Strong ionospheric perturbations were generated by the intense geomagnetic storm on 17 March 2015. In this article, we are studying perturbations in the European‐African sector observed in the total electron content (TEC). Focal points are wavelike phenomena considered as large‐scale traveling ionospheric disturbances (LSTIDs). In the European‐African sector, the storm produced three different types of LSTIDs: (1) a concurrent TEC perturbation at all latitudes simultaneously; (2) one LSTID propagating toward the equator, having very large wave parameters (wavelength: ≈3600 km, period: ≈120 min, and speed: ≈500 m/s); and (3) several LSTIDs propagating toward the equator with typical wave parameters (wavelength: ≈2100 km, period: ≈60 min, and speed ≈600 m/s). The third type of LSTIDs is considered to be exited as most LSTIDs either due to variations in the Joule heating or variations in the Lorentz force, whereas the first two perturbation types are rather unusual in their appearance. They occurred during the partial recovery phase when the geomagnetic perturbations were minor and the interplanetary magnetic field turned northward. A westward prompt penetration electric field is considered to excite the first perturbation signature, which indicates a sudden TEC depletion. For the second LSTID type, variations in the Lorentz force because of perturbed electric fields and a minor particle precipitation effect are extracted as possible excitation mechanisms.


Abstract. The Finnish Meteorological Institute, in collaboration with the University of Helsinki, has established a new ground-based remote-sensing network in Finland. The network consists of five topographically, ecologically and climatically different sites distributed from southern to northern Finland. The main goal of the network is to monitor air pollution and boundary layer properties in near real time, with a Doppler lidar and ceilometer at each site. In addition to these operational tasks, two sites are members of the Aerosols, Clouds and Trace gases Research InfraStructure Network (ACTRIS); a Ka band cloud radar at Sodankyla will provide cloud retrievals within CloudNet, and a multi-wavelength Raman lidar, PollyXT (POrtabLe Lidar sYstem eXTended), in Kuopio provides optical and microphysical aerosol properties through EARLINET (the European Aerosol Research Lidar Network). Three C-band weather radars are located in the Helsinki metropolitan area and are deployed for operational and research applications. We performed two inter-comparison campaigns to investigate the Doppler lidar performance, compare the backscatter signal and wind profiles, and to optimize the lidar sensitivity through adjusting the telescope focus length and data-integration time to ensure sufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in low-aerosol-content environments. In terms of statistical characterization, the wind-profile comparison showed good agreement between different lidars. Initially, there was a discrepancy in the SNR and attenuated backscatter coefficient profiles which arose from an incorrectly reported telescope focus setting from one instrument, together with the need to calibrate. After diagnosing the true telescope focus length, calculating a new attenuated backscatter coefficient profile with the new telescope function and taking into account calibration, the resulting attenuated backscatter profiles all showed good agreement with each other. It was thought that harsh Finnish winters could pose problems, but, due to the built-in heating systems, low ambient temperatures had no, or only a minor, impact on the lidar operation – including scanning-head motion. However, accumulation of snow and ice on the lens has been observed, which can lead to the formation of a water/ice layer thus attenuating the signal inconsistently. Thus, care must be taken to ensure continuous snow removal.


Abstract:The 1940s and 1950s were a revolutionary era in both access to and imagination of the underwater environment in the most modernized nations of the globe. This article examines new possibilities in the exhibition of the underwater environment in film thanks to new dive and filming technologies. It focuses on how the depths are portrayed as a setting in Richard Fleischer's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954), by the Disney studio, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle's The Silent World (1956). In both films, conventions for portraying terrestrial settings are adapted to the resistant conditions of the aquatic environment. Such adaptation unleashes creativity in filmmaking and results in portrayals in which audiences are at once at home in this alien area of our planet and able to assimilate and enjoy its unprecedented vistas and savage life.


Spatial-multiplexing cameras have emerged as a promising alternative to classical imaging devices, often enabling acquisition of `more for less'. One popular architecture for spatial multiplexing is the single-pixel camera (SPC), which acquires coded measurements of the scene with pseudo-random spatial masks. Significant theoretical developments over the past few years provide a means for reconstruction of the original imagery from coded measurements at sub-Nyquist sampling rates. Yet, accurate reconstruction generally requires high measurement rates and high signal-to-noise ratios. In this paper, we enquire if one can perform high-level visual inference problems (e.g. face recognition or action recognition) from compressive cameras without the need for image reconstruction. This is an interesting question since in many practical scenarios, our goals extend beyond image reconstruction. However, most inference tasks often require non-linear features and it is not clear how to extract such features directly from compressed measurements. In this paper, we show that one can extract nontrivial correlational features directly without reconstruction of the imagery. As a specific example, we consider the problem of face recognition beyond the visible spectrum e.g in the short-wave infra-red region (SWIR) - where pixels are expensive. We base our framework on smashed filters which suggests that inner-products between high-dimensional signals can be computed in the compressive domain to a high degree of accuracy. We collect a new face image dataset of 30 subjects, obtained using an SPC. Using face recognition as an example, we show that one can indeed perform reconstruction-free inference with a very small loss of accuracy at very high compression ratios of 100 and more.


Museums of contemporary art—as they have been defined, activated, and understood over the past thirty years—are in need of a reassessment to re-think the traditional notion of the "museum." With its traditional core tasks of collection and conservation, this historic category stands in contrast to the term "contemporary." This volume takes a variety of complementary perspectives on today's museology as it reflects upon the paradoxes underlying the very concept of the museum of contemporary art. Composed of three chapters—"Now," "Tomorrow," and "Flux"—and gathering together original essays, extensive conversations, as well as canonical texts, this anthology addresses questions regarding the roles and tasks of the contemporary art museum. It discusses its double character as a site of both production and conservation, and emphasizes its relation to different public spheres. It also explores ways of dealing with the standards, norms, and regulations that emerge from the practices of collecting, organizing, and educating.

Published with the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, in collaboration with the Institute of Art History, University of Bern, and the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.

The publication is edited by Beatrice von Bismarck, Heike Munder, and Peter J. Schneemann, with contributions from art historians and cultural experts, including Claire Bishop, Buro trafo.K, Martha Buskirk, Beatriz Colomina, Bettina Funcke, Christian Kravagna, Oliver Marchart, Donald Preziosi, Sophia Prinz, Beat Wyss, and Artur Zmijewski. The conversations feature different protagonists from the art field, including Sepake Angiama, Karla Black, Zachary Bowman, Bruna Casagrande, Yilmaz Dziewior, Kate Fowle, Andrea Fraser, Raphael Gygax, Francesca von Habsburg, Philipp Kaiser, Heike Munder, Alena Nawrotzki, Lars Nittve, Nadia Schneider Willen, Bernadett Settele, Wolfgang Ullrich, and Judith Welter.


Services that operate over the Internet are under constant threat of being exposed to fraudulent use. Maintaining good user experience for legitimate users often requires the classification of entities as malicious or legitimate in order to initiate countermeasures. As an example, inbound email spam filters decide for spam or non-spam. They can base their decision on both the content of each email as well as on features that summarize prior emails received from the sending server. In general, discriminative classification methods learn to distinguish positive from negative entities. Each decision for a label may be based on features of the entity and related entities. When labels of related entities have strong interdependencies—as can be assumed e.g. for emails being delivered by the same user—classification decisions should not be made independently and dependencies should be modeled in the decision function. This thesis addresses the formulation of discriminative classification problems that are tailored for the specific demands of the following three Internet security applications. Theoretical and algorithmic solutions are devised to protect an email service against flooding of user inboxes, to mitigate abusive usage of outbound email servers, and to protect web servers against distributed denial of service attacks. In the application of filtering an inbound email stream for unsolicited emails, utilizing features that go beyond each individual email's content can be valuable. Information about each sending mail server can be aggregated over time and may help in identifying unwanted emails. However, while this information will be available to the deployed email filter, some parts of the training data that are compiled by third party providers may not contain this information. The missing features have to be estimated at training time in order to learn a classification model. In this thesis an algorithm is derived that learns a decision function that integrates over a distribution of values for each missing entry. The distribution of missing values is a free parameter that is optimized to learn an optimal decision function. The outbound stream of emails of an email service provider can be separated by the customer IDs that ask for delivery. All emails that are sent by the same ID in the same period of time are related, both in content and in label. Hijacked customer accounts may send batches of unsolicited emails to other email providers, which in turn might blacklist the sender's email servers after detection of incoming spam emails. The risk of being blocked from further delivery depends on the rate of outgoing unwanted emails and the duration of high spam sending rates. An optimization problem is developed that minimizes the expected cost for the email provider by learning a decision function that assigns a limit on the sending rate to customers based on the each customer's email stream. Identifying attacking IPs during HTTP-level DDoS attacks allows to block those IPs from further accessing the web servers. DDoS attacks are usually carried out by infected clients that are members of the same botnet and show similar traffic patterns. HTTP-level attacks aim at exhausting one or more resources of the web server infrastructure, such as CPU time. If the joint set of attackers cannot increase resource usage close to the maximum capacity, no effect will be experienced by legitimate users of hosted web sites. However, if the additional load raises the computational burden towards the critical range, user experience will degrade until service may be unavailable altogether. As the loss of missing one attacker depends on block decisions for other attackers—if most other attackers are detected, not blocking one client will likely not be harmful—a structured output model has to be learned. In this thesis an algorithm is developed that learns a structured prediction decoder that searches the space of label assignments, guided by a policy. Each model is evaluated on real-world data and is compared to reference methods. The results show that modeling each classification problem according to the specific demands of the task improves performance over solutions that do not consider the constraints inherent to an application.


