In this study, Don Ross explores the relationship of economics to other branches of behavioral science, asking, in the course of his analysis, under what interpretation economics is a sound empirical science. The book explores the relationships between economic theory and the theoretical foundations of related disciplines that are relevant to the day-to-day work of economics—the cognitive and behavioral sciences. It asks whether the increasingly sophisticated techniques of microeconomic analysis have revealed any deep empirical regularities—whether technical improvement represents improvement in any other sense. Casting Daniel Dennett and Kenneth Binmore as its intellectual heroes, the book proposes a comprehensive model of economic theory that, Ross argues, does not supplant but recovers the core neoclassical insights and counters the caricaturish conception of neoclassicism so derided by advocates of behavioral or evolutionary economics. Because he approaches his topic from the viewpoint of the philosophy of science, Ross devotes one chapter to the philosophical theory and terminology on which his argument depends and another to related philosophical issues. Two chapters provide the theoretical background in economics, one covering developments in neoclassical microeconomics and the other treating behavioral and experimental economics and evolutionary game theory. The three chapters at the heart of the argument then apply theses from the philosophy of cognitive science to foundational problems for economic theory. In these chapters economists will find a genuinely new way of thinking about the implications of cognitive science for economics and cognitive scientists will find in economic behavior a new testing site for the explanations of cognitive science.


The discovery of neutrino oscillation proved recently that neutrinos have non-vanishing masses in contrast to their present description within the Standard Model of particle physics. However, the neutrino mass scale, which is very important for particle physics as well as for cosmology and astrophysics, cannot be resolved by oscillation experiments. The beta-decaying isotope tritium is a key isotope to search for new physics in the neutrino sector: For more than 50 years tritium has been the best isotope to search for a non-zero value of the mass of the neutrino. The recent experiments at Mainz and Troitsk have given upper limits of about 2 eV/c2. The new Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN) will enhance the sensitivity on the neutrino mass by another order of magnitude down to 0.2 eV/c2. KATRIN will use a windowless gaseous tritium source, in which the tritium inventory is re-circulated and purified yielding a column density of 5 1017 molecules/cm2. Another way to search for new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics is to use tritium as a very strong source of low energy electron antineutrinos. The elastic cross section of low energy neutrinos on electrons allows the experiment to become sensitive to a possible magnetic moment of the neutrino.


CS1 (computer science 1) is a course that aims to introduce college students to a first contact with the computing world, especially simple computer-coded everyday problems. The lessons focus on computational thinking and introduce the use of one (or several) programming languages for students beginning their university course. CS1 plays an important role in the academic and professional life of new computer scientists. For this reason, this course unit is very much associated with programming languages. Curricula are not much different, but programming languages have changed a lot over the years. How was this change? Are there clues to these changes? Are there logical reasons why the choice of programming language does not hold up? What programming language should the teacher choose to teach students? The discussion about the early programming language is long: there have always been various trends and their fervent supporters, as well as those who are always critical. This article makes a historical review of the programming languages used in the introduction of computing course over the last 30 years, differentiating an evolution of programming language choices in the past century and now. At the end of the article, an evolutionary trend is listed by articles published by people involved in the subject. The methodology used in this article compiles the Google Scholar articles for each of the last 30 years (1988-2018) and analyses which programming languages are used in academic studies. It is very interesting to see how the programming languages used in the introductory programming units change over the years.


Many approaches to program synthesis perform a search within an enormous space of programs to find one that satisfies a given specification. Prior works have used neural models to guide combinatorial search algorithms, but such approaches still explore a huge portion of the search space and quickly become intractable as the size of the desired program increases. To tame the search space blowup, we propose training a neural model to learn a hands-on search policy for bottom-up synthesis, instead of relying on a combinatorial search algorithm. Our approach, called CrossBeam, uses the neural model to choose how to combine previously-explored programs into new programs, taking into account the search history and partial program executions. Motivated by work in structured prediction on learning to search, CrossBeam is trained on-policy using data extracted from its own bottom-up searches on training tasks. We evaluate CrossBeam in two very different domains, string manipulation and logic programming. We observe that CrossBeam learns to search efficiently, exploring much smaller portions of the program space compared to the state-of-the-art.


This paper proposes a user terminal-controlled mobility management across heterogeneous networks without architectural changes in existing infrastructure. It describes a user-centric approach for vertical handover management. The user-centric network selection at the terminal supports seamless terminal-initiated and terminal-controlled vertical handover. It enables the mobile terminals to select the most suitable access network .Existing handoff methods are disconnection oriented, if the signal strength is considerably low then hand off is initiated. These kind of handoff doesn't take any other factors into account. the proposed method handles handoff in a user preferred way. Whenever user want the terminal can force a handoff. It provides the user a way to get connected to the preferred


Abstract. Altimetry by using GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) reflectometry is regarded as a new promising technique. One important step to utilize this technique is modeling the interferometric path (the difference between the direct and the reflected signal paths). This paper evaluates three models: the planar model, the planar model with tropospheric correction and a model based on ray-tracing. If decimeter level accuracy for water surface fluctuation is required, the planar model cannot be used when a receiver is at an altitude of a few hundred meters and observations are taken at low elevation angles. On the other hand, depending on the mapping function and zenith total delay in the tropospheric correction, the planar model with tropospheric correction can provide decimeter level accuracy for low altitude stations. If simulated observations with a 1 cm accuracy have been employed to estimate Sea Surface Height (SSH) by the model based on ray-tracing the numerical results present 1 cm as RMSE for phase retrieval and 5 cm for Doppler retrieval. The planar model with tropospheric correction does not yield RMSE better than some decimeters for the same condition.


A well known dilemma for statistics educators is that while different groups of students learn best in different ways (see for example Cotts, 1994), usually there are only a few instructors for a course operating within tight time and content constraints, especially at first year university level. I will outline a way of partially accommodating the needs of indigenous and migrant students of first year statistics, arrived at by co-operation with the local community and taking their aspirations into account. We also kept in mind what the students themselves wanted from the course and how they planned to use statistics in their lives. Our programme has achieved successful outcomes for many of these students and while we work within a New Zealand framework there are many aspects of our programme that can be adapted in other countries.


Abstract Underpinning China's technological advancement are the twin-engines of exports and innovation. To better understand China's meteoric economic transformation, we explore the extent to which new products are triggered by exports (direct effects) and by exposure to other exporters (indirect effects). Our methodology (generalised propensity score model) tackles two sources of selectivity bias – at the level of the firm and neighbourhood. Given that production is highly specialised and localised, it would be unusual if firms failed to learn from exposure to local exporters.Our findings reveal an overwhelmingly positive direct effect of exports on new product introductions. Also, a more modest spillover effect. Interestingly, firms with a reduced need to innovate (processing exporters) can also appropriate export spillovers. Our findings have implications for other developing countries seeking to maximise exporting in economic clusters, promoting innovation and ultimately growth.


Democracy became a popular and highly contested concept in the Danish-speaking parts of the Danish monarchy in 1848. For a brief time, it went from being an occasional guest in political language to a popular concept in the constitutional struggle of 1848–1849. This article argues democracy became attached to an equally popular concept of the time, movement, when introduced into everyday political communication in Denmark. In this context, democracy became a name for the movement observed in Europe and in the Danish monarchy. The article identifies three main interpretations of democracy that occurred in the Danish constitutional struggle of 1848–1849 and argues the battle over the constitution was essentially a battle over how one interpreted the past, the present, and the future. Democracy became a key term in this battle in 1848 Denmark.


K-Ar ages on basaltic rock within the Malagarasian of Burundi and Bukoban of Tanzania are reported. Amygdaloidal lavas at the base of the Uha (Tanzania) and Mosso (Burundi) Groups are in stratigraphical continuity and give ages of 805 m.y. In Burundi, gabbros which intrude the underlying Musindozi Group (correlated with the Kigonero Flags of Tanzania) give ages of at least 890 m.y. The Kavumwe Group, which is continuous with the Bukoba Sandstone of Tanzania, is cut by quartz gabbros which are at least 1000 m.y. old. The correlation of the Kavumwe Group with the Nkoma Group which in Burundi is younger than the Musindozi Group is unsound, and this is confirmed by palaeomagnetic work which shows poles for the Bukoba Sandstone (= Kavumwe Gp), the Kigonero Flags (= Musindozi Gp), and the Gagwe Lavas and Manyovu Red Beds (= Mosso Gp) in that order on a polar wandering curve. The Nkoma Gp is thus an independent formation situated between the Musindozi Group and Mosso Group in the time gap 890 to 805 m.y.


The manufacturability of logic circuits based on quantum tunnelling devices, namely double-barrier resonant tunnelling diodes (RTD), is studied in detail. The homogeneity and reproducibility of III/V mesa technology-based devices is experimentally evaluated and interpreted using multiple I-V characteristic simulations. The experimental sensitivity of the RTD I-V parameters on well and barrier thickness is compared with multiple I-V simulations. With shrinking minimum feature size the fluctuations in the peak current can be directly attributed to an RTD area variation caused by the increasing impact of lithography and etching on lateral dimensions. These results prove that the III/V technology fulfils the requirements for a large scale integration of RTD devices. A nanoelectronic circuit architecture based on an improved MOBILE threshold logic gate is presented. Detailed SPICE simulations using the experimental data show that clock and supply voltage fluctuations are tolerated up to ± 0.1 V at a supply voltage of 0.7 V. Very strong local peak voltage variations of 15 per cent in opposite directions would be necessary to have a critical impact on to the circuit functionality. Smaller deviations only affect the timing without degrading the reliability of the circuit. Consequently, the design of a stable power supply and clocking scheme is more important for the overall circuit performance than the small relative deviations of the RTD peak voltage.


