When given as a supplement to an energy restricted diet the sympathomimetic agent ephedrine, in combination with methylxanthines such as caffeine, improves fat loss by dual actions: a central suppression of appetite and peripheral stimulation of energy expenditure covered by fat oxidation. Mean weight loss was found to be 16.6 kg after 6 months when E+C was given as an adjuvant to an efficient hypoenergetic diet, which was 3.4 kg higher than in the placebo group. An additional 24 weeks treatment with E+C prevented relapse. In the first weeks of treatment E+C offset the hypotensive effect of energy restriction and weight loss, but the effect was transient, and after 8 weeks blood pressures were indistinguishable from those of the placebo group. E+C has no adverse effect on glucose and lipid metabolism, but has been shown to prevent the decline in HDL-cholesterol caused by weight loss. In a comparative trial the weight loss produced by E+C was similar to that of dexfenfluramine. More research on sympathomimetics and methylxanthines should be carried out to identify combinations with improved efficiency and safety. Moreover, more long-term trials and studies in males are required.


There are changes in the nuclear content of the estrogen receptor in the rat uterus during the estrous cycle that are associated with changes in its physiology. The changes correlate with the concentrations of circulating estradiol. It appears that uterotrophic response to estradiol is a function of the nuclear receptor. The insertion of an IUD leads to changes in the treated uterine horn which appear to be the result of an increased responsitivity to circulating estradiol. The presence of an IUD did not alter the estrous cycle, gonadotropin, or corpus luteum function. The intracellular distribution of the estrogen receptor was investigated in normal uterine horns and in the horns with devices throughout the estrous cycle. Groups of 30 Wistar rats had a silk suture fitted in the lumen of 1 uterine horn. After 14 days the progress of these estrous cycles was determined. Rats were grouped according to the stage of the cycle on the 4th day. Rats were then killed and the uteri removed. Cytosol receptors were measured. The capacity of the cytosol estrogen receptor to bind to oligo(dT)-cellulose was determined. Cytosol protein, nuclear protein, and DNA were measured. At all stages of the estrous cycle, the wet weight and cytosol receptor of the treated horns were greater than the control horns. A slight increase in the capacity of cytosol receptor to bind to oligo(dT)-cellulose was noted at proestrus. The response elicited by the IUD was not considered to be due to an estrogenic response since the changes observed were not accompanied by a corresponding increase in the content of nuclear receptor.


Additive models for conditional quantile functions provide an attractive framework for nonparametric regression applications focused on features of the response beyond its central tendency. Total variation roughness penalities can be used to control the smoothness of the additive components much as squared Sobelev penalties are used for classical L 2 smoothing splines. We describe a general approach to estimation and inference for additive models of this type. We focus attention primarily on selection of smoothing parameters and on the construction of confidence bands for the nonparametric components. Both pointwise and uniform confidence bands are introduced; the uniform bands are based on the Hotelling (1939) tube approach. Some simulation evidence is presented to evaluate finite sample performance and the methods are also illustrated with an application to modeling childhood malnutrition in India.


Recent studies show a significant effect of online communication on campaign donations. Social exchange theory has been used in the literature to explain fundraisers motivatio. A limitation, however, is that motivation and the relation between online and offline actions are often derived from questionnaires that may suffer from selection and self-report biases, are often cross-sectional, do not scale-up and are often too costly to conduct. In an attempt to decrease such limitation, our study models the motivation of participants in an online campaign with social media analysis. We present a preliminary Satiation-Deprivation model, based on social exchange theory, that estimates fundraisers' motivation levels over time based on a Twitter mention network and a donation dataset obtained from the Movember 2014 campaign. Despite our limited sample size, we find that motivation levels may serve as predictors for likelihood of donations and may improve baseline predictors such as co-occurrences of mentions and donations. After further validation, our preliminary model may inform strategic mentioning policies by campaign organizers, in order to maintain high motivation levels in their on-line community. Our findings suggest that a quantitative approach may serve as an accessible and valuable tool for predicting effectiveness of donation campaigns in the future.


An essay of only five short paragraphs published several years ago by the noted Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould about a controversial call by baseball umpire Babe Pinelli provides all the foundation necessary for a thorough investigation of the phenomenon of legal reasoning. The present article contrasts Gould's analysis of a "strike" with the comment by then-Judge John Roberts at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings that he just wanted to "call [the] balls and strikes," and through this exchange develops a new approach toward identifying — and teaching — the basic elements of sophisticated legal thinking. This article divides legal reasoning into four interrelated elements that anchor and structure the complex process that lays "beneath" the more traditional references to "analogy" and "characterization" and the like on which the existing literature on the topic focuses. The challenge of legal reasoning, and the difficulty of being a decision-maker in this context, arise from the fact that each of these elements generates its own special forms of disagreement and controversy, all of which lawyers and judges attempt to resolve satisfactorily. The result is a complicated, but patterned, thought process that corresponds to the equally complicated, but patterned, nature of the law itself. The four elements of legal reasoning developed in detail here are: 1) Text: understanding the subtle "is/ought" distinction that animates the language in which the law is expressed; 2) Context: identifying with care the "scale" of the circumstances (micro or macro) that will characterize the legal controversy; 3) Hypertext: determining not just the normative values, but the kind of values (categorical or consequential) that will justify an argument or result; and 4) Subtext: appreciating the institutional and political circumstances of the judiciary within our form of government. The last of these categories will in fact be argued as the true, or at least the only plausible, basis for Justice Roberts' evidently simplistic comment about "balls and strikes."


The relationship between project management and procurement as an organisational function is often a clash of wills. The field of project management is ripe with stories of clashes between project managers and procurement officers who, for whatever reason do not work well together. There is no lack of literature on project failure and reasons why projects fail. Available literature concludes that successful projects are defined as those completed on time, within budget, and in ways that meet objectives. The biggest challenge to project managers is to mitigate risk in an environment filled with uncertainties. Marketplace forces such as unstable corr~modity markets and economic fluctuations are among the competitive forces experienced by project managers. Suppliers play an integral role within the project life cycle and therefore it is essential to ensure that the right suppliers are selected. The role of procurement has changed from functional to strategic and is no longer viewed as a backroom function, which converts requests into supplier orders. The main reason for the change is due to challenging factors such as globalisation, inflation, technological innovations, and fluctuations in exchange rates and commodity markets. Due to the large portion of expenditure spend by the procurement department within the organisation the savings on purchasing costs can have a substantial effect on the profitability of the organisation. Procurement savings initiatives are now far more visible on the agendas of senior management. Selection of the right suppliers is crucial for any organisation striving to achieve the business objectives of the organisation and meet the expectations of customers and shareholders. The procurement department apply certain tools and techniques to select, evaluate, and measure the performance of suppliers. Various tools and techniques are available, the focus of the study is on three of these tools and techniques namely: negotiations, material budgets, and the SESPA(Supplier Evaluation, Selection, and Performance Appraisal) process. According to the literature reviewed, a project life cycle can be broken down into four to five key phases namely: the conceptual, planning, execution, close out, and control phases and procurement process into five steps namely: define the requirements, select the supplier, produce an agreement, adrrrinister day-to-day activities, and assess the performance of suppliers. A comparison between the steps within the procurement process and the phases within the project management life cycle reveals commonality and the potential of benefits that the tools and techniques applied by procurement can contribute to the project life cycle. Thus the challenge to the procurement office is how to partner with the project management function in a manner that will positively impact on the project management life cycle and the project success. With these obstacles facing most organisations, it is time for procurement and project management to focus on cooperation instead of confrontation. Developing a culture that sees individual projects as elements of a business plan will require change. There is no lack of literature on resistance to change. Change is seldom easy and old ways die hard, even when there is wide agreement that change is needed. Therefore whatever the reason for change, it is essential for organisations to realise that successful implementation of change will require a systematic change implementation process.


Information Technology success factors are interpreted as a cumulative measure of multi-dimensional constructs within a socio-technical model in an organizational structure and warrant organizational acceptance from pre-implementation to post-implementation periods. We use a theoretical model based on the Cognitive Dissonance Theory (CDT) to measure perceived usefulness of Information Technology activities. The constructs play an important role in setting initial user expectations before Information Technology activities are rolled out in organizations. In this study, we surveyed physicians to measure the perceived usefulness of a multi-million dollar healthcare project. The analysis shows that computer expertise has a direct, positive effect and an indirect mitigating effect on end-user concerns on perceived usefulness. Ease of use was also found to have a negative effect on perceived usefulness.


Teheran-ro in Seoul and Mediaspree area in Berlin are pristine examples for public spaces with a history of rapid change in the context of broader political and economic transitions. Dahae Lee shows that in such a transitional context, the public sector alone is incapable to provide and manage public space. Hence, it engages private sector entities in the form of privately owned public space/s (POPS). By analysing the planning instruments used for POPS in both cases, their uniqueness as well as strengths and weaknesses are revealed. Based on the results this study offers a number of policy recommendations for cities that encounter similar problems.


