates, including Education for All (UNESCO 2000). Second, it represents an overall shift in emphasis in assessing the quality of education from a concern with inputs (such as student participation rates, physical facilities, curriculum materials, and teacher training) to a concern with outcomes. This emphasis on outcomes can, in turn, be considered an expression of concern with the development of human capital in the belief (a) that knowledge is replacing raw materials and labor as resources in economic development and (b) that the availability of human knowledge and skills is critical in determining a country's rate of economic development and its competitiveness in an international market. The purposes and main features of national assessments are described in chapter 2. The reasons for carrying out a national assessment are considered in chapter 3, and the main decisions that have to be made in the design and planning of an assessment are covered in chapter 4. Issues (as well as common errors) to be borne in mind in the design, implementation, analysis, reporting, and use of a national assessment are identified in chapter 5. In chapter 6, international assessments of student achievement, which share many procedural features with national assessments (such as sampling, administration, background data collected, and methods of analysis), are described.


CONTEXT
Grading scientific evidence is a critical step in developing practice guidelines and quality performance measures.

GENERAL QUESTION
What is the most useful way to grade evidence?

SPECIFIC QUESTION
How should we grade the recommended clinical practices for patients with diabetes?

STANDARD APPROACH
Hierarchical grading systems (e.g., grades I, II, and III), such as that used by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, have traditionally been used to rank the research designs of studies that support a particular clinical practice.

POTENTIAL DIFFICULTIES
Many studies that support the clinical practices of diabetes care do not clearly conform to the categories traditionally used in hierarchical grading systems. As a result, there is a tendency to inaccurately characterize the level of evidence, leading to the phenomenon of evidence inflation or evidence deflation. To avoid exaggerating the evidence, important sources of information may be excluded, resulting in an understatement of the available supporting evidence.

ALTERNATE APPROACH
This paper offers a more descriptive typologic system that uses the study design and an explanatory modifier to grade the evidence supporting the clinical practices of diabetes care. The study grades are randomized, controlled trial (RCT); RCT-embedded component; RCT-treatment only; RCT-different population; observational study-risk factor; and expert opinion. Using this grading system, the authors were able to more accurately describe the best available evidence supporting the clinical practices of diabetes care.


Online social networks allow us to study the interactions between people. Typically, users share updates, photos, videos and URL with the other users they are connected to and others share their feedback by "liking", commenting or sharing the content. In our work, we study the social networks at the community level of structure of interactions and at the individual level of user influence. (1) Community level: The social interactions can be represented as a graph. Graph decomposition techniques, such as k-core decomposition, have been used to understand structures such as partitions and hierarchies in graphs. In this work we present a O(n log d) space approximate algorithm to estimate k-cores in graphs, where n is the number of nodes, and d is the maximum degree. Our experimental study shows space savings up to 60X with average relative error less than 2.3%. Analogous to k-core, k-peak decomposition finds centers of dense regions in a graph. We present analysis of the k-peak decomposition and show that it outperforms k-core decomposition in applications such as community detection. In addition to that, we present a graph visualization technique, that uses both k-core and k-peak decomposition to give a global mapping of the graph. (2) Individual level: We study the influence of users on one another based on the posts they share and the feedback received. H-index, used as a measure of impact in academic settings, can also be used as a measure of influence in online social interactions. The high volume and rate of online social interactions make in-memory computations challenging. We present algorithms to compute h-index in various streaming settings and get a (1 \pm \epsilon) estimate of the h-index with sublinear, ie, polylog or even O(1) space. Thus, we present efficient algorithms, analysis and visualizations in an effort to study the group level structure of interactions and individual level influence, among users in social networks. Defense Committee: Prof. S. Muthukrishnan (Chair), Prof. Badri Nath, Prof. William Steiger, Prof. Laks Lakshmanan (University of British Columbia)


This essay, prepared for a symposium on legal aspects of the Armenian Genocide, addresses the treatment of the Armenian community in Ottoman law. For most of its history, the Ottoman Empire adhered to classical Islamic law, which viewed Armenians and other Christians as dhimmis – formally protected, but legally subordinate, minority communities. The nineteenth-century Ottoman reform movement known as the Tanzimat granted dhimmis legal equality for the first time. Equality for dhimmis subverted the traditional social hierarchy and sparked a religious backlash, including the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896, which killed hundreds of thousands of Armenians and other Christians. The Hamidian massacres in turn initiated a cycle of violence that led eventually to genocide. Although the Tanzimat did not itself cause the Armenian Genocide, the failure of legal reform, and the resentment that equality for religious minorities created in Ottoman society, were important contributing factors.


Remission is a new research outcome indicating long-term wellness. Remission not only sets a standard for minimal severity of symptoms and signs (resolution); it also sets a standard for how long symptoms and signs need to remain at this minimal level (6 months). Individuals who achieve remission from schizophrenia have better subjective well-being and better functional outcomes than those who do not. Research suggests that remission can be achieved in 20–60% of people with schizophrenia. There is some evidence of the usefulness of remission as an outcome indicator for clinicians, service users and their carers. This article reviews the literature on remission in schizophrenia and asks whether it could be a useful clinical standard of well-being and a foundation for functional improvement and recovery.


This article reviews Malaysia's attempt to achieve zero migration irregularity by focusing on workplace enforcement, and examines how Malaysia's migration control has become a struggle between the state and employers. Applying the framework of "enforcement through attrition," this research examines three newly introduced principles governing workplace enforcement: employer sanctions, the Strict Liability Principle, and the Employers' Mandatory Commitment. The shift to employers in Malaysia's attrition landscape aims to control illegal employment, thereby frustrating the friendly environment to affect migrants' behaviour. The Malaysian experience suggests that increasing legal consequences for employers hiring undocumented workers runs parallel with making them accountable for the welfare of their foreign workers, thus ensuring better protection of migrant rights. Drawing upon data from semi-structured interviews, government documents, regulations and online news media, this paper empirically analyses the new policy's effects and implications. The findings suggest this deterrence model has a positive effect on the existing documented migrants, demonstrating an increase in both legal employment and in wages for the existing legal migrant workforce.


New second-generation ruthenium benzylidene and isopropoxybenzylidene catalysts bearing N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) ligands with o-biphenyl groups at the N-atoms and syn methyl or phenyl groups on the backbone were obtained and their catalytic behaviors were compared to those of analogous N-o-tolyl catalysts in standard ring-closing metathesis (RCM) reactions. A pronounced difference in catalyst efficiency was observed depending on the nature of ortho-N-aryl substituents (methyl or phenyl). Notably, very impressive catalytic performances were exhibited by N-o-biphenyl complexes with a syn dimethyl backbone in the formation of di- and trisubstituted cycloalkenes. To rationalize catalytic results, methyl and phenyl substituent effects on the steric and electronic properties of NHC ligands were assessed through experimental and theoretical investigations involving ruthenium complexes as well as newly developed rhodium derivatives. Despite the different electron donor capacities of the examined carbenes, the steric differences shown by N-o-biphenyl and N-o-tolyl NHCs, although subtle, were found to be the key factor in addressing catalyst behavior.


The aim of this project is to keep the x-ray exposure of the patient as low as reasonably achievable while improving the diagnostic image quality for the radiologist. The means to achieve these goals is to develop and evaluate an efficient adaptive filtering (denoising/image enhancement) method that fully explores true 4D image acquisition modes. The proposed prototype system uses a novel filter set having directional filter responses being monomials. The monomial filter concept is used both for estimation of local structure and for the anisotropic adaptive filtering. Initial tests on clinical 4D CT-heart data with ECG-gated exposure has resulted in a significant reduction of the noise level and an increased detail compared to 2D and 3D methods. Another promising feature is that the reconstruction induced streak artifacts which generally occur in low dose CT are remarkably reduced in 4D.


We compare micro-photoluminescence (μPL) as a measure of the electron density in a clean, two-dimensional (2D) system confined in a GaAs quantum well (QW) to the standard magneto-transport technique. Our study explores the PL shape evolution across a number of molecular beam epitaxy-grown samples with different QW widths and 2D electron densities and notes its correspondence with the density obtained in magneto-transport measurements on these samples. We also measure the 2D density in a top-gated quantum well sample using both PL and transport and find that the two techniques agree to within a few percent over a wide range of gate voltages. We find that the PL measurements are sensitive to gate-induced 2D density changes on the order of 109 electrons/cm2. The spatial resolution of the PL density measurement in our experiments is 40 μm, which is already substantially better than the millimeter-scale resolution now possible in spatial density mapping using magneto-transport. Our results establish that μPL c...