Today when many practitioners run basic NLP on the entire web and large-volume traffic, faster methods are paramount to saving time and energy costs. Recent advances in GPU hardware have led to the emergence of bi-directional LSTMs as a standard method for obtaining per-token vector representations serving as input to labeling tasks such as NER (often followed by prediction in a linear-chain CRF). Though expressive and accurate, these models fail to fully exploit GPU parallelism, limiting their computational efficiency. This paper proposes a faster alternative to Bi-LSTMs for NER: Iterated Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks (ID-CNNs), which have better capacity than traditional CNNs for large context and structured prediction. Unlike LSTMs whose sequential processing on sentences of length N requires O(N) time even in the face of parallelism, ID-CNNs permit fixed-depth convolutions to run in parallel across entire documents. We describe a distinct combination of network structure, parameter sharing and training procedures that enable dramatic 14-20x test-time speedups while retaining accuracy comparable to the Bi-LSTM-CRF. Moreover, ID-CNNs trained to aggregate context from the entire document are more accurate than Bi-LSTM-CRFs while attaining 8x faster test time speeds.


This paper develops and estimates a dynamic general equilibrium model that realistically accounts for an input-output linkage between firms operating at different stages of processing. Firms face technological change which is specific to their processing stage and charge new prices according to stage-specific Calvo-probabilities. Only a fixed fraction of households have an opportunity to adjust nominal wages to new information each period. Intermediate-stage technology shocks account for the bulk of output variability at business cycle frequencies, while final-stage technology shocks do not explain much. Although technology shocks drive the business cycle, the model predicts weakly procyclical real wages, and a near-zero correlation between return to working and hours worked. Furthermore, the model has rich implications for the dynamics of business cycles.


ABSTRACT This paper examines differences in work restrictions of midlife family carers of older people in terms of prevalence, gender and explanatory variables, in six European countries: Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. A sample of 2,897 carers aged 45–64 was extracted from the EUROFAMCARE (Services for Supporting Family Carers of Older People in Europe: Characteristics, Coverage and Usage) European project database, in order to analyse four possible work restrictions experienced in connection with the activity of care-giving: the reduction of working hours; giving up working; difficulties in career developments and forced occasional work. The results show that work restrictions are experienced differently between countries especially by women: they are reported to a higher degree in the United Kingdom, Germany and Greece, less so in Italy, and seldom in Poland and Sweden. Gender differences within countries are not so marked. Country differences are explained in the light of the different welfare regimes characterising the countries under investigation, in order to elucidate how policy makers may act to improve working carers' conditions through appropriate policies.


The paper presents a new implementation of direct flux and current vector control of an induction motor drive using the techniques of model predictive control. The advantages offered by predictive control are used to enhance the dynamics of direct flux vector control. To minimize the problems of variable switching frequency inherent to finite control set predictive control, an alternative approach using pulse width modulation is studied for command execution as occurs in the so-called modulated model predictive control. A comparison between finite control set and modulated model predictive control is presented and the results are also compared with the control implementation through traditional proportional-integral regulators to highlight the advantages and drawbacks of predictive control based strategies. Apart from a greater harmonic content in stator currents, the predictive control can offers control dynamics comparable with proportional-integral control while maintaining immunity against machine parameter variations and excluding the need for controller tuning.


Detailed examination and description of structures in nature, relative to the environments in which they occur, provides evidence for the function of these structures. Here I describe the oberhautchen (outer skin surface) of 24 species of Australian carphodactyline (Squamata: Carphodactylidae) and diplodactyline gecko (Squamata: Diplodactylidae). Using methods specially adapted for the purpose, I describe details of skin microornamentations, examined at high magnification, of these geckos, and examine relationships between these skin characteristics and environmental conditions, substrate use, hydrophobic properties, and evaporative water loss (EWL), with a view to determining the function of these features.

I used 24 species (and populations therein) of geckos collected from northern and western Queensland, and from the Great Victoria Desert, South Australia, as subjects for my descriptions. To examine the oberhautchen of living lizards, I adapted and tested a method for creating extremely detailed moulds of surfaces using polyvinylsiloxane impression material and epoxy resin (Epirez 123®, ITW Polymers & Fluids). This method produces exceptional quality reproductions of complex microornamentations within the oberhautchen of living lizards.

Using scanning electron microscopy on the moulds I created, I examined scale characteristics (primary scale size, secondary scale size, spinule length and density, pit diameter and density, furrow width and depth, percentage of knobs covering scales, and hair sensor characteristics including hair sensors per scale, hair sensors per square millimeter, bristles per sensor, bristles per square millimeter, and hair sensor diameter), I related these to body size, substrate use, environmental conditions at the centre of each species' geographic range, and phylogeny, using univariate statistics and canonical discriminant function analysis. Carphodactyline geckos are quite different from diplodactyline geckos, and have larger body size, larger primary scales, shorter spinules, greater numbers of hair sensors and bristles per square millimeter, knobs and larger hair sensor diameters. Examining both carphodactyline and diplodactylines together, I found that terrestrial geckos tend to be smaller, live in xeric conditions, and usually have smaller scales and higher numbers of bristles and hair sensors per square millimeter. Nonterrestrial geckos tend to be larger, and live in more mesic and hydric conditions, and usually have larger scales and fewer hair sensors and bristles per square millimeter. Because geckos in xeric habitats live in dry conditions, they may need more sensory information about their environment, to enable them to select appropriate shelter. I traced the character evolution of hair sensor bristle shape, and found that bottlebrush-shaped hair sensors with many hairs appear to be primitive, whereas tapered hair sensors of various shapes with fewer hairs appear to be derived. The causes of evolutionary differences in bristle shape and hair sensor number was not clear from the variables I examined.

Hydrophobicity is thought to enhance the adhesiveness of geckos with adhesive toe pads, by keeping these surfaces clean. Because specialized adhesive foot scales are evolutionarily derived from the body scales, I examined the hydrophobic properties of body scales. To estimate hydrophobicity, I used a sessile drop technique to quantify contact angles of droplets of distilled water. Tiny (0.25 μL) droplets of distilled water were incrementally increased in size and photographed at high resolution, and contact angles of droplets were used to predict the hydrophobic properties of the dorsal skin surface of geckos. I established which species were most hydrophobic and which dorsal scale characteristics had the strongest relationships with hydrophobic properties. Several species had superhydrophobic skin (advancing contact angles greater than 150°), including Lucasium damaeum, Strophurus taeniatus, Diplodactylus conspicillatus (Winton population), Oedura rhombifer, and Lucasium steindachneri. Geckos with high hydrophobicity were characterized by skin characteristics that promoted rough surface adaptation, especially small primary scales and long spinules.

The great range of variation in gecko oberhautchen is likely to have some functional significance. However, most functions suggested in the literature (ecdysis, coping with varying temperatures on different parts of the body, pheromone capture, retention, and dispersal, the creation or reduction of friction, the reflection or channeling of solar radiation, wear prevention) can be rejected as explanations for variation in the oberhautchen of Australian gecko skin. I provide evidence that high hydrophobic properties of the skin help geckos remain clean. Hydrophobicity was, on average, higher in terrestrial species and in species living closer to the ground (and hence, likely to come into contact with dust and dirt), than in non-terrestrial species living away from the ground. Terrestrial geckos, as a group, had longer spinules and smaller scales than saxicolous and arboreal geckos, enhancing their hydrophobic properties. With the effects of phylogeny removed hydrophobicity was related to distance from the ground, indicating that these two characters evolve together.

Recent studies have linked evaporative water loss rates with scale characteristics of reptiles. I measured the EWL of Australian geckos gravimetrically, using the flow-through chamber technique, to examine patterns in water loss rates of Australian geckos in relation to scale characteristics, body size and habitat. Evaporative water loss was strongly correlated with body size, larger geckos had larger body surface area and lost more water than smaller geckos. Mass-specific water loss rates were correlated with habitat use; terrestrial species lost more water than arboreal and saxicolous species, which did not differ in their water loss. In addition, species with larger scales tended to have lower water loss rates, and the evolution of deeper scale furrows was correlated with the evolution of higher EWL.

In summary, my work provides evidence that, not only are variations in Australian gecko skin morphology influenced by phylogenetic relationships, but at least some characters appear to have functional significance. Xeric-dwelling, terrestrial geckos have more sensory organs than do non-terrestrial mesic and hydric-dwelling geckos, likely because they require accurate information on environmental conditions. Terrestrial geckos tended to have smaller scales and longer spinules than non-terrestrial geckos, possibly to enhance their hydrophobicity. Terrestrial geckos also had higher EWL rates than saxicolous and arboreal geckos, but may be able to avoid high water loss by using burrows as shelter. Finally, terrestrial and xeric dwelling species tended to be smaller than non-terrestrial mesic and hydric dwelling species.


The phenomenon of induced seismicity has been recognized for decades; however, it has commanded significant new attention in the last five years. This is particularly true as it is related to unconventional hydrocarbon recovery methods that are seeing increasingly wide use in the oil and gas industry. Early attention on the topic was brought into focus by a U. S. Department of Energy (DOE)-sponsored study undertaken by the National Research Council (issued in 2012), well-attended SEG technical workshops, and interest from both the public and the press about the cause of earthquakes in areas that are unaccustomed to having them.


ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to develop and validate two survey instruments to evaluate high school students' scientific epistemic beliefs and goal orientations in learning science. The initial relationships between the sampled students' scientific epistemic beliefs and goal orientations in learning science were also investigated. A final valid sample of 600 volunteer Taiwanese high school students participated in this survey by responding to the Scientific Epistemic Beliefs Instrument (SEBI) and the Goal Orientations in Learning Science Instrument (GOLSI). Through both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, the SEBI and GOLSI were proven to be valid and reliable for assessing the participants' scientific epistemic beliefs and goal orientations in learning science. The path analysis results indicated that, by and large, the students with more sophisticated epistemic beliefs in various dimensions such as Development of Knowledge, Justification for Knowing, and Purpose of Knowing tended to adopt both Mastery-approach and Mastery-avoidance goals. Some interesting results were also found. For example, the students tended to set a learning goal to outperform others or merely demonstrate competence (Performance-approach) if they had more informed epistemic beliefs in the dimensions of Multiplicity of Knowledge, Uncertainty of Knowledge, and Purpose of Knowing.


Despite the elaborate intervention strategies and huge emphasis on AIDS and orphan hood, there is a looming danger that might create a lost generation of young people who are growing up without role models, parental guidance, warmth, love and proper care. Young people in these times of AIDS are charged with the responsibility of caring for their infected parents until they die; and thereafter to care for their siblings. Despite playing these important roles coupled with their complex developmental issues young people face as they negotiate their independence towards adulthood, there is generally a lack of concern as far as the psychosocial issues experienced by youth who are orphaned due to AIDS is concerned as evidence by paucity of published literature. This research therefore, focused on the psychosocial issues of youth orphaned by HIV/AIDS in Western Kenya. This comparative study compared youth who have lost their parent(s) to AIDS, to those who have lost parent(s) through other causes and youth from intact families. The study explored the daily hassles and uplifts as experienced by these three categories. Their psychological well-being was studied in a bid to understand how this phenomenon has impacted on the orphaned young people emotional well-being. The extend to which selfefficacy (resilience), perceived social support and good coping strategies buffer young people from HIV/AIDS impact were studied. Data was obtained from 156 students at the Moi University. One way ANOVA test used to test the mean hassles and mean uplifts scores revealed there were not significantly different across the participants' status. Investigations to determine whether the mean scores for anxiety, self esteem, and depression depend on participants' status; a further one way ANOVA was carried out, which revealed based on overall F-test the mean self esteem and iii depression scores are significantly different at 5% level of significant. A pairwise Pearson correlation was performed to investigate whether anxiety, depression and self esteem scores depend on the coping skills, self-efficacy and perceived social support. Results indicate depression significantly associated with social support, while self esteem is significantly associated with self-efficacy. The qualitative data further validated these findings by revealing that orphaned youth by AIDS were depressed and had poor self-esteem.


Abstract. Receiver functions for the central Tien Shan and northern Tarim in central Asia reveal a pronounced depression on the 410 km discontinuity beneath the Permian basalts in Tarim. The depression may be caused by elevated temperature. The striking spatial correlation between the anomaly of the MTZ and the Permian basalts suggests that both may be effects of the same plume. This relation can be reconciled with the possible motion of Tarim on the order of 1000 km by assuming that the mantle layer, which has moved coherently with the plate since the Permian, extends to a depth of 410 km or more. Alternatively, the lithosphere and underlying mantle are decoupled at a depth of  ∼ 200 km, but a cumulative effect of the Tarim plate motion since the Permian is less by an order of magnitude. A similar explanation is applicable to the Siberian traps.


BACKGROUND
Battlefield hemorrhage remains the primary cause of death in potentially survivable combat injuries with noncompressible hemorrhage. Fibrin dressings have great potential for reducing mortality, however are limited by cost, availability, and disease transmission.

METHODS
Dressings comprising a soluble dextran dressing with lyophilized salmon thrombin and fibrinogen (STF) were tested against Combat Gauze (CG) as a control in a standard swine femoral artery hemorrhage model. Ten female swine were used in each arm of the study.

RESULTS
Survival, blood loss, and time to hemostasis were similar between the two dressings. Two of the CGtreated animals that survived exsanguinated during the simulated walking maneuver. Three CG-treated animals formed a clot within the wound, but the clot did not adhere to the femoral artery injury. All ten of the STF-treated animals formed a clot in the wound that adhered and sealed the arterial injury site, even in three animals that did not survive. None of the STF-treated animals bled following the simulated walking maneuver. Three of five STF-treated animals reestablished blood flow distal to the injury as demonstrated by angiography.

CONCLUSIONS
The STF dressing is as efficacious as CG in treating hemorrhage in this model of a lethal injury. Further, the STF dressing formed a fibrin sealant over the injury, whereas CG achieved hemostasis by occlusive compression of the artery. The sealant property of the STF dressing allowed reestablishment of antegrade blood flow into the distal limb, demonstrating that this dressing has the potential of limb salvage in addition to control of life-threatening hemorrhage.


Neural oscillations are widely studied using methods based on the Fourier transform, which models data as sums of sinusoids. For decades these Fourier-based approaches have successfully uncovered links between oscillations and cognition or disease. However, because of the fundamental sinusoidal basis, these methods might not fully capture neural oscillatory dynamics, because neural data are both nonsinusoidal and non-stationary. Here, we present a new analysis framework, complementary to Fourier analysis, that quantifies cycle-by-cycle time-domain features. For each cycle, the amplitude, period, and waveform symmetry are measured, the latter of which is missed using conventional approaches. Additionally, oscillatory bursts are algorithmically identified, allowing us to investigate the variability of oscillatory features within and between bursts. This approach is validated on simulated noisy signals with oscillatory bursts and outperforms conventional metrics. Further, these methods are applied to real data—including hippocampal theta, motor cortical beta, and visual cortical alpha—and can differentiate behavioral conditions.


Decorrelation in an interferometric set-up appears due to movements of the speckle pattern. In the case of rigid body movements the effect of decorrelation severely limits the performance of speckle interferometers. If the movement is larger than the speckle size the wanted phase information of the deformation is lost. Phase modulating spatial light modulators (SLMs) provide a new method to non-mechanically deflect and shape light. By using the SLM for scanning the field-of-view and focusing at different distances it is possible to measure intensity speckle patterns in a three-dimensional volume. These intensity images can then be cross correlated to give a three-dimensional correlation coefficient of the speckle pattern. If an SLM is utilized in an interferometric set-up it is possible to compensate for unwanted movements during an experiment. The measured correlation coefficient will then provide information regarding how large movements that are allowed with maintained performance of the interferometer. It is shown that for large movements the SLM can be used to retrieve phase maps.


This chapter reviews the law and economics literature on intellectual property law and price discrimination. We introduce legal scholars to the wide range of techniques used by intellectual property owners to practice price discrimination; in many cases the link between commercial practice and price discrimination may not be apparent to non-economists. We introduce economists to the many facets of intellectual property law that influence the profitability and practice of price discrimination. The law in this area has complex effects on customer sorting and arbitrage. Intellectual property law offers fertile ground for analysis of policies that facilitate or discourage price discrimination. We conjecture that new technologies are expanding the range of techniques used for price discrimination while inducing new wrinkles in intellectual property law regimes. We anticipate growing commentary on copyright and trademark liability of e-commerce platforms and how that connects to arbitrage and price discrimination. Further, we expect to see increasing discussion of the connection between intellectual property, privacy, and antitrust laws and the incentives to build and use databases and algorithms in support of price discrimination.


Introduction and objectives The incidence of empyema has been increasing in children. We investigated trends in the incidence of empyema cases over the time period 2006–2010 in relation to temperature, rainfall and the introduction of the pneumococcal vaccine using regression analysis. Methods All admissions with ICD-10 codes J86.0 and J86.9 coding for pyothorax with/without fistula from 1st January 2006 until 31st May 2010 were collated. A generalised least squares (GLS) modelling technique was employed to investigate trends in child cases in relation to local average monthly maximum temperature and monthly rainfall. The timing of the introduction of the PCV-7 vaccine was included as a co-variate. Results 183 cases of paediatric empyema were identified. There was a negative relationship between number of cases of childhood empyema and average maximum temperature in the month of admission (t=−2.24, p>0.00). Introduction of the PCV-7 vaccine was associated with a reduction in cases (t=−5.00, p=0.02). There was no significant relationship between the number of cases and average monthly rainfall. There was no significant evidence of autocorrelation for this model suggesting that the number of cases each month were independent of the number in the preceding or following month. Fitted values from the model and the observed trend in cases are shown in Abstract P81 Figure 1. The number of cases appears to be inversely related to temperature variation across the year. The R-squared of the final model was 0.36, whilst the R-squared for model without the vaccine was 0.30, suggesting that 6 % of the variation in cases could be explained by the introduction of the vaccine. Conclusions Mean maximum temperature in the month of admission appears to be a significant predictor of cases of empyema and correlates with the cyclical pattern of cases. Introduction of PCV-7 vaccine was associated with a reduction in the number of cases which may be related to a combination of direct and indirect vaccine effects secondary to improved herd immunity. Further work is required to establish whether this finding is generic across the UK and the underlying mechanisms driving this phenomenon.Abstract P81 Figure 1 Variation in monthly admissions of children with empyema and variation in mean monthly maximum temperature from January 2006—May 2010. 1st plot: Grey line—observed number of admissions, Black line—admissions predicted by model.