Purpose
In the UK, the Children and Families Act aims to create one assessment process for children with special educational needs or disability, through Education, Health and Care Plans. It also aims for greater participation from children and young people in decisions about their own lives. Current evidence suggests that children's needs and desires across education, health and social care are not being fully met, partly because adult agendas drive policy, practice and standards of care. Furthermore, little attention is paid to the way in which disabled children and young people are included either within decisions about their own support or within research processes. The purpose of this paper is to present a research process designed to address these issues.

Design/methodology/approach
Six disabled young people co-led this participatory research project; for the first time, disabled young people had the opportunity to define a research agenda which spoke to what "quality" might look like in planning for their own future and that of other disabled children and young people.

Findings
This paper presents findings from this process, addressing important ethical issues relevant for policy, practice and research, identified through this rights based, collaborative way of working in partnership. Three key issues were identified and are explored here. They include first, tensions between young people becoming leaders and dominant ideas about safeguarding and child protection; second, being empowered through engagement within the project yet restricted in other areas of personal life and, finally, the emotional impact on new researchers of gathering evidence of a continuing lack of autonomy for disabled children and young people. We argue that challenging dominant notions concerning the participation and protection of disabled children is required in order to ensure that they access their right to be decision-makers in their own lives, and to being empowered within research processes.

Originality/value
This is the first disabled young people-led study to investigate quality and rights for disabled children and young people using this rights-based methodology.


Conductive membranes are the highly demanding materials in the field of bio-fuel generation, bio-electrodes, sensors and anti-static air filter systems. The conductive membranes can effectively be utilized for above mentioned applications if they have better conductivity, lower weight, flexibility and cost effectiveness. Textile materials are extremely versatile in nature because their synergic combinations with other functional materials could be used for a wide range of applications, such as medical, sports, defence, energy generation and chemical industry. The non-woven micro-porous textile substrates can effectively be functionalized by coating them with conjugated polymers, such as PEDOT and polypyrrole. Coating with conjugated polymers not only gives better conductivity values but also maintain the lower molecular weight of the substrate material. In our research, we have prepared micro-porous conductive membranes by coating cellulosic non-woven fabrics with conductive polymer PEDOT. For coating purpose, we utilized most effective deposition technique, which is called chemical vapour deposition (CVD) process. The deposition of PEDOT by CVD process showed advantages over other conventionally used methods, such as the micro-pores were not blocked even after PEDOT deposition. The electrical characterization on produced conductive membranes was performed by using Kiethely 6000 picoammeter. The surface morphology was examined by scanning electron microscopy and structural properties were determined by ATR-FTIR analysis. In order to see the behaviour of these conductive membranes, electrochemical impedance scanning (EIS) was performed in different electrolyte solutions. The produced conductive membranes might have potential to be utilized as active electrode in bio-fuel cells and also can be used in anti-static air filter systems.


From the moment Katherine Anne Porter arrived on the American literary scene in 1922, the public was intrigued with her life. Yet she herself revealed only scant facts of her background and often gave conflicting accounts. She maintained, though, that a germ of her own experience lay at the core of everything she wrote. In Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, Darlene Harbour Unrue finds that Porter's deceptions were a screen for deep personal turmoil. With unprecedented access to archival and personal papers, Unrue brings much new information to light. Porter's maternal grandmother was institutionalized; Porter had more marriages than she acknowledged; she lost babies to miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth, and she grieved over her failed motherhood. Ever present were her fears of exile and insanity. Despite these constant fears, Porter (1890-1980) lived an extraordinary life that vaulted her from poverty and obscurity to wealth and the fame of being a best-selling author. She experienced or observed many of the major events of the twentieth century. So often on the move, she lived in Greenwich Village during its heyday as a hotbed of radical politics and experimental art, in Mexico during the cultural revolution of the 1920s, in Europe during the rise of Nazism, and in America during the Cold War. Thirteen years old when she first rode in an automobile and saw an airplane, she was invited in her last decade to observe and write about the launching of the final Apollo space ship. Asked to summarize her own life, Porter was fond of quoting Madame Du Barry: "My life has been incredible. I don't believe a word of it!" Darlene Harbour Unrue is a professor of English at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. She has written several books on Katherine Anne Porter, including Understanding Katherine Anne Porter and Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction.


For the first time to our knowledge, thermal laser-induced gratings (LIGs), generated via two-photon stimulated Raman excitation of pure rotational (and low-lying vibrational) transitions in molecules employing broadband radiation of a single pump laser, are observed. The efficiency of LIGs excitation using a few ns pulse duration dye laser with the spectral width of about 400 cm(-1), which covers the frequency range of the characteristic rotational transitions, is experimentally investigated in a number of molecular gases (N(2), CO(2), C(3)H(8)) at room temperature and pressures of 0.1-5 bar. The physical mechanisms of LIG formation are discussed and comparison of the shapes of the LIG signals obtained in different gases is presented in relation to the spectra of rotational and vibrational energies of the molecules under study, as well as to the selection rules for Raman transitions.


One hundred doctoral students and graduates of a doctoral program in education on the Mexico border were asked to complete a survey developed by the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID). According to the CID developers, Walker, Golde, Jones, Bueschel and Hutchings, "the purpose of the survey is to examine the relationship between student experiences in a doctoral program and the outcomes of doctoral education. The survey addresses the full range of responsibilities which may be expected of a holder of the doctorate including research, teaching, and the application of knowledge and skills in the discipline to practical problems in the world outside the university." Fifty percent of those surveyed responded.


This written report supports the creative thesis entitled Corrupt Fairytales An Exploration of Implied Gender Roles Through Functional and Wearable Art. This thesis will investigate implied gender roles through research and the body of work presented consists of functional and wearable art objects using imagery and elements of nostalgia from the mid-twentieth century. By using materials pertaining to the time period I am referencing and integrating graphics with text. The art objects created converse about my views on current gender issues and my search for identity in today's society.


It has been postulated that TNF has a pivotal role in a cytokine cascade that results in joint inflammation and destruction in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). To evaluate this, we examined the response of TNF-deficient (Tnf(-/-)) mice in two models of RA. Collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) was induced by injection of chick type II collagen (CII) in CFA. Tnf(-/-) mice had some reduction in the clinical parameters of CIA and, on histology, significantly more normal joints. However, severe disease was evident in 54% of arthritic Tnf(-/-) joints. Tnf(-/-) mice had impaired Ig class switching, but preserved T cell proliferative responses to CII and enhanced IFN-gamma production. Interestingly, CII-immunized Tnf(-/-) mice developed lymphadenopathy and splenomegaly associated with increased memory CD4(+) T cells and activated lymph node B cells. Acute inflammatory arthritis was also reduced in Tnf(-/-) mice, although again some mice exhibited severe disease. We conclude that TNF is important but not essential for inflammatory arthritis; in each model, severe arthritis could proceed even in the complete absence of TNF. These results call into doubt the concept that TNF is obligatory for chronic autoimmune and acute inflammatory arthritis and provide a rationale for further studies into TNF-independent cytokine pathways in arthritis.


This paper examines the question of the likely effects on global forests of a further reduction in wood products tariffs including both solid wood products and pulp and paper, as has been proposed to the World Trade Organization (WTO) by the Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC). The tariff reductions would be an extension of the tariff reductions associated with the Uruguay Round (Federal Register 1999). The questions include both how international trade is likely to change in response to further tariff reduction and also the implications for timber harvests and forests generally of such trade liberalization in the various forest regions. The paper finds that the evidence suggests further reductions in tariffs on forest products are likely to generate only very modest increases in worldwide trade and production, and the increased harvest pressures on forests due to tariff reduction should be quite modest. The major countries likely to experience export and production increases are found largely in the northern hemisphere and are likely to be able to facilitate additional harvests with minimal effects on the forests due to the modest nature of the impact, new forest practices laws, new forest set-asides, and movement toward improved practices designed to achieve multifaceted sustainable forestry. Furthermore, there is little reason to expect that tariff reductions will significantly increase harvests from tropical forests. Earlier tariff reductions appear to have had minimal impacts on tropical harvests or exports. Nevertheless, tropical forests will remain under deforestation pressure due to land conversion objectives, commonly to provide additional agricultural lands.


The following list includes the official nomenclature of bacteria and yeasts recognized by the International Committee on Systematic Bacteriology as published or validated in the International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology (IJSB) according to the International Code of Nomenclature of Bacteria (ICNB), Rule 27. References to nomenclature established by the 1980 Approved Lists of Bacterial Names are designated by (AL). Except where noted, all references pertain to IJSB. References to original refereed articles published in IJSB are marked with an asterisk (*). References to names that appear only on validation lists give only the year, volume, and page number without special designations. The validity of species is not guaranteed by inclusion in these lists. However, the priority of the name is established by the date and page of publication in IJSB either as an original article or by mention in the validation lists (ICNB Rule 27). As far as possible, the citations of names are in the correct format according to the code and may differ from those used by the original authors. Basonyms are included to clarify the previous names or histories of individual taxa. Annotations are made to clarify the rules or rationale for some of the nomenclatural changes in this index. We would appreciate factual information concerning any errors or corrections for this list. Abbreviations and addresses of collections from which designated type strains are available (ICNB Recommendation 30A) are listed alphabetically at the end of the list. We thank Bobbie Brandon of the American Type Culture Collection for helping to provide complete addresses for the culture collections. Reprints of this publication are available for $3.00 each (U.S.) (prepaid) from the American Society for Microbiology, Publications Sales, 1913 I Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20006.


Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth Century Mexico. By William B.Taylor. (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1996. Pp. xv, 868. $75.00.) Massive is the word which springs to mind in considering William B.Taylor's most recent contribution to colonial Latin American historiography. It is truly as comprehensive a work on the topic as one is likely to enjoy.The fruit of many years in the archives, it will stand as a cornerstone for future research on the eighteenth-century Mexican Church.This is the first major study of the Bourbon Church in Mexico, since Nancy Farriss wrote in 1968. At its most basic level Taylor's work is a view of the Bourbon reforms in Mexico.This broad range of changes which occurred in the administrative structure of the Spanish overseas empire is seen through the prism of the clergy and their parishioners. It is a unique undertaking in which the scope and consequences of the changes are analyzed through one of the parts, rather than focusing on the part to draw conclusions about the whole.Taylor has chosen to analyze two different areas in an attempt to come to grips with issues of commonalty. He has focused on the large archdiocese of Mexico, which stretched from Tampico in the north to Acapulco in the south, measuring some 150 miles wide, and the diocese of Guadalajara, located in western Mexico, nearly reaching Saltillo in the north, and widening as it flowed to the southwest. Deep within Taylor's work he seeks to understand four seeming paradoxes of late colonial Mexico (p. 4). How could the colonial system stand for nearly four centuries without a standing army, given that it was based on a relatively rigid social system with little upward mobility and much real inequality? Were parish priests of the late colonial world truly separate from the world and at the same time of the world? What then would lead some of these priests to fully back an insurgency which could bring about the loss of their own position of privilege? Last, how did anticlericalism develop in the region when the Church was not perceived as in decline?The seeking of answers to these questions provides the reader with a deep subtext which runs through the work. This book is divided into four large parts. The first part, consisting of three chapters, sets the stage for the study. It considers the nature of change under the Bourbon reforms, the physical geography of the two regions under consideration, and the nature of local religious traditions in the parishes.The second part takes the parish priests as its theme. In six chapters, Taylor studies the process whereby young men became priests in eighteenth-century Mexico. He looks at their career patterns, their sources of income, their outside occupations as judges and teachers, the aspects of their daily life and labors, and lastly their occasional failings. …


Bile acid homeostasis is tightly regulated via a feedback loop operated by the nuclear receptors farnesoid X receptor (FXR) and small heterodimer partner (SHP). Contrary to current models, which place FXR upstream of SHP in a linear regulatory pathway, here we show that the phenotypic consequences in mice of the combined loss of both receptors are much more severe than the relatively modest impact of the loss of either Fxr or Shp alone. Fxr-/-Shp-/- mice exhibited cholestasis and liver injury as early as 3 weeks of age, and this was linked to the dysregulation of bile acid homeostatic genes, particularly cytochrome P450, family 7, subfamily a, polypeptide 1 (Cyp7a1). In addition, double-knockout mice showed misregulation of genes in the C21 steroid biosynthesis pathway, with strong induction of cytochrome P450, family 17, subfamily a, polypeptide 1 (Cyp17a1), resulting in elevated serum levels of its enzymatic product 17-hydroxyprogesterone (17-OHP). Treatment of WT mice with 17-OHP was sufficient to induce liver injury that reproduced many of the histopathological features observed in the double-knockout mice. Therefore, our data indicate a pathologic role for increased production of 17-hydroxy steroid metabolites in liver injury and suggest that Fxr-/-Shp-/- mice could provide a model for juvenile onset cholestasis.


Understanding how the shape of a three dimensional object may be recovered from shading in a two-dimensional image of the object is one of the most important - and still unresolved - problems in machine vision. Although this important subfield is now in its second decade, this book is the first to provide a comprehensive review of shape from shading. It brings together all of the seminal papers on the subject, shows how recent work relates to more traditional approaches, and provides a comprehensive annotated bibliography.The book's 17 chapters cover: Surface Descriptions from Stereo and Shading. Shape and Source from Shading. The Eikonal Equation: some Results Applicable to Computer Vision. A Method for Enforcing Integrability in Shape from Shading Algorithms. Obtaining Shape from Shading Information. The Variational Approach to Shape from Shading. Calculating the Reflectance Map. Numerical Shape from Shading and Occluding Boundaries. Photometric Invariants Related to Solid Shape. Improved Methods of Estimating Shape from Shading Using the Light Source Coordinate System. A Provably Convergent Algorithm for Shape from Shading. Recovering Three Dimensional Shape from a Single Image of Curved Objects. Perception of Solid Shape from Shading. Local Shading Analysis Pentland. Radarclinometry for the Venus Radar Mapper. Photometric Method for Determining Surface Orientation from Multiple Images.Berthold K. P. Horn is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He has presided over the field of machine vision for more than a decade and is the author of "Robot Vision. "Michael Brooks is Reader in Computer Science at The Flinders University of South Australia. "Shape from Shading" is included in the Artificial Intelligence series, edited by Michael Brady, Daniel Bobrow, and Randall Davis.


The authors present an uncertainty calculation together with a technique to assess the residual error when calibrating the effective source match of power splitters. The technique is applied to the Juroshek method, which is the most convenient way of measuring the effective source match. The technique uses an airline as impedance reference and is similar to the ripple technique used when evaluating the residual errors in vector network analyzers


INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES: Enhanced recovery pathways after surgery (ERAS) have been shown to reduce surgical morbidity and length of stay across various procedures. Our objective was to provide a framework for standardized perioperative management for women undergoing abdominal sacrocolpopexy (ASC) for pelvic organ prolapse. METHODS: Following the PRISMA statement, a systematic review of the literature was conducted using Pubmed. Search terms included: Sacrocolpopexy or pelvic organ prolapse surgery and 22 ERAS elements. Eligible articles contained ERAS components and postoperative outcomes of ASC published since 2008. RESULTS: Of 513 abstracts identified, 33 full-text papers were included for final review. (Figure 1) ERAS items with available data specific to ASC were: patient education, medical comorbidities, preoperative bowel preparation, minimally-invasive approach (MIS), prophylactic antibiotics, epidural analgesia, postoperative: urinary drainage, ileus, analgesia and early mobilization. (Table 1) No data existed on the following elements: preanesthesia medications, venous thromboembolism, skin preparation, standard anesthetic protocol, perioperative fluid management, and prevention of postoperative nausea/vomiting. Key principles appear to be appropriate preoperative counseling with a focus on patient literacy, no benefit with preoperative bowel preparation or prophylactic antibiotic use, improved outcomes with MIS and addition of spinal anesthesia. Limiting opioid use postoperatively and early mobilization appear to be beneficial but with little supporting evidence. Early urethral catheter removal benefit is unclear. CONCLUSIONS: There exists limited data regarding ERAS principles in perioperative care of patients undergoing ASC. Additional prospective studies with implementation of these principles are needed to assess impact on postoperative care of these patients. Figure. No caption available. Table. No title available. Source of Funding: none


Changes in 3-alkyl-2-methoxypyrazines (MPs) in Cabernet Sauvignon (Vids vinjfera) and Zuoshanyi (fltis amurensis Rupr.) grapes from different areas of North China were monitored throughout berry development in 2010. One kind of MP, 3-isobutyl-2-methoxypyrazine (IIBMP), was detected in Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, and its content in grapes from Gaotai County was much higher than in those from the other two producing areas at the stages of véraison and maturity. Zuoshanyi grapes contained much more IBMP than Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, and an additional kind of MP, 3-isopropyl-2-methoxypyrazine (IPMP), was also detected in developing Zuoshanyi grapes. Abundant MPs might explain the stronger 'green' and 'herbaceous' characters in Zuoshanyi grapes. MPs accumulated in the early developmental stage in both Zuoshanyi and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes and rapidly decreased in the later stages. Delays in the time of harvest for Cabernet Sauvignon in Gaotai County and Zuoshanyi in Beijing are suggested in order to reduce MPs levels and the herbaceous character of these grapes.


Bacterial pore-forming toxins cause intestinal epithelial cells to extrude their cytoplasm. Intestinal stem cells (ISCs) proliferate to replace intestinal epithelial cells damaged by pathogens. Lee et al. found that ingestion of the insect pathogen Serratia marcescens Db11 (SmDb11) induced robust ISC proliferation in Drosophila melanogaster a day after ingestion but did not induce ISC proliferation in the first few hours immediately following ingestion. Instead, ingestion of SmDb11 caused the gut epithelium to thin within a few hours of feeding, but the epithelium regained its normal thickness within 24 hours. Epithelium thinning was characterized by the presence of large vacuoles, the accumulation of lipid droplets, and the enlargement of mitochondria in the epithelial cells, followed by the extrusion of the cytoplasm into the gut lumen. Extrusion did not induce cell death or compromise the barrier function of the gut. Infection with a strain of S. marcescens lacking the pore-forming toxin hemoylsin (Sm21C4) did not trigger epithelial thinning. Furthermore, Sm21C4-infected flies exhibited decreased survival and greater ISC proliferation at later stages of infection compared with flies infected with SmDb11, implying that cytoplasmic purging reduces pathogen-induced epithelial damage. Pseudomonas entomophila also required its pore-forming toxin, monalysin, to cause epithelial thinning. When flies lacking the conserved cyclin CycJ were fed SmDb11, the intestinal epithelium thinned but did not recover its original thickness, and CycJ mutants exhibited reduced survival following infection. Feeding SmDb11, but not Sm21C4, induced the transcription of several uncharacterized genes predicted to encode short, secreted proteins in wild-type flies but not in CycJ mutants. Expressing either of two of these genes improved the recovery from intestinal thinning in CycJ mutants. Infection with bacteria that produce pore-forming toxins also caused gut epithelial thinning in honeybees, mice, and cultured human intestinal epithelial cells. Cytoplasmic extrusion was detected in the infected human cells. These results identify a conserved mechanism by which intestinal epithelial cells respond to pore-forming toxins by purging the cells of bacteria, bacterial toxins, and damaged cellular components, all of which contribute to tissue damage (see also Bonfini and Buchon). K.-Z. Lee, M. Lestradet, C. Socha, S. Schirmeier, A. Schmitz, C. Spenlé, O. Lefebvre, C. Keime, W. M. Yamba, R. Bou Aoun, S. Liegeois, Y. Schwab, P. Simon-Assmann, F. Dalle, D. Ferrandon, Enterocyte purge and rapid recovery is a resilience reaction of the gut epithelium to pore-forming toxin attack. Cell Host Microbe 20, 716–730 (2016). [PubMed] A. Bonfini, N. Buchon, Pore-forming toxins trigger the purge. Cell Host Microbe 20, 693–694 (2016). [PubMed]