In this article I investigate the internal syntax of Dutch nominal expressions like twee slangen van elk twee meter (two snakes of each two meter). The preposition van separates the quantifier elk from the expression twee slangen to which it is connected interpretatively. From a purely observational view, the quantifier could be said to be floating in the nominal domain. In this article I argue that this floating elk is an instance of so-called 'binominal each'. So far, discussions of the binominal-each-phenomenon have concentrated on dependencies involving material in the clausal domain. In this article I show that dependencies involving binominal elk are also attested DP-internally. Syntactic issues that will be discussed in the context of the DP-internal binominal-each-phenomenon include: Constituency of the nominal expression, the nature of the DP-internal anaphoric dependency, the various manifestations of the binominal pattern, and word order rearrangements by DP-internal displacement.


INTRODUCTION
Diabetes mellitus, a major metabolic disorder associated with hyperglycaemia is one of the leading cause of death in many developed countries. However, use of natural phytochemicals have been proved to have a protective effect against oxidative damage.

AIM
To investigate the effect of citral, a monoterpene on high glucose induced cytotoxicity and oxidative stress in human hepatocellular liver carcinoma (Hep G2) cell line.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Cells were treated with 50 mM concentration of glucose for 24 hours incubation following citral (30 μM) was added to confluent HepG2 cells. Cell viability, Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) generation, DNA damage, lipid peroxidation, antioxidants and Mitogen Activated Protein Kinases (MAPKs) signaling were assessed in citral and/or high glucose induced HepG2 cells.

RESULTS
Cells treated with glucose (50 mM), resulted in increased cytotoxicity, ROS generation, DNA damage, lipid peroxidation and depletion of enzymatic and non enzymatic antioxidants. In contrast, treatment with citral (30 μM) significantly decreased cell cytotoxicity, ROS generation, DNA damage, lipid peroxidation and increased antioxidants enzymes in high glucose induced HepG2 cells. In addition, the present study highlighted that high glucose treated cells showed increased expression of Extracellular Signal Regulated Protein Kinase-1 (ERK-1), c-Jun N-terminal Kinase (JNK) and p38 in HepG2 cells. On the other hand treatment with citral significantly suppressed the expression of ERK-1, JNK and p38 in high glucose induced HepG2 cells.

CONCLUSION
Citral protects against high glucose induced oxidative stress through inhibiting ROS activated MAPK signaling pathway in HepG2 cells.


Why would the governing party in a Westminster parliamentary system ever surrender the right to choose the timing of the next election in favour of a fixed electoral cycle that precisely dates future elections? This analysis suggests an answer relation to Canada's recent (2007) adoption of a four year fixed governing term by arguing that the institutional combination of a fixed maximum (rather than minimum) term and the right to choose the next election date allows opportunism to generate an externality that can result in election calls arising too soon. Evidence from Canada is introduced consistent with the cost of that externality rising through time. In such circumstances a change in institutional rules that sets a higher minimum term would realize net social advantage. The approach also suggests that as the efficiency potential of a fixed term comes to dominate the status quo, it will be the political party with relatively little success in using election timing for electoral advantage that will initiate change. The true test of the efficiency hypothesis will come only with the election of an opposition party. While the current elimination of discretion may seem desirable when in opposition, the desirability of may well change when in power.


This thesis consists of essays investigating job mobility and measurement error. Job mobility, captured here as a change of employer, is a striking feature of the labour market. In empirical work on job mobility, researchers often depend on self-reported tenure data to identify job changes. There may be measurement error in these responses and consequently observations may be misclassified as job changes when truly no change has taken place and vice versa. These observations serve as a starting point for this thesis.
Chapter 3 explores the level and determinants of job mobility in Ireland, using the Living in Ireland Survey, the Irish component of the European Community Household Panel. One of the findings is that the rate of voluntary (i.e. employee initiated) job mobility in Ireland trebled over the period 1995 to 2000. A decomposition technique indicates that composition changes only explain around one-fifth of the increase, while the remainder reflects changes in operation of the labour market.
Chapter 4 uses Monte Carlo simulation techniques to investigate the performance of a modified probit estimator developed by Hausman, Abrevaya and Scott-Morton (1998) that controls for misclassification in a dependent variable. An analysis of the data indicates that there is the possibility of substantial measurement error which may make it difficult to capture job changes. The Hausman et al. (1998) estimator is used to formally control for measurement error in models of job change for Ireland (Chapter 5) and other European countries (Chapter 6). The main findings are that the true rates of job change are being severely undercounted in several countries and also that similar factors are important in determining job changes across countries.
Finally, Chapter 7 contributes to the existing literature that examines the impact of job mobility on wage growth. It finds that by controlling for measurement error in job changes, the effect of job mobility on wage growth is larger than prevailing estimates suggest.


Abstract Disturbance-caused patchiness is important for development and maintenance of spatial and temporal heterogeneity in ecosystems. Mammals are important agents of biopedturbation (soil disturbance by organisms) which is a major source of patchiness in arid ecosystems. The contribution of soil disturbance by mammals to heterogeneity is a function of the size and longevity of the soil disturbance. Foraging pits produced by a variety of mammals are relatively short-lived features that trap plant litter and seeds that are rapidly buried. These form nutrient-rich germination sites. High water infiltration rates, a low bulk density rooting environment, and frequently increased soil nutrient content (especially mounds of central-place foragers and larder-hoarders) characterize warren complexes. Productivity tends to be higher on these mounds and the vegetation tends to differ in composition and richness from the surrounding areas. Soil ejected from fossorial mammal burrow systems is generally of low bulk density, erodes readily, and varies greatly with respect to concentration of nutrients and organic matter depending upon the species and landscape in which the species lives. The variability in soil properties of fossorial burrow system ejecta mounds precludes generalizations about the effects of these disturbances on vegetation. Long-lived features such as Mima-like mounds and heuweltjies are nutrient-rich features that support high productivity and a distinct floral assemblage. There is a significant relationship between longevity of mammal soil disturbance and size of the disturbance: longevity in years=9.33 Area 0.735 . The data suggest that pedturbation by mammals can be an important force in pedogenesis, in structuring landscapes, and in maintaining heterogeneity in ecosystems. Data on mammalian pedturbation is based on scattered autecological studies. There is a need for long-term studies that focus on biopedturbation (soil disturbance by invertebrates and vertebrates) as a process at scales from the patch to the landscape.


Low-carbon eco-city development is one of the key approaches taken by the Chinese government to achieve its international commitment of reducing carbon intensity by 40% to 45% by 2020, as well as other national targets. Cities have planned and implemented various measures to fulfill these goals; however, most of the plans lacked explicit targets, metrics, and implementation mechanisms, and strategies undertaken are often too vague and piecemeal, therefore hindering their effectiveness. To fill these gaps and significantly accelerate the speed of developing low-carbon and eco-city plans, and to facilitate selection and implementation of sound policy apparatus at a large scale, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has developed multiple tools based on both international and Chinese best practices. This paper introduces the application of two of the tools in Jinan, China. The Benchmarking and Energy Saving Tool for Low Carbon Cities (BEST Cities) focuses on energy savings and carbon emissions reduction potential and strategies. The Eco and Low-carbon Indicator Tool for Evaluating Cities (ELITE Cities) has a broader scope that includes air, water, and land use. These tools help cities benchmark and evaluate performance, track progress, and provide practical and scientific prescriptions. This paper sheds light on understanding where a city falls on the path to sustainability, quantifies the city's sectoral energy- and carbon-saving potentials, and reveals challenges and barriers a city may have in implementing the tools and policies. The prioritized policy recommendations made are based on the carbon savings impact, the city's capacity to act, and the government's program costs.


Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are enzymes that are elevated during states of inflammation and have specifically been linked to cartilage, tendon and bone pathologies. Concentrations of these enzymes fluctuate naturally with various injury states, and these enzymes have been shown to be directly inhibited by doxycycline. Historically, doxycycline has been used exclusively for its antimicrobial properties, but recent studies have investigated the anti-inflammatory properties of doxycycline and its effects on musculoskeletal pathologies. This study sought to describe the current use of doxycycline for its MMP inhibitory properties in the setting of musculoskeletal pathologies. During preclinical studies, improved healing properties were noted acutely in tendon injuries following surgical repair and chronically in cartilage injuries, demonstrating decreased rates of joint space narrowing and improved cartilage quality. There is only one known clinical trial that has examined doxycycline use, and it reported that doxycycline can decrease the rate of joint space narrowing in patients with osteoarthritis. Furthermore, doxycycline was well tolerated with minimal side effects reported in both animal and human studies. While it can be reasonably inferred that the positive effects of doxycycline are related to its ability to inhibit MMP activity, further clinical research is warranted to investigate the use of doxycycline in orthopaedic and musculoskeletal pathologies. Level of Evidence: Current Concepts, Level IV.


The frequency-following response (FFR) is a measure of the brain's periodic sound encoding. It is of increasing importance for studying the human auditory nervous system due to numerous associations with auditory cognition and dysfunction. Although the FFR is widely interpreted as originating from brainstem nuclei, a recent study using MEG suggested that there is also a right-lateralized contribution from the auditory cortex at the fundamental frequency (Coffey et al., 2016b). Our objectives in the present work were to validate and better localize this result using a completely different neuroimaging modality and to document the relationships between the FFR, the onset response, and cortical activity. Using a combination of EEG, fMRI, and diffusion-weighted imaging, we show that activity in the right auditory cortex is related to individual differences in FFR–fundamental frequency (f0) strength, a finding that was replicated with two independent stimulus sets, with and without acoustic energy at the fundamental frequency. We demonstrate a dissociation between this FFR–f0-sensitive response in the right and an area in left auditory cortex that is sensitive to individual differences in the timing of initial response to sound onset. Relationships to timing and their lateralization are supported by parallels in the microstructure of the underlying white matter, implicating a mechanism involving neural conduction efficiency. These data confirm that the FFR has a cortical contribution and suggest ways in which auditory neuroscience may be advanced by connecting early sound representation to measures of higher-level sound processing and cognitive function. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The frequency-following response (FFR) is an EEG signal that is used to explore how the auditory system encodes temporal regularities in sound and is related to differences in auditory function between individuals. It is known that brainstem nuclei contribute to the FFR, but recent findings of an additional cortical source are more controversial. Here, we use fMRI to validate and extend the prediction from MEG data of a right auditory cortex contribution to the FFR. We also demonstrate a dissociation between FFR–related cortical activity from that related to the latency of the response to sound onset, which is found in left auditory cortex. The findings provide a clearer picture of cortical processes for analysis of sound features.


This essay presents the subjective experience of life and sickness for the punished in late Imperial Siberia, and the distinctions the punished made between legitimate and illegitimate forms of punishment. The essay also explores state policies towards the sick punished, and explores how different levels of the Tsarist administration and local Siberian society dealt with the challenge of sick and decrepit exiles. It argues that conditions in Siberian prisons were, in general, worse than those in European Russian prisons in the post-1906 period, and that the experience of exile in eastern Siberia placed it among the most difficult locations for exile. Though neither the state nor the punished regarded illness as an integral part of their punishment, the prevalence of illness and disease compounded the cruelty of sentences.


Automatic segmentation of lung lesions associated with COVID-19 in CT images requires large amount of annotated volumes. Annotations mandate expert knowledge and are time-intensive to obtain through fully manual segmentation methods. Additionally, lung lesions have large inter-patient variations, with some pathologies having similar visual appearance as healthy lung tissues. This poses a challenge when applying existing semi-automatic interactive segmentation techniques for data labelling. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that can be learned online while the annotator provides scribble-based interaction. To accelerate learning from only the samples labelled through user-interactions, a patch-based approach is used for training the network. Moreover, we use weighted cross-entropy loss to address the class imbalance that may result from user-interactions. During online inference, the learned network is applied to the whole input volume using a fully convolutional approach. We compare our proposed method with state-of-the-art and show that it outperforms existing methods on the task of annotating lung lesions associated with COVID-19, achieving 16% higher Dice score while reducing execution time by 3$\times$ and requiring 9000 lesser scribbles-based labelled voxels. Due to the online learning aspect, our approach adapts quickly to user input, resulting in high quality segmentation labels. Source code will be made available upon acceptance.


The purpose of this project is to study the CO2 corrosion in oil production wells and
the focus of the study will be on the tubing component of the production string. The
main objectives of the project are; a) To study the material used in a well production
string. b) To determine the average CO2 corrosion rate of a typical well production
string. As for the problem statement of this project, in oil and gas industry, CO2
corrosion has been a recognized problem in production and transportation facilities
for many years e.g. in the tubing string of an oil producing well. The corroded tubing
will cause leakage and tubing failure hence, disrupt oil production. The scopes of
study for this project consist of identifying the rate of CO2 corrosion during the
production life time of the tubing string and determine the factors leading to the CO2
corrosion. In order to provide a reliable prediction on the behavior of CO2 corrosion
on tubing steel, the project's methodology used Weight Loss Method using
Autoclave Machine and Linear Polarization Resistance Method (LPR) to simulate
the actual environment in the tubing during the oil production and analyze the CO2
corrosion rate. The laboratory experiments are conducted on API L 80 type steel.
The Weighted Loss Method is conducted in stagnant condition using 3 wt% NaCl
over a series of parameters which includes pressure = 10 bar, 40 bar and 60 bar,
pH=5 and temperature at 25 C. The LPR method is conducted in flowing solution
using 3 wt% NaCl over a series of parameters which includes temperature = 25 ˚C,
40 ˚C and 60 ˚C, pH = 5 and pressure at 1 atm. All data were collected and analyzed
using Weighted Loss Method, LPR, SEM, OM and Hardness (Vicker) Test to
determine the CO2 corrosion rate and the effects on the L 80 steel. As for the
findings, the average CO2 corrosion rates in API L 80 steel yield from the laboratory
test ranges from 1.3 mm/yr to 4.7 mm/yr.


BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES
Among the array of microangiopathies that may occur during pregnancy, HELLP syndrome and thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) produce similar laboratory findings (hemolytic anemia and thrombocytopenia), although neurological symptoms prevail in TTP and abnormal liver function in HELLP syndrome. It is clinically important to distinguish the two entities given that their managements differ (prompt induction of delivery in HELLP syndrome, plasma exchange in TTP). The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether or not ADAMTS-13, the metalloprotease that disposes ultralarge, highly thrombogenic multimers of von Willebrand factor (VWF) and is severely deficient or undetectable in many patients with TTP, is deficient in HELLP syndrome.

DESIGN AND METHODS
We measured ADAMTS-13 and VWF (antigen, ristocetin cofactor activity, collagen binding, multimeric structure) in 17 pregnant women during HELLP syndrome and after 6 months during clinical remission. Controls were 25 healthy pregnant women and 50 healthy non-pregnant women.

RESULTS
All the women with HELLP syndrome had lower plasma levels of ADAMTS-13 activity (median and range: 31%, 12-43) than did the healthy pregnant (71%, 48-105) and non-pregnant women (101%, 45-152); the reduced levels returned to normal on remission (115%, 90-170). Reduced levels were not due to the presence of inactivating autoantibodies and in no case was the protease undetectable in plasma. Ultralarge VWF multimers were not present in plasma, the levels of VWF were higher than in normal pregnancy.

INTERPRETATION AND CONCLUSIONS
Because none of the pregnant women diagnosed with HELLP syndrome had undetectable ADAMTS-13 levels in pregnancy-associated thrombotic microangiopathies, the finding of severe ADAMTS-13 deficiency would argue against a diagnosis of HELLP syndrome and for a diagnosis of TTP.