In this classic study, surveying the city's life from Christian Antiquity through the Middle Ages, Richard Krautheimer focuses on monuments of art and architecture as they reflect the historical events, the ideological currents, and the meaning Rome held for its contemporaries. Lavishly illustrated, this book tells an intriguing story in which the heritage of antiquity intertwines with the living presence of Christianity. Written by one of the great art historians of our time, it offers a profile of the Eternal City unlike any drawn in the past or likely to be drawn in the future."Krautheimer was never (or only rarely) interested in studying heavily researched subjects, in valorizing what was already valorized, in reconquering what had long been conquered and reconquered. He was at heart a pioneer, a discoverer, a master of uncharted scholarly terrain in an age when so many things art historical were thought to be understood."--"From the preface by Marvin Trachtenberg"


Abstract: The dependence of skeletal alteration on time spent in the taphonomic active zone (TAZ) can generate a taphonomic clock, which can be used to quantify scales of time averaging and rates of skeletal production and recycling in the fossil record. However, the strength of the taphonomic clock is variable in present-day shallow marine environments and it is unclear how this strength varies with depth. Here, we assess the strength of the taphonomic clock in Nautilus macromphalus dead shells that were collected in cool-water, sediment-starved, epi- and mesobathyal environments off New Caledonia and range in postmortem age from few decades to several millennia. We find that, first, differences in the onset and extent of alteration states in the epibathyal zone (< 750 m) segregate well-preserved shells with red stripes (less than ∼ 200 years) from encrusted shells with faded colors and extensively bored by sponges (∼ 400 years), and from strongly fragmented, bored, and coated shell relicts (> 1,000 years). The onset of dissolution and formation of clay-goethitic coating occurs earlier (∼ 200 years) in the mesobathyal zone (> 750 m) than in the epibathyal zone. Clay-goethitic rims and boring infills show signs of microbial binding, pelletization, and coccolith dissolution and can represent nascent stages of glauconitization. Second, shells several centuries old show differences between right and left flanks (1) in the degree of encrustation and sponge bioerosion in the epibathyal zone and (2) in the extent of clay-goethitic coating in the mesobathyal zone. The upper flanks are ultimately removed in both depth zones, leaving relict half-shells that are millennia old. Third, the depth dependence of alteration can reflect a bathymetric decline in disintegration rates by heterotrophic borers due to a reduced productivity in the mesobathyal zone and an increase in dissolution rates due to the proximity of the aragonite compensation depth. The between-flank asymmetry in preservation implies (1) horizontal position of shells close to the sediment-water interface for several decades or centuries without being overturned or subjected to reworking and (2) shell exposure to two distinct taphonomic regimes separated by few centimeters, with the upper flank located in the TAZ and the lower flank facing a less aggressive sediment zone. The stable exposure of shells in the taphonomic active zone and slow alteration rates in bathyal environments allow discriminating between within-habitat time-averaged assemblages on one hand and environmentally or stratigraphically condensed assemblages on the other hand.


One of the most enduring problems for the study of ancient empires is the fact that material correlates indicative of imperial integration are often difficult to define in the archaeological record. This situation results in part from two factors that distinguish empires from other less complex political formations. First, the military and administrative structures that integrate otherwise diverse areas into a single imperial system vary considerably in their nature and intensity, and second, such systems are often superimposed over existing political,economic, and social structures, thus altering existing systems in ways which may or may not be visible in the archaeological record. Thus the archaeological manifestations of empire may be far more diverse than those of less complex polities. This article explores how the material correlates of Assyrian imperialism are manifest in the archaeological record by analyzing and combining archaeological and textual data from the Mesopotamian Iron Age (ca. 1100-600 B.C.) in southeastern Anatolia.It suggests that imperial integration affects the archaeological record in significant and identifiable ways by illuminating three overarching themes that are characteristic of Assyrian imperialism: the establishment of agricultural colonies in newly annexed regions; the use or enforcement of buffer zones between frontier provinces and hostile neighbors; and the discontiguous nature of Assyrian imperial control.


Background: Iron deficiency anemia is a common condition affecting the quality of life, as well as maternal and fetal outcomes in non-pregnant and pregnant women respectively. Oral iron supplementation represents the most convenient and cost-effective form of therapy. Conventional non-heme iron oral supplements are known to be associated with poor gastrointestinal tolerability, and therefore reduced compliance and efficacy. Oral Heme iron supplementation represents a better tolerated and more bioavailable option for oral iron therapy. Though evidence of its efficacy and tolerability are available through some randomized clinical trials, real world data from its regular use in pregnant and non-pregnant patients is lacking. Methodology: 378 non-pregnant and pregnant women visiting 56 gynecology clinics across India with an in-clinic diagnosis of iron deficiency anemia based on baseline laboratory evaluation of hemoglobin (Hb), along with ferritin, MCV and hematocrit, were treated with daily tablets of heme iron polypeptide (HIP) for an average duration of 3 months. Laboratory parameters assessed at baseline were repeated at final follow up and the patients' tolerability to therapy was also recorded. Results: In non-pregnant women, the average rise in Hb was 1.17, 2.06 and 3.28 (g/dl), in groups with baseline mild, moderate, and severe anemia, while in pregnant women, the average Hb rise was 2.70 and 3.53 (g/dl) in groups with baseline moderate and severe anemia. The rise in Hb was highly significant in both pregnant and non-pregnant women with baseline moderate and severe anemia. There was also a significant decline in the number of patients with moderate and severe anemia, as well as in percentage patients with low ferritin, MCV and hematocrit values. The tolerability of HIP was satisfactory with a treatment adverse event related discontinuation rate of less than 0.8%. Conclusion: This study suggests that oral HIP therapy can be an effective treatment option in pregnant and non-pregnant women with iron deficiency due to its better gastrointestinal tolerability and efficacy in improving hematological parameters.


The standard explanation for the choice of electoral institutions, building on Rokkan's seminal work, is that proportional representation (PR) was adopted by a divided right to defend its class interests against a rising left. But new evidence shows that PR strengthens the left and redistribution, and we argue the standard view is wrong historically, analytically, and empirically. We offer a radically different explanation. Integrating two opposed interpretations of PR—minimum winning coalitions versus consensus—we propose that the right adopted PR when their support for consensual regulatory frameworks, especially those of labor markets and skill formation where co-specific investments were important, outweighed their opposition to the redistributive consequences; this occurred in countries with previously densely organized local economies. In countries with adversarial industrial relations, and weak coordination of business and unions, keeping majoritarian institutions helped contain the left. This explains the close association between current varieties of capitalism and electoral institutions, and why they persist over time.


The research was carried out to determine the level of job satisfaction
among engineers working in engineering consultant firms in Klang Valley,
Selangor and the factors that affect the level of job satisfaction. Ten engineering
consultant firms were selected for this research. The above companies were
operating engineering consultancy services in the fields of Civil, Structural,
Mechanical and Electrical. The size of the companies selected were varies from
small to medium size. The small size company would typically have about five
engineers while the medium size company would normally have about 15 to 20
engineers.
The Job Descriptive Index (JDI) questionnaire has been used in this
research where it consists of 72 statements from 5 facets of job satisfaction.
There were 120 questionnaire sheets distributed to various engineering
consultants firms. Out of this, only 51 engineers were responded to the
questionnaires.
From the data collected, majority (78.4%) of the respondents were
moderately satisfied with their job and 3.9% of the respondents were
experiencing highly satisfied with their job situation. However, only 17.7% of
the respondents have expressed their dissatisfaction. Hence, it is found that
majority of the respondents were moderately satisfied with their job as a whole
without differentiating their demographic data.


Cities are responsible for three-quarters of the world s energy consumption. If we are to reduce our demands on the planet s resources how can we make our urban areas more energy efficient? One way is to refit existing buildings with more thermally efficient building materials. But such retrofitting involves significant issues of social acceptance and public participation. Retrofitting the City provides an important corrective to the assumptions that have been made concerning the ability of people and places to cope with such residential transformation. Drawing upon case studies from a number of European cities that have undergone far-reaching change in their built environments, the author shows that supposedly inadaptable people and places show a strong, if often hidden, degree of flexibility in responding to economic change and building transformation."


