This article offers a critique of the "team production theory" of corporate law as articulated by Margaret Blair and Lynn Stout and a partial defense of the shareholder primacy norm. The team production theory rejects the principal-agent model of the public corporation and replaces it with a "mediating hierarch" approach to corporate governance. Under a mediating hierarch model, directors of public corporations do not maximize shareholder value but instead resolve competing claims that various "stakeholders" might have to the firm's residual product. According to Blair and Stout, this "mediating hierarch" model of governance empowers public corporations to refrain from opportunistic exploitation of non-shareholder constituents and thus reduces the transaction costs associated with obtaining relationship-specific investment. Such a model supposedly illuminates numerous aspects of corporate law, particularly the law of Delaware, that the principal-agent model purportedly cannot explain. Blair and Stout limit their "team production theory" to public corporations on the assumption that non-shareholder constituents of such firms are particularly vulnerable to opportunism. However, Blair and Stout have not shown that such participants in publicly-held corporations are more vulnerable to opportunism than similar participants in private firms. In fact, certain attributes of public corporations render participants in such ventures less vulnerable to opportunism than similar participants in private firms. Thus, the transaction costs of obtaining team-specific investment from non-shareholder constituents would seem to be lower for public corporations than for private firms, thereby undermining Blair and Stout's assertion that special economic characteristics of public firms call for a "mediating hierarch" model of governance. At the same time, various facets of the public corporation, in particular the separation of ownership from control, render shareholders of such firms more vulnerable to opportunism than similar participants in private firms. If anything, then, the case for the shareholder primacy norm is stronger where public corporations are concerned. At any rate, Blair and Stout have neglected an additional consideration, namely, the costs of ownership. By transforming the firm's residual product into common property and empowering directors to distribute this property as they see fit, a mediating hierarch approach would undermine the shareholders' role as the primary monitors of firm activity and thus severely attenuate the incentives of directors to maximize anything other than their own welfare. As a result, such an approach to corporate governance would likely increase the transaction costs of inducing team-specific investment while at the same time attenuating the specialization benefits that would otherwise result from the separation of ownership from control. These ownership costs likely explain why, as Blair and Stout concede, states have rejected a mediating hierarch model for private firms. A fortiori, one would expect states to reject such an approach for public firms as well. Careful analysis of corporate law and the institutional arrangements that support it confirms that Delaware at least has embraced a principal-agent conception of the publicly-held corporation. Each of the doctrines that Blair and Stout have cited in support of their theory is perfectly consistent with the principal-agent model, particularly in light of the market mechanisms that have evolved to align the interests of shareholders and directors. The existence of these mechanisms, which supplement legal regulation of director conduct, would itself appear inconsistent with a mediating hierarch model of firm governance. Indeed, scholars who espouse the principal-agent view have applauded many of the attributes of corporate law that Blair and Stout have invoked. Moreover, Blair and Stout have overlooked other doctrines that are flatly inconsistent with a mediating hierarch approach and can only be explained by a principal-agent conception of the public corporation.


This research studies the behavior of a fully confined air pocket under the effect of water pulses induced by a water hammer phenomenon using several experimental tests in a pressurized transient condition. A compressed air vessel (CAV) has been tested under transient conditions to show its ability to absorb the pressure surges and to demonstrate the energy storage capability of the air pocket. Proper dimensionless parameters are introduced and the relationship between governing factors is analyzed. Smaller sizes of air pocket lead to higher pressures, and there exists a critical size associated with the higher pressure value depending on the flow velocity.


In this paper computation independent contact regions for general curved objects with applications to grasping is presented. The main contribution of the paper is a new statement of the grasp planning problem as a root finding problem. This is achieved due a suitable interpretation of recent results on grasping problem literature. Therefore, we propose to solve the root finding problem via numerical continuation. Simulation results are presented, which validate our proposal.