The Filipino diaspora is at least four hundred years old. For two-and-a-half centuries, Filipinos by the hundreds traveled yearly to Mexico and the Americas, with many electing to stay and find a new life. The chief means for migration was the Manila galleon that sailed between the Philippines and Mexico to carry on a lively trade in Asian goods in exchange for silver from the Americas and the trappings of civilization from the West. The end of the galleon trade in 1815 did not stop the exodus of Filipinos to foreign lands as they began to discover the lure of other exotic ports in Asia and Europe. This book attempts to answer the question often asked: What happened to those Filipinos who started the diaspora? The answers are important because they fill a gap in the long history of this adventurous race.


The life of Canadian landscape painter Emily Carr has posed a persistent challenge for playwrights, who have accordingly experimented with a variety of techniques to express her individualist lifestyle and vision of the natural world. Focusing on six Carr plays, this essay examines their varying degrees of success in staging the "subjectivity" of such a woman artist. Insofar as depicting an individual's authentic sense of self is dependent upon realizing that person's subjectivity, a theatrical "biography" would seem to be a technical impossibility: theater tends toward objectification - whatever is presented on stage is apprehended in a contextualizing mise en scene which makes characters and events the objects of the audience's gaze. In the case of depicting a woman's life, this difficulty is compounded by reason of the way that a patriarchal culture has already performed a kind of objectification - in the sense that women's roles have been constructed according to patterns which assume male centricity. When the focus of a drama is the life of a woman artist, however, an expression of her own way of seeing is crucial, since her aesthetic response to the world is a fundamental component of her "character." Attempts to dramatize the life of the Canadian landscape painter Emily Cart (1871-1945) have therefore proven to be both fascinating and problematic for Canadian playwrights. Cart is entrenched in the national consciousness as a kind of cultural icon, a marker for revolt against social and aesthetic ideologies. Moreover, her "fresh seeing" has inevitably been conflated with her popular reputation as a social eccentric, a role which she herself constructed in highly imaginative terms in her autobiographies and stories, such as Klee Wyck (1941), The Book of the Small (1942), and The House of All Sorts (1944). In these works she recalls her childhood rebellion against a patriarchal household in Victoria, British Columbia, a city overlaid with imperialist attitudes and traditions. Her artistic training included studying painting in San Francisco, London, and Paris, after which she returned to Canada and developed a vigorous expressionist style in response to the primal forms and colors of the West Coast landscape and to its indigenous Native culture, recording the vanishing villages and totem poles of the Haida on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Although her painting was encouraged by Lawren Harris, one of the "Group of Seven" Canadian landscape painters, for most of her life she experienced a strong sense of artistic isolation. After a series of heart attacks, she spent her last years living with her sister Alice in Victoria, articulating her aesthetic philosophy in her journals, one of which, entitled Hundreds and Thousands, includes her perception of herself as being "a nothing, only a channel for the pouring through of that which is something, which is all" (34). The extent to which Emily Carr has proven to be a difficult subject for dramatization is evidenced by the fact that several Canadian playwrights - including Sheldon Rosen, John Murrell, and Sharon Pollock - have abandoned projects of this kind. In this essay, however, I wish to demonstrate the problem by exploring the work of six dramatists who did make the attempt. In roughly chronological fashion, these works range from Herman Voaden's pioneering script of 1951 to the 1990 French production by Jovette Marchessault, although my concern is less with tracing a historical progression than with exploring how the respective playwrights use not only the "materials" of Carr's life - including her paintings and autobiographical writings - to "dramatize" her inner life but how they also use their own experiences. In this way, I also hope implicitly to argue for the value of what might be called a more feminist mode of "expressionism," one which views character as fluid and amorphous, and reality as subjective perception. Herman Voaden (1903-91), a pioneer of Canadian theater, was the first to put Emily Carr on the stage. …


This 2003 book offers an interpretation of Heidegger's major work, Being and Time. Unlike those who view Heidegger as an idealist, Taylor Carman argues that Heidegger is best understood as a realist. Amongst the distinctive features of the book are an interpretation explicitly oriented within a Kantian framework (often taken for granted in readings of Heidegger) and an analysis of Dasein in relation to recent theories of intentionality, notably those of Dennett and Searle. Rigorous, jargon-free and deftly argued this book will be necessary reading for all serious students of Heidegger.


The results of numerical simulations of the Eltanin impact are combined with the available geological data in order to reconstruct the impact dynamics and to get some constraints on the impact parameters. Numerical simulations show that the Eltanin projectile size should be less than 2 km for a 45° oblique impact and less than 1.5 km for a vertical impact. On the other hand, we demonstrate that the projectile diameter cannot be considerably smaller than 1 km; otherwise, the impact‐induced water flow cannot transport eroded sediments across large distances. The maximum displacement approximately equals the water crater radius and rapidly decreases with increasing distances. Numerical simulations also show that ejecta deposits strongly depend on impact angle and projectile size and, therefore, cannot be used for reliable estimates of the initial projectile mass. The initial amplitudes of tsunami‐like waves are estimated. The presence of clay‐rich sediments, typical for the abyssal basins in cores PS2709 and PS2708 on the Freeden Seamounts (Bellingshausen Sea, Southern Ocean) combined with numerical data allow us to suggest a probable point of impact to the east of the seamounts. The results do not exclude the possibility that a crater in the ocean bottom may exist, but such a structure has not been found yet.


Focus on Adult Health: Medical-Surgical Nursing, is uniquely designed to prepare today's students to succeed as practicing nurses by focusing on the most important medical disorders and key nursing responsibilities."As the demand for nurses continues to grow, new nurses are entering a dynamic and challenging work environment, and many feel unprepared," said Linda H. Pellico, RN, PhD, the lead author and editor of the textbook. "We developed this textbook and related tools to prepare students for the reality of medical-surgical nursing. We need to teach students how to think like a nurse, and how to focus quickly on the most critical aspects. Beyond taking care of what you see, nursing is about predicting and preventing risks, so this book details risk factors, clinical presentation, and treatment." The textbook prepares students for both the NCLEX exam and for daily nursing practice by focusing on the need-to-know content. Both the text and the supporting tools include features designed to reinforce student understanding, such as: * Focused Assessment Guides, which summarize key content for quick reference and review, * Guidelines for Nursing Care: Clear, step-by-step "how to" procedures are paired with action rationales to explain why actions are important, * Innovative Art Program: Connects text-based concepts with real-life patient scenarios, * Nursing alerts, evidence-based practice boxes, and risk factor boxes, to keep students engaged and increase their comprehension.


A state-of-the-art V Band millimeter-wave agile receiver subsystem, consisting of an RF module and a phase-locked oscillator (PLO) module, has been designed, fabricated, and tested. All of the active circuits within this subsystem (with the exception of the operational amplifiers in the phase-locked loop) are GaAs MMICs. The RF module includes a 0.1 micron pseudomorphic HEMT-based LNA, a Schottky diode subharmonically pumped mixer and a 7.5 to 30 GHz LO multiplier/amplifier chain designed around a 0.25 x 400 micron power MESFET. The receiver module noise figure is 7.5 dB DSB maximum and the VSWR at the RF input port is less than 2:1. The PLO module includes a linear 7.5 GHz. VCO and other commercial MMIC chips which complete the phase-locked loop. In both modules, the MMIC chips have been assembled into light-weight, compact, laser scalable housings, making them attractive for use in space-based communication systems. In addition, the MMIC components have been put through and have passed a full round of radiation testing, including exposure to gamma and x-ray transient dose rates of 3 x 1012 and 5 x 1012 RAD(Si)/sec, respectively, as well as neutron and total dose tests.


We need a more nuanced debate on how prices and policies affect food security; neither high nor low prices are panaceas. Spikes in food prices have pushed food security to the top of the global policy agenda. Price increases have mixed effects on poverty and hunger: They increase the cost of food for consumers but increase incomes of farmers, who represent the bulk of the world's poor. Net effects will differ depending on whether poor households or countries buy or import, or sell or export food (infrastructure, institutions, and market imperfections will play roles, as well) (1–4). Policies to influence prices imply winners and losers, not just between rich and poor, but also among the poor. These nuances are too often absent in public debate, to the detriment of policy-making. Moreover, the arguments put forward today, that high food prices generally hurt the poor, are in contrast with those put forward a few years ago, that low food prices were hurting the poor.


Small-scale fisheries (SSFs) constitute a critical socioeconomic sector by providing a source of income and animal protein for fishing communities worldwide. In Uruguay this sector has traditionally been neglected. More recently, the Uruguayan government has shown an increasing interest in readdressing this situation by setting a high-level policy for SSFs. This paper addresses the long-term process from conceptualization to operationalization of the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries (EAF) in Uruguayan SSFs. An overview of the socialecological enabling conditions that facilitated EAF operationalization across four pilot sites is also provided. Long-term results showed that the intrinsic characteristics of each fishery conditioned the goals achieved. Fishery systems with more favorable enabling conditions served as starting points for operationalizing an EAF strategy. By contrast, SSFs with historical conflicts of use and a complex relationship between the fisheries management agency and fishing communities are still challenging. These results were used as learning platforms to strength and enhance the normative framework regarding management of SSFs. Progresses in EAF implementation at pilot sites have provided initial building blocks for scaling practices to other Uruguayan SSFs. The translation of processes and results into the long-term fishery policy allowed establishing an appropriate legal basis for further EAF development at a national level. Despite the above, long-term political will is critical for sustaining responsible fishing practices and the involvement of fishers as stewardships of their own activity.