Salivary Gland and Tooth Abnormalities Massively Increase Caries Susceptibility in A Mouse Model of Cleft Lip/Palate Basma Ibrahim Tamasas Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Timothy Cox Oral Health Sciences Objectives: Cleft lip and palate (CLP) is one of the most common birth defects and has been found to be associated with multiple dentofacial anomalies, including hypoplastic teeth, and defects of the orbicularis oris muscle. In view of this associated spectrum of anomalies, numerous studies have investigated the risk of caries development in the CLP population, with the vast majority reporting an increase in caries incidence and severity. However, the cause of the observed increase in caries is largely unknown, making it difficult to manage and significantly prevent. Conditionally targeted mice for the cleft gene, Irf6 (Irf6 Null-E) have been established by deleting the gene only in the oral epithelium after the development of the lip has been completed, thus permitting investigation of the gene's other roles in the oral phenotypes. Therefore, these mice provide an ideal system with which to investigate the susceptibility and risk factors for caries progression. The overall goal of this research is to assess the function of Irf6 in oral epithelia during morphogenesis of teeth and salivary glands, and in particular how it later impacts tooth structure, salivary function and caries susceptibility. I hypothesize that mice lacking the expression of Irf6 in oral epithelia will have a higher caries incidence compared to matched controls because of abnormal crown morphology and decreased enamel mineralization, as well as altered salivary gland function. Methods: A dental epithelium-specific Irf6 knockout (Irf6 Null-E) mouse was generated using a Pitx2-Cre driver line. Dental development was analyzed by microcomputed tomography, and immuno-histochemistry. Salivary glands were assessed functionally using pilocarpine and histologically postmortem. We then employed an established caries induction protocol that involved infection of the oral cavity with S. mutans, a cariogenic bacterium, followed by feeding with a high-sucrose diet for eight weeks. Bacteria were then recovered from the animals by sonication of the lower jaw in normal saline, bacterial numbers counted to investigate the extent of oral cavity colonization, and the incidence and severity of caries scored under a dissecting microscope and following microCT imaging. Results: I here found, as other previously did (Chu, 2015), that Irf6 Null-E mice recapitulate the dental phenotype observed in patient with cleft lip and palate, such as hypodontia, supernumerary teeth, and misshapen teeth (i.e., flat crown and root taurodontism), as well as enamel mineralization defects that were associated with delayed polarization of ameloblasts. This thesis demonstrated that Irf6 ablation drastically alters the structure of major salivary glands. Histologically, salivary glands from Irf6 null mice exhibited persistent dysplastic changes, disorganized structure that were associated with reduced and disorganized expression of adhesion proteins, altered salivary cell polarization, increased salivary cell proliferation, and reduced acinar cell differentiation. As a consequence, salivary gland hypofunction including low flow rate and reduced buffering capacity, as well as changes in mucin distribution, were observed in the null mice. A striking increase in caries was observed in Irf6 Null mice compared to controls (P<0.0001), and this was associated with a significant increase in both total cultivable flora and the S. mutans population (P <0.001). Conclusions: In addition to altered tooth morphology and decreased enamel mineralization, abnormal salivary gland function may be significantly increasing bacterial colonization and caries susceptibility and severity in the CLP population. For children with IRF6 mutations, implementation of early oral health strategies may be warranted.


The motivation behind this work was the exploration of the possibility of diamond deposition on steel substrates for low friction and low wear applications. Materials such as tungsten carbide are commercially available as diamond coated tools, where the diamond coating greatly extends the tool lifetime and performance. The diamond deposition on steel differs in terms of limitations to the diamond deposition on tungsten carbide. The main limitations of steel are its sensitivity to elevated temperatures which are commonly used for diamond deposition and a large difference in the thermal expansion coefficients of steel and diamond. Overcoming those challenging limitations would result in an introduction of competitive products for many applications. This project was a pioneering work in diamond deposition on steel substrates at Aston University in co-operation with Teer Coatings Ltd (Miba goup). The main focus was on the use of an interlayer as a facilitator of enhanced diamond growth and its adhesion towards the steel substrate. Particular attention was given to amorphous carbon coating being a buffer layer for subsequent diamond growth, followed by the investigation of diamond film growth on tungsten coated steel substrates. Interlayers were deposited using the magnetron sputtering technique at Teer Coatings. Diamond thin films were deposited at Aston University using microwave plasma chemical vapour deposition (CVD) with methane and hydrogen as a deposition gas mixture. Investigation of diamond growth from amorphous carbon films coated on steel substrates was found despite the initial promising results to provide low diamond nucleation coverage resulting samples with a sparse population of diamond crystals. The focus of the study changed into an investigation of diamond growth on steel substrates coated with metallic interlayers. As an enhancement for diamond nucleation a pre-treatment of seeding the substrates with nanocrystalline diamond particles, transferred onto the substrates by immersion into a diamond suspension, was developed and used further in this work. Tungsten coating was chosen as the main interlayer material for its diffusion barrier properties, carbide formation, specific thermal expansion coefficient and no inclination to hydrogen embrittlement. The direct tungsten deposition onto a substrate was found problematic and was initially solved by the development of a structured CrW interlayer (1 μm thick) on which an optimization of diamond CVD deposition conditions was performed. The need for a reliable temperature measurement resulted in creation of a setup with thermocouple mounted at the bottom of a substrate holder and a suitable calibration of the setup to be able to calculate the temperature of the substrate surface. CrW was found to have poor adhesion properties and a new MoW interlayer (1 μm thick) possessing excellent adhesion characteristics was developed. The diamond films deposited using previously optimised diamond deposition conditions was found to be at 785 °C. The ≈250 nm thick diamond films showed a good adhesion strength while the MoW interlayer was proved to be an effective diffusion barrier. The previously optimised diamond deposition conditions were found to deteriorate the steel substrate's properties and further low temperature diamond deposition conditions were optimised for diamond growth at 650 °C. The resulting ≈250 nm thick films showed poor diamond adhesion characteristics due to weaker bonding between diamond and the substrate. The steel substrate did not undergo any softening during the diamond deposition. The effect of different diamond deposition temperatures, as well as the different thickness of the MoW interlayer on stress within diamond film, was studied. Lowest amount of compressive stress of 1.6 GPa was found for a sample coated with the thickest MoW (8.3 μm) and diamond deposition conditions at 650 °C. The sample showed superior adhesion upon Rockwell C indentation, while poor adhesion was observed by means of scratch testing using WC ball as an indenter.


This research examined whether or not relationships exist between preschool teacher quality and parent involvement as indicated by the Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler Model of Parent Involvement Survey. Additionally, the study also considered family income and child membership in special education as predictors of parent involvement. The survey instruments included the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale, Revised (ECERS-R) and the Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler Parent Involvement Survey. A total of 306 parents across 35 preschool classrooms participated in the study. Effect sizes, beta weights and structure coefficients from a series of multiple regression analyses measured the relationship between variables. A regression equation comprised of teacher quality, family income and child membership in special education was statistically significant in predicting parent school-based involvement. In the school-based involvement model the predictors teacher quality and child membership in special education accounted for a greater percentage of variance than did family income. Teacher quality demonstrated a small, negative beta weight but accounted for the greatest amount of variance among the three predictors within the school-based parent involvement model. A negative relationship between teacher quality and school-based parent involvement suggested that as teacher quality improved, parents reported less involvement in school-based activities and events. Findings for special education membership, however, demonstrated a reverse effect in the model and appeared to have a positive significant effect on school-based involvement of parents. The study contributes to the literature on the relationship between teacher quality and parent involvement in early childhood preschool programs.


India accounts for 1.7 million child deaths, a quarter of global child mortality. The current literature has succeeded in establishing an association between domestic violence and child mortality, but has yet to present evidence of a causal relationship. In this paper we use an instrumental variable approach to analyse the causal impact of domestic violence against the mother on child mortality in the Indian context. Domestic violence is instrumented with the real price of gold at the time of marriage of the mother. Results lend evidence to a bias in OLS estimates and show a significant positive relationship between domestic violence and mortality. A one standard deviation increase in domestic violence translates to a 6 percentage point increase in both neonatal and infant mortality.


Objective: The Multi-Threat Framework accounts for potentially different forms of stereotype threat that differ in target (i.e., the individual or the group) and source (i.e., the self or others). This investigation examined how these different forms of perceived stereotype threat were related to concepts, such as group identity, stereotype endorsement, stigma consciousness, etc., among overweight and obese individuals. Method: 216 adults completed an online survey. Participants' mean age was 23.6 (SD 10.1; range 18-64) years and mean BMI was 31.6 (SD 7.5) kg/m2. Results: Participants reported a history of feeling threatened by stereotypes related to weight. When reflecting on past experiences of perceived stereotype threat, participants reported greater levels of self/own stereotype threat compared to group stereotype threat. Level of stereotype threat was related to a number of personal characteristics (i.e., sex, BMI) and individual factors (i.e., group identity, stigma consciousness, fear of fat). Conclusion: Individuals who are overweight report a history of being threatened by negative stereotypes. The findings support the Multi-Threat Framework for stereotype threat based on body weight. Overweight individuals' susceptibility to stereotype threat may vary systematically depending on several factors. Future research should examine weight-related stereotypes' impact on cognitive and behavioral outcomes.


Stability in the Balkans was a top foreign policy priority for the members of the European Union (EU) during most of the 1990s. EU policy makers pointed to nationalism, ethnic hatred, social inequalities, and human rights violations as the root causes for the Balkan conflicts. With this presumption in mind, the EU intervened in the Macedonian conflict in 2001 and implemented both conflict prevention and peace-building policies and measures. The European Union saw Macedonia's future EU membership as the ultimate guarantee of stability in the region. The April 2001 Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) between the EU and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (1) was incorporated in the Stabilization and Association Process (SAP). This process presented Macedonia (as well as other countries of the Western Balkans) with a framework that would reduce the threat of renewed conflict and ready them for EU membership. This article argues that the development assistance under the SAP and the EU's peacebuilding efforts, although well-intentioned and successful in some aspects, are ill-advised because they have not recognized cross-border crime or the rebels' economic interests as one of the chief causes of the Macedonian conflict. Evidence of this is the continued lack of stability in Macedonia. Reports indicate continued ethnic tension, sporadic rebel violence, (2) rebel attempts to assert control over certain parts of the country and the persistent flourishing of cross-border crime. (3) These incidents are not the dying echoes of past conflicts, but rather compelling evidence that unrest persists because, for a core of militant rebels, the primary interest in mobilization was not to secure social and political reform for their communities. Some analysts have argued instead that the conflict in Macedonia was a criminalized "spillover" of the war in Kosovo and the conflict in the Presevo Valley (Southern Serbia); that it was inspired more by Albanian criminal networks, conducting illicit cross-border activities, especially trafficking in drugs and human beings, who sought to preserve or expand their interests by inciting ethnic conflict. (4) The first section of this paper will review the EU's conflict prevention policies and its initiatives to fight organized crime, and explore the role of organized crime in the 2001 conflict in Macedonia. It will then analyze whether and how EU development initiatives undertaken within SAP contributed to stabilizing Macedonia. THE EU AND CONFLICT PREVENTION General Policies The original mission of the EU as well as the motivation for the eastward enlargement process was stability in Europe and prevention of future wars. (5) Since the mid-1990s the EU has created various instruments to implement conflict prevention measures. New positions and bodies were created such as the High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy, the Special Representatives and the Policy Planning and Early Warning Unit. The defence links between the EU and the Western European Union (WEU) were strengthened, and the WEU was mandated to deal with peacekeeping, peacemaking and humanitarian crises. (6) The EU's conflict management mechanisms were further shaped in April 2001 when the European Commission published Communication, in which it outlined the EU's strategy for conflict prevention and four main objectives in this area that the Commission noted. One of them was the EU's "duty to try to address the many cross-cutting issues that generate or contribute to conflict," (7) especially drugs and arms smuggling. The Commission praised the "noteworthy results" that the Phare program in the Balkans has achieved in setting up "filters" along the Afghan heroin road. (8) While the document clearly recognized that drugs in Colombia or diamonds in Africa are causes of conflicts, parallel conclusions were not reached for the Balkans (where drugs, arms and human trafficking have perpetuated and, arguably, even caused conflicts). …