In 1993, Alan Rabinowitz, called the "Indiana Jones" of wildlife science by "The New York Times", arrived for the first time in the country of Myanmar, known until 1989 as Burma, uncertain of what to expect. Working under the auspices of the Wildlife Conservation Society, his goal was to establish a wildlife research and conservation programme and to survey the country's wildlife. He succeeded beyond all expectations, not only discovering a species of primitive deer completely new to science but also playing a vital role in the creation of Hkakabo Razi National Park, now one of Southeast Asia's largest protected areas. "Beyond the Last Village" takes the reader on a journey of exploration, danger and discovery in this remote corner of the planet at the southeast edge of the Himalayas where tropical rain forest and snow-covered mountains meet. As we travel through this "lost world" - a mysterious and forbidding region isolated by ancient geologic forces - we meet the Rawang, a former slave group, the Taron, a solitary enclave of the world's only pygmies of Asian ancestry and Myanmar Tibetans living in the furthest reaches of the mountains. We enter the territories of strange, majestic-looking beasts that few people have ever heard of and fewer have ever seen - golden takin, red goral, blue sheep and black barking deer. The survival of these ancient species is now threatened, not by natural forces but by hunters with snares and crossbows, trading body parts for basic household necessities. The powerful landscape and unique people the author befriends help him come to grips with the traumas and difficulties of his past and emerge a man ready to embrace the world anew. Interwoven with his scientific expedition in Myanmar and helping to inform his understanding of the people he met and the situations he encountered, is this more personal journey of discovery.


The growing interest in reflexive social science has been matched by a voluminous literature on the epistemological consequences of positionality in social research. Inter-subjectivist approaches to positionality emphasise how social interactions within the field produce 'interpretative moments' and thereby consciously affect the process of knowledge production. Objectivist approaches to positionality emphasise the 'background thinking' that social researchers carry into the field, unexamined, as occupants of social positions that are class, gender etc. based. It follows that this (class, gendered) background thinking unconsciously influences the process of knowledge production. However, since this literature has had little impact on the field of housing and urban research, its relevance to these fields remains to be established and vice versa. In this paper, I discuss both of these approaches and find them helpful but limited in their relevance to housing and urban research. Since housing and urban research tends to be undertaken on behalf of 'policy funders', I argue that constant exposure to the 'disciplinary gaze' of those funders means that the positionality of housing and urban researchers is also moulded during the course of the academic career. This means that the positionality of housing and urban researchers is not simply established within the field nor carried into the field. Rather, the positionality of housing and urban researchers develops over time of constant exposure to the 'disciplinary gaze' of research funders and manifests itself in what Foucault refers to as 'docility', i.e. research practices intuitively and uncritically oriented to satisfying the needs and demands of research funders. I draw on my own research career experiences to demonstrate this argument and, in doing so, show how my docility manifested itself during recent 'policy funded' research into the housing and urban problems of visual impaired children.


We present a new versatile synthetic strategy for amphiphilic nanogels with tunable amphiphilicity. Our approach is based on crosslinked reactive precursor particles, which serve as a platform for secondary functionalization with hydrophilic and hydrophobic moieties: the functionalization of reactive poly(pentafluorophenyl methacrylate) (PPFPMA) nanogels with different amines allows precise adjustment of the internal network composition. Since nanogels with varying amphiphilicity originate from the same uniform precursor particles, they exhibit similar particle sizes, size distributions and homogeneous morphologies. This comparability between nanogels allows accurate investigation of their structure–property relationships. For example, by tuning the amphiphilic network composition, the loading and release profiles for Nile red as a hydrophobic model compound can be controlled through adjusting the hydrophobic interactions with the network. Consequently, our strategy represents a powerful platform for the generation of a new type of amphiphilic nanocarrier that combines the exceptional biocompatibility of hydrophilic nanogels with the transport of hydrophobic cargoes.