Currently biofuels have strong political support, both in the EU and Sweden. The EU has, for example, set a target for the use of renewable fuels in the transportation sector stating that all EU member states should use 10% renewable fuels for transport by 2020. Fulfilling this ambition will lead to an enormous market for biofuels during the coming decade. To avoid increasing production of biofuels based on agriculture crops that require considerable use of arable area, focus is now to move towards more advanced second generation (2G) biofuels that can be produced from biomass feedstocks associated with a more efficient land use.
Climate benefits and greenhouse gas (GHG) balances are aspects often discussed in conjunction with sustainability and biofuels. The total GHG emissions associated with production and usage of biofuels depend on the entire fuel production chain, mainly the agriculture or forestry feedstock systems and the manufacturing process. To compare different biofuel production pathways it is essential to conduct an environmental assessment using the well-to-tank (WTT) analysis methodology. In Sweden the conditions for biomass production are favourable and we have promising second generation biofuels technologies that are currently in the demonstration phase. In this study we have chosen to focus on cellulose based ethanol, methane from gasification of solid wood as well as DME from gasification of black liquor, with the purpose of identifying research and development potentials that may result in improvements in the WTT emission values. The main objective of this study is thus to identify research and development challenges for Swedish biofuel actors based on literature studies as well as discussions with the the researchers themselves. We have also discussed improvement potentials for the agriculture and forestry part of the WTT chain. The aim of this study is to, in the context of WTT analyses, (i) increase knowledge about the complexity of biofuel production, (ii) identify and discuss improvement potentials, regarding energy efficiency and GHG emissions, for three biofuel production cases, as well as (iii) identify and discuss improvement potentials regarding biomass supply, including agriculture/forestry. The scope of the study is limited to discussing the technologies, system aspects and climate impacts associated with the production stage. Aspects such as the influence on biodiversity and other environmental and social parameters fall beyond the scope of this study. We find that improvement potentials for emissions reductions within the agriculture/forestry part of the WTT chain include changing the use of diesel to low-CO2-emitting fuels, changing to more fuel-efficient tractors, more efficient cultivation and manufacture of fertilizers (commercial nitrogen fertilizer can be produced in plants which have nitrous oxide gas cleaning) as well as improved fertilization strategies (more precise nitrogen application during the cropping season). Furthermore, the cultivation of annual feedstock crops could be avoided on land rich in carbon, such as peat soils and new agriculture systems could be introduced that lower the demand for ploughing and harrowing. Other options for improving the WTT emission values includes introducing new types of crops, such as wheat with higher content of starch or willow with a higher content of cellulose. From the case study on lignocellulosic ethanol we find that 2G ethanol, with co-production of biogas, electricity, heat and/or wood pellet, has a promising role to play in the development of sustainable biofuel production systems. Depending on available raw materials, heat sinks, demand for biogas as vehicle fuel and existing 1G ethanol plants suitable for integration, 2G ethanol production systems may be designed differently to optimize the economic conditions and maximize profitability. However, the complexity connected to the development of the most optimal production systems require improved knowledge and involvement of several actors from different competence areas, such as chemical and biochemical engineering, process design and integration and energy and environmental systems analysis, which may be a potential barrier. Three important results from the lignocellulosic ethanol study are: (i) the production systems could be far more complex and intelligently designed than previous studies show, (ii) the potential improvements consist of a large number of combinations of process integration options wich partly depends on specific local conditions, (iii) the environmental performance of individual systems may vary significantly due to systems design and local conditons.
From the case study on gasification of solid biomass for the production of biomethane we find that one of the main advantages of this technology is its high efficiency in respect to converting biomass into fuels for transport. For future research we see a need for improvements within the gas up-grading section, including gas cleaning and gas conditioning, to obtain a more efficient process. A major challenge is to remove the tar before the methanation reaction. Three important results from the biomethane study are: (i) it is important not to crack the methane already produced in the syngas, which indicates a need for improved catalysts for selective tar cracking, (ii) there is a need for new gas separation techniques to facilitate the use of air oxidation agent instead of oxygen in the gasifier, and (iii) there is a need for testing the integrated process under realistic conditions, both at atmospheric and pressurized conditions. From the case study on black liquor gasification for the production of DME we find that the process has many advantages compared to other biofuel production options, such as the fact that black liquor is already partially processed and exists in a pumpable, liquid form, and that the process is pressurised and tightly integrated with the pulp mill, which enhances fuel production efficiency. However, to achieve commercial status, some challenges still remain, such as demonstrating that materials and plant equipment meet the high availability required when scaling up to industrial size in the pulp mill, and also proving that the plant can operate according to calculated heat and material balances. Three important results from the DME study are: (i) that modern chemical pulp mills, having a potential surplus of energy, could become important suppliers of renewable fuels for transport, (ii) there is a need to demonstrate that renewable DME/methanol will be proven to function in large scale, and (iii) there is still potential for technology improvements and enhanced energy integration. Although quantitative improvement potentials are given in the three biofuel production cases, it is not obvious how these potentials would affect WTT values, since the biofuel production processes are complex and changing one parameter impacts other parameters. The improvement potentials are therefore discussed qualitatively. From the entire study we have come to agree on the following common conclusions: (i) research and development in Sweden within the three studied 2G biofuel production technologies is extensive, (ii) in general, the processes, within the three cases, work well at pilot and demonstration scale and are now in a phase to be proven in large scale, (iii) there is still room for improvement although some processes have been known for decades, (iv) the biofuel production processes are complex and site specific and process improvements need to be seen and judged from a broad systems perspective (both within the production plant as well as in the entire well-to-tank perspective), and (v) the three studied biofuel production systems are complementary technologies. Futher, the process of conducting this study is worth mentioning as a result itself, i.e. that many different actors within the field have proven their ability and willingness to contribute to a common report, and that the cooperation climate was very positive and bodes well for possible future collaboration within the framework of the f3 center. Finally, judging from the political ambitions it is clear that the demand for renewable fuels will significantly increase during the coming decade. This will most likely result in opportunities for a range of biofuel options. The studied biofuel options all represent 2G biofuels and they can all be part of the solution to meet the increased renewable fuel demand.


At the beginning of the 1990s, Italy went through two tectonic changes. Externally, the end of the Cold War called for a redefinition of the roles of NATO and the EU, the pillars on which Italy had built its foreign and security policy for forty years. Internally, Italy's old ruling elites vanished under the huge mani pulite corruption scandal. The new political parties that rose in their place have remained committed to NATO and the EU, but have often met with obstacles in reconciling the national, European and Atlantic components of Italy's security. While this hinges mostly on structural factors – like the rising costs of participation in NATO or EU operations abroad, including in terms of public support – the tendency of the new elites to emphasize their differences and neglect their more fundamental commonalities have multiplied the "grey zones" in Italian security policy.


A remarkable feature of the human species is our great capacity to lose heat and to regulate our body temperatures when exposed to heat. The Heinrich (Hunting) hypothesis theorises that this capacity evolved in early hominids and provided an extraordinary evolutionary advantage since it allowed our human ancestors to chase nutritionally-dense but non-sweating mammals like large antelope, to their (lesser) limits of thermoregulatory failure. In this fatigued state, the exhausted animals were more easily killed. It is further hypothesised that it was the consumption of the high protein / fat diet made possible by the capture of such animals that fuelled the development of the higher brain centres on which superior human intelligence depends. But the key physiological point is that during the hunt, early hominids had no access to fluid, the carrying of which would have hindered their ability to run. Thus for their evolutionary progress to have occurred, humans had to evolve a sweating mechanism to prevent overheating during exercise, as well as the capacity to continue exercising in the heat even though they were becoming increasingly dehydrated as the duration of the hunt increased and the environmental conditions likely became more severe. Until 1969 the advice given to endurance athletes mirrored this understanding of our evolutionary biology. Thus human athletes were advised lIgnotl/Ig to drink during exercise. But the development of the world's first "sports drink" in Florida in the 1960s led gradually, but perhaps inevitably, to the promotion of a novel dogma that humans need to drink "as much as tolerable" during exercise if they are to avoid heatstroke and to optimise their performances. In this article this and three other dogmas that have evolved simultaneously over the past 35 years are analysed. These are: (i) that dehydration is the most important determinant of the body temperature during exercise; (ii) that athletes collapse after exercise because of a circulatory collapse caused by dehydration and hyperthermia; and (iii) that heatstroke always occurs in otherwise normal, healthy athletes who simply exercise too hard for too long in exceptionally hot conditions. Rather, it is argued in this paper that (i) all the published evidence supports the belief that health and performance during exercise are optimised by drinking according to the dictates of thirst ("ad libitum"); (ii) the brain sets both the work rate and the rectal temperature during exercise specifically to insure that heatstroke will almost never occur in otherwise healthy humans. As a result, the rectal temperature is determined principally by the exercising work rate; (iii) that post-exercise collapse in athletes who remain conscious is due to a low peripheral vascular resistance to which dehydration makes essentially no contribution; and (iv) that heatstroke is more likely due to an exaggerated and explosive thermogenesis that develops in genetically-predisposed individuals on exposure to exercise and other triggering environmental factors. It is also suggested that the skeletal muscles are the site of this florid thermogenesis and that the leakage of toxic proteins into the circulation from damaged muscles, and not the hyperthermia, is the more likely cause of the multiple organ failure that typifies fatal heatstroke.