Summary
1.
Because of the widespread distribution of trichuris, its undoubted pathogenicity in severe infestations and its probable harmfulness even when harbored in lesser numbers, treatment for this parasite is important.
2.
It has been well established that the anthelmintics usually employed in the treatment of worm infestations are as a general rule inefficient against trichuris.
3.
Leche de higueron, the fresh latex of the fig, Ficus laurifolia, has been effectively used by the indigenes of South America against helminths, including trichuris, and has been recommended by a number of investigators.
4.
A preparation of the sap of Ficus laurifolia, higuerolatex, kept cool in dark bottles for almost a year before use, was found by us to be highly efficient in the treatment of both trichuriasis and ascariasis.
A.
In the treatment of nine patients in 1927 with slightly more than 30 cc. of the drug, and 117 patients in 1928 with 60 cc., reduction in egg output of 89.5 per cent and 85.4 per cent respectively was obtained in the two series, with 22.2 per cent of the patients cured in the first group and 53.8 per cent in the larger one. The variation in percentages of cures in the differing intensity groups (A, 74.5; B, 46.0; C, 32.7; and DE, 0.0 per cent) suggests that two treatments should be given to remove practically all worms.
B.
The results obtained in treating an equal number of patients with oil of chenopodium are in accord with the findings of others as to the inefficiency of this drug in general oral treatment. Only 17 per cent reduction was observed in egg output and only 1.7 per cent of the patients was freed from worms.
C.
In the group treated with higuerolatex, the ascaris egg output of 37 patients infested with this parasite, was reduced by 89.7 per cent, and 70.3 per cent of the patients was presumably cured. This compares favorably with the results obtained with an equal number of ascaris infested patients in the group treated with chenopodium, in which 83.2 per cent reduction was obtained in egg output, and a larger percentage of the patients (83.8) was cured. The marked specificity of oil of chenopodium in ascaris infestation is emphasized by results for a group of 27 patients treated with 2 cc. of this drug in 1927: the egg output of these patients was reduced 94.9 per cent, and 92.2 per cent of cures was obtained.


Precursor B-lymphoblastic lymphoma (B-LBL) may present as a solitary bone tumor. Fewer than 10 cases with a proven precursor B-cell phenotype have been reported in the English literature. In this report, we describe four cases of B-lymphoblastic lymphoma presenting as a localized intraosseous mass, which clinically and histologically mimicked Ewing's sarcoma. Three tumors occurred in the tibia and one in the humerus. In all four cases, the initial diagnosis was either "Ewing's sarcoma" or "consistent with Ewing's sarcoma." All four patients were female. Three were children and one was an adult; mean age was 12.5 years (range, 4 to 31 years). All had extremity pain without significant constitutional symptoms. In three cases, the tumors were osteolytic on radiographic evaluation, and in one case, osteosclerotic. Immunohistochemical stains on paraffin-embedded tissue showed that the neoplastic cells expressed terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase, CD43, vimentin, and CD99 (MIC2 gene product) in all cases. Three cases were negative for CD45. CD79a was positive in all four cases studied; however, CD20 (L26) was positive in only two of four cases. CD3 was negative in all cases. Two cases showed focal granular cytoplasmic staining for keratin. Two cases analyzed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) revealed clonal rearrangement of the immunoglobulin heavy chain (IgH) gene. Follow-up revealed that the three pediatric patients, who received a high-dose multiagent chemotherapy regime for LBL, are disease free at follow-up intervals of more than 1, 11, and 12 years, respectively. The adult patient died two years after diagnosis with disseminated disease. Although rare, B-lymphoblastic lymphoma should be considered in the differential diagnosis of small round cell tumors of bone. A diagnosis of Ewing's sarcoma should be made only after complete immunophenotyping and, if necessary, molecular diagnostic tests to exclude lymphoblastic lymphoma. A limited panel of antibodies can lead to an erroneous diagnosis; B-lymphoblastic lymphoma may be negative for CD45 and CD20 but positive for CD99 and even for keratin, mimicking Ewing's sarcoma. Correct diagnosis is extremely important because LBL usually is curable in the pediatric age group with appropriate therapy.


Software metrics have many uses, e.g., defect prediction, effort estimation, and benchmarking an organization against peers and industry standards. In all these cases, metrics may depend on the context, such as the programming language. Here we aim to investigate if the distributions of commonly used metrics do, in fact, vary with six context factors: application domain, programming language, age, lifespan, the number of changes, and the number of downloads. For this preliminary study we select 320 nontrivial software systems from Source Forge. These software systems are randomly sampled from nine popular application domains of Source Forge. We calculate 39 metrics commonly used to assess software maintainability for each software system and use Kruskal Wallis test and Mann-Whitney U test to determine if there are significant differences among the distributions with respect to each of the six context factors. We use Cliff's delta to measure the magnitude of the differences and find that all six context factors affect the distribution of 20 metrics and the programming language factor affects 35 metrics. We also briefly discuss how each context factor may affect the distribution of metric values. We expect our results to help software benchmarking and other software engineering methods that rely on these commonly used metrics to be tailored to a particular context.


The energy dependence of the local ${\cal P}$ and ${\cal CP}$ violation in Au+Au and Cu+Cu collisions in a large energy range is estimated within a simple phenomenological model. It is expected that at LHC the chiral magnetic effect will be about 20 times weaker than at RHIC. At lower energy range, covered by the low-energy scan at RHIC and future NICA/FAIR facilities, the created magnetic field strength and energy density of deconfined matter are rather high providing necessary conditions for the chiral magnetic effect. However, the particular model for the chiral magnetic effect predicts that this effect should vanish sharply at energy somewhere above the top SPS one. To elucidate CME background effects the Hadron-String-Dynamics (HSD) transport model including electromagnetic fields is put forward. Importance of new planning experiments at LHC and for the low-energy RHIC scan program is emphasized.


Aging is associated with reduced numbers of all thymocyte sub-populations, including early T-cell progenitors. However, it is unclear if this is due to inadequate recruitment of lymphohematopoietic progenitor cells (LPCs) to the aged thymus or to abnormal development of T cells within the thymus. We found that LPCs from young mice were recruited equally well to the thymi of young or aged mice and that thymic stromal cells (TSCs) from young and old mice expressed similar levels of P-selectin and CCL25, which are believed to mediate recruitment of LPCs to the adult thymus. However, the number of recruited thymocytes in old thymus was markedly reduced after two weeks, indicating that T-cell development or proliferation is defective in the aged thymus. We also found that LPCs from aged and young mice have similar capacities to seed a fetal thymus that was transplanted under the kidney capsule. Thymic epithelial cells (TECs) in aged mice had lower proliferative capacity and higher rate of apoptosis, compared with findings in young animals. In addition, immunofluorescence staining with antibodies to cortical and medullary TECs revealed that aged thymi had a disorganized thymic stromal architecture, combined with reduced cellularity of the medulla, and apoptosis of thymocyte sub-populations in the medullary microenvironment was increased, compared with that in young mice. We conclude that aging does not impair recruitment of LPCs to the thymus, but is characterized by abnormalities in thymic epithelial architecture, especially medullary TEC function that may provide sub-optimal support for thymic development of LPCs.


We study the evolution of a gynodioecious species under mixed-mating through a nucleocytoplasmic male sterility model. We consider two cytoplasmic types and a nuclear locus with two alleles. Here, the interaction between one cytoplasmic type and a recessive nuclear male-sterility factor gives rise to only one female genotype, while the remaining types correspond to hermaphroditic plants. We include two fitness paramaters: the advantageous female fitness t of females relative to that of hermaphrodites; and a silent and dominant cost of restoration, that is, a diminished fitness for plants carrying a dominant restorer gene relative to that of hermaphrodites. The parameter related to the cost of restoration is assumed to be present on outcrossing male fertility only. We find that every population converges to a stable population. We also determine the nature of the attracting stable population, which could be a nucleocytoplasmic polymorphism, a nuclear polymorphism or another population with some genotypes absent. This depends on the position of t with respect to critical values expressed in terms of the other parameters and also on the initial population.


We introduce a new approach to the Josephson effect in SIS tunnel junctions. The Josephson coupling energy is calculated from the overlap of real space Cooper pair wavefunctions in two superconductors through an insulating barrier. It is shown that the Josephson tunneling is limited by the size of the Cooper pair and its shrinking during the tunneling. Therefore, the Josephson coupling energy and the critical current become extremely small in high T c superconductors, including M gB 2. This shrinking also causes the observed DC supercurrent in low T c superconductors, such as Pb and Sn, to fall off much faster than 1/R n for tunneling resistance R n above several ohms. Consequently there is a material-dependent threshold resistance, above which the supercurrent decreases much faster with increasing resistance. The impurity-induced shrinking is also shown to limit the critical current. Furthermore, the (weak) temperature dependence of the Cooper pair size is found to contribute to the temperature dependence of the DC supercurrent.