The antioxidant supplementation such as vitamin C, E, A and beta carotene etc, has proven to prevent the process of ageing caused by free radicals. Antioxidants either prevent free radical production or counteract the impeding damage by doing so they are involved in the protection and prevention of cellular damage which is the common pathway for cancer, aging and much disease. The cyanobacteria is a blue green micro algae believed to be a rich antioxidant source, found in abundance in Spirulina platensis is evaluated for antioxidant potential by modern in vitro techniques. METHODS the alcoholic extract of cyanobacteria is studied by in vitro Lipid Peroxidation inhibition assay (LPO) , The nitric oxide (NO)free radical scavenging activity and the determination of the DPPH (one, 1-diphenyl-2- picrylhydrazil) radical scavenging activity in concentrations which ranged from 1.95 g/mg to 500 g/mg in a geometric progression using spectrophotometer Results: The IC-50 % inhibition value of cyanobacteria by LPO is 102.70 mcg/ml, DPPH is 63.35 mcg/ml and by NO is 8.80 mcg/ml CONCLUSION The alcoholic extract of corynebacterium culture from Spirulina platensis exhibited potent NO free radical scavenging activity with mild activity on DPPH and LPO inhibition assay.


Among the most enduring diplomatic projects in the postcolonial Third World, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN has for long inspired antipodal reviews ranging from the celebratory to the derisive. These judgments notwithstanding, the varied practices of ASEAN's diplomacy have impressively grown in scope, ritual, and ambition in the years following the Cold War and well into the contemporary post-unipolar conjuncture where ASEAN has emerged as a default manager of a geopolitical landscape bookended by the material and symbolic power struggles of China and the United States in Asia. Despite the abundance of writings on ASEAN and Asian security, much about its routine production and performance remain enigmatic. Little is known about the everyday practices that constitute this diplomacy; the varied kinds of labour nourishing its production; the sociological biographies of its practitioners and the endowments of class, language, and social capital shaping their shared dispositions; and the vernacular idiom in which this diplomacy is performed. This thesis interrogates ASEAN's diplomatic practice with an eye on these concerns by pursuing ethnographic fieldwork for 13 months in a site of ASEAN diplomacy par excellence. This site is the ASEAN Secretariat in South Jakarta and a field of multilateral diplomacy of Great and Middle Powers clustered around it in a city that has laid claim to becoming "ASEAN's diplomatic capital" (Ibukota diplomatik ASEAN). The thesis constructs two arguments. First, it argues against pervasive understandings of the ASEAN Secretariat's inconsequentiality. As the only bureaucratic 'organ' to physically attend and memorialise every 'ASEAN meeting', the Secretariat is a key institution coordinating the burgeoning apparatus of activity in and through which a lexically and ritually coherent 'ASEAN' is produced. More importantly, as 'servants' of states, Secretariat staff render their 'emotional labour' to level the tortured inequalities of the ASEAN diplomatic field. Through practices of face-work, staff deploy an exacting solicitousness to ensure that ASEAN's state representatives – with varying endowments of linguistic, cultural, and social capital– are not threatened with embarrassment by which they may 'lose face', be 'out of face' or 'shamefaced,' as they gather among each other and their vaunted foreign partners as equals. Second, by analysing the everyday practices of Secretariat staff, ASEAN diplomats, and foreign diplomats based in Jakarta, this thesis draws on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and Erving Goffman to construct a wider argument about ASEAN's diplomatic practice. It argues that ASEAN's diplomacy is produced in everyday life not by prevailing representations of the 'ASEAN Way' but instead through a stock of historically structured, sociologically patterned, tacit and embodied group dispositions – a diplomatic habitus. ASEAN's diplomatic habitus is organised around a perennial concern among its practitioners to save the physical and figurative 'face' of the state – instantiated by its representatives – to enable their performances of a mythic sovereign equality among each other and satisfy their demands for recognition from Great and Major powers, especially as they strive for 'centrality' in the performative games of Asian security.


Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are becoming increasingly popular for a broad variety of tasks ranging from aerial imagery to objects delivery. With the expansion of the areas, where drones can be efficiently used, the collision risk with other flying objects increases. Avoiding such collisions would be a relatively easy task, if all the aircrafts in the neighboring airspace could communicate with each other and share their location information. However, it is often the case that either location information is unavailable (e.g. flying in GPS-denied environments) or communication is not possible (e.g. different communication channels or non-cooperative flight scenario). To ensure flight safety in this kind of situations drones need a way to autonomously detect other objects that are intruding the neighboring airspace. Visual-based collision avoidance is of particular interest as cameras generally consume less power and are more lightweight than active sensor alternatives such as radars and lasers. We have therefore developed a set of increasingly sophisticated algorithms to provide drones with a visual collision avoidance capability. First, we present a novel method for detecting flying objects such as drones and planes that occupy a small part of the camera field of view, possibly move in front of complex backgrounds, and are filmed by a moving camera. In order to be solved this problem requires combining motion and appearance information, as neither of the two alone is capable of providing reliable enough detections. We therefore propose a machine learning technique that operates on spatio- temporal cubes of image intensities where individual patches are aligned using an object-centric regression-based motion stabilization algorithm. Second, in order to reduce the need to collect a large training dataset and to manual annotate it, we introduce a way to generate realistic synthetic images. Given only a small set of real examples and a coarse 3D model of the object, synthetic data can be generated in arbitrary quantities and further used to supplement real examples for training a detector. The key ingredient of our method is that the synthetically generated images need to be as close as possible to the real ones not in terms of image quality, but according to the features, used by a machine learning algorithm. Third, though the aforementioned approach yields a substantial increase in performance when using Adaboost and DPM detectors, it does not generalize well to Convolutional Neural Networks, which have become the state-of-the-art. This happens because, as we add more and more synthetic data, the CNNs begin to overfit to the synthetic images at the expense of the real ones. We therefore propose a novel deep domain adaptation technique that allows efficiently combining real and synthetic images without overfitting to either of the two. While most of the adaptation techniques aim at learning features that are invariant to the possible difference of the images, coming from different sources (real and synthetic). Unlike those methods, we suggest modeling this difference with a special two-stream architecture. We evaluate our approach on three different datasets and show its effectiveness for various classification and regression tasks.


Paul Ricoeur is one of the most important modern literary theorists and a philosopher of world renown. This collection brings together his published articles, papers, reviews, and interviews that focus on literary theory and criticism. The first of four sections includes early pieces that explore the philosophical foundations for a post-structural hermeneutics. The second contains reviews and essays in which Ricoeur engages in debate over some of the central themes of literary theory, including figuration/configuration and narrativity. In the third section are later essays on post-structuralist hermeneutics, and in the fourth, interviews in which he discusses text, language, and myths. Mario Valdes provides an introduction to the literary theories of Paul Ricoeur and the works in this collection particularly. He also includes a complete bibliography of Ricoeur's works that have appeared in English.


The Holmquist-Johnson-Cook (HJC) model for concrete was presented in 1993 and has been used extensively since that time. Since then a third invariant effect has been added and the shear modulus has been revised to vary such that Poisson's ratio is held constant. It has always been diffcult, however, to determine the appropriate constant for the strain-rate effect as most of the published data are for the net stress as a function of the strain rate. Because concrete is both pressure dependent and strain-rate dependent, it is necessary to separate the individual effects. Recently strain-rate data for three concrete materials were presented by Piotrowska and others [1, 2], where the data are presented as equivalent stress versus confining pressure for a high strain rate and a quasi-static strain rate. This is the form necessary to determine the appropriate strain-rate effect, and the data show that the strain-rate effect is larger than used in the initial publication of the HJC model, and also that the strain-rate effect is a function of the confining pressure. For lower pressures the strain-rate effect is a factor to be applied to the quasi-static data (which is the effect represented in the original HJC model), but for higher pressures the strain rate effect is better represented by an additive term. With the addition of an another HJC constant (the pressure at which the strain rate effect transitions from a multiplied factor to an additive term) it is possible to more accurately represent the response of concrete under high pressures and high strain rates, and it is possible to compute more accurate results for projectile penetration into concrete targets. The paper presents the modified form of the HJC model, an analysis of the strain-rate effects, and results of penetration computations that are compared to experimental data in the literature.