Abstract Background The aim of this interventional study was to assess, document and improve the Patient-held Record (PHR) System in the Emtshezi Subdistrict. The study began in 1998 and was conducted using a Quality Assurance (QA) Cycle, which focuses on systems and processes and encourages a team approach to problem solving and quality improvement.1 The keeping of good, accurate health records, as well as the communication of this clinical information between health practitioners, is essential for good quality practice in primary care. In Emtshezi, many patients receive care from different health facilities and practitioners. Historically, the health services in the Subdistrict, as in much of KwaZulu-Natal, were fragmented. Clinics, hospitals and private practitioners in the Subdistrict used a variety of different health records systems, which did not integrate with each other. There was very little communication between these health providers, possibly because no overall plan for health records was worked out for the Subdistrict or the Province at that stage. The Emtshezi Subdistrict forms part of the uThukela Health District of KwaZulu-Natal and lies 120 km northwest of Pietermaritzburg. The population is mostly rural. The major towns are Estcourt, Weenen and Winterton. In the Subdistrict, there is one district hospital of 300 beds, 10 residential clinics and four mobile clinics. There are more than 20 private practitioners, the majority of whom practice in Estcourt. The term "ambulatory records" refers to records that are used by outpatients as opposed to records used for admission to a hospital ward. Two basic types of ambulatory medical records are used throughout KwaZulu-Natal—the A4-sized Facility- held Record (FHR) and the small PHR (see Photograph 1). They are both called "Outpatient Record". The FHRs are used only at that facility and are filed at the facility. The PHR is kept by the patient and can thus be used at any health facility. Method The method used for this study was the Quality Assurance Cycle. Focus group discussions were the main research tool utilised. This research was conducted with ethical approval as the dissertation towards an MFamMed degree at MEDUNSA. Results The following problems were identified: poor communication of clinical information between health facilities. There were problems with the records system in the hospital, poor design of ambulatory records and the use of multiple PHRs by patients. The following solutions were proposed: A single, common PHR to be the definitive ambulatory health record for every patient at district level. The design of the PHR has been improved and meets the legal requirements for a health record. Conclusions PHRs have a valuable role to play within the District Health System in South Africa. They are especially useful in improving the standard of health care, as well as the continuity of care between the district hospital and the clinics and community health centres that the hospital supports. PHRs form a vital link, not only between facilities, but as a link through time: patients need a definitive personal health record for themselves, a record that is problem-orientated and tracks their health and illnesses throughout life. We need to move away from episodic care. Hospital doctors need to be more seriously committed to communicating with the PHC clinics and private practitioners who refer to that hospital. Senior managers and policy planners need to be more aware of the potential of PHRs as a means of transformation towards a better district health system.


Does data disclosure have an impact on citations? Four leading economics journals introduced a data disclosure policy between 2004 and 2006. We use panel data consisting of 17,135 article citing-year observations from 1996 to 2015 for articles published in these journals. Empirical articles that did not disclose data (46% of the sample) serve as a control group. Evidence for a positive open data citation effect is weak (6% and not statistically significant). On the other hand, the citation impacts of publication are substantial and precisely estimated. Pure theory, hybrid and purely empirical articles enjoy citations benefits of 22%, 32% and 44%, respectively. Our pre- and post-publication citation data allow us to identify the citation effects of data disclosure and publication, while controlling for intrinsic article quality.


b Climate field reconstructions (CFR) of the Common Era (the last two millennia) provide important insights into the dynamics of past climate change that, in turn, have implications for the future. Multiple CFR methods have emerged in the literature, and comparisons between these methods using pseudoproxy experiments have been performed. These experiments, however, have not fully quantified the spatial skill of the CFRs, particularly with regard to the relative performance of each. Toward such ends, a formal statistical hypothesis test is proposed as a means of evaluating the differences between two random fields that integrate the differences in both the mean and the dependence structure. This involves a careful selection of the statistical model for the CFR residual process and systematic comparisons over different spatial scales. Application of this method yields a systematic assessment of the spatial character of five widely applied CFRs in a pseudoproxy experiment context. The analyses indicate that spatial differences among the five CFRs are not statistically significant. Further rigorous statistical assessments will help elucidate the strength and weakness of each CFR method, while quantifying the degree to which their spatial dissimilarities can be ascribed to methodological choices.


This study explores whether anti-fat bias is reduced when obesity in women is perceived to be the result of an uncontrollable versus controllable factor. An experiment was designed to test whether manipulating the causal attribution in favor of the target (i.e., offering an uncontrollable attribution that removes all responsibility from the target for her obesity) would have an impact on perceivers' anti-fat attitudes, beliefs about weight controllability, and tendency to blame a woman for her weight. The exploration of this topic was conducted within a greater context of obesity-related issues including body image, social stigma, responsibility, and a culture of blame. Equally important in this endeavor was gaining insight into the reasons why women are blamed more for their obesity than their male counterparts. Attribution theory (Heider, 1958) serves as the primary theoretical framework. One hundred and eighty undergraduates from a large, southwestern university participated in the study. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the following six conditions, five of which contained a version of the treatment embedded in an essay: Uncontrollable attribution, controllable attribution, potentially controllable attribution, manifest mention of weight, no mention of weight or control. The potentially controllable attribution was ultimately determined to be insufficiently manipulated and responses generated in response to it were not included in the data analysis. All participants completed a survey comprised of various measures designed to gauge anti-fat attitudes, beliefs about weight controllability, and blame tendency. A mediated model examining the relationships among the above three variables was also tested. Additionally, participants completed the Obesity-Induced Blame Scale (OIBS); a


Federal government mapping of the offshore areas of the United States in support of the development of oil and gas resources began in 1954. The first mapping system utilized a network of rectangular blocks defined by State Plane coordinates which was later revised to utilize the Universal Transverse Mercator grid. Creation of offshore boundaries directed by the Submerged Lands Act and Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act were mathematically determined using early computer programs that performed the required computations, but required many steps. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has revised these antiquated methods using GIS technology which provide the required accuracy and produce the mapping products needed for leasing of energy resources, including renewable energy projects, on the outer continental shelf. (Note: this is an updated version of a paper of the same title written and published in 2015).


This dissertation is a polemical exegesis of Heidegger's 1920's position with respect to the foundational, extracting from his thought an original pre-conception of the foundational which does not conform to current patterns of Heidegger interpretation. This might be expressed as a rescuing of foundations from metaphysics. The first half of the dissertation concentrates on methodological idiosyncracies in the semantic, syntactic and macrostructural organisation of foundational ideas, an analysis which begins to yield a number of "patterns" embedded in the language and thinking of Heidegger, patterns which, for example, subvert the propositional and reverse the normal processes of understanding. These patterns are "paratypes", the tools of "disas-sembling" (the latter term describes that in Heidegger's thought which provides the original motivation for the later development of deconstruction). The second half of the dissertation applies and extends these findings in two directions: firstly, with respect to the internal development of the Sein und Zeit project, by exploring the coalescence of temporality and foundations; secondly, with respect to the direction and fate of the Sein und Zeit project, by exploring a limited number of "foundational" aspects (fugue, Kehre, Abgrund, Ereignis) of a single but singularly important writing from the 1930's: Beitrage zur Philosophie. In so doing the dissertation aims to bring out the Copernican thought-revolution in the early work, and to provide both the conceptual motivation and the methodological tools for a more farreaching reappreciation of Heidegger's early work. Thus the dissertation has consequences, not only for the foundational, but also for the language-thought problematic, for the possibility of overcoming metaphysics, for Heidegger's general development, and for the appraisal of the position of time in his work.


Natural language understanding involves reading between the lines with implicit background knowledge. Current systems either rely on pre-trained language models as the sole implicit source of world knowledge, or resort to external knowledge bases (KBs) to incorporate additional relevant knowledge. We propose an unsupervised framework based on \emph{self-talk} as a novel alternative to multiple-choice commonsense tasks. Inspired by inquiry-based discovery learning (Bruner, 1961), our approach inquires language models with a number of information seeking questions such as "$\textit{what is the definition of ...}$" to discover additional background knowledge. Empirical results demonstrate that the self-talk procedure substantially improves the performance of zero-shot language model baselines on four out of six commonsense benchmarks, and competes with models that obtain knowledge from external KBs. While our approach improves performance on several benchmarks, the self-talk induced knowledge even when leading to correct answers is not always seen as useful by human judges, raising interesting questions about the inner-workings of pre-trained language models for commonsense reasoning.