The error-backpropagation (backprop) algorithm remains the most common solution to the credit assignment problem in artificial neural networks. In neuroscience, it is unclear whether the brain could adopt a similar strategy to correctly modify its synapses. Recent models have attempted to bridge this gap while being consistent with a range of experimental observations. However, these models are either unable to effectively backpropagate error signals across multiple layers or require a multi-phase learning process, neither of which are reminiscent of learning in the brain. Here, we introduce a new model, Bursting Cortico-Cortical Networks (BurstCCN), which solves these issues by integrating known properties of cortical networks namely bursting activity, short-term plasticity (STP) and dendrite-targeting interneurons. BurstCCN relies on burst multiplexing via connection-type-specific STP to propagate backprop-like error signals within deep cortical networks. These error signals are encoded at distal dendrites and induce burst-dependent plasticity as a result of excitatory-inhibitory top-down inputs. First, we demonstrate that our model can effectively backpropagate errors through multiple layers using a single-phase learning process. Next, we show both empirically and analytically that learning in our model approximates backprop-derived gradients. Finally, we demonstrate that our model is capable of learning complex image classification tasks (MNIST and CIFAR-10). Overall, our results suggest that cortical features across sub-cellular, cellular, microcircuit and systems levels jointly underlie single-phase efficient deep learning in the brain.


Introduction Women have increasingly made a significant impact on the paid workforce over the past 70 years. But even with increasing female participation rates, the workplace poses distinct challenges for women in remaining permanently employed and maneuvering through corporate ranks. The popular media has presented "opting out" as a rationale for women's unstructured career paths. The popular press has made the case that women, in great numbers and in high level careers, make the choice to leave the workforce because of a strong desire to raise their children. However, studies have shown that most newspaper stories only relate the experiences or opinions of a few select women. Most reports have failed to relate the truth about the female majority and have neglected the real experiences of most American families and working women. (1) While it is true that women make life choices based on the strong pull from their personal lives--children, eldercare, spousal career demands, and even family relocation--it is not clear if "opting out" is a matter of necessity or choice; are there possibly more push factors than pull factors involved when making these critical decisions. (2) Therefore, the issue is, if given better options or solutions, would women more readily choose to remain in the workforce and choose career goals over unemployment or underemployment? And what are employers willing to do or doing, if anything, to assist women faced with these challenges? A possible solution that would be available to employers is presented. Background Women's participation in the United States workforce has steadily increased from 43% in 1970 to 59.5% in 2008. (3) Statistics also show that 66% of all American households with children under 18 have all adults working as do 51% of households with women living without a husband. (4) In 2008, 51% of women with children under the age of 18 worked full-time, whereas 16.4 % worked part-time, 4% were unemployed and 28.6% were not in the workforce. (5) According to the US Census Bureau, "60% of women earn half or more of their families' income. (6) The current data implies that it is imperative for most women to work--either to provide two parent households with dual income or to provide the sole income to account for the increased number of single female households. Basic economic factors for family survival seem to refute the belief that most women can voluntarily choose to leave the workforce. Although the evidence shows that women either want to or need to work, many women still leave the workforce at some point in their career. Nearly four in ten highly qualified women (37%) reported that they left work voluntarily at some point in their careers and among women who had children, that statistic rose to 43%. (7) These figures indicate that many women make a choice to leave the workforce and having children has an increased impact on this decision. However, these figures do not provide the specific reasons behind the premise of "opting out." While "opting out" is an easy explanation for women's non-linear career paths, it is not so simple. Studies have shown that of highly qualified women "only 16% always intended to quit when they had children" and of the 43 women surveyed, only 5 had a "stable preference to be a stay-at-home mom." (8) Cleary, while a minority of women will choose to be stay-at-home mothers out of pure preference, most women, especially educated women, prefer to maintain a working status. The theory of "opting out" continues to lack validity for providing a basis for why many women become unemployed or underemployed. The demographics of stay-at-home mothers is yet another facet in further weakening the "opting out" premise. In the United States, the number of households with children under18 has consistently decreased and only 8% of professional women (born since 1956) have left the workforce for childbearing. (9) In 2007, the U. …


Abstract A nonparametric method for comparing multiple forecast models is developed and implemented. The hypothesis of Optimal Predictive Ability generalizes the Superior Predictive Ability hypothesis from a single given loss function to an entire class of loss functions. Distinction is drawn between General Loss functions, Convex Loss functions and Symmetric Convex Loss functions. The research hypothesis is formulated in terms of moment inequality conditions. The empirical moment conditions are reduced to an exact and finite system of linear inequalities based on piecewise-linear loss functions. The hypothesis can be tested in a statistically consistent way using a blockwise Empirical Likelihood Ratio test statistic. A computationally feasible test procedure computes the test statistic using Convex Optimization methods, and estimates conservative, data-dependent critical values using a majorizing chi-square limit distribution and a moment selection method. An empirical application to inflation forecasting reveals that a very large majority of thousands of forecast models are redundant, leaving predominantly Phillips Curve type models, when convexity and symmetry are assumed.


I. INTRODUCTION The government will act to bring the religious and secular closer through mutual understanding and respect.(1) There is no doubt that religion is woven into various aspects of the State of Israel.(2) Religious influence is evident in the symbols representing the government of Israel, institutions supported by the state, and legislation passed in Israel's parliament, the Knesset.(3) There is virtually no protest to religious symbolism or even much protest to government support of religious institutions.(4) What draws the most criticism is the legislation that compels the Jewish citizens to adhere to certain religious practices, such as the Sabbath rest laws.(5) This kind of protest should be expected within a country that still has not clearly defined the role of religion in its government.(6) Israel, a self proclaimed Jewish Democratic State, has three choices in defining its goals for the relationship of Judaism to the Knesset.(7) Israel can be a state where the majority of its citizens are Jewish, a nation-state that realizes the Jewish nation's right to self governance, or a religious state guided purely by the laws of Judaism.(8) Perhaps it is a combination of these three definitions that has emerged over the past fifty years. This Comment takes a historical look at the role that religion has played in Israeli politics, society and government, and allows the reader to decide where the 21st century will take Israel. II. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND A. Zionist Movement The world needs the Jewish State; therefore it will arise.(9) Faced with the rise of anti-Semitism throughout Europe, Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, was revived by Theodor Herzl, an educated Western European Jewish journalist and author.(10) Herzl brought the concept of creating a Jewish homeland to the attention of international leaders and politicians.(11) However, Herzel realized that simply writing about the needs of Jews was not enough and that to help the movement, organization and action were necessary.(12) Thus, the World Zionist Congress was convened on August 29, 1897,(13) where the Congress created a permanent Zionist organization through which it could work to achieve its goals.(14) Though the Zionist movement initiated by Herzl was political by nature, there were essentially three varieties of Zionism: Religious, Socialist, and Zionism as refuge.(15) The religious idea is the oldest of the three.(16) One of the central themes of the Jewish religion is the tie between the people and the Land of Israel, as described in the Torah (the Old Testament).(17) This theme has been traced back to the covenant between God and Abraham.(18) The Socialist idea, the principal view among Jews that arrived as early pioneers into Palestine, envisioned a perfect socialist society intertwined with Jewish beliefs.(19) Most of the supporters of this idea were either indifferent, or perhaps even opposed, to religion.(20) Their goal was the rebuilding of the Jewish culture.(21) Finally, the concept of Zionism as refuge viewed the creation of the Jewish state as a solution to "the European `problem of the Jews.'"(22) Jews that found themselves dealing with anti-Semitism would have a place to seek refuge and be welcomed.(23) This idea was well received, but unlike the other two views, it lacked detailed planning of the state-building process.(24) This view was then divided further by the Revisionists and the General Zionists B.(25) The Revisionists were concerned with boundaries and the territory that would be in Israel's control, while the General Zionists B were concerned with countering the Socialist ideology and promoting free enterprise and capitalism.(26) From the beginning of Zionism there were varying opinions among the Religious Jews. Notwithstanding the religious calling for a Jewish state, many Religious Jews did not support the establishment of Israel and actually condemned it. …


Cyber attacks deceive machines into believing something that does not exist in the first place. However, there are some to which even humans fall prey. One such famous attack that attackers have used over the years to exploit the vulnerability of vision is known to be a Homoglyph attack. It employs a primary yet effective mechanism to create illegitimate domains that are hard to differentiate from legit ones. Moreover, as the difference is pretty indistinguishable for a user to notice, they cannot stop themselves from clicking on these homoglyph domain names. In many cases, that results in either information theft or malware attack on their systems. Existing approaches use simple, string-based comparison techniques applied in primary language-based tasks. Although they are impactful to some extent, they usually fail because they are not robust to different types of homoglyphs and are computationally not feasible because of their time requirement proportional to the string length. Similarly, neural network-based approaches are employed to determine real domain strings from fake ones. Nevertheless, the problem with both methods is that they require paired sequences of real and fake domain strings to work with, which is often not the case in the real world, as the attacker only sends the illegitimate or homoglyph domain to the vulnerable user. Therefore, existing approaches are not suitable for practical scenarios in the real world. In our work, we created GlyphNet, an image dataset that contains 4M domains, both real and homoglyphs. Additionally, we introduce a baseline method for a homoglyph attack detection system using an attention-based convolutional Neural Network. We show that our model can reach state-of-the-art accuracy in detecting homoglyph attacks with a 0.93 AUC on our dataset.