The development of generalized programs for the evaluation of hazard to aquatic organisms associated with the use of both existing and new chemicals is a major concern of several organizations currently attempting to establish regulations for chemicals potentially reaching the aquatic environment. Two of these groups actively working toward acceptable hazard evaluation schemes are the Aquatic Organisms Section of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) Subcommittee E35.21 on Safety to Man and Environment, and the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) Aquatic Hazards of Pesticides Task Group. An important ASTM goal is the development of a standard practice for a laboratory testing scheme to evaluate hazard to nontarget aquatic organisms. The current draft of the procedure identifies several key decision points and, depending on resultant data, can consist of as many as three distinct phases: (a) an outline of priority and scope, (b) acute hazard, and (c) overall hazard. The testing scheme has provisions for examination of the usage and disposal patterns of a substance and its biological, physical, and toxicological properties in a stepwise manner using sequential evaluation and feedback to select supplementary tests or implement decision alternatives. The program is intended for general application to any of the wide variety of chemical substances potentially reaching natural surface waters. The AIBS Task Group for the Aquatic Hazards of Pesticides was formulated at the request of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of Pesticide Programs, to assist in the development of an organized and uniform aquatic safety testing program for use in pesticide registration and registration-oriented research. Specifically, the group has been concerned with the development of criteria and rationale for use with the currently required, basic aquatic test data to determine the need for additional testing. A strong emphasis is placed on the development of simple criteria for decision making relative to evaluation of the aquatic hazards of pesticides with the recognition that the criteria ultimately should aid in the exercise of flexible good judgment concerning the need for additional testing. Current drafts of the respective programs developed by these two groups are summarized here as a basis for an evaluation and discussion of decision criteria employed in aquatic environmental hazard assessments.


In 21st century America, bullying of children by other children at school continues at epidemic levels. Organizations as diverse as the Department of Health and Human Services (through the National Institutes of Health and Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)), the National Crime Prevention Council, the National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center, and the National Education Association, have all targeted school bullying and its consequences in various initiatives and campaigns over the last several years. These organizations argue that if schools and parents do not properly intervene to prevent bullying, the long-term ramifications for both the bully and the bullied could be disastrous. In fact, there appears to be a new momentum among parents and educators to take the problem of bullying more seriously. Recent violence at schools across the country, including the now-infamous Columbine school shooting, has made educators, parents, and children more reluctant to accept that bullying is just a normal part of growing up. Even so, legal remedies for victims of bullying continue to be woefully nadequate. Although victims of student-on-student sexual harassment have a claim for compensatory damages under the federal gender discrimination in education law, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the Supreme Court of the United States has yet to endorse the idea of a same-sex harassment cause of action for more common forms of bullying under Title IX (i.e., boys bullying boys or girls bullying girls). That being said, there is some hope that same-sex harassment causes of action for bullying behavior may become more common under Title IX as an increasing number of courts and the United States Department of Education have adopted the reasoning of the Supreme Court's Title VII decision of Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc. In these instances, decisions have embraced Oncale's central teaching that same-sex harassment need not depend upon sexual attraction or desire, but mayalso derive from nonsexual animus based on the failure of the harassed individual to live up to stereotypical gender norms. Indeed, research studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that those victimized by bullying are typically students who do not fit stereotypical notions of what it is to be masculine or feminine, athletic, cool, or in at school. Classic examples include not only children who are smaller, younger, gay or effeminate, obese, or from different countries, but also children who look and/or act differently from other children as a result of physical and/or mental impairments (i.e., special education children). It is the legal ramifications for verbally and physically abused special education children, mostly by members of their own gender, upon which this article focuses. Presently, most observers, and even the Supreme Court in its seminal student-on-student sexual harassment decision, Davis v. Monroe County Bd. of Educ., have yet to undertake a sufficient evaluation of the complex legal issues surrounding the bullying of special education children. To date, commentators and lower courts have primarily focused on the Title IX implications for students subject to same-sex harassment by other students and then, mostly in the context of harassment based on the actual, or perceived, sexual orientation of the student. Yet, when another student bullies a special education child based on that child's appearance, behavior, or failure to live up to stereotyped notions of gender, it is necessary to consider the intersection between Title IX and the primary, federal special education law, the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA). Under IDEA, children with disabilities are entitled to a free and appropriate education (FAPE) in the least restrictive environment practicable. In turn, a FAPE includes special education and related services which are reasonably calculated to permit a child with a disability to benefit educationally. Consequently, actions taken by school districts to alleviate an unpleasant bullying situation for a special education child in order to comply with Title IX's dictates concerning peer sexual harassment may inadvertently also violate a child's right to a FAPE by altering that child's placement and/or programs. In order to prevent placing school officials in this legal Catch-22, a legal model needs to be developed which ties the overlapping statutory frameworks of Title IX and IDEA together in one hybrid legal cause of action. Alternatively, if Title IX's stringent legal standards for peer sexual harassment cannot be met in a given bullying case even after incorporating IDEA concepts, IDEA may also provide legal bases for special education children to obtain monetary damages against school officials who have failed to protect them from bullying, which, in turn, has violated that child's right to a FAPE under IDEA. With these issues at the forefront, this article advocates two IDEA-based legal models to increase the legal protections available for special education children who are the subject of same-sex harassment/bullying at school. The first proposal attempts to provide this additional protection by strengthening the Davis Title IX framework for peer sexual harassment at school by incorporating IDEA concepts directly into that framework. Under this hybrid model, a school is liable for the same-sex harassment of a special education child where (1) the school had actual notice of the harassment; (2) the character of the harassment was severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive; (3) the school's response to the known harassment was clearly unreasonable in light of its obligations under Title IX and IDEA; and (4) the student was denied a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment practicable or otherwise denied access to appropriate educational opportunities and benefits as a result of the harassment. Next, after addressing the lack of effective legal theories of recovery outside the Title IX context because of various procedural and substantive limitations on such claims, this article sets forth a second legal model. The second legal model involves an IDEA-based Section 1983 action for money damages, while at the same time recognizing that special education plaintiffs should normally have to first exhaust their administrative remedies under IDEA before bringing such a claim.