One of the original ocean-bottom time-lapse seismic studies was performed at the Teal South oil field in the Gulf of Mexico during the late 1990's. This work reexamines some aspects of previous work using modern analysis techniques to provide improved quantitative interpretations. Using three-dimensional volume visualization of legacy data and the two phases of post-production time-lapse data, I provide additional insight into the fluid migration pathways and the pressure communication between different reservoirs, separated by faults. This work supports a conclusion from previous studies that production from one reservoir caused regional pressure decline that in turn resulted in liberation of gas from multiple surrounding unproduced reservoirs. I also provide an explanation for unusual time-lapse changes in amplitude-versus-offset (AVO) data related to the compaction of the producing reservoir which, in turn, changed an isotropic medium to an anisotropic medium. In the first part of this work, I examine regional changes in seismic response due to the production of oil and gas from one reservoir. The previous studies primarily used two post-production ocean-bottom surveys (Phase I and Phase II), and not the legacy streamer data, due to the unavailability of legacy prestack data and very different acquisition parameters. In order to incorporate the legacy data in the present study, all three poststack data sets were cross-equalized and examined using instantaneous amplitude and energy volumes. This approach appears quite effective and helps to suppress changes unrelated to production while emphasizing those large-amplitude changes that are related to production in this noisy (by current standards) suite of data. I examine the multiple data sets first by using the instantaneous amplitude and energy attributes, and then also examine specific apparent time-lapse changes through direct comparisons of seismic traces. In so doing, I identify time-delays that, when corrected for, indicate water encroachment at the base of the producing reservoir. I also identify specific sites of leakage from various unproduced reservoirs, the result of regional pressure blowdown as explained in previous studies; those earlier studies, however, were unable to identify direct evidence of fluid movement. Of particular interest is the identification of one site where oil apparently leaked from one reservoir into a "new" reservoir that did not originally contain oil, but was ideally suited as a trap for fluids leaking from the neighboring spill-point. With continued pressure drop, oil in the new reservoir increased as more oil entered into the reservoir and expanded, liberating gas from solution. Because of the limited volume available for oil and gas in that temporary trap, oil and gas also escaped from it into the surrounding formation. I also note that some of the reservoirs demonstrate time-lapse changes only in the "gas cap" and not in the oil zone, even though gas must be coming out of solution everywhere in the reservoir. This is explained by interplay between pore-fluid modulus reduction by gas saturation decrease and dry-frame modulus increase by frame stiffening. x In the second part of this work, I examine various rock-physics models in an attempt to quantitatively account for frame-stiffening that results from reduced pore-fluid pressure in the producing reservoir, searching for a model that would predict the unusual AVO features observed in the time-lapse prestack and stacked data at Teal South. While several rock-physics models are successful at predicting the time-lapse response for initial production, most fail to match the observations for continued production between Phase I and Phase II. Because the reservoir was initially overpressured and unconsolidated, reservoir compaction was likely significant, and is probably accomplished largely by uniaxial strain in the vertical direction; this implies that an anisotropic model may be required. Using Walton's model for anisotropic unconsolidated sand, I successfully model the time-lapse changes for all phases of production. This observation may be of interest for application to other unconsolidated overpressured reservoirs under production.


AbstractStem cell technology holds a key, although arguably not an exclusive position, in the future of healthcare. Alongside two other candidates worthy of this mantle – personalized cancer medicine and vaccine development – all three healthcare innovations are explored primarily from a scientific and also an ethics perspective. This insightful and informative essay secured its 12-year old author a place on Newcastle Upon Tyne's city universities' 'Leading Edge' science programme in January 2012. The programme forges links between local academics and enthusiastic youngsters aged 12–14 years, selected from 13 participating schools. The aim is to motivate and inspire children to consider careers in science. Supported by their science teacher Jonny Instone, Gosforth Central Middle School's team of six, including the author, worked with Dr Ben Horrocks from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne's Chemical Nanosciences Laboratories in the School of Chemistry. Their four-month nanotechnology project focused on...


Introduction In order not to occupy too much time or confuse my auditors with details, it has seemed best to give a brief summary of the known fossil floras bearing on the problem of intercontinental land connections between North and South America, followed by the conclusions which it has seemed might be legitimately drawn from their evidence. This evidence is not presented in detail, since it has been given at length in publications recently printed or now in press. 2 Upper Cretaceous The flora which commenced to radiate from Arctogaea in the Cenomanian, and which during the Turonian and Emscherian covered most of North America and Europe, and presumably Asia, penetrated as far as southern South America before the close of the Upper Cretaceous, and at least 26 typical species have been recorded from Argentina. 3 This would seem to indicate that there was some land connection between North and South America throughout . . .


Translating new entity names is important for improving performance in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as Machine Translation (MT) and Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). Usually, transliteration is used to obtain phonetic equivalents in a target language for a given source language word. However, transliteration across different writing systems often results in different representations for a given source language entity name. In this paper, we address the problem of automatically translating transliterated entity names that originally come from a different writing system. These entity names are often spelled differently in languages using the same writing system. We train and evaluate various models based on finite state technology and Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) for a character-based translation of the transliterated entity names. In particular, we evaluate the models for translation of Russian person names between Dutch and English, and between English and French. From our experiments, the SMT models perform best with consistent improvements compared to a baseline method of copying strings.


Like cars on a highway, neuronal signaling routes merge and diverge between origin and destination. By identifying developing motor and sensory neurons in the mouse embryo with distinguishable labels, Gallarda et al. (see the Perspective by Murai and Pasquale) have visualized how the growing axons keep entanglement at bay. The axons grew into parallel but separated bundles. Signaling through the ephrin A receptors and ligands present on the growing axons served to keep like axons bundled with like. B. W. Gallarda, D. Bonanomi, D. Müller, A. Brown, W. A. Alaynick, S. E. Andrews, G. Lemke, S. L. Pfaff, T. Marquardt, Segregation of axial motor and sensory pathways via heterotypic trans-axonal signaling. Science 320, 233-236 (2008). [Abstract] [Full Text] K. K. Murai, E. B. Pasquale, Axons seek neighborly advice. Science 320, 185-186 (2008). [Summary] [Full Text]


The study evaluated the nephroprotective potentials of methanolic extract (ME) and dichloromethane fraction (DCMF) of root-bark of Garcinia kola on gentamicin-induced nephrotoxicity in rats with a view to utilize the extracts of the root of G. Kola in the amelioration of antibiotic-induced kidney damage. The study involved preparation of the extract, fractionation, phytochemical screening and evaluation of phenolics and flavonoid contents. Moreover, both the acute and sub-acute toxicities of ME and DCMF were determined in mice and albino rats with concentrations ranging from 10 to 5000 mg/kg body weight (bwt) respectively. Forty albino rats were divided into 8 groups of five animals each and induced with gentamicin (80 mg/kg bwt). The renal biochemical metabolites and enzymes were quantified and assayed respectively. The histopathological examinations of kidney were carried out. Phytochemical screening of the ME and DCMF of the root-bark of G. kola revealed the presence of flavonoids, tannins, cardiac glycosides, saponins, alkaloids and terpenoids. The extract and DCMF did not elicit any adverse effect and a dose of 250 mg/kg bwt of ME and DCMF was selected for further studies. The administration of gentamicin (80 mg/kg bwt) caused elevated levels of plasma renal biomarkers, reduction in AciPase activities. Moreover, administration of gentamicin (80 mg/kg bwt) resulted in damage to kidney structures. The treatments (pre and post) of the rats with 250 mg/kg extract and fraction reversed alterations of biochemical parameters which were supported by low levels of tubular and glomerular injuries induced by gentamicin treatment. The study concluded that, both the extract and fraction of G. kola root-bark elicited antioxidant and appreciable nephroprotective potentials.

 Key words: Antioxidant potentials, Garcinia kola, Methanolic extract, Nephrotoxicity, Renal biomarkers.


Abstract : Organizations struggle with many problems in complex systems of systems for which solutions are not codified or even conceived, such as a mutual understanding of "common" terms and concepts across participating enterprises and the lack of a global view by any single system-of-systems participant. System and software purchasers and suppliers need a different set of approaches and techniques than are typically in use today to satisfy user demands that reflect turbulent operational environments. Beyond purchasers and engineers, all participants in a complex, systems-of-systems environment need a different set of perspectives and expectations about user demands than those typical in product-centered engineering. The SoS Navigator approach provides leaders participating in complex systems of systems with (1) novel insights into critical aspects of the demand and supply sides of their situation and (2) criteria on which to decide whether their systems-of-systems context requires the adoption and sustainment of a different business model than ones that are typical today. This technical note introduces the fundamental concepts, processes, and techniques of the evolving SoS Navigator approach. It also summarizes case studies that illustrate the use of SoS Navigator processes and tools in healthcare, military, and civilian government systems-of-systems contexts.


Purpose
Despite the pressure on work-family polices arising from the increase in nonstandard working times in various sectors, only a few studies have addressed management practices in 24/7 workplaces. This paper aims to investigate the challenges Finnish managers face in meeting the various tensions stemming from nonstandard working hours and services operating 24/7. Two typical 24/7 work contexts are focused: the hospitality and retail industries and flexibly scheduled early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. The emphasis is on management practices relating to the planning of work shifts and children's care schedules.

Design/methodology/approach
Study 1 comprises focus group interviews with middle managers (N = 20) working in hotels, stores and service stations with restaurants and shopping facilities. Study 2 uses survey data on directors (N = 20) of centers offering flexibly scheduled ECEC services.

Findings
The results showed that management in 24/7 workplaces raises issues of fairness and social responsibility. Managers in both sectors were faced with constantly varying service demands, leading further to changes and unpredictability in employee working times. Alongside organizational goals, the business managers reported needing to consider employee needs and the ECEC service directors the well-being of parents and children. They also reported seeking the most cost-effective way to deliver services at a time of budget cuts.

Research limitations/implications
The relatively small sample sizes and non-representative nature of the data restrict the generalizability of the results.