The development of animals and plants needs a higher order of regulation of gene expression to maintain proper cell state. The mechanisms that control what, when and where a gene should (or should not) be expressed are essential for correct organism development. The Polycomb group (PcG) is a family of genes responsible for maintaining gene silencing and Suppressor of zeste 12 (Su(z)12) is one of the core components in the PcG. The gene is highly conserved in organisms ranging from plants to humans, however, the specific function is not well known. The main tasks of this thesis was to investigate the function of Su(z)12 and its expression at different stages of Drosophila development. In polytene chromosomes of larval salivary glands, Su(z)12 binds to about 90 specific euchromatic sites. The binding along the chromosome arms is mostly in interbands, which are the most DNA de-condensed regions. The binding sites of Su(z)12 in polytene chromosomes correlate precisely with those of the Enhancer-of-zeste (E(z)) protein, indicating that Su(z)12 mainly exists within the Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2). However, the binding pattern does not overlap well with Histone 3 lysine 27 tri-methylations (H3K27me3), the specific chromatin mark created by PRC2. The Su(z)12 binding to chromatin is dynamically regulated during mitotic and meiotic cell division. The two different Su(z)12 isoforms: Su(z)12-A and Su(z)12-B (resulting from alternative RNA splicing), have very different expression patterns during development. Functional analyses indicate that they also have different functions he Su(z)12-B form is the main mediator of silencing. Furthermore, a neuron specific localization pattern in larval brain and a giant larval phenotype in transgenic lines reveal a potential function of Su(z)12-A in neuron development. In some aspects the isoforms seem to be able to substitute for each other. The histone methyltransferase activity of PRC2 is due to the E(z) protein. However, Su(z)12 is also necessary for H3K27me3 methylation in vivo, and it is thus a core component of PRC2. Clonal over-expression of Su(z)12 in imaginal wing discs results in an increased H3K27me3 activity, indicating that Su(z)12 is a limiting factor for silencing. When PcG function is lost, target genes normally become de-repressed. The segment polarity gene engrailed, encoding a transcription factor, is a target for PRC2 silencing. However, we found that it was not activated when PRC2 function was deleted. We show that the Ultrabithorax protein, encoded by another PcG target gene, also acts as an inhibitor of engrailed and that de-regulation of this gene causes a continued repression of engrailed. The conclusion is that a gene can have several negative regulators working in parallel and that secondary effects have to be taken into consideration, when analyzing effects of mutants. PcG silencing affects very many cellular processes and a large quantity of knowledge is gathered on the overall mechanisms of PcG regulation. However, little is known about how individual genes are silenced and how cells "remember" their fate through cell generations.


Real-time heuristic search is a standard approach to pathfind- ing when agents are required to make decisions in a bounded, very short period of time. An assumption usually made in the development and evaluation of real-time algorithms is that the environment is unknown. Nevertheless, in many interesting applications such as pathfinding for automnomous characters in video games, the environment is known in advance. Recent real-time search algorithms such as D LRTA* and kNN LRTA* exploit knowledge about the environment while pathfinding under real-time constraints. Key to those algorithms is the computation of subgoals in a preprocessing step. Subgoals are subsequently used in the online planning phase to obtain high-quality solutions. Preprocessing in those algorithms, however, requires significant computation. In this paper we propose a novel preprocessing algorithm that generates subgoals using a series of backward search episodes carried out from potential goals. The result of a single backward search episode is a tree of subgoals that we then use while planning online. We show the advantages of our approach over state-of-the-art algorithms by carrying out experiments on standard real-time search benchmarks.


As the specification of Release 11 of the LTE standards is approaching its completion, 3GPP is gradually moving its focus toward the next major step in the evolution of LTE. The drivers of the LTE evolution include the increasing demand for mobile broadband services and traffic volumes as well as emerging usage scenarios involving short-range and machine-type communications. In this article we provide an overview of the key technology areas/components that are currently considered by 3GPP for Rel-12, including support for further enhanced local area access by tight interaction between the wide area and local area layers, signaling solutions for wireless local area network integration, multi-antenna enhancements, improved support for massive MTC, and direct device-to-device communications.


A central theme underlies this review: "Genetics offers an important tool for identifying key molecular events that are involved in specifying biological functions." This approach has been used repeatedly to understand such diverse biological phenomena as oncogenesis, development, and the cell cycle, but has only recently been applied to the analysis of organismic aging and senescence. The power of the genetic approach lies in the ability to integrate phenomena that are displayed at multiple observational levels (i.e., from the molecular to the whole organism), and the power to reveal causal factors that are not dependent upon the prejudice of the investigator. I discuss several areas where genetics has been fruitfully applied to the study of the aging processes: human genes identified by "segmental progeroid" mutations; neurological diseases of the elderly; the limited proliferative life span of human somatic cells in tissue culture; studies on the life span of the mouse; and genetic analysis of life span in shorter-lived metazoans (Drosophila melanogaster and Caenorhabditis elegans), and the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.


Many online service systems leverage user-generated content from Web 2.0 style platforms such as Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, and many more. Often, the value lies in the freshness of this information (e.g. tweets, event-based articles, blog posts, etc.). This freshness poses a challenge for supervised learning models as they frequently have to deal with previously unseen features. In this paper we address the problem of online classification for tweets, namely, how can a classifier be updated in an online manner, so that it can correctly classify the latest "hype" on Twitter? We propose a two-step strategy to solve this problem. The first step follows an active learning strategy that enables the selection of tweets for which a label would be most useful; the selected tweet is then forwarded to Amazon Mechanical Turk where it is labeled by multiple users. The second step builds on a Bayesian corroboration model that aggregates the noisy labels provided by the users by taking their reliabilities into account.


We investigate the impacts of improved intellectual property rights (IPR) protection on cross-border M&A performance. Using multiple measures of IPR protection and based on generalized difference-in-differences estimates, we find that countries with better IPR protection attract significantly more hi-tech cross-border M&A activity, particularly in developing economies. Moreover, acquirers pay higher premiums for companies in countries with better IPR protection, and there is a significantly higher acquirer announcement effect associated with these hi-tech transactions.


Whether you are a scientist on a ship in Antarctic waters or a young girl in a Philippine village, you can learn whenever and whatever you want from whomever you are interested in learning it from. As technologies have become more available, even in the most remote reaches of the world, and as more people contribute a wealth of online resources, the education world has become open to anyone anywhere. In The World Is Open, education technology guru Curtis Bonk explores ten key trends that together make up the "WE-ALL-LEARN" framework for understanding the potential of technology's impact on learning in the 21st century: Web Searching in the World of e-Books E-Learning and Blended Learning Availability of Open Source and Free Software Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare Learning Object Repositories and Portals Learner Participation in Open Information Communities Electronic Collaboration Alternate Reality Learning Real-Time Mobility and Portability Networks of Personalized Learning In addition, this important resource contains compelling interviews that capture the diverse global nature of the open educational world from those who are creating new learning technologies as well as those who are using them to learn and teach in new ways. Using the dynamic "WE-ALL-LEARN" model, learners, educators, executives, administrators, instructors, and parents can tap into the power of Web technology and unleash a world of information.


This paper describes Djed, an algorithmic stablecoin protocol that behaves like an autonomous bank that buys and sells stablecoins for a price in a range that is pegged to a target price. It is crypto-backed in the sense that the bank keeps a volatile cryptocurrency in its reserve. The reserve is used to buy stablecoins from users that want to sell them. And revenue from sales of stablecoins to users are stored in the reserve. Besides stablecoins, the bank also trades reservecoins in order to capitalize itself and maintain a reserve ratio significantly greater than one. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first stablecoin protocol where stability claims are precisely and mathematically stated and proven. Furthermore, the claims and their proofs are formally verified using two different techniques: bounded model checking, to exhaustively search for counter-examples to the claims; and interactive theorem proving, to build rigorous formal proofs using a proof assistant with automated theorem proving features.