Traffic measurements on a ring local area computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are presented. The analysis of the arrival pattern shows that the arrival processes are neither Poisson nor compound Poisson. An alternative model called "packet train" is proposed. In the train model, the traffic on the network consists of a number of packet streams between various pairs of nodes on the network. Each node-pair stream (or node-pair process, as we call them) consists of a number of trains. Each train consists of a number of packets (or cars) going in either direction (from node A to B or from node B to A). The intercar gap is large (compared to packet transmission time) and random. The intertrain time is even larger. The Poisson and the compound Poisson arrivals are shown to be special cases of the train arrival model. Another important observation is that the packet arrivals exhibit a "source locality." If a packet is seen on the network going from A to B, the probability of the next packet going from A to B or from B to A is very high. Implications of the train arrivals and of source locality on the design of bridges, gateways, and reservation protocols are discussed. A numbet of open problems requiring development of analysis techniques for systems with train arrival processes are also described.


The production of high-throughput gene expression data has generated a crucial need for bioinformatics tools to generate biologically interesting hypotheses. Whereas many tools are available for extracting global patterns, less attention has been focused on local pattern discovery. We propose here an original way to discover knowledge from gene expression data by means of the so-called formal concepts which hold in derived Boolean gene expression datasets. We first encoded the over-expression properties of genes in human cells using human SAGE data. It has given rise to a Boolean matrix from which we extracted the complete collection of formal concepts, i.e., all the largest sets of over-expressed genes associated to a largest set of biological situations in which their over-expression is observed. Complete collections of such patterns tend to be huge. Since their interpretation is a time-consuming task, we propose a new method to rapidly visualize clusters of formal concepts. This designates a reasonable number of Quasi-Synexpression-Groups (QSGs) for further analysis. The interest of our approach is illustrated using human SAGE data and interpreting one of the extracted QSGs. The assessment of its biological relevancy leads to the formulation of both previously proposed and new biological hypotheses.


The purpose of this study was to identify the major risk factors among adolescents who have either contemplated or attempted suicide. Along with successful suicides, suicide attempts and contemplation are coexisting factors that are prominent in the adolescent population and therefore warrant major concern. A secondary data analysis of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) was completed to explore the factors that may influence adolescents' thoughts or actions about suicidal behavior. The YRBS represents high-school students throughout 50 states. Nine questions from the YRBS were used to elicit information about the relationships among the risk factors: (1) Suicidal thoughts and attempts; (2) illegal drug use; (3) alcohol use; (4) tobacco use; and (5) depressive symptoms. Statistically significant relationships among the risk factors were found for adolescents. Adolescents considered suicide (15.8%); attempted suicide at least once (7.8%); were injured while attempting suicide (n = 2.7%). Our findings support the idea that illegal substance use can lead to suicidal thoughts and actions. Depression had a positive relationship with suicidal ideations, supporting similar studies suggesting that depression leads to suicidal action.


Recent interest in the collection and monitoring of data using data mining technology for the purpose of security and businessrelated applications has raised serious concerns about privacy issues. For example, mining health care data for the detection of disease outbreaks may require analyzing clinical records and pharmacy transaction data of many individuals over a certain area. However, releasing and gathering such diverse information belonging to different parties may violate privacy laws and eventually be a threat to civil liberties. Privacy preserving data mining strives to provide a solution to this dilemma. It aims to allow useful data patterns to be discovered without compromising privacy. This paper presents an brief overview on preserving data mining methodologies.


Introduction : To determine fertility influential factors, demographical researchers study influential economical, social and cultural elements. The aim of this article is to apply Poisson regression model to investigate influential factors on children ever born, one of the fertility determinant indices, of migrant women to Tehran according to 2011 Population and Housing Census. Materials & Methods : From 2011 Population and Housing Census data, 33420 ever married migrant women to Tehran were selected. Poisson regression model of these women's children ever born according to predictors of age, educational level, job status, internet use, and migration cause has been fitted by SPSS 22. Findings : All of the predictors (age, P-value< 0.001, educational level, P-value< 0.001, job status, P-value< 0.001, internet use, P-value< 0.001, and migration cause, following family, P-value< 0.028) interaction of women's age and women's migration cause (P-value< 0.001) had significance effects on children ever born. Discussion & Conclusion s: The results of fitted Poisson regression showed that women in older age groups with lower educational level, unemployed, and those who didn't use internet and their cause of the migration was following family had greater mean of children ever born. According to the results, it can be concluded that the possibility of increasing children ever born of women in younger ages, with higher education and employed could be existed by applying correct fertility policies.


Objectives: To determine if levels of neighbourhood poverty and neighbourhood antisocial behaviour modify associations between household poverty and child and youth mental health problems. Methods: Data come from the 2014 Ontario Child Health Study—a provincially representative survey of 6537 families with 10,802 four- to 17-year-olds. Multivariate multilevel modelling was used to test if neighbourhood poverty and antisocial behaviour interact with household poverty to modify associations with children's externalizing and internalizing problems based on parent assessments of children (4- to 17-year-olds) and self-assessments of youth (12- to 17-year-olds). Results: Based on parent assessments, neighbourhood poverty, and antisocial behaviour modified associations between household poverty and children's mental health problems. Among children living in households below the poverty line, levels of mental health problems were 1) lower when living in neighbourhoods with higher concentrations of poverty and 2) higher when living in neighbourhoods with more antisocial behaviour. These associations were stronger for externalizing versus internalizing problems when conditional on antisocial behaviour and generalized only to youth-assessed externalizing problems. Conclusion: The lower levels of externalizing problems reported among children living in poor households in low-income neighbourhoods identify potential challenges with integrating poorer households into more affluent neighbourhoods. More important, children living in poor households located in neighbourhoods exhibiting more antisocial behaviour are at dramatically higher risk for mental health problems. Reducing levels of neighbourhood antisocial behaviour could have large mental health benefits, particularly among poor children.


From the perspective of World Englishes (i.e., varieties of English in different regions of the world), mutual intelligibility is a key issue for both listeners and speakers. Nevertheless, learners often have an idealized notion of native-speaker spoken norms and may be in favor of more prestigious inner circle models than others. This study examined students' (N = 617) perceptions and expectations of their pronunciation and their attitudes toward instructors' accent varieties in the three circles of World Englishes collected from six countries in the inner circle (the United States and New Zealand), the outer circle (South Africa and Pakistan), and the expanding circle (Japan and South Korea). The results show that students in the inner circle and expanding circle countries, compared to those in the outer circle, were more dissatisfied with their current curriculum of learning pronunciation due to confusion of various models, teachers' mono-model treatment of accent variation, and lack of effort of incorporating the role of English as an international language. These findings suggest that the concept of World Englishes should be better integrated into ESL/EFL classroom teachings.


This study investigates the depiction of cattle by the Dutch painter Aelbert Cuyp (1620-91). It seeks to identify possible reasons for his choices of subject-matter and to trace the implications- for subsequent taste. Origins of the Dutch 17th-century veestuk (cattle piece) can be found in artefacts and writings of many earlier cultures, in which cattle images served mythological, religious, instructional and other functions. The real and symbolic importance of Dutch cattle husbandry and dairy farming contributed further significance to this iconography, and in Cuyp's day the 'Dutch cow' was recognised as a patriotic emblem for the politically independent and economically successful United Provinces.

Analysis of the colours and condition of contemporary cattle and of farming practices suggests there were evident differnces between the subjects as Cuyp depicted them and the actuality from which he derived his compositions. This prompts a reconsideration of claims, that 'realism' is the prime character of Cuyp's art. It is proposed that Cuyp adopted a deliberately selective and idealised vision, representing rural subjects in nostalgic terms.

Aspects of the intricate interrelationship between observable actuality and pictorial invention are exposed by attending to the cultural imperatives that informed and were informed by the pictures. Cuyp's works not only exploited estab1ished associations to images of cattle but also carried moralising, pietistic and entertaining messages, similar to those found in still-life and genre subjects, whose meaning has become lost to modern observers.