Practical implications
Service organizations need to design a 24/7 strategy that includes organizational communication and guidelines on fair work scheduling. Key issues in management are finding ways to enhance predictability within unpredictability, discussing the most common ethical problems and developing the skills needed to manage diversity. These are elements that should be included in management training.

Originality/value
The study contributes to the literature by focusing on seldom studied issues and innovately approached by comparing two work sectors.


Activists have long recognized the importance of rhetoric and emotional appeal in building support for the global justice movement. However, many political theorists worry that the use of rhetoric may obstruct clear presentation of the issues at stake, and may result in our policies being determined by where the sympathies of the best rhetoricians lie. In this article I examine the ways in which contemporary theorists try to accommodate the need for rhetoric and emotional appeal, and I argue that their attemptsare unsatisfactory because they view rhetoric as a tool or skill that can be used to manipulate people to support any position. Yet if we question the sharp separation between rhetoric and reason, then the aims of building support for a cause, identifying the causes we ought to support, and treating others with respect need no longer conflict. Re-examining the radical liberal theories of J.S. Mill, L.T. Hobhouse and J.A. Hobson, will help us to see how this separation might be questioned and rhetoric recovered as a respectful and respectable form of argument.


Feature Issue on Photonics in SwitchingWe propose an architecture for a WDM-based photonic packet switch. This is a wavelength routed switch in which, once the wavelength of the incoming packet is tuned appropriately, will either be directly transmitted to the output fiber or will be placed in the buffer, and comes out of the loop buffer after the required amount of delay. The main advantage of this architecture is that no controlling is required inside the buffer. The working of the switch is explained in detail and simulations are done to obtain packet loss probability and delay. These results have been verified by the mathematical model.


This study is concerned with image segmentation techniques using mathematical models
based on elastic curves or surfaces defined within an image domain that can move under
the influence of a defined energy. These active contour models use internal and external
forces generated from curves or surfaces in 2D and 3D image data. The algorithms that
measure these energies must cope with non-homogeneous objects and regions, low
contrast boundaries and image noise. It investigates level sets, which employ an energy
formulation defined by partial differential equations (PDEs), that are sensitive to weak
boundaries yet are robust to noise whilst maintaining computational stability.
The methodology is evaluated using medical imagery, which commonly suffer from high
levels of noise, blur and exhibit weak boundaries between different types of adjacent
tissue. An energy based on PDEs has been used to evolve an image contour from an
initial guess using image forces derived from region properties to drive the search to
locate the boundaries of the desired objects that includes the maximum and minimum
curvature function to enable length shortening in the curve evolution. It is applied to both
2D and 3D CTA datasets for the segmentation of abdominal and thoracic aortic aneurysm
(AAA&TAA). For some image data the methodology can be initialised automatically
using a contour detected after intensity thresholding. Non-homogeneous regions require
a manual initialisation that crosses the boundary between the aorta and thrombus.
Sussman's re-initialization has been used in the 3D algorithm to maintain stability in the
evolving boundary, as a consequence of the re-formulation from the continuous to the
discrete domain.
A hybrid method is developed that combines a novel approach using region information
(i.e. intensities inside and outside the object) and edge information, computed using a
diffusion-based approach integrated into a level set formulation, to guide the initial curve
to the object boundary by finding strong edges with local minima. Boundary information
supports finding a local minimum length curve on evaluation and only examines data on
the contour. Using Green's theorem, region information is be used to address the
boundary leakage problem, as it minimizes the energy related to the whole image data
and the moving curve is stopped by strong gradients on the borders of objects.
Finally, a Gabor filter has been integrated into the hybrid algorithm to enhance the image
and support the detection of textured regions of interest. The method is evaluated on both
synthetic and real image data and compared with the region-based methods of Chan-Vese
and Li et al.


In order to alleviate poverty and food insecurity in Malawi – one of the poorest countries in the world – in 2016 the Government of Malawi, the Mwanza District Council, and COMSIP Cooperative Union, with the support of the GIZ Social Protection Programme, designed and implemented the Economic Empowerment Pilot Project in the district of Mwanza. The programme targets ultra-poor and labour-constrained households in six randomly selected areas of the district. Three groups of beneficiaries were identified. The first received training on group formation, financial literacy and business management, in order to increase savings and access to loans through the creation of Village Savings and Loans (VSL) groups and to improve financial and business knowledge. The second received a lump-sum transfer (about 70 USD) with the objective of raising business investments. The final group received both the lump-sum and the training. In view of the forthcoming impact evaluation, this report provides the first evidence of the immediate effects of this programme. The objective was to verify how beneficiaries spend the lump-sum transfers, in which kind of micro-business activities they engage, and what is the potential role of training (with and without lump-sum) in coming up with new business ideas and generating stable savings groups. It builds on three rounds of qualitative interviews conducted between June and October 2016. Focus group discussions with members of the VSL groups, expert interviews and interviews with purposely selected households provided further useful information. Our findings highlight the importance of providing poor households with a one-time lump-sum transfer to support their income diversification and, therefore, reduce their vulnerability. Moreover, basic financial/business training has thus far proven to be very important in ensuring that people spend the transfer in a productive way. Those who received the lump-sum transfer and training used the lump-sum significantly more for productive investments and savings (44.4% and 14.6% of the total lump-sum transfers, respectively) compared to those that only received the lump-sum transfer (36.1% and 3.3 of the total lump-sum transfers, respectively). The training has also been the key driver for the creation of VSL groups, which continue to function long after the implementation of the intervention. An increase in savings, especially combined with lump-sum transfers that increase productive investments, can smooth consumption and improve beneficiaries' living standards in the long run. Two important aspects, however, must be considered. First, in 2016, Malawi faced one of the worst droughts of the past decades, which may limit the effects of the project. Second, as most of the beneficiaries bought livestock, GIZ introduced livestock training sessions during the project because of the beneficiaries' limited knowledge about livestock rearing, feeding and health.


When we speak of global governance today, we no longer mean simply state-to-state diplomacy, international treaties, or intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations. Alongside these 'traditional' elements of global politics are a host of new institutions ranging from global networks of governmental officials, to private codes of conduct for corporations, to action-oriented partnerships of NGOs, governments, corporations, and other actors. These innovative mechanisms offer intriguing solutions to pressing transnational challenges as diverse as climate change, financial governance, workers' rights, and public health. But they also raise new questions about the effectiveness and legitimacy of transnational governance. An expanding body of scholarship has sought to identify and assess these new forms of governance, but this young body of work has lacked a sense of the larger picture. This volume seeks to fill that need by presenting a comprehensive overview of new forms of transnational governance. This resource is essential for those who want to explain why transborder governance has changed and to understand what implications these changes have for global politics.


Nowadays, internet-based surveys are increasingly used for data collection, because their usage is simple and cheap. Also they give fast access to a large group of respondents. There are many factors affecting internet surveys, such as measurement, survey design and sampling selection bias. The sampling has an important place in selection bias in internet survey. In terms of sample selection, the type of access to internet surveys has several limitations. There are internet surveys based on restricted access and on voluntary participation, and these are characterized by their implementation according to the type of survey. It can be used probability and non-probability sampling, both of which may lead to biased estimates. There are different ways to correct for selection biases; poststratification or weighting class adjustments, raking or rim weighting, generalized regression modeling and propensity score adjustments. This paper aims to describe methodological problems about selection bias issues and to give a review in internet surveys. Also the objective of this study is to show the effect of various correction techniques for reducing selection bias.


This book provides an insight on advanced methods and concepts for the design and analysis of structures against earthquake loading. This second volume is a collection of 28 chapters written by leading experts in the field of structural analysis and earthquake engineering. Emphasis is given on current state-of-the-art methods and concepts in computing methods and their application in engineering practice. The book content is suitable for both practicing engineers and academics, covering a wide variety of topics in an effort to assist the timely dissemination of research findings for the mitigation of seismic risk. Due to the devastating socioeconomic consequences of seismic events, the topic is of great scientific interest and is expected to be of valuable help to scientists and engineers. The chapters of this volume are extended versions of selected papers presented at the COMPDYN 2011 conference, held in the island of Corfu, Greece, under the auspices of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS).


In this paper we study how to maximize the lifetime of randomly deployed wireless sensor networks by applying adaptive traffic distribution and power control. We model this problem as a linear program by abstracting the network into multiple layers. First we focus on the scenario where transmission energy consumption plays the dominant role in overall energy consumption. After ignoring the receiving energy consumption, we observe that: in order to maximally extend the lifetime, each node should split its traffic into two portions, where one portion is sent directly to the sink, and the other one to its neighbor in the next inner layer. Next we consider the effect of incorporating the processing energy consumption. In this case, we have similar observation: for each packet to be sent, the sender should either transmit it using the transmission range with the highest energy efficiency per bit per meter, or transmit it directly to the sink. Besides studying the upper bound of maximum achievable lifetime extension, we discuss some practical issues, such as how to handle the signal interference caused by adaptive power control. Finally, we propose a fully distributed algorithm to adaptively split traffic and adjust transmission power for randomly deployed wireless sensor networks. We also provide extensive simulation results which demonstrat that the network lifetime can be dramatically extended by applying the proposed approach in various scenarios.