It is widely accepted that the effects of global sea‐level changes at the transition from the Devonian to the Carboniferous are recorded in deposits on the shelf of northern Gondwana. These latest Devonian strata had been thought to be poor in fossils due to the Hangenberg mass extinction. In the Ma'der (eastern Anti‐Atlas), however, the Hangenberg Black Shale claystones (latest Famennian) are rich in exceptionally preserved fossils displaying the remains of non‐mineralized structures. The diversity in animal species of these strata is, however, low. Remarkably, the organic‐rich claystones have yielded abundant remains of Ammonoidea preserved with their jaws, both in situ and isolated. This is important because previously, the jaws of only one of the main Devonian ammonoid clades had been found (Frasnian Gephuroceratina). Here, we describe four types of jaws of which two could be assigned confidently to the Order Clymeniida and to the Suborder Tornoceratina. These findings imply that chitinous normal‐type jaws were likely to have already been present at the origin of the whole clade Ammonoidea, i.e. in the early Emsian (or earlier). Vertebrate jaws evolved prior to the Early Devonian origin of ammonoids. The temporal succession of evolutionary events suggests that it could have been the indirect positive selection pressure towards strong (and thus preservable) jaws since defensive structures of potential prey animals would otherwise have made them inaccessible to jawless predators in the course of the mid‐Palaeozoic marine revolution. In this respect, our findings reflect the macroecological changes that occurred in the Devonian. [Correction added on 28 July 2016 after first online publication: In the Abstract, the sentence "Vertebrate jaws probably … in the Early Devonian" was amended]


In packet-optical integrated transport nodes for metropolitan networks, the wavelength data rate of the transponders has increased quickly to 10, 40, and 100 Gbps to reduce the cost of the transported bit. Meanwhile, the majority of the client data rate in routers and packet switches are still operating at 1, 2.5, and 10 Gbps. In this scenario, the introduction of optical transport network (OTN) switching technology enables an efficient wavelength bandwidth utilization and reduces the number of wavelengths, leading to reduced network costs. It has been shown that the use of integrated OTN/WDM switch architecture is cost effective because it reduces the number of short-reach client interfaces. The OTN/WDM also reduces the rack space and the power consumption compared to an architecture that uses a reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer and a separate standalone OTN switch or one that uses back-to-back muxponder connections to perform manual grooming. We introduce and investigate the performance of a new integrated OTN/WDN switching architecture in which the number of OTN switches is minimized. We propose an analytical model for the evaluation of the switch-blocking probability when two different OTN switch assignment policies are used. We show how the number of OTN switches can be reduced if a suitable dimensioning procedure is performed and depending on the traffic percentage needing OTN switching. As an example, if traffic is less than 45%, then the new proposed OTN/WDM switching architecture allows for 25% savings in OTN switching resources in the case of a switch with 4 input/output lines, 48 wavelengths, and 12 × 12 OTN switches.


Contact between parents and children in care is a contested area. Parental contact is recognized to be important, yet may present protective issues; in the kinship care environment, it brings the particular challenges of complex family relationships. Seeking the parents' perspective in a child protection context is difficult and therefore under-researched. This paper describes a nested study within an Australian research project on family contact in kinship care in which the perspectives of 18 mothers and 2 fathers were sought via in-depth interviews. Mothers and fathers described strong feelings of disempowerment in the context both of their family and the child protection system. The relationship between parent and caregiver emerged as a significant issue. All of the parents wished to remain in contact with their children in a meaningful way, whether or not they were likely to resume their children's care; however, contact arrangements presented many difficulties for them. Mothers articulated the need for services that are more empowering and respectful, rather than oriented towards them as failed parents. In order to build appropriate models of support and intervention, we argue for a more inclusive conceptual frame for family life that gives greater recognition to the role of non-custodial parents in the lives of their children.


In this thesis, I examine constructions of youth deviance in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 2002. In 2002, New Zealand had a national election in which adult commentators and observers concentrated and speculated on the reasons for a supposed increase in youth deviance and a spate of extraordinarily violent youth crimes. Youth-at-risk, early intervention, the family, and education were words that emerged continuously in commentator discussions. There was no critique of these words, or the practices they implied, and very little discussion of the implications the use of these words and practices posed for young people. In this thesis, I address this gap in the discussion by critically exploring the ways in which authors in institutional contexts constructed deviant youth and the implications of these constructions for youth. In this research, I sampled published texts in 2002 from academia, government, and media; three institutions which produce and reproduce knowledge in New Zealand. I applied a form of discourse analysis to the texts to explore and contextualise evident constructions. This analysis involved a bricolage of poststructural methodologies in the attempt to make an accessible argument, which effectively addressed the purposes of the research. I found that authors did not apply a knowledge devoid of power. Whether used to construct a picture of the deviant youth, or to describe necessary interventions into deviance, they used knowledge to construct the deviant youth as powerless effects of development and risk. Authors used knowledge to divide young people into the abnormally-deviant youth-at-risk and the normally-deviant adolescent. Applying knowledge allowed those writing about youth crime to construct and position young people as powerless. Authors reinforced this when they used knowledge to inform practices and interventions, which allowed adults to control the young person's access to, and use of, power. In particular, authors and other experts saw mass education as a powerful practice of control and socialisation. Through education, adult society could remove the abnormallydeviant youth from the dysfunctional family environment and re-socialise the young person into conformity. Those writing applied a similar reasoning in other described interventions such as surveillance, conferencing, and early intervention. Interventions allowed adults to control the deviance of youth. I finish this thesis by arguing that interventions and contradictions in constructions show that power is not one-sided. That is, power is not always in the hands of adults. Rather, sociological theory can be applied to demonstrate and explore a power struggle between adults and young people where resistance coexists with power. I argue that resistance can provide an alternative explanation to the dominant ideas held by those working with, and talking about, deviant youth. Resistance allows for a concept of agency in which both deviance and non-deviance can be seen as a reactive response by the young person.


We characterize the lengthscale-dependent rheological properties of mucus from the ubiquitous Chaetopterus marine worm. We use optically trapped probes (2–10 μm) to induce microscopic strains and measure the stress response as a function of oscillation amplitude. Our results show that viscoelastic properties are highly dependent on strain scale (l), indicating three distinct lengthscale-dependent regimes at l1 ≤4 μm, l2≈4–10 μm, and l3≥10 μm. While mucus response is similar to water for l1, suggesting that probes rarely contact the mucus mesh, the response for l2 is distinctly more viscous and independent of probe size, indicative of continuum mechanics. Only for l3 does the response match the macroscopic elasticity, likely due to additional stiffer constraints that strongly resist probe displacement. Our results suggest that, rather than a single lengthscale governing crossover from viscous to elastic, mucus responds as a hierarchical network with a loose biopolymer mesh coupled to a larger scaffold responsible for macroscopic gel-like mechanics.


This study adopted the regression analysis to analyze the data with a view to determining the impact of cashless policy on small scale businesses. The regression analysis is carried out using the E-views statistical package version 7.1. The data employed in this study are national aggregates obtained from secondary sources. The data covers the period of 1980-2014. The major sources of the data include the Central Bank of Nigeria statistical Bulletins. Findings among others show that the coefficient of money supply (MOS) had a significant positive relationship (0.0018) at 1% probability level with the contribution of SMEs to total GDP. The result implies that as money supply in the system increases, the contribution of SMEs to total GDP also increases. Finally, the variable of interest, cashless policy (CP) is a positive insignificant relationship with contribution of SMEs to total GDP (Proxy for Performance of SMEs). This significant relationship could be attributed to the infant nature/stage of the policy implementation. Hence, in the long-run, the policy will have more positive impact on SMEs in the country.


In March 2011 an inflatable boat carrying 72 asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa set out from the coast of Libya hoping to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa. As one Italian official commented, sailing from Libya towards Italy should have been 'a bit like doing a slalom between military ships'. Yet as, out of fuel, supplies of food and water dwindled to nothing and the people on board began to get sick and die, the boat continued to drift and no help came. Eventually it floated all the way back to the Libyan coast. Of the 50 men, 20 women and two babies who set out to sea, only eleven remained alive. Sharon Davis and Geoff Parish reconstruct this tragedy through interviews with five young men who survived the trip. Their first-person accounts of the journey are augmented by interviews with sympathetic Dutch politician Tineke, Rome-based Eritrean Priest Father Mussie Zerai, who was contacted by the passengers by satellite phobe, human rights investigator Lorenzo Pezzani, who forensically reconstructed the boat's movements, and dour NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu. One survivor (Abu Kurke) speaks in halting English; for the others the vernacular is faded under voice-overs. It is raw, simple narrative, expertly selected and edited to move the story seamlessly forward while also allowing listeners time to form mental images of the boat and its passengers and to absorb the emotional impact of what they are hearing. The survivors' individual accounts overlap and repeat to poetic effect, underscoring the veracity of their testimony. The survivors' tale floats on a bed of sound – the splash of waves; the hum of a boat motor; restrained, ominous music (with cello predominating), and the occasionally distant chime from an old clock tower marking the relentless passing of time and its deadly impact on the voyage. The radio makers' approach is dignified, restrained and powerful. Just as the clean lines of minimalist architecture can rely on sophisticated engineering, so the apparent simplicity of a chronological account conceals the artistry, deep thought and sheer hard work of radio production. A strong undercurrent of anger flows through the documentary, and we are given strong encouragement to doubt that NATO has been fully truthful in its response to the tragedy. The Left-To-Die Boat won a United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Prize and was shortlisted for a Sony Academy award (UK), the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards and the Australian Human Rights Awards.


In August 2016, poet Helen Mort, along with composer William Carslake, travelled to south-eastern Greenland to cross the remote glaciers and climb mountains near Sermiligaaq Fjord. They were later joined by filmmaker Richard Jones, and together their responses formed a unique performance with original music, poetry and film footage. The Singing Glacier includes the whole of the poem sequence, accompanied by a conversation between Mort and Carslake, an essay by the literary geographer David Cooper, senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, and prints and drawings by the artist Emma Stibbon RA, whose images of ice and glaciers vividly reveal how the apparently monumental can be so fragile.