Cuyp seems to have worked entirely for a local clientele, and, since Dordrecht was not an agricultural centre, explanations of the appeal of his cattle images are sought in that community's prevailing patrician and burgerlijk attitudes and beliefs about rural subjects. It is argued that his paintings, rather than being regarded as neutrally descriptive reflections of local conditions, were valued both for their illusionistic naturalism and for their underlying meanings. Cuyp's posthumous reputation in Dordrecht and subsequent influence are examined in the light of these aesthetic transformations.


GATA family activators (Gln3p and Gat1p) and repressors (Dal80p and Deh1p) regulate nitrogen catabolite repression (NCR)-sensitive transcription in Saccharomyces cerevisiaepresumably via their competitive binding to the GATA sequences upstream of NCR-sensitive genes. Ure2p, which is not a GATA family member, inhibits Gln3p/Gat1p from functioning in the presence of good nitrogen sources. We show that NCR-sensitive DAL80 transcription can be influenced by the relative levels of GAT1 andURE2 expression. NCR, normally observed with ammonia or glutamine, is severely diminished when Gat1p is overproduced, and this inhibition is overcome by simultaneously increasing URE2expression. Further, overproduction of Ure2p nearly eliminates NCR-sensitive transcription under derepressive growth conditions,i.e. with proline as the sole nitrogen source. Enhanced green fluorescent protein-Gat1p is nuclear when Gat1p-dependent transcription is high and cytoplasmic when it is inhibited by overproduction of Ure2p.


The present scarcity of operational knowledge-based systems (KBS) has been attributed, in part, to an inadequate consideration shown to user interface design during development. From a human factors perspective the problem has stemmed from an overall lack of user-centred design principles. Consequently the integration of human factors principles and techniques is seen as a necessary and important precursor to ensuring the implementation of KBS which are useful to, and usable by, the end-users for whom they are intended. Focussing upon KBS work taking place within commercial and industrial environments, this research set out to assess both the extent to which human factors support was presently being utilised within development, and the future path for human factors integration. The assessment consisted of interviews conducted with a number of commercial and industrial organisations involved in KBS development; and a set of three detailed case studies of individual KBS projects. Two of the studies were carried out within a collaborative Alvey project, involving the Interdisciplinary Higher Degrees Scheme (IHD) at the University of Aston in Birmingham, BIS Applied Systems Ltd (BIS), and the British Steel Corporation. This project, which had provided the initial basis and funding for the research, was concerned with the application of KBS to the design of commercial data processing (DP) systems. The third study stemmed from involvement on a KBS project being carried out by the Technology Division of the Trustees Saving Bank Group plc. The preliminary research highlighted poor human factors integration. In particular, there was a lack of early consideration of end-user requirements definition and user-centred evaluation. Instead concentration was given to the construction of the knowledge base and prototype evaluation with the expert(s). In response to this identified problem, a set of methods was developed that was aimed at encouraging developers to consider user interface requirements early on in a project. These methods were then applied in the two further projects, and their uptake within the overall development process was monitored. Experience from the two studies demonstrated that early consideration of user interface requirements was both feasible, and instructive for guiding future development work. In particular, it was shown a user interface prototype could be used as a basis for capturing requirements at the functional (task) level, and at the interface dialogue level. Extrapolating from this experience, a KBS life-cycle model is proposed which incorporates user interface design (and within that, user evaluation) as a largely parallel, rather than subsequent, activity to knowledge base construction. Further to this, there is a discussion of several key elements which can be seen as inhibiting the integration of human factors within KBS development. These elements stem from characteristics of present KBS development practice; from constraints within the commercial and industrial development environments; and from the state of existing human factors support.


We use rich longitudinally matched administrative data on students and teachers in North Carolina to examine the patterns of differential effectiveness by teachers' years of experience. The paper contributes to the literature by focusing on middle school teachers and by extending the analysis to student outcomes beyond test scores. Once we control statistically for the quality of individual teachers using teacher fixed effects, we find large returns to experience for middle school teachers in the form both of higher test scores and improvements in student behavior, with the clearest behavioral effects emerging for reductions in student absenteeism. Moreover these returns extend well beyond the first few years of teaching. The paper contributes to policy debates by documenting that teachers can and do continue to learn on the job.


In order to reap the benefits which the Internet offers, users often have to provide personal information over the Web. Data types that are frequently required by online vendors include names, mailing and e-mail addresses, telephone numbers or credit card numbers. Previous research has identified several antecedents which influence users' decisions on providing personal details over the Web. This paper adds to the existing research by scrutinizing the concept of personal information and positing an individual's perceived risk of personal information as an antecedent of information disclosure. The results of an empirical survey show that users differentiate between various types of personal data according to the risk of privacy intrusion. Perceived risk of personal information turns out to be a stronger predictor for the intention to provide personal information online than trust in the Internet or in the online vendor.


This thesis describes a test of the applicability of a model developed from a qualitative study of a market for consumer nondurables to two other markets for consumer non-durables. The model was developed to explain the effect of public relations information on housewives 1 buying decisions.

The results of two questionnaire surveys of fifty housewives each were analysed. Results from the first market study were to be confirmed by the second study before acceptance.

The relationships specified in the model were not identified in the tests. It is suggested that the relationship between perceived risk and openness to information was not supported because of the low risk in the present studies and that relationships concerning usage strategies were not identified because it was not possible to group individual strategies.

In the light of the results the problems of developing a generalisable model from a qualitative study of one situation and ways of tackling these problems are discussed. The advantages and disadvantages to the project of using a market research firm for the survey and of having commercial sponsors are identified.

This thesis provides several criteria for distinguishing between the diverse conceptualisations of perceived risk reviewed. It points out why the uncertainty component and not the probability component is consistent with perceived risk theory. It shows that there is little conclusive evidence of a relationship between consumer perceived risk and information handling due to a lack of quality programmatic research, although that relationship is often held to be true.

The above point highlights a general problem in consumer behaviour research exemplified by a lack of programmatic research, by exploratory studies which are not followed up and by many measures of concepts none of which are validated.


Every species referred to herein has been seen by Dr. H. L. Clark, of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, to whom I wish to express my sincere thanks for kind advice and assistance. Giving me his tentative opinion in each case where his advice was sought he allowed me every freedom in action, and so greatly do I value his opinion that, in most cases, I have adopted his suggestions after due consideration. As Dr. Clark's time was short when he visited the Australian Museum in November of 1929, he did not have an opportunity to investigate each species fully; so in fairness no blame for error in judgment, should there be any, can be ascribed to him.


We apply the technique of floating-gate differential injection to a 1.2-GHz CMOS comparator to achieve arbitrary, accurate, and adaptable offsets. The comparator uses nonvolatile charge storage on floating-gate nodes for either offset nulling or automatic programming of a desired offset. We utilize impact-ionized pFET hot-electron injection to achieve fully automatic offset programming. The design has been fabricated in a commercially available 4-metal, 2-poly 0.35-mum CMOS process. Experimental results confirm the ability to reduce the variance of comparator offset by 3600times and to accurately program a desired offset with maximum observed residual offset of 469 muV and standard deviation of 199 mu V. We achieve controlled injection to accurately program the input offset to voltages uniformly distributed from -1 to 1 V. The comparator operates at 1.2 GHz with a power consumption of 3.3 mW.


Scholars in science education have reported an in increase in scientific literacy due to socioscientific issues (SSI)-based instruction. While several SSI are related to agriculture, such as climate change, whether to eat organic food, land use issues, and the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), literature that connects agricultural education to the theoretical framework is scant. This collective case study investigates how National Future Farmers of America (FFA) Organization teachers utilize school gardens to teach science, including whether and how SSI are utilized as an educational framework. Qualitative data was collected by conducting semistructured interviews with two Ohio school-based agricultural educators, and data was analyzed using the constant comparative method. Findings indicated both teachers utilized applied science teaching methods and expressed frustrations regarding the difficulty of meeting mandated science learning standards. While the teachers often integrated controversial topics in classroom discussions, fidelity to the SSI framework did not appear to be utilized.


The careers of Teach For America (TFA) corps members are much discussed but less often analyzed. Critics of TFA suggest that corps members remain teachers for too short a time, while supporters suggest the program bolsters education reform even if corps members leave teaching. In this paper, I analyze the employment of TFA corps members who begin their careers in NYC. To do this, I first combine data from TFA, NY State, NY City, and charter management organizations to generate a dataset superior to prior datasets used to explore corps member employment. Second, I use the Kaplan-Meier survival method to estimate how long corps members remain in the teaching profession. Third, I use logistic regression to identify predictors associated with corps member attrition from teaching. Fourth, I use survey weights and raking to track the employment of TFA alumni and adjust for non-response bias. I find that corps members remain teachers longer than is commonly reported. Roughly 90% of corps members remain teachers for a second year, 57 to 61% remain for a third, 42 to 45% remain for a fourth, and 32 to 36% remain for a fifth. Further, many corps members who leave teaching remain educators. In year 10, 61% of TFA alumni remain employed in the education sector, including 43% employed in preK-12. Finally, I identify several strong predictors of TFA attrition. Corps members have the lowest odds of attrition in year 1 and the highest odds in year 2. Adjusted for other covariates, corps members are less likely to leave teaching if Hispanic, an education major, a special education teacher, or a teacher at a school with higher test scores. Corps members are more likely to leave if Asian, male, or a teacher at a charter school, and corps members are also more likely to leave if their college GPA was high, they attended a selective college, or they majored in a subject with high potential earnings. Older corps members and corps members from lower-income backgrounds are more likely to leave teaching in their first year, but less likely to leave teaching thereafter. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Education First Advisor Richard M. Ingersoll


This paper presents an approach for constrained Gaussian Process (GP) regression where we assume that a set of linear transformations of the process are bounded. It is motivated by machine learning applications for high-consequence engineering systems, where this kind of information is often made available from phenomenological knowledge. We consider a GP $f$ over functions on $\mathcal{X} \subset \mathbb{R}^{n}$ taking values in $\mathbb{R}$, where the process $\mathcal{L}f$ is still Gaussian when $\mathcal{L}$ is a linear operator. Our goal is to model $f$ under the constraint that realizations of $\mathcal{L}f$ are confined to a convex set of functions. In particular, we require that $a \leq \mathcal{L}f \leq b$, given two functions $a$ and $b$ where $a < b$ pointwise. This formulation provides a consistent way of encoding multiple linear constraints, such as shape-constraints based on e.g. boundedness, monotonicity or convexity. We adopt the approach of using a sufficiently dense set of virtual observation locations where the constraint is required to hold, and derive the exact posterior for a conjugate likelihood. The results needed for stable numerical implementation are derived, together with an efficient sampling scheme for estimating the posterior process.