Polyanilines have many applications in Aerospace, especially in their doped form. Studies on their synthesis in a pilot scale can contribute to obtain products with desirable characteristics for such applications. The present study reports the chemical oxidative synthesis of polyaniline in pilot scale and different reaction times in order to determine if there are variations in the polyaniline structure, morphology and conductivity due to these synthesis conditions. It is very common to analyze these data for polymers obtained through bench scale. However, several parameters change the properties of final material in major scales, such as thermal, mechanic and diffusive variables. Therefore, the reaction time is the only variable into the 9 syntheses carried out, and polyaniline is obtained in a doped form, being dedoped with ammonium hydroxide and redoped with dodecylbenzenesulphonic acid. The doped and redoped samples were characterized by their molecular structure, thermal behavior, crystallinity and morphology. The electrical conductivity of redoped samples was determined. Some differences in the structure and morphology of doped and dedoped forms, identifying the doping structures, were reported. This paper aims to present the relationship between changes on structure and morphology of doped and undoped polyaniline obtained by the mentioned experiments. Furthermore, some addicts on conductivity are carried out. It was possible to contribute in order to obtain a more conductive polyaniline in pilot scale.


Early this year fifty people took an experimental course at Xerox PARC on knowledge programming in Loops. During the course, they extended and debugged small knowledge systems in a simulated economics domain called Truckin. Everyone learned how to use the environment Loops, formulated the knowledge for their own program, and represented it in Loops. At the end of the course a knowledge competition was run so that the strategies used in the different systems could be compared. The punchline to this story is that almost everyone learned enough about Loops to complete a small knowledge system in only three days. Although one must exercise caution in extrapolating from small experiments, the results suggest that there is substantial power in integrating multiple programming paradigms.


This paper uses panel data accumulated from 1972 to 1997 to investigate the effect of political systems on the public expenditure of state governments in India. We focus on the decline of the Indian National Congress, which was the dominant party until the mid 1960s, and the development of regional parties (RPs) that are based on specific religious or caste groups. The effects of changes in party systems are carefully distinguished from those in voter preference, which affect party systems and government policy. We find that the decline of a dominant party increases development expenditure, which suggests that little political competition is bad for development. By contrast, an increase in seats occupied by RPs decreases development expenditure and increases non-development expenditure. This suggests that, in a pluralistic society, the diversity of political parties does not contribute to an economic development and a reduction in poverty.


Somitogenesis is the key developmental process which lays down the framework for an organised body plan in vertebrates and cephalochordates. Somitogenesis divides the body axis into transient segmental structures called somites, which later give rise to muscles and vertebrae of the trunk and tail. Somites are generated from the unsegmented presomitic mesoderm (PSM) by an intricate process of prepatterning. Prepatterning is driven by a segmentation clock referred to as the presomitic mesoderm oscillator. This oscillator consists of certain gene members with oscillating mRNA expression compartments that sweep like a wave from the posterior to the anterior end of the embryonic PSM. The Delta-Notch pathway and various genes belonging to the hairy-(h) and Enhancer of split � [E(spl)] related family, are the core conserved components of this oscillator. h/E(spl) genes in zebrafish are commonly referred to as her genes. her1 and her7, play very important roles in the regulation of somitogenesis. The open question is how many her genes are core components of the zebrafish presomitic mesoderm oscillator and how do they interact with one another? To answer this, an in situ screen for h/E(spl) genes in zebrafish was conducted by Sieger et al., (2004). Three new her genes with oscillating mRNA expression domains were identified and one of them is her15, which has been further characterized in this PhD thesis. her15 mRNA is expressed as a distinct oscillatory posterior PSM domain which shows three primary phases, namely broad, intermediate and dot-like. Comparable to other her genes, her15 also showed stripes in the anterior PSM but unlike others, these stripes were found to be expressed at double segmental distance. Additionally, the her15 stripe was found to label the posterior border of the last somite. Morpholino gene knock down studies showed that the oscillating expression of her15 is partly dependent on her7 regulation, but independent of her1. Oscillating her15 mRNA signals in the posterior PSM displays fluctuations with respect to left and right halves of the embryonic PSM, suggestive of the autonomy of both halves of the embryo in generating the signal. Misexpression studies suggest a prospective role for her15 in the regulation of somite border formation and oscillatory gene expression in zebrafish PSM. Morpholinos against her15 did not result in morphological border disruption, or in changes in mRNA expression of genes of the Delta-Notch pathway. ZfChp, the second candidate gene which has been analyzed in the present thesis, came out of a screen of the NIH cDNA in situ expression database. ZfChp exhibits dynamic stripes of mRNA expression in the intermediate PSM region, a dynamic zone where tail bud mesenchymal cells undergo transition to epithelial state (mesenchymal to epithelial transition-MET), thus giving rise to somites. It the molecular signature of a Rho family GTPase with respect to conserved Rho GTPase domains. The Delta-Notch signaling pathway positively regulates the dynamic stripes of ZfChp in the intermediate PSM region. This provides the first molecular evidence supporting a link between prepatterning of the PSM and MET in zebrafish embryos.


Industrialization has elevated our energy demand during the last century by many a folds, to deal with the rapid social growth. Non-renewable energy sources, like petroleum being the main source of energy, have become scarce due to their overuse and limited available reserve. Water hyacinth can be considered as a good source of lignocellulosic biomass. Cellulose and hemi-cellulose derived from water hyacinth via effective bioprocess can be converted to bioethanol. Production of liquid fuel from biomass can only be made economically viable and sustainable only if the de-polymerization of the recalcitrant hemi-cellulosic fraction of the biomass can be optimally utilized. The study aims to obtain an in-depth mechanistic understanding of the catalytic reaction involved in dilute sulphuric acid pre-treatment of water hyacinth biomass. Acid catalysed hemi-cellulose hydrolysis reaction kinetics in water hyacinth was studied based on a bi-phasic model. Arrhenius equation was used to study the kinetic modelling in a greater depth. A distinct relationship of soaking time of the biomass in the acid before hydrolysis on the activation energy and frequency factor was observed. A maximum xylose yield of 76.96% was predicted by the genetic algorithm based model for the optimum operating conditions; operating temperature (135.8 °C), concentration of sulphuric acid (5.6%), treatment time (17.45 min), and soaking time (3.99 h).


Extracting the main cyclic fluctuations from sea level changes of the Persian Gulf and Oman Sea is vital for understanding the behavior of tides and isolating non-tidal impacts such as those related to climate and changes in the ocean-sea circulations. This study compares two spectral analysis methods including: Least Squares Spectral Analysis (LSSA) and Least Squares Harmonic Estimation (LSHE), to analyze satellite altimetry derived sea surface height changes of the Persian Gulf and Oman Sea. SSH data are derived from about 16 years of satellite altimetry observations (1992 to 2008), including the Topex/Poseidon and Jason-1 missions. By analyzing the real data, we extract significant tidal components in the spectrum of LSSA and LS-HE including those with the period of 62.07, 173.3, 58.71, 45.68, 88.86, 364.2 and 117.5 days, which are interpreted as Principal Lunar semi-diurnal, Luni-Solar Diurnal, Principal Solar Semi-diurnal, Principal Lunar Diurnal, GAM2, annual, Solar Diurnal periods are dominant in the level fluctuations. Moreover, some tidal components appear in the spectrum of LSSA and LS-HE, from which the Moon's semidiurnal component M is dominant. Also, to evaluate the efficiency of these two techniques, we run three experiments in each extracted frequency from LSSA, LS-HE, and astronomical tide tables are separately used to predict the sea level in the Persian Gulf and Oman Sea for three years. The results of this prediction indicate that RMSE from LSSA, astronomical table, and LS-HE is 0.101 m, 0.093 m, and 0. 086 m, respectively. According to the results LS-HE is found a more efficient technique to analyze cyclic fluctuations from altimetry measurements.


Theoretical investigations of the generation of light with sub-shot-noise intensity fluctuations by vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers are performed with a semiclassical model. From these results we conclude that, because of their dimensions and structure, vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers are promising candidates for generation of amplitude squeezed states. Finally, the influence of internal loss, distributed reflection coefficients, and gain suppression is emphasized and discussed.


Taenia solium is a helminth parasite that causes 2 diseases in humans: cysticercosis and taeniasis. The establishment of T. solium metacestodes in the central nervous system causes neurocysticercosis, while development of the adult tapeworm in the small intestine causes taeniasis. Serological diagnosis of neurocysticercosis is performed by Western blot with an enriched fraction of glycoproteins that has been extensively used for clinical diagnosis and epidemiological surveys. The lectin-bound fraction that is used for this assay contains 7 antigenic glycoproteins. These antigenic proteins are considered to be highly specific for cysticercosis when tested with heterologous parasitic diseases. However, recent studies show that people with taeniasis have cross-reactive antibodies against the neurocysticercosis diagnostic glycoproteins and vice versa. Nevertheless, it is not known if these diagnostic proteins are expressed in the adult stage of the parasite. In this paper, we describe the location of 3 of these glycoproteins in T. solium adults and cysticerci using polyclonal antibodies raised against a synthetic peptide based on the amino acid sequence of TS14, a recombinant protein T24H, and the native GP50. The glycoproteins' distribution was different in invaginated and evaginated cysticerci as well as in adult tapeworms. Specifically, the 3 glycoproteins studied were differentially expressed during embryogenesis. Our findings indicate that expression of the diagnostic glycoproteins is developmentally regulated; this is noteworthy since these glycoproteins are considered specific for the diagnosis of neurocysticercosis but nevertheless are present in different structures throughout the development of T. solium. Here we describe the glycoprotein expression and localization, which can be important in understanding their biological functions. In addition, our results help clarify the cross-reaction observed between people with neurocysticercosis and taeniasis to TS14, T24H, and GP50, which are used as diagnostic antigens for neurocysticercosis.