Section 20 of the Income Tax Act, No 58 of 1962 allows a taxpayer that has sustained an assessed loss to carry forward the balance of assessed loss and be set off against income earned in the future years. In addition, the loss sustained from one source may be set off the income from another. The assessed loss may be carried forward indefinitely, provided the taxpayer does not fall foul to a provision that restricts the continued use of the assessed loss. The taxpayer's right to retain, carry forward and utilise the assessed loss will be lost if: • The taxpayer's debt(s) are reduced or extinguished, without it being settled. • When a company cease trading. • Also in the case of a company, when income is channelled into it solely for the utilisation of the assessed loss. A recent amendment prevents certain individuals from setting off the assessed loss sustained in certain activities against the income of another.


Recent data indicate that the number of children cared for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections in hospitals is in the range of 50,000 to 100,000 per year in the United States [3]. Major risk factors include apart from prematurity specifically below 29 weeks, congenital heart defects, Down syndrome and further congenital anomalies. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommended in 2014 a restriction of Palivizumab prophylaxis to preterm infants of < 29 weeks of gestation and those with a high-risk course postnatally and higher gestational ages apart from specific indications resulting from congenital anomalies including congenital heart defects [1]. In the current issue of the Klinische Pädiatrie, a group from Bosnia-Herzegovina published data on the effects of prophylactic immunization with Palivizumab on the occurrence of RSV infection in preterm neonates and other high-risk children [6]. Main data of the present study indicate that out of 101 children about 49 % were preterm neonates, 40 % had a congenital heart defect and 11 % exhibit individual risk factors. The authors showed clearly that out of 101 children, who were treated prophylactically with Paliviziumab, none was hospitalized due to RSV infection. Despite the small number of the enrolled infants and older children, the data indicate that also under conditions of a reduced economical state of the National Health Service, the prophylaxis is working adequately. However, there still remain some questions open with respect to efficacy of Palivizumab. 1. The number of preterm neonates being enrolled in the trial was relatively low, thus, giving only a restricted measurement of effectiveness of Palivizumab. 2. The data have to be interpreted with caution, since the effects of Palivizumab have been restricted to somewhat less than 50 % of preterm neonates, the further treated children of the group are either affected by congenital heart disease or by other disorders, e. g. neurologic problems, cardiopulmonary anomalies among others. In a recently published multicenter analysis enrolling pediatric hospitals from the Northern as well as from the Southern hemisphere (United States, Canada, Italy, The Netherlands and Australia), infants were enrolled, if they were born prematurely ( < 36 weeks of gestation) and were younger than 24 months. In the second year of life, only infants with the diagnosis of bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) or related pulmonary disorders were enrolled [3]. Out of more than 1,000 preterm neonates enrolled in this study, about 900 were able to be identified as the group with adequate data available. Main results of this study include that Palivizumab was used in about 430 infants, whereas it was not given in 415 neonates serving as controls. RSV was identified in 47 % on occasion of either outpatient or hospitalized care in enrolled children with respiratory symptoms. RSV was identified in a total of 403 neonates, the effect of Palivizumab for intensive care admission was a risk reduction 58 % (CI 43–69 % on the 95 % level) for neonates of 24 to 35 weeks of gestation without chronic lung disease (BPD) and other children enrolled in the trial after adjustment for common risk factors; for children having a gestational age of 28 to 35 weeks of gestation without BPD it was 74 % (CI 56–85 % on the 95 % level). However, in this trial, no data on the severity of respiratory symptoms of hospitalized children as well as on mortality were published [3]. The authors discuss a high-degree efficacy rate of Palivizumab also in children of > 29 weeks of gestation and thus propose in order to redefine the indications for Palivizumab in the prophylaxis of less immature premature infants related to the indications proposed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Recent data thus confirm older study results and indicate that the outcome of RSV infections is improved by RSV prophylaxis using Palivizumab in neonates > 29 weeks of gestation, a clear-cut reduction in mortality has not been proven until now [1, 2]. In the context of data published from a German group [8] where the authors also could show that there is a reduction of RSV related hospitalization after Palivizumab among preterm neonates of a birthweight below 1,500 g, however, also without changing of mortality. These data further add some weight with respect to prevenPalivizumab for prophylaxis of respiratory syncytial virus infections in preterm neonates Prophylaxe von Infektionen durch das respiratorische Synzytialvirus bei Frühgeborenen


The Spanish verb phrase can take on many forms, depending on the temporal, aspectual and modal interpretation that a speaker wants to convey. At least half a dozen constructions work together to build or analyze even the simplest verb form such as hablo 'I speak'. This paper documents how the complete Spanish verb conjugation system can be operationalized in a computational construction grammar formalism, namely Fluid Construction Grammar. Moreover, it shows how starting from a seed grammar that handles regular morphology and grammar one can create a productive grammar that captures systematicity in Spanish verb conjugation and can expand its construction inventory when new verbs are encountered.


Contemporary predictive models are hard to interpret as their deep nets exploit numerous complex relations between input elements. This work suggests a theoretical framework for model interpretability by measuring the contribution of relevant features to the functional entropy of the network with respect to the input. We rely on the log-Sobolev inequality that bounds the functional entropy by the functional Fisher information with respect to the covariance of the data. This provides a principled way to measure the amount of information contribution of a subset of features to the decision function. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method surpasses existing interpretability sampling-based methods on various data signals such as image, text, and audio.


This dissertation summarizes both experimental and analytical studies on the seismic response of conventional steel concentrically braced frame systems of the type widely used in North America, and preliminary studies of an innovative hybrid braced frame system: the Strong-Back System. The research work is part of NEES small group project entitled International Hybrid Simulation of Tomorrow's Braced Frames. In the experimental phase, a total of four full-scale, one-bay, two-story conventional braced frame specimens with different bracing member section shapes and gusset plate-to-beam connection details were designed and tested at the NEES@Berkeley Laboratory. Three braced frame specimens were tested quasi-statically using the same predefined loading protocol to investigate the inelastic cyclic behavior of code-compliant braced frames at both the global and local level. The last braced frame specimen was nearly identical to one of those tested quasi-statically. However, it was tested using hybrid simulation techniques to examine the sensitivity of inelastic behavior on loading sequence and to relate the behavior observed to different levels of seismic hazard. Computer models of the test specimens were developed using two different computer software programs. In the software framework OpenSees fiber-based line elements were used to simulate global buckling of members and yielding and low-cycle fatigue failure at sections. The LS-DYNA analysis program was also used to model individual struts and the test specimens using shell elements with adaptive meshing and element erosion features. This program provided enhanced ability to simulate section local buckling, strain concentrations and crack development. The numerical results were compared with test results to assess and refine and the ability of the models to predict braced frame behavior. A series of OpenSees numerical cyclic component simulations were then conducted using the validated modeling approach. Two hundred and forty pin-ended struts with square hollow structural section shape were simulated under cyclic loading to examine the effect of width-to-thickness ratios and member slenderness ratios on the deformation capacity and energy dissipation characteristics of brace members. The concept of a hybrid system, consisting of a vertical elastic truss or strong-back, and a braced frame that responds inelastically, is proposed herein to mitigate the tendency of weak-story mechanisms to form in conventional steel braced frames. A simple design strategy about member sizing of the proposed Strong-Back System is provided in this study. To assess the ability of the new Strong-Back System to perform well under seismic loading, a series of inelastic analyses were performed considering three six-story hybrid braced frames having different bracing elements, and three six-story conventional brace frames having different brace configurations. Monotonic and cyclic quasi-static inelastic analyses and inelastic time history analyses were carried out. The braced frame system behavior, bracing member force-displacement hysteresis loops, and system residual drifts were the primary response quantities examined. These indicated that the new hybrid system was able to achieve its design goals. Experimental results show for the same loading history that the braced frame specimen using round hollow structural sections as brace members has the largest deformation capacity among the three types of bracing elements studied. Beams connected to gusset plates at the column formed plastic hinges adjacent to the gusset plate. The gusset plates tend to amplify the rotation demands at these locations and stress concentrations tended to result in early fractures of the plastic hinges that form. To remedy this problem, pinned connection details used in the last two specimens; these proved to prevent failures at these locations under both quasi-static and pseudo-dynamic tests. Failure modes observed near the column to base plate connections in all of the specimens suggest the need for further study. Both OpenSees and LS-DYNA models developed in this study predict the global braced frame behavior with acceptable accuracy. In both models, low-cycle fatigue damage models were needed to achieve an acceptable level of fidelity. Shell element models were able to predict local behavior and the mode of failures with greater but not perfect confidence. OpenSees analysis results show that the proposed hybrid braced frames would perform better than conventional braced frames and that the story deformations are more uniform. Finally, future research targets are briefly discussed at the end of this dissertation.