A series of structurally similar 5–cyano–6–aryl–2–thiouracil derivatives as Hepatitis C viral NS5B RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (HCV NS5B RdRp) inhibitors have been subjected for QSAR analysis using VLife MDS 3.5 software. The compounds were divided into training and test set. Best QSAR model was selected on the basis of various statistical parameters like square correlation coefficient (r2), cross validated square correlation coefficient (q2) and sequential Fischer test (F). 3D– QSAR study reveals that electronegative and slightly less bulky substitution at sulfur atom, the bulky group on the carbonyl oxygen, reduction in electronegativity of the cyano group and introduction of bulkier group at C–6 position of the 5–cyano–6–aryl–2– thiouracil improve the inhibition of HCV NS5B RdRp.


Antedon bifida (Crinoids Echinodermata): Immune properties

Michel Leclerc
Immunology of Invertebrates University of Orleans, 556 rue Isabelle Romee, 45640 Sandillon, France

Abstract

We discover the Fundamentals immune properties of the Crinoid: Antedon Bifida by the use of its genome. We review the presence of IGKappa gene, Fab fragment gene, Fc receptor one and MHC genes. In summary, Antedon bifida presents an IPA (Invertebrate Primitive Anti body) and an Adaptative Immunity.

Introduction:
The aim of this work is to confirm or infirm the presence of immune genes in an ancestral Echinodermata: Antedon Bifida which belongs to the class of Crinoids. Echinodermata are composed of 5 classes: The Asterids, the Echinids, the Ophuirids, the Crinoids, and There for the Holothurids which haven't the famous axial organ considered as an ancestral lymphoid organ. It''s an ancestral Echinodermeta. The body Is a concave disc surrounded by ten pinnately divided arms, giving it a fem-like Appearance. Antedon Bifida is a strange animal, with a disc (the main body) which is surrounded by ten arms. The mouth and ambulacral grooves are on the upper surface of the disc. The arms can be up to 10 cm (4 in) long but are usually shorter than this. The undersides of the arms have prominent transverse ridges and some have modifications for feeding and reproduction. The pinnules are jointed, have around 35 portions and bear inconsistant measured cylinder feet in gatherings of three. The arm colour is variable, starting from yellow or pink to deep purple, sometimes spotted or blotched, and therefore the pinnules are usually paler or white. There are around twenty short cirri, joined and masterminded in transverse lines on a focal raised ossicle. These twist under and handle the surface empowering the creature to slither around which it can do with extraordinary quickness. It May be mistaken for the fairly comparable Antedon petasus however that species is commonly bigger with up to 50 cirri, looks neater and dosent have edges on the undersides of its arms. Antedon bifida is primatial found on the shorelines of north-west Europe, the range expansion from the Shetland Islands south to Portugal. It has additionally been accounted for from Algeria, Tunisia, West Africa and Venezuela. Around the British Isles, it is found on northeastern and on western coasts.It occurs from the low tide mark to a depth of about 200 m (650 ft) and occasionally much deeper. It is often related to other crinoids and bryozoans and should dominate its habitat. It moves from place to place, clinging to rocks, seaweed and molluscs with its clawed cirri. It favours areas with strong currents in both sheltered and fairly exposed positions and is often found in gullies. A. Bifida May be a suspension feeder, catching detritus and plankton with its pinnules as they float past. Larger particles are captured and held by the two larger tube feet of each group of three. Small particles adhere to the mucus they extrude and the smaller third foot helps to bundle these together to form a bolus. The food is then transferred to the ambulacral groove where it's moved towards the mouth by the present created