Finite-state controllers are a compact and effective plan representation for agent widely used in AI. In this paper, we proposea generic framework and related solver for synthesizing bounded finite-state controllers, and show its instantiations to three different applications, including generalized planning, planning programs and service composition under partial observability and controllability. We show that our generic solver is sound and complete, and amenable to heuristics that take into account the structure of the specific target instantiation. Experiments show that instantiations of our solver to the problems above often outperform tailored approaches in the literature. This suggests that our proposal is a promising base point for future research on finite-state controller synthesis.


During 16 years 202 patients with leg ulcer have been studied prospectively. Whenever possible, cure has been obtained in ambulatory, which was the main objective. Surgery was preferentially made after the cure of the ulcer. From the 202 patients, 166 have made a prolonged follow-up. Cure in ambulatory has been obtained in 91% of the patients. We stress the importance of the direct control of all the treatment by the responsible doctor.


Molecular sequences in public databases are mostly annotated by the submitting authors without further validation. This procedure can generate erroneous taxonomic sequence labels. Mislabeled sequences are hard to identify, and they can induce downstream errors because new sequences are typically annotated using existing ones. Furthermore, taxonomic mislabelings in reference sequence databases can bias metagenetic studies which rely on the taxonomy. Despite significant efforts to improve the quality of taxonomic annotations, the curation rate is low because of the labour-intensive manual curation process. Here, we present SATIVA, a phylogeny-aware method to automatically identify taxonomically mislabeled sequences ("mislabels") using statistical models of evolution. We use the Evolutionary Placement Algorithm (EPA) to detect and score sequences whose taxonomic annotation is not supported by the underlying phylogenetic signal, and automatically propose a corrected taxonomic classification for those. Using simulated data, we show that our method attains high accuracy for identification (96.9% sensitivity / 91.7% precision) as well as correction (94.9% sensitivity / 89.9% precision) of mislabels. Furthermore, an analysis of four widely used microbial 16S reference databases (Greengenes, LTP, RDP and SILVA) indicates that they currently contain between 0.2% and 2.5% mislabels. Finally, we use SATIVA to perform an in-depth evaluation of alternative taxonomies for Cyanobacteria. SATIVA is freely available at https://github.com/amkozlov/sativa.


A graph is $d$-bounded if its maximum degree is at most $d$.  We apply the Ore-Ryser Theorem on $f$-factors in bipartite graphs to obtain conditions for the extension of a $2$-bounded subgraph to a $2$-factor in a bipartite graph.  As consequences, we prove that every matching in the $5$-dimensional hypercube extends to a $2$-factor, and we obtain conditions for this property in general regular bipartite graphs.  For example, to show that every matching in a regular $n$-vertex bipartite graph extends to a $2$-factor, it suffices to show that all matchings with fewer than $n/3$ edges extend to $2$-factors.


Evaluating and improving planning for autonomous vehicles requires scalable generation of long-tail traffic scenarios. To be useful, these scenarios must be realistic and challenging, but not impossible to drive through safely. In this work, we introduce STRIVE, a method to automatically generate challenging scenarios that cause a given planner to produce undesirable behavior, like collisions. To maintain scenario plausibility, the key idea is to leverage a learned model of traffic motion in the form of a graph-based conditional VAE. Scenario generation is formulated as an optimization in the latent space of this traffic model, perturbing an initial real-world scene to produce trajectories that collide with a given planner. A subsequent optimization is used to find a "solution" to the scenario, ensuring it is useful to improve the given planner. Further analysis clusters generated scenarios based on collision type. We attack two planners and show that STRIVE successfully generates realistic, challenging scenarios in both cases. We additionally "close the loop" and use these scenarios to optimize hyperparameters of a rule-based planner.


This study aims at investigating the effectiveness of nutritional supplements containing vitamins, minerals, and ammonia on the sexual and breeding behaviors in Ghezel sheep. To this end, 28 three and half-year old ewes (50±3 kilograms) with the record of giving birth to two lambs and 4 three-year old (90±3.5 kilograms) rams were used. The ewes were divided into two groups of A (i.e., treatment) and B (i.e., control) with 14 ewes in each group. The treatment group received 40 grams of the compound 7 days before and 7 days after sexual intercourse. The results demonstrate that the treatment group showed sexual receptivity behavior earlier than the control group. Also, such a behavior in the treatment group was accomplished in a shorter period of time than the control group. Moreover, in the treatment group, the breeding rate was demonstrated to be higher than the control group. Nevertheless, the measurement of estrogen, calcium, and phosphate in three different stages showed no significant differences between the two groups. The receptivity power (i.e., the number of successful jumping permission) and the new-born lambs' weight were not reported to be significant. The current study demonstrated that livestock supplements (nutrients) improve the livestock's health and sexual behavior. In addition, such supplements have a positive influence on breeding rate


Far infrared radiation (FIR) has been shown to have physiological effects when used as a treatment modality for certain medical conditions. Athletic apparel are currently commercially available that are constructed with fabrics that purportedly emit FIR. If apparel with this technology are capable of inducing positive physiological effects, then there may be important implications when worn by an athlete during exercise. The purpose of this study is to examine whether FIR apparel has an effect on oxygen consumption during exercise at submaximal intensities. Twelve male cyclists have completed submaximal incremental cycling tests. Each subject is tested on 4 separate days, twice while wearing a full body Control garment, and twice while wearing a similar garment made out of FIR fabric. Throughout each cycling test, the volume of oxygen uptake is monitored by using a breathing mask and metabolic analysis cart. At lower cycling intensities, the subjects consume statistically significantly less oxygen when wearing the FIR apparel compared to the Control garment, despite performing the same amount of mechanical work. Additional research is required to determine the implication of this effect for a training or competing athlete; however, the results indicate that this apparel technology does elicit a physiological effect.


A moving standard deviation (MSD) technique is developed to infer the onset and cessation of ephemeral streamflow using temperature data from the upper 2.25 m of streambed sediments. During periods of streamflow, shifting of the predominant thermal‐transport mechanism within the sediments from conduction to advection produced changes in the amplitude of the vertically propagating diurnal temperature waves. Analytical expressions describing propagation of conductive and advective diurnal temperature waves through streambed sediments are presented for identifying depths with the largest changes in the diurnal temperature wave amplitude between periods of flow and no flow. The MSD statistical technique was developed to identify the thermal amplitude changes from bed sediment thermographs and to infer streamflow timing. The accuracy of the MSD technique is quantified using direct streamflow and streambed water content measurements. Accuracy of the technique was most sensitive to the MSD window length and the threshold parameter separating periods of conductive and advective heat transport. An alternative calibration procedure was developed using temperature measurements alone. The average error for streamflow timing was approximately 400 min for each event. The results show that temperature sensors may be deployed at a range of sediment depths depending on streamflow stage and soil thermal and hydraulic properties, and that the MSD procedure can provide an objective and repeatable means to quantify streamflow timing.


This review highlights the recent applications of Ir-catalyzed reactions in the total synthesis of natural products. On the basis of the type of Ir-catalyzed reaction, the applications will be grouped into four main sections, including transfer hydrogenation reactions, hydrogenation reactions, allylic substitution reactions and C–H borylation reactions. The examples presented demonstrate the high efficiency of the entitled reactions in the formation of chemical bonds and the construction of naturally occurring skeletons.