Abstract Prior to the 2009 L'Aquila event, earthquake forecasting and early warning research focused specifically on earthquakes as the crisis events. Although this is still true, the manslaughter convictions of six earthquake scientists and one public official for failed risk communication in 2009 served as a catalyst for expanding these goals to also intentionally examine the challenges of communicating earthquake risk with non-scientific during the pre-crisis stage of the earthquake lifecycle. The Crisis Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) Model developed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides specific guidelines for doing so. Thus, based on a thematic analysis of interviews with 21 earthquake scientists, this study identifies what those responsible for communicating regularly about earthquake risk see as major communication challenges and the extent to which the CERC model recommendations are useful for addressing them. Results suggest that earthquake risk science communicators are most effective when they translate scientific and technical information simply, respond to competing messages, capitalize on relevant popular culture references, employ risk communication campaigns during 'quiet periods', and acknowledge uncertainty. These findings have implications not only for earthquake science risk communicators, but also for expanding the pre-crisis stage best practices proposed in the Crisis Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) model. Essentially, this study reveals that soliciting and responding to feedback in the pre-crisis stage could help spokespersons clarify or correct any messages that are perceived by audiences as unclear or are simply not accurate. Doing so may improve risk communication effectiveness not only during the pre-crisis stage but also throughout the earthquake crisis lifecycle.


The emergence of RNA interference (RNAi) on the heels of the successful completion of the Drosophila genome project was seen by many as the ace in functional genomics: Its application would quickly assign a function to all genes in this organism and help delineate the complex web of interactions or networks linking them at the systemic level. A few years wiser and a number of genome-wide Drosophila RNAi screens later, we reflect on the state of high-throughput RNAi screens in Drosophila and ask whether the initial promise was fulfilled. We review the impact that this approach has had in the field of Drosophila research and chart out strategies to extract maximal benefit from the application of RNAi to gene discovery and pursuit of systems biology.


In contrast to the largely functionalist and apolitical literature which dominates organisational scholarship on exploitation and exploration after March, this paper seeks to complement this view of exploitation and exploration with a Marxist reading which is unwittingly implied by these terms. More specifically, we combine neo-Marxist and paleo-Marxist arguments to more fully understand the conflictual relations that underpin exploitation and exploration in the management of firms. This enables us to address both the objective and subjective dimensions of exploitation and exploration which firms and workers are involved in through the contemporary capitalist labour process. We illustrate this by drawing on a case study of a large Swedish manufacturing firm which sought to improve lean production by systematically helping employees to explore their own lifestyles and possibilities for a healthier and happier life.


Motivated by a high Spitzer IRAC oversubscription rate, we present a new technique of randomly and sparsely sampling phase curves of hot Jupiters. Snapshot phase curves are enabled by technical advances in precision pointing as well as careful characterization of a portion of the central pixel on the array. This method allows for observations which are a factor of roughly two more efficient than full phase curve observations, and are furthermore easier to insert into the Spitzer observing schedule. We present our pilot study from this program using the exoplanet WASP-14b. Data of this system were taken both as a sparsely sampled phase curve as well as a staring mode phase curve. Both datasets as well as snapshot style observations of a calibration star are used to validate this technique. By fitting our WASP-14b phase snapshot dataset, we successfully recover physical parameters for the transit and eclipse depths as well as amplitude and maximum and minimum of the phase curve shape of this slightly eccentric hot Jupiter. We place a limit on the potential phase to phase variation of these parameters since our data are taken over many phases over the course of a year. We see no evidence for eclipse depth variations compared to other published WASP-14b eclipse depths over a 3.5 year baseline.


Tax expenditures occur when a government provides a reduction in a tax obligation such that it collects less tax than it would have otherwise collected. Tax expenditures are an integral, though controversial, part of all contemporary tax systems. This policy briefing first summarises the various ways in which tax expenditures can be defined and measured. Estimates of the size of tax expenditures are sensitive to these decisions about definition and measurement. The brief then focuses on energy-related tax expenditures (ERTEs). ERTEs are increasingly under attack, because they can result in significant revenue losses for governments and, because, by reducing consumer prices of fossil fuel products and thus incentivising their use, they contribute to air pollution and global warming. Yet, we know little about their size, especially in developing countries. The little data that exists on ERTEs comes from the OECD and a few emerging economies; these suggest that ERTEs are relatively small in these countries. There are very few estimates of ERTEs in developing countries. However, the available estimates of the size of energy subsidies (of which ERTEs are one component) suggest that the revenue benefits of removing such subsidies in developing countries may be much larger.


BACKGROUND
Oral submucous fibrosis (OSMF) is a crippling slowly progressive disease of oral cavity that predominantly affects people habit of consuming areca nut and its commercial preparations which generates high levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) during their metabolism.

OBJECTIVE
The objective of this present study is to evaluate the role of oxidative stress in causation and progression of OSMF by measuring the levels of nonenzymatic antioxidants in OSMF patients.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
For this study we selected 27 newly diagnosed OSMF patients of both sex with age group between 23 to 40 years and the same number of age and sex matched healthy individuals were selected as control group. In both the groups we measured plasma non enzymatic antioxidants like vitamin A. E, C and reduced glutathione. Total antioxidant activity was also assessed in both the groups.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
We observed a very low levels of plasma non-enzymatic antioxidants (p < 0.001) and at the same time a very poor antioxidant activity (p < 0.001) in OSMF patients when compared to controls. Therefore, consumption of tobacco or areca quid creates an oxidative stress environment which might plays a major role in the causation of OSMF.


Model based testing is the most powerful technique for testing hardware and software systems. Models in Hardware Testing describes the use of models at all the levels of hardware testing. The relevant fault models for nanoscaled CMOS technology are introduced, and their implications on fault simulation, automatic test pattern generation, fault diagnosis, memory testing and power aware testing are discussed. Models and the corresponding algorithms are considered with respect to the most recent state of the art, and they are put into a historical context by a concluding chapter on the use of physical fault models in fault tolerance.


Background White matter changes, as revealed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), may occur in depression and Alzheimer's disease. Method T2-weighted MRI scans were performed in 39 control subjects, 61 subjects with NINCDS/ADRDA Alzheimer's disease and 60 subjects with DSM–III–R major depression. Deep white matter lesions (DWML) and periventricular lesions (PVL) were rated on a standard 0–3 scale by two radiologists blind to clinical diagnosis. Results After controlling for differences in vascular risk factors and current blood pressure, DWML were significantly more common in depressed subjects and PVL in Alzheimer's disease subjects compared to controls. DWML were most common in those presenting in late life with their first ever depression and 50% of such subjects had severe (grade 3) DWML. Conclusion An association between DWML and depression and PVL and Alzheimer's disease is supported. The increase with DWML that occurs with ageing may predispose some elderly subjects to depression.


Listening tests were conducted in order to investigate the frequency dependency of localization
thresholds in relation to vertical interchannel crosstalk. Octave band and broadband pink
noise stimuli were presented to subjects as phantom images from vertically arranged stereophonic
loudspeakers located directly in front of the listening position. With respect to the
listening position the lower loudspeaker was not elevated; the upper loudspeaker was elevated
by 30◦. Subjects completed a method of adjustment task in which they were required to reduce
the amplitude of the upper loudspeaker until the resultant phantom image matched the position
of the same stimulus presented from the lower loudspeaker alone. The upper loudspeaker was
delayedwith respect to the lower by 0, 0.5, 1, 5, and 10 ms. The experimental data demonstrated
that the main effect of frequency on the localization threshold was significant, with the low
frequency stimuli (125 and 250 Hz) requiring significantly less level reduction (less than 6 dB)
than the mid-high (1, 2, and 8 kHz) frequency stimuli (9–10.5 dB reduction). The main effect
of interchannel time difference (ICTD) on the localization thresholds for each octave band was
found to be non-significant. For all stimuli interchannel level difference (ICLD) was always
necessary, indicating that the precedence effect is not a feature of median plane localization.


During the Middle Pennsylvanian (Desmoinesian), the Paradox basin was an enclosed, evaporitic basin consisting of a deep trough with a shallow shelf rimming its south and west side. During Desert Creek deposition, at least two large phylloid algal-mound complexes flourished on or at the edge of the shelf. One complex is now delineated by Aneth field and the other is partly delineated by Bug and Papoose Canyon fields. In the Bug-Papoose Canyon algal-mound complex of southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado, carbonate mud mounds grew by accumulation of platy algal fragments, by baffling and trapping of fine sediment by the algae, and by precipitation of botryoidal aragonite cement between fragments. Extensive diagenesis of the accumulations began with syndepositional precipitation of botryoidal cement, inferred to have been aragonite, on phylloid algal plates, creating a topographically prominent, rigid framework containing abundant pore space. Brecciation during compaction created more pores. Parts of voids were subsequently filled by internal sediment and by calcite and gypsum cements. Finally, the algal-mound accumulations were extensively dolomitized and their porosity increased by dissolution. The relationship of these algal mounds to the Desert Creek shelf edge suggests that delineation of the shelf edge holds the promise of further discoveries of algal mounds as it is traced to the west and east of Bug and Papoose Canyon fields.