by the cilia that line the groove. As well as crawling around, this feather star can swim short distances by flapping its arms. A. Bifida is dioecious, each individual being either male or female. Gametes are produced, mostly between May and July, from the genital canals found at the bottom of some arms. The eggs stick with the surface of the pinnules where fertilisation takes place. The female produces a mucus net and protects the developing embryos by holding her arms together in what is described as brooding behaviour. After about five days, the eggs hatch into free-swimming larvae which soon choose a solid surface and fasten themselves with a brief stalk. Now referred to as pentacrinoid larvae, they need an identical feeding system thereto of the adults. Eventually, they develop clawed cirri and become detached from their stalks, reaching maturity in one to two years. A. Bifida features a symbiotic relationship with the marine worm, Myzostoma cirriferum. The worm larvae are caught by the tube feet of the feather star and treated like food particles. They join inside the ambulacral notches of the pinnules where they experience transformation and develop. They hold on with parapodial hooks and can move about on the host We have performed genomic studies in 2018, concerning this ancestral Echinoderm, as following :Antedon bifida possesses two adhesive systems: the papillae and therefore the hillocks. It comes from Roscoff (France) (see the figure below)

Materials and Methods Creatures:
Antedon Bifida was gotten at the station « Of Biologie Marine of Roscoff » France. Obtention of crinoid mRNA: Digestive coeca were extracted from the A. Bifida body. A. Bifida mRNA

Sequencing:
Sequencing was made on Illumina Next Seq 500 with matched end: 2. 75 bp Transcriptome was gathered from RNA-Seq fastq documents utilizing Trinity v2.1.1 with default boundaries. A BLAST database was made with the gathered transcripts utilizing makeblastdb application from ncbi-blast+ (v2.2.31+). The groupings of transcripts of intrigue were then impacted against this database utilizing blastn application from ncbi-blast+ with boundary word_size 7.

Conclusion:
 From data to data it appears that Echinodermata, especially Antedon Bifida, possess a sophisticated immune system from a point of genomic point of view. Many human immune genes are shared with Echinodermata genes and in particular: Antedon Bifida: It's of special interest in the domain of Comparative Immunology. So, 3 classes of Echinodermata: the Asterids, the Ophuirids and the Crinoids possess the IPA, Fab fragment gene, Fc receptor gene and MHC genes. They present Adaptative Immunity. 2 classes: the Holothurids, the Echinids, have not. We suppose these last ones are less evolved and show we think just an innate.


The art market is rapidly developing along the ways of globalisation, digitalisation, and democratisation. Yet, it has several characteristics that favour market manipulation, such as lack of transparency and conflicts of interest. Despite substantial advancements, it is acknowledged that sector regulation does not address such limitations properly. In the light of US, EU, and national case-law, this article assesses the role that competition law could play in the art sector, also in conjunction with civil liability. It is found that competition law enforcement in the art market has been scarce so far. It provided for effective reaction tools against few, significant market manipulation strategies carried out by key auction houses. On those occasions, competition authorities and undertakings set shared, basic rules of conduct through commitments. Such cases also seem to have inspired recent self- and heteroregulatory initiatives. All in all, competition law seems to play the residual role of a sentinel in the secondary art market. In contrast, whether or not competition law will be enforced in the authentication service sector mainly depends on how private enforcement will develop in the EU and the US.