Asphalt production consumes considerable amount of fuel and electric energy as significant amount of materials (bitumen and aggregates) are blended together for the construction of flexible pavements. Bitumen is used in asphalt as a binder but can also be used as an alternate energy source. Feedstock energy of bitumen becomes relevant in the life cycle cost (LCC) study, as cost of the binder would be reflected in its alternative value as fuel. In this study, a method was suggested to calculate energy content of the bitumen. Importance of choosing electricity not produced in local diesel generators was also demonstrated. Replacing fuel with inefficiently produced electricity for heating the materials in the asphalt plant would result in high environmental impacts. The calculation of feedstock energy and the understanding of efficient energy production and use could be utilized in the life cycle assessment (LCA) of the roads.


When it comes to the economic efficiency of oil and gas field development, finding the optimum well locations that augment an economical cost function like net present value (NPV) is of paramount importance. Well location optimization has long been a challenging problem due to the heterogeneous nature of hydrocarbon reservoirs, economic criteria, and technical uncertainties. These complexities lead to an enormous number of possible solutions that must be evaluated using an evaluation function (e.g. a simulator). This makes it necessary to develop a powerful optimization algorithm into which a fast function evaluation tool is incorporated. The present study describes the application of a combination of the genetic algorithm (GA) and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) into a hybrid GA-PSO algorithm that is implemented in a streamline simulator to determine optimal locations for production and injection wells across heterogeneous reservoir models. Performance of the hybrid GA-PSO algorithm is then compared to that of the PSO and the GA separately. The results confirm that compared to conventional methods, the recommended method provides a fast and well-defined approach for production optimization complications. Cited as :  Yazdanpanah, A., Rezaei, A., Mahdiyar, H., Kalantariasl, A. Development of an efficient hybrid GA-PSO approach applicable for well. Advances in Geo-Energy Research, 2019, 3(4): 365-374, doi: 10.26804/ager.2019.04.03.


This research aims to determine how big the influence of the specific variables of the bank are the efficiency of management, size, financing to deposit ratio (FDR), capital adequacy, and profitability to financing problem of sharia banks in Indonesia on period 2011 to 2016. This research is done by purposive sampling method. The sample used are 7 sharia commercial banks in Indonesia. The data used are quarterly bank reports obtained from each website of sharia bank which is used as research sample. Multiple linear regression analysis was used in this study. This study uses computer software program SPSS 23. The results showed that all of independent variables used significantly affected the financing problem of sharia banks. Variable management efficiency, capital adequacy and profitability have a significant negative effect on financing problem. Financing to Deposit Ratio is the only variable has not significant effect on financing problem. The variable of bank size is the only independent variable that has a significant positive effect on financing problem. In this study, the adjusted R square has a high enough value of 0.297, which means 29,7% of the predicted NPF change of the five variables, while the remaining 70.3% is predicted by other variables outside the research model.


We study privacy in a distributed learning framework, where clients collaboratively build a learning model iteratively through interactions with a server from whom we need privacy. Motivated by stochastic optimization and the federated learning (FL) paradigm, we focus on the case where a small fraction of data samples are randomly sub-sampled in each round to participate in the learning process, which also enables privacy amplification. To obtain even stronger local privacy guarantees, we study this in the shuffle privacy model, where each client randomizes its response using a local differentially private (LDP) mechanism and the server only receives a random permutation (shuffle) of the clients' responses without their association to each client. The principal result of this paper is a privacy-optimization performance trade-off for discrete randomization mechanisms in this sub-sampled shuffle privacy model. This is enabled through a new theoretical technique to analyze the Renyi Differential Privacy (RDP) of the sub-sampled shuffle model. We numerically demonstrate that, for important regimes, with composition our bound yields significant improvement in privacy guarantee over the state-of-the-art approximate Differential Privacy (DP) guarantee (with strong composition) for sub-sampled shuffled models. We also demonstrate numerically significant improvement in privacy-learning performance operating point using real data sets.


In cardiac imaging, the spacing between sub-cellular sarcomere structures is of great importance to physiologists in understanding muscle design and performance. Making accurate measurements of the sarcomere length (SL) presents a significant imaging challenge owing to the size of the SL (~2μm) and its naturally low variability (<6%), requiring a high level of precision to determine subtle changes between heart disease models. Moreover, measurements of SL from traditional two-photon imaging have so far been ambiguous to within a factor of cos(α), where α is the inclination of the tissue with respect to the focal plane. By remotely focussing a customised two-photon microscope, it is possible to image heart cells at two oblique angles within 200ms. The oblique images uniquely resolve the tissue inclination ambiguity and reduce the variance of SL measures by as much as 23%. This improved precision is crucial in discerning between pathological models of chronic hypertension. As well as improving measurement precision, the distribution of α across the field of view provides additional structural information which can be related to disease morphology. To validate this new imaging protocol, the value of α calculated from the oblique planes provided the input to a rigid model cell which was used to predict the appearance of the cell in the conventional focal plane. The comparison of the model to the image data provided a confidence metric for our measurements. Finally, by considering the optical transfer function, the range of cell orientations for which the method is valid could be calculated.


Agent-based systems provide hope for solving a wide variety of distributed problems. One key aspect of agent-based system is coordinating agent actions to achieve coherent behavior. For example, in concurrent engineering (CE), it is necessary to ensure that the individual decision made by constituents in a design organization achieve overall organizational objectives (e.g., increase market share), while still allowing individuals to exploit their expertise. We believe CE is representative of many multi-agent problems, in that agent coordination must include facilities to support both solving a hierarchically decomposed problem, e.g., the contract net, and interactions among peers as well.


This study addresses the questions that arise when collecting, describing, and analyzing information from multiple informants regarding attributes of individual students. Using data from the Fast Track study, we evaluate alternative measurement strategies for using multiple teacher ratings of student adjustment to middle school among a sample of 326 Grade-6 pupils. One goal of the study was to compare the advantages of three measurement strategies using multiple and single informants in terms of their correlation with contemporaneous measures of behavior and academic achievement. Comparisons of residual variance using an aggregated rating, the rating from an "optimal informant," and a score selected at random from the response set, indicate that aggregation provides the highest criterion-related validity. As part of these analyses, we explore the significance of inter-rater concordance, measured in terms of the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Results indicate that for some aggregated scores, reliability can significantly limit their interpretability. The second main goal of the study was to evaluate the effects of variation in the number of teacher ratings on residual variance estimates for aggregate measures in selected behavioral domains. We conclude that the advantages of using multiple ratings are significant with a larger number of informants.


The advancement towards knowledge-based societies has modified
the labor markets and qualification requirements. In this sense, and
considering that individual choices about careers and occupations have
pervasive social effects, there is a growing interest from both academics
and policy makers in understanding and influencing the process of
education choice. Specifically, there is a worldwide renewed concern on
achieving higher levels of graduation from scientific and technological
disciplines. Available evidence shows that mobilizing individual wills
towards these highly priority careers is not an easy nor mechanical task.
Thus, it is necessary to expand the standard view about the process of
occupation choice by adding non pecuniary factors, influence of social
networks and the role of information and guidance policies. With these
ob jectives in mind, and after reviewing the theoretical literature about
occupation choice in economics, the present paper analyzes the effects
that diverse personal, family, social and economic aspects have in the
selection of an university career. Based on the empirical findings, some
policy recommendations are put forward.


Reliable DNA detection is of great importance for the development of the Lab-on-chip technology. The effort of the most recent projects on this field is to integrate all necessary operations, such as sample preparation (mixing, PCR amplification) together with the sensor user for DNA detection. Among the different ways to sense the DNA hybridization, fluorescence based detection has been favored by the market. However, fluorescence based approaches require that the DNA targets are labeled by means of chromophores. As an alternative label-free DNA detection method, capacitance detection was recently proposed by different authors. While this effect has been successfully demonstrated by several groups, the model used for data analysis is far too simple to describe the real behavior of a DNA sensor. The aim of the present paper is to propose a different electrochemical model to describe DNA capacitance detection.


No longer elusive, mammalian antiviral RNA interference is now confirmed. [Also see Reports by Li et al. and Maillard et al.] RNA interference (RNAi) is an evolutionarily conserved pathway in cells for potent and specific silencing of gene expression. It is triggered by the accumulation of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), which is subsequently processed into small interfering RNA (siRNA) and taken up into a protein complex that silences genes by cleaving their complementary RNAs (1). This mechanism has an important function in immunity against viruses in infected plants and invertebrates, but whether this is true in mammals has been widely debated (2). On pages 235 and 231 of this issue, Maillard et al. (3) and Li et al. (4) provide evidence for the existence of a functional antiviral RNAi pathway in mammalian cells.