Vietnam was America's most divisive and unsuccessful foreign war. It was also the first to be televised and the first of the modern era fought without military censorship. From the earliest days of the Kennedy-Johnson escalation right up to the American withdrawal, and even today, the media's role in Vietnam has continued to be intensely controversial. The "Uncensored War" gives a richly detailed account of what Americans read and watched about Vietnam. Hallin draws on the complete body of the New York Times coverage from 1961 to 1965, a sample of hundreds of television reports from 1965-73, including television coverage filmed by the Defense Department in the early years of the war, and interviews with many of the journalists who reported it, to give a powerful critique of the conventional wisdom, both conservative and liberal, about the media and Vietnam. Far from being a consistent adversary of government policy in Vietnam, Hallin shows, the media were closely tied to official perspectives throughout the war, though divisions in the government itself and contradictions in its public relations policies caused every administration, at certain times, to lose its ability to "manage" the news effectively. As for television, it neither showed the "literal horror of war," nor did it play a leading role in the collapse of support: it presented a highly idealized picture of the war in the early years, and shifted toward a more critical view only after public unhappiness and elite divisions over the war were well advanced. The "Uncensored War" is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Vietnam war or the role of the media in contemporary American politics. A groundbreaking study of the media's influence on the Vietnam War .Overturns the conventional notions about the media's role in the war .Draws directly on a huge body of newspaper and TV coverage"


In this paper, the problem of automated aircraft conflict prediction is studied for two-aircraft midair encounters. A model is introduced to predict the aircraft positions along some look-ahead time horizon, during which each aircraft is trying to follow a prescribed flight plan despite the presence of additive wind perturbations to its velocity. A spatial correlation structure is assumed for the wind perturbations such that the closer the two aircraft, the stronger the correlation between the perturbations to their velocities. Using this model, a method is introduced to evaluate the criticality of the encounter situation by estimating the probability of conflict, namely, the probability that the two aircraft come closer than a minimum allowed distance at some time instant during the look-ahead time horizon. The proposed method is based on the introduction of a Markov chain approximation of the stochastic processes modeling the aircraft motions. Several generalizations of the proposed approach are also discussed.


Abstract Melt degassing by bubble nucleation and growth is a driving mechanism of magma ascent. Therefore, decompression experiments with hydrous silicate melts were used to investigate the onset and the dynamics of H2O degassing. Nominally H2O undersaturated trachytic Campi Flegrei and phonolitic Vesuvius melts representative for the magma compositions of the Campi Flegrei volcanic system were decompressed at a super-liquidus temperature of 1050 °C from 200 MPa to final pressures (Pfinal) of 100, 75, and 60 MPa using continuous decompression rates of 0.024 and 0.17 MPa/s. Experiments started from either massive glass cylinders or glass powder to demonstrate the infl of the starting material on melt degassing. Glass powder can be used to shorten the equilibration time (teq) prior to decompression for dissolution of H2O in the melt. The decompressed samples were quenched and compared in terms of bubble number density (NV), porosity, and residual H2O content in the melt. Decompression of all glass cylinder samples led to homogeneous bubble nucleation with high NV of ~105 mm–3. The supersaturation pressures for homogeneous bubble nucleation were estimated to be <76 MPa for the trachytic and <70 MPa for the phonolitic melt. In contrast to glass cylinders, the usage of glass powder equilibrated for 24 h before decompression prevented homogeneous bubble nucleation during decompression. We suggest that trapped air in the powder pore space resulted in the formation of tiny H2O-N2 bubbles throughout the samples prior to decompression. Degassing of these glass powder samples was facilitated by diffusive growth of these pre-existing bubbles and thus did not require signifi H2O supersaturation of the melt. This is evidenced by several orders of magnitude lower NV and lower residual H2O contents at correspondingly higher porosities compared to the glass cylinder samples. However, a signifi extension of teq to 96 h in the glass powder experiments led to degassing results comparable to the glass cylinder samples. This effect is probably due to Ostwald ripening, coalescence, and the ascent of the pre-existing bubbles during the extended teq prior to decompression. The NV of the glass cylinder samples were used to test the applicability of the vesiculation model provided by Toramaru (2006). For the applied decompression rates, the experimental NV are up to 5 orders of magnitude higher than the values predicted by the model. This may be mainly attributed to the usage of the macroscopic surface tension and the total H2O diffusivity in the model to describe the molecular process of bubble nucleation. A signifi increase in modeled NV can be achieved by application of a reduced surface tension in combination with the lower diffusivity of network formers as a limiting parameter for the formation of a bubble nucleus. This study demonstrates that the investigation of homogeneous bubble nucleation necessitates an optimized experimental protocol. We strongly recommend performing experiments with massive glass cylinders as starting material. The timescale of decompression is a limiting parameter and must be short enough to minimize the opportunity for a reduction of NV by bubble coalescence. Considering our comparably high NV, the samples of many previous experimental studies that were used to calibrate models for homogeneous bubble nucleation were probably subject to signifi NV reduction. Newly derived data from optimized experiments will require improved models for homogeneous bubble nucleation during magma ascent.


The stable marriage problem is a well-known problem of matching men to women so that no man and woman who are not married to each other both prefer each other. Such a problem has a wide variety of practical applications ranging from matching resident doctors to hospitals to matching students to schools. A well-known algorithm to solve this problem is the Gale-Shapley algorithm, which runs in polynomial time.
It has been proven that stable marriage procedures can always be manipulated. Whilst the Gale-Shapley algorithm is computationally easy to manipulate, we prove that there exist stable marriage procedures which are NP-hard to manipulate. We also consider the relationship between voting theory and stable marriage procedures, showing that voting rules which are NP-hard to manipulate can be used to define stable marriage procedures which are themselves NP-hard to manipulate. Finally, we consider the issue that stable marriage procedures like Gale-Shapley favour one gender over the other, and we show how to use voting rules to make any stable marriage procedure gender neutral.


The purpose of this study is to test the efficacy of bioactive natural product berberine in the treatment of patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). Data of 45 paroxysmal AF patients treated with berberine and 43 age, gender, New York Heart Association functional classification score, and concomitant cardiovascular disease matched patients treated with amiodarone were analyzed retrospectively to examine conversion rate, average conversion time, average heart rate, and echocardiographic parameters. There was no statistical difference between berberine and amiodarone on conversion rate or echocardiographic parameters. Berberine treatment showed a significantly longer average time to conversion and higher heart rate during sinus rhythm (SR) than amiodarone. Echocardiographic parameters showed that E/A ratio and left atrial diameter were significantly improved after 6- and 12-month berberine treatment, but only E/A ratio improved significantly at the same time points after amiodarone treatment. This is the first report to specifically compare efficacy of berberine and amiodarone in the treatment of patients with AF. We find that berberine and amiodarone are equally effective for conversion of AF and maintenance of normal SR.


Here we report the results of the study of a set of thirteen hydrocarbons R-H not leading to extensively charge-delocalized anions R - upon ionization, R-H → R - + H + . It essentially involves the following: (i) The computation at the G2 level of the changes in thermodynamic state functions for this process in the gas phase. The reliability of the computational method was further assessed by comparison with CCSD(T)/Aug-cc-pVTZ results. (ii) A direct comparison of the experimentally available thermodynamic (gas phase) and kinetic (solution) data pertaining to this reaction. (iii) A careful re-examination of the experimental data sets and the Bronsted-type relationships derived therefrom by using the computed thermodynamic data. This treatment suggests the existence of mechanistic features affecting the experimental data and indicates the need for further experimental and computational work.


The substructure and crystallographic texture characteristics of both the deformed matrix and dynamically recrystallized (DRX) grains were investigated in a Ni-30%Fe austenitic model alloy subjected to hot torsion. Deformation was performed at a temperature of 1000°C using strain rates of 1, 0.1 and 0.01 s-1, which produced a range of DRX grain sizes. Electron back-scattered diffraction and transmission electron microscopy were employed in the investigation. Both the deformed matrix and DRX grains revealed the texture components expected for simple shear deformation by crystallographic slip. The texture of DRX grains was dominated by low Taylor factor components as a result of their lower consumption rate during growth of these grains. There was a marked difference in the substructure characteristics between the deformed matrix and DRX grains regardless of the grain size and orientation. The deformed matrix substructure was largely characterized by organized, banded subgrain arrangements with alternating misorientations. By contrast, the substructure of DRX grains was generally more random in character and displayed complex, more equiaxed subgrain/cell arrangements characterized by local accumulation of misorientations. Based on the experimental observations, a mechanism of the distinct substructure development within DRX grains has been proposed.


This article assesses the probable implications of Scottish independence for nationality and immigration law and policy, in the event of a 'yes' vote in the September 2014 referendum. It will firstly show that the Scottish Government plans to limit the implications of independence in the nationality field, but that some new Scottish citizens might lose British citizenship. In the immigration field, it will argue that intra-EU migration is one reason why, in the event of a successful referendum, a treaty should be put in place to ensure continuity of Scotland's membership of the EU. In relation to immigration control, it will argue that the most likely outcome is that an independent Scotland would be part of the common travel area, rather than the Schengen zone. In relation to immigration policy, it will show that Scotland's greater freedom of action after independence might be constrained by participation in EU immigration and asylum legislation.


Merging of particle pairs during selective laser sintering (SLS) of polymers is vital in defining the final part properties. Depending on the sintering conditions, polymers can undergo full or partial sintering whereby incomplete sintering results in poor mechanical properties. At present, the underlying mechanisms and related conditions leading to various consolidation phenomena of polymer particles are not well understood. In the present work, a novel in-house developed experimental setup is used to perform laser sintering experiments on polystyrene (PS) particle doublets while performing in situ visualization of the sintering dynamics. From the recorded images, the evolution of the growth of the neck radius formed between both particles is analyzed as a function of time. Sintering conditions such as heating chamber temperature, laser pulse energy and duration, laser spot size and particle size are precisely controlled and systematically varied. A non-isothermal viscous sintering model is developed that allows qualitative prediction of the observed effects of the various parameters. It is shown that the sintering kinetics is determined by a complex interplay between the transient rheology caused by the finite relaxation times of the polymer and the time-dependent temperature profile which also affects the polymer viscosity. The combination of a full material characterization with sintering experiments under well-defined conditions has resulted in a general understanding of the effects of material and process parameters on laser sintering. Thereby a strong foundation is laid for the route towards rational design of laser sintering.