INTRODUCTION In this catalogue — entitled "provisional" because our knowledge of the subject is still so evidently incomplete — all species of Ficus mentioned as hosts of fig wasps, are listed with the Hymenoptera Chalcidoidea reared from their receptacles. The names used for the Agaonidae are in accordance with those in Grandi's (1963b) world catalogue of this Chalcidoid family, two items excepted for nomenclatorial reasons, viz. Blastophaga (B.) inopinata and B. (Eupristina) jacobsoni. Blastophaga (B.) puncticeps distinguenda Grandi (1916a: 129), if considered conspecific with B. (B.) inopinata Grandi (1926: 355), should be called B. (B.) d. distinguenda Grandi, while B. (B.) puncticeps sensu Grandi (1916a: 129) not Mayr (1906: 156), should be indicated as B. (B.) distinguenda inopinata Grandi. The name Eupristina jacobsoni Grandi (1926: 358) cannot be used now that Eupristina Saunders is reduced to a subgenus of Blastophaga Gravenhorst (Grandi, 1963b: 334), Grandes name being preoccupied by B. (Waterstoniella) jacobsoni Grandi (1916a: 126). I suggested the need for a replacement name to Prof. Grandi, who left the renaming to me. I propose Blastophaga (Eupristina) adempta nom. nov. for B. (E.) jacobsoni Grandi. The Chalcidoidea of the family Torymidae, subfamily Sycophaginae, and most of the other inquilines, should be thoroughly revised before a critical list of their host preferences can be presented. Their nomenclature is not very stable as yet. The name Philotrypesis ornata Grandi (1930: 82), synonym P. unispinosa sensu Grandi (1921b: 128; 1926: 361) not Mayr (1906: 175) is preoccupied by P. unispinosa ornata Grandi (1921b: 137),


Behavioral health conditions such as depression and anxiety are a global concern, and there is growing interest in employing speech technology to screen and monitor patients remotely. Language modeling approaches require automatic speech recognition (ASR) and multiple privacy-compliant ASR services are commercially available. We use a corpus of over 60 hours of speech from a behavioral health task, and compare ASR performance for four commercial vendors. We expected similar performance, but found large differences between the top and next-best performer, for both mobile (48% relative WER increase) and laptop (67% relative WER increase) data. Results suggest the importance of benchmarking ASR systems in this domain. Additionally we find that WER is not systematically related to depression itself. Performance is however affected by diverse audio quality from users' personal devices, and possibly from the overall style of speech in this domain.


In a 4-year study, the incidence of various types of injuries (caused by insects, birds, growth cracks, mechanical wounding, and other, unidentified factors) was assessed in relation to brown rot development (caused by Monilinia fructigena) on fruit of three apple cultivars (Prima, Jonathan, and Mutsu) in integrated and organic blocks of two apple orchards in Hungary. In addition, populations of male codling moths (Cydia pomonella) were monitored with pheromone traps season-long in both management systems. On average, injury incidence on fruit at harvest was 6.1 and 19.2% in the integrated and organic treatments, respectively. Insect injury, which was caused primarily by C. pomonella, had the highest incidence among the five injury types, accounting for 79.4% of the total injury by harvest in the organic blocks and 36.6% in the integrated blocks. Levels of all other injury types remained close to zero during most of the season, but the incidence of bird injury and growth cracks increased markedly in the final 3 to 5 weeks before harvest in both production systems. Brown rot developed more slowly and reached a lower incidence in the integrated (6.4% final incidence on average) compared with the organic blocks (20.1% average incidence). In addition, the disease developed later but attained higher levels as the cultivar ripening season increased from early-maturing Prima to late-maturing Mutsu. Overall, 94.3 to 98.7% of all injured fruit were also infected by M. fructigena, whereas the incidence of brown-rotted fruit without visible injury was very low (0.8 to 1.6%). Correlation coefficients (on a per plot basis) and association indices (on a per-fruit basis) were calculated between brown rot and the various injury types for two selected assessment dates 4 weeks preharvest and at harvest. At both dates, the strongest significant (P < 0.05) relationships were observed between brown rot and insect injury and between brown rot and the cumulative number of trapped C. pomonella. At the harvest assessment, two additional significant correlations were between brown rot and bird injury and between brown rot and growth cracks. In every case, correlation coefficients were larger in organic than in integrated blocks. Although it is well established that brown rot in pome fruits is closely associated with fruit injuries, this is the first study to provide season-long progress data on different injury types and quantitative analyses of their relative importance at different times in the growing season and across two distinct management systems.


Ground-based observations of the Earthshine, i.e., the light scattered by Earth to the Moon, and then reflected back to Earth, simulate space observations of our planet and represent a powerful benchmark for the studies of Earth-like planets. Earthshine spectra are strongly linearly polarized, owing to scattering by molecules and small particles in the atmosphere of the Earth and surface reflection, and may allow us to measure global atmospheric and surface properties of planet Earth. Aims. We aim to interpret already published spectropolarimetric observations of the Earthshine by comparing them with new radiative transfer model simulations including a fully realistic three-dimensional (3D) surface-atmosphere model for planet Earth. We used the highly advanced Monte Carlo radiative transfer model MYSTIC to simulate polarized radiative transfer in the atmosphere of the Earth without approximations regarding the geometry, taking into account the polarization from surface reflection and multiple scattering by molecules, aerosol particles, cloud droplets, and ice crystals. We have shown that Earth spectropolarimetry is highly sensitive to all these input parameters, and we have presented simulations of a fully realistic Earth atmosphere-surface model including 3D cloud fields and two-dimensional (2D) surface property maps. Our modeling results show that scattering in high ice water clouds and reflection from the ocean surface are crucial to explain the continuum polarization at longer wavelengths as has been reported in Earthshine observations taken at the Very Large Telescope in 2011 (3.8 % and 6.6 % at 800 nm, depending on which part of Earth was visible from the Moon at the time of the observations). We found that the relatively high degree of polarization of 6.6 % can be attributed to light reflected by the ocean surface in the sunglint region.


The reception of ancient tragedy is one of the most research-active areas within classical reception studies. The majority of scholarship, however, focuses upon watershed performances and staged translations and adaptations. It infrequently encompasses experimental productions that rework ancient tragedy into new, freestanding plays that retain only an ambiguous connection to their source texts. This thesis focuses upon such experimental reinventions, and analyses receptions of Greek and Roman tragedy that come under the banner of 'postdramatic theatre'. Hans-Thies Lehmann defines the postdramatic as "a theatre that feels bound to operate beyond drama, at a time 'after' the authority of the dramatic paradigm in theatre". It is a style of performance in which the traditional components of drama, such as character and narrative, are subordinate to the immediate, affective power of the more abstract elements of performance, such as image and sound. The aim of the project is to document this underrepresented form of reception, and to explore the effect of combining tragedy with postdramatic techniques. My first chapter consists of an overview of the postdramatic paradigm and the role of the classics within this. Four chapters follow, in which I investigate a range of receptions produced by Anglophone practitioners including playwrights Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp, devising ensembles The Wooster Group and The Hayloft Project, and immersive theatre companies Zecora Ura and Para Active. I argue that classicism is a factor that is not just unexplored within postdramatic theatre, but is also critically important to the style, and that the combination of postdramatic techniques and ancient tragedy results in affective performances that constitute a new, political form of classical reception. Their study contributes to scholarship on the role of tragedy in the modern world, and illuminates the degree to which postdramatic receptions can shed light back onto classical drama and its reception.


The last twenty years have witnessed the development of promising methodologies and new paradigms that have brought substantial findings and have changed our views on early language acquisition. Focusing on early comprehension, this article is mainly devoted to a review of these new paradigms analyzing their benefits and limits. One of the main challenges is the development of reliable on-line behavioural methods coupled with neurophysiological data in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Another challenge is the extension of these new paradigms within a powerful crosslinguistic perspective. In the second part of the article, we focus on some advances in different domains directly linked to new methodologies: the evaluation of task dependence in early syntactic comprehension, some new insights on production/comprehension asymmetries and the predictive value of speed of processing language in two-year-olds for language and cognitive abilities in later childhood.