In this paper we describe mobile virtual healthcare communities as a solution for meeting cancer patients information and interaction needs. After an introduction into the healthcare system and its potential starting points for virtual communities, we focus on cancer patients. We analyse their situation through field studies and identify information and interaction needs. On this basis we derive requirements for user centric socio technical system design for cancer patients. As at present no existing offers meet these prerequisite, we intend to develop and implement a mobile healthcare community for cancer patients. The objective is to introduce a socially accepted, technically stable and economically reasonable system. By the time of the conference we assume to have implemented this community platform.


In 1412, Europe was a miserable backwater ravaged by plague, bad sanitation and incessant war, while the Orient was home to dazzling civilizations. Yet, somehow, the West came to dominate the Rest for most of the next half millennium. In this vital, brilliant book, Niall Ferguson reveals the six 'killer applications' that the Rest lacked: competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. And he asks: do we still have these winning tools? Or is this the end of Western ascendancy? 'Brilliantly written, full of wit and virtuosity, stuffed with memorable lines and gorgeous bits of information. A great read' The Times 'A dazzling history of Western ideas ...epic' Economist 'Vivid and fascinating' Daily Telegraph 'Superb ...brings history alive ...dazzling' Independent 'This is sharp. It feels urgent. Ferguson ...twists his knife with great literary brio' Andrew Marr, Financial Times


We designed an edge-lighting light guide plate (LGP) based on a micro-prism structure for liquid crystal display. Its top and bottom surfaces have micro-prisms, and a layer of high reflection film is coated on the bottom surface. The principle of the LGP was analyzed. The optical simulation tool ASAP was used to calculate the apex angle and height of the micro-prism on the top of the LGP, the apex angle of the micro-prism on the bottom of the LGP and the emitting angle dependent luminous flux of the LGP. By adjusting the width of micro-prisms on the bottom, the LGP achieved uniform luminance. A 12-in LGP based on a micro-prism structure as an example was designed. The results proved that the LGP based on a micro-prism structure is thin and simple with uniform luminance and high efficiency.


On 16 December 2008, in the case of MKM Capital Property Limited v. Corbo and Poyser, Master Harper of the Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court permitted service of a default judgment via the social networking website Facebook. The first part of this article considers the MKM Capital decision and an earlier decision of the Queensland District Court, in which permission to serve via Facebook was refused.
In the second part, after providing an outline of the recent amendments to the rules for service of documents contained in Part 6 of the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR), which came into force on 1 October 2008, this article then goes on to consider whether, on the basis of existing case law and in light of those amendments, the English courts would be likely to permit service of documents through Facebook or another social networking website.


In the past decade or so geographers have been arguing for more performative, practice-oriented and non-representational accounts of the ways in which people encounter, move through and inhabit landscapes, spaces and places. In this paper I argue that these theoretical concerns should also prompt geographers to explore the fairly long history of critical commentaries and aesthetic interventions by writers, artists, film-makers and landscape practitioners who have shown a sensibility to movement and embodied practices in the landscape. The paper then examines how landscape architects focused their attention on the movements, speed and visual perspective of vehicle drivers in their arguments for the landscaping and design of motorways in early postwar Britain. During the 1940s the Institute of Landscape Architects pushed for the involvement of their members in the landscaping and planting of all future roads, and prominent landscape architects criticized the tendency of local authorities and organizations such as the Roads Beautifying Association to plant ornamental trees and shrubs which would interrupt the flow of the landscape and distract drivers travelling at speed. Landscape architects such as Brenda Colvin, Sylvia Crowe and Geoffrey Jellicoe argued for a focus on simplicity, flow and the visual perspective of drivers, and the government's Advisory Committee on the Landscape Treatment of Trunk Roads applied similar criticisms to the work of Sir Owen Williams and Partners in designing and landscaping the earliest sections of Britain's first major motorway, the London to Yorkshire Motorway or M1. The paper examines how landscape architects pushed for a functional modernism to be constructed around the movements and speed of motorists, and it concludes by discussing how an admiration for foreign motorways was tempered by calls for a British motorway modernism reworked in regional and local settings.


A new air-source heat pump technology optimized for cold climates was designed and fabricated by the authors in close cooperation with three industrial partners. The constructed unit will undergo a field demonstration in a military barrack to identify heat pumps as cost effective systems that have less primary energy consumption when compared to traditional cold climate heating methods. A simulation model developed in EES predicted the designed heat pump performance at different ambient conditions. The EES results were incorporated with a TRNSYS model to couple the military barrack building load with the available heat pump capacity using weather data. The TRNSYS model enables the assessment of the field demonstration performance during the heating season. The heat pump design is based on two-stage compression with economizing. Commercially available components were selected for all parts of the heat pump. A variable-speed scroll compressor is used as the high-stage compressor matched with a tandem fixed-speed scroll compressor used as the low-stage compressor. The configuration has a predicted capacity of 18.34 kW (62,580 BTU/h) at the design ambient temperature of -20 o C (4 o F) based on the EES simulation results. The building has a heating load of less than 18 kW for more than 95% of the heating season that lasts 8 months out of the year. The heat pump design therefore is predicted to satisfy the building heating load for the entire heating season. The heating season COP based on TRNSYS hourly simulation results is 3.67 with a yearly heating capacity of 30,970 kWh (105,674 kBTU) and 8,438.37 kWh (28,793 kBTU). The CCHP simulations predict over 30% savings in primary energy and CO2 emissions with a 25% cost savings for annual heating energy use compared to an 85% AFUE natural gas furnace.


Tire shred-soil mixture backfill for use in mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) walls has several advantages over traditional backfill materials: 1) good drainage, 2) high shear strength, 3) low compacted unit weight and 4) low lateral pressure exerted on retaining structures. This work presents the results of laboratory tests performed on tire shred-sand mixtures focusing on determining the properties required for their use as backfill in MSE wall applications. Three sizes of tire shreds are considered: tire chips with 9.5mm in nominal size, and tire shreds with 50-to-100-mm and 100-to-200-mm in length. The optimal mix proportions of tire shred-sand mixtures for enhanced mechanical response of the composite material are provided. Segregation of the materials in the tire shred-sand mixtures was investigated for various mix proportions. The effects of tire shred size, and tire shred-sand mixing ratio on the interaction between geogrids/ ribbed-metal strips and the mixtures are evaluated based on a series of laboratory pullout tests. Results indicate that the optimal mix proportion of tire shreds and sand is 25/75 and 30/70 (tire shred/sand) by weight, equivalent to approximately 40/60 and 50/50 (tire shred/sand) by volume for tire shreds with 50-100 mm and 100-200mm in length, respectively. This optimum mix proportion also ensures negligible segregation of the components of the mixture in the composite material. For all three shredded tire sizes considered, the pullout capacity of a geogrid embedded in the tire shred-sand mixtures prepared at the optimum mixing ratio is larger than that obtained for pure tire shreds. The pullout capacity of geogrid placed in samples prepared at optimum tire shred-sand mixing ratio is found to be higher for tire chip-sand mixtures than for tire shred-sand mixtures. This is mainly due to the crossing of the geogrid by the tire chips, which generates passive resistance during pullout. The size of tire shred has a negligible effect on the pullout response of ribbed-strip embedded in mixtures. Large-scale direct tests evaluated the shear strength properties of samples prepared at optimum tire chip-sand and tire shred (50 to 100 mm in size)-sand mixing ratios.


To assess whether lactate determination in vaginal fluids " Lac-test ", can be used as a diagnostic test for premature rupture of membranes (PROM) and to derive the best cutoff value for a positive test. It was a cross-sectional study performed at Al Azhar Bab El Sheria and Ain Shams Maternity Hospitals. 120 women were subdivided into 80 cases with sure or suspected history of PROM and 40 cases with no history of PROM as a control group for determination of lactate concentrations in vaginal fluid, nitrazine paper test and AFI were analysed. : A lactate concentration ≥ 4.3 mmol/L was found to be the best cut-off value for a positive test. The "Lactest" had a sensitivity of 89.06%, specificity 85.71%, positive and negative predictive values of 87.7% and 87.3%, respectively. Corresponding values for the nitrazine paper test were 75%, 75%, 77.4% and 72.4%. Likelihood ratio for a positive "Lac-test" was 6.2 and for a negative test 0.1. Corresponding values for the nitrazine paper test were 3 and 0.3 respectively. "Lac-test" is a valid test in cases with suspected PROM and may even be a better predictor than the nitrazine test. Keywords