In recent years, the studies related to the efficiency and practices based on educational inclusion policies have shown controversial results. Besides that, studies are focused on singular experiences, and unable to evaluate in large-scale the impact of these educational policies in schools. The present study aimed to investigate and compare the barriers faced by the students with physical disabilities who are being educated in public schools in three different municipalities. The participants were 24 students with physical disabilities, aged from 7 to 16 years, who were enrolled in regular schools of three different municipalities (A, B, and C). For data collection, a set of interviews for the school context written by Scots, translated and adapted to Brazilian reality researchers was used. The results indicated variations in the number and types of barriers, according to the municipalities, and that in general the policies were well evaluated by these students with physical disabilities, considering the 16 indicators analyzed. However, there were notable differences among the three municipalities, and even in the better evaluated municipality, the qualitative analysis of the students reports allowed to identify and exemplify the remaining barriers. The importance is discussed for the school inclusion policy in making the systems responsible to advance removing of all the barriers identified by the students, and not just intervention in those that are more economically viable.


The crystal structure of a voltage-gated sodium channel provides insight into its voltage-dependent gating, selectivity for sodium, and blockade by drugs. Voltage-gated sodium channels open in response to small changes in the potential difference across the plasma membrane, enabling the influx of positively charged sodium ions, further membrane depolarization, and the propagation of action potentials in excitable cells. Like other voltage-gated ion channels, voltage-gated sodium channels have a tetrameric structure comprising four subunits (or subunit-like domains) around a central pore, with the voltage-sensing domains distinct from the pore-forming regions (see Horn). Payandeh et al. now describe the 2.7 Å resolution crystal structure of NavAb, a voltage-gated sodium channel from the bacterium Arcobacter butzleri, providing insight into various aspects of sodium channel function, including its voltage-dependent gating, selectivity for sodium, and blockade by drugs. NavAb, which the authors crystallized in a lipid-based bicelle system, was captured in a conformation in which the pore was closed but the four voltage-sensing S4 segments were in an outward activated conformation. The selectivity filter was short and water-filled and appears to enable the selective permeation of sodium ions through a mechanism that involves their partial dehydration as they pass through a high-field-strength anionic site provided by a ring of four Glu side chains. Unexpectedly, the NavAb structure revealed four "fenestrations," lateral openings that allowed acyl chains of lipids to penetrate the central cavity of the closed pore. The authors postulate that these fenestrations may provide routes for the entry of small hydrophobic drugs, giving them access to binding sites within the pore of the closed channel. J. Payandeh, T. Scheuer, N. Zheng, W. A. Catterall, The crystal structure of a voltage-gated sodium channel. Nature 475, 353–358 (2011). [PubMed] R. Horn, Peering into the spark of life. Nature 475, 305–306 (2011). [PubMed]


The mathematical development and numerical solution of the finite-difference equations are summarized. The report provides a guide for user application and details the programming structure of DIF3D. Guidelines are included for implementing the DIF3D export package on several large scale computers. Optimized iteration methods for the solution of large-scale fast-reactor finite-difference diffusion theory calculations are presented, along with their theoretical basis. The computational and data management considerations that went into their formulation are discussed. The methods utilized include a variant of the Chebyshev acceleration technique applied to the outer fission source iterations and an optimized block successive over-relaxation method for the within-group iterations. A nodal solution option intended for analysis of LMFBR designs in two- and three-dimensional hexagonal geometries is incorporated in the DIF3D package and is documented in a companion report, ANL-83-1.


The first decades of the new millennium will witness an explosive growth in the number and diversity of networked devices and portals. We foresee high degrees of mobility, heterogeneity, and interactions among computing devices connected to global networks. While previous research in distributed operating systems solved many problems related to resource