One big limitation of computational tools for analyzing ChIP-seq data is that most of them ignore non-unique tags (NUTs) that match the human genome even though NUTs comprise up to 60% of all raw tags in ChIP-seq data. Effectively utilizing these NUTs would increase the sequencing depth and allow a more accurate detection of enriched binding sites, which in turn could lead to more precise and significant biological interpretations. In this study, we have developed a computational tool, LOcating Non-Unique matched Tags (LONUT), to improve the detection of enriched regions from ChIP-seq data. Our LONUT algorithm applies a linear and polynomial regression model to establish an empirical score (ES) formula by considering two influential factors, the distance of NUTs to peaks identified using uniquely matched tags (UMTs) and the enrichment score for those peaks resulting in each NUT being assigned to a unique location on the reference genome. The newly located tags from the set of NUTs are combined with the original UMTs to produce a final set of combined matched tags (CMTs). LONUT was tested on many different datasets representing three different characteristics of biological data types. The detected sites were validated using de novo motif discovery and ChIP-PCR. We demonstrate the specificity and accuracy of LONUT and show that our program not only improves the detection of binding sites for ChIP-seq, but also identifies additional binding sites.


We present a detailed study of parameter sweeps of silicon photonic arrayed waveguide gratings (AWG), looking into the effects of phase errors in the delay lines, which are induced by fabrication variation. We fabricated AWGs with 8 wavelength channels spaced 200 GHz and 400 GHz apart. We swept the waveguide width of the delay lines, and also performed a sweep where we introduced increments of length to the waveguides to emulate different AWG layouts and look into the effect of the phase errors. With this more detailed study we could quantitatively confirm the results of earlier studies, showing the wider waveguides reduce the effect of phase errors and dramatically improve the performance of the AWGs in terms of insertion loss and crosstalk. We also looked into the effect of rotating the layout of the circuit on the mask, and here we could show that, contrary to results with older technologies, this no longer has an effect on the current generation of devices.


This paper intends to observe and compare the R&D output on 'Buffaloes' by the researchers in India and Pakistan. The chosen study period is 55 years (1955- 2009) and CAB Direct Online is the source database for this research. During the period (1955 – 2009) a total of 9,096 and 706 publications were published by the scientists of India and Pakistan respectively on buffalo research and India is the top producing country with 9,096 papers (92.80%) followed by Pakistan with 706 papers (7.20%). The average number of publications published per year by India and Pakistan were 165 and 12 respectively. The spurt in the literature output of India and Pakistan were reported during 2001-2009 and 1991-2000 respectively. The study also reports the most preferred journals and most productive authors in India and Pakistan. This study also provides an inventory and scientometric dimensions of publications on buffalo research by India and Pakistan. Keywords: Buffalo, India, Pakistan, Scientometric analysis, CAB Direct


We present a coupler design allowing normally-incident light coupling from free-space into a monomode photonic crystal waveguide operating in the slow-light regime. Numerical three-dimensional calculations show that extraction efficiencies as high as 80% can be achieved for very large group indices up to 100. We demonstrate experimentally the device feasibility by coupling and extracting light from a photonic crystal waveguide over a large group-index range (from 10 to 60). The measurements are in good agreement with theoretical predictions. We also study numerically the impact of various geometrical parameters on the coupler performances.


Reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) in urban energy systems requires the implementation of alternative infrastructure configurations across different geographical, technical and social scales. Furthermore, alternative configurations may improve systems resilience and democratization of service provision. However, unlike current centralised systems, which are well understood from the technical and social perspectives, there is a lack of knowledge on the socio-technical interplay across multiple intermediate scales of alternative infrastructures, defined as all the possible configurations in between off-grid and centralised infrastructure. There are various concepts in the literature describing decentralised, distributed and integrated systems using different primary energy resources and generating various energy carriers -for electricity, heating, and cooling. However, the information on alternative models is limited to the technical requirements leaving a gap in knowledge on the societal requirements. Alternative infrastructure models potentially reduce GHGE but they may require unique forms of social organisation structures to support their adoption and increase the pace towards decarbonisation. To obtain in-depth understanding of the socio-technical interplay of alternative infrastructures across scales, this paper draws on complexity theory, the concept of modularity and transitions modelling literature. This aid in the definition of the proposed conceptual framework and the Service Provision Modules (SPM). This conceptual framework serves as the basis for spatially specific modelling and simulation. The SPM may use different types of networks and can represent any type of conventional or alternative infrastructure configuration. The conceptual framework then uses the modules to construct the socio-technical layouts for the baseline and possible future configurations in a given area. The paper briefly outlines various concepts in the literature which technically define alternative energy systems, then presents a description of the conceptual framework and the definition of an SPM. Finally, the SPMs are used to represent the Australian electricity system.


Introduction Perhaps no Japanese phrase is more familiar to karate practitioners around the world than "karate ni sente nashi." Typically translated as, "There is no first attack in karate," this maxim has become known primarily through the teachings of Gichin Funakoshi. The founder of Shotokan and, according to many, the "father of modern karate-do," Funakoshi made the principle the second of his Niju Kun ("Twenty Precepts"), following only the directive to not forget that "karate begins and ends with courtesy" (Funakoshi, "Karate-do nijukajo"). Clearly, for Funakoshi, the maxim karate ni sente nashi was of great importance. In addition to including it as one of his "Twenty Precepts," he stated in a 1935 magazine article that he "view[s] it as [expressing] the essence of karate-do" (Funakoshi, "Karate no hanashi" 65). Nor is he alone in this view: Shoshin Nagamine, respected founder of the Matsubayashi school of Shorin-ryu karate, wrote that, "This phrase [. . .] embodies the essence of Okinawan karate" (Nagamine 13). Similarly, Masatoshi Nakayama, longtime head of the Japan Karate Association, stated that, "[. . .] it is not an exaggeration to say that it is these words that succinctly and fully express the spirit of karate-do" (Nakayama 80). With such esteemed masters as these expressing such strong sentiments regarding the significance of the sente nashi principle, one can only assume that the principle represents a way of thinking that is -or at least should be -profoundly important for those who consider themselves to be serious practitioners of the art of karate-do. Specifying just exactly what that way of thinking is, in all of its subtleties, would perhaps be a difficult task, but obviously, at its most basic level, the maxim at least clearly proscribes the use of any "first strikes" on the part of karate-ka. Or does it?


In the framework of the so-called "sharing economy", the number of on-demand companies matching labour supply and demand is on the rise. These schemes may enlarge opportunities for people willing to find a job or to top up their salaries. Despite the upsides of creating new peer marketplaces, these platforms may also be used to circumvent employment regulation, by operating informally in traditionally regulated markets.Literature showed how, by 2009, over 2 million worker accounts had been generated within these frameworks. Productivity may be fostered but, at the same time, a new version of Taylorism is disseminated (i.e. the fragmentation of labour into hyper-temporary jobs – they call them microtasks – on a virtual assembly line), strengthened by globalisation and computerisation. All these intermediaries recruit freelance or casual workers (these continue to be independent contractors even though many indicators seem to reveal a disguised employment relationship).Uncertainty and insecurity are the price for extreme flexibility. A noteworthy volume of business risk is shifted to workers, and potential costs as benefits or unemployment insurance are avoided. Minimum wages are often far from being reached.This paper will present a case study analysis of several "on-demand work" platforms, starting from the Amazon Mechanical Turk, one of the first schemes founded in 2005, which is arguably "employing humans-as-a-service". It splits a single service in several micro "Human Intelligence Tasks" (such as tagging photographs, writing short descriptions, transcribing podcasts, processing raw data); "Turkers/Providers" (workers) are selected by "Requesters" to rapidly accomplish assignments online, are then rated according to an internal system and are finally paid (also in gaming credits) only if delivery is accepted. After having signed up and worked within some platforms, I comment upon TaskRabbit (thousands people on the service who bid to do simple manual tasks), Handy and Wonolo (personal assistance at a local level), oDesk and Freelancer (online staffing), Uber and Lyft (peer-to-peer ridesharing), Airbnb (hosting service), InnoCentive (engineering solutions), Axiom (legal research or service), BitWine (consultancy).Finally I highlight downsides and upsides of work in these platforms by studying terms of service or participation agreements to which both parties have to agree. I look into several key features such as (i) means of exchange/commodities, (ii) systems of payment, (iii) demographics, (iv) legal issues concerning status and statutory protection of workers, indicators of subordination, treatment of sickness, benefits and overtime, potential dispute resolution, and deprived "moral valence of work" and I discuss potential strategies to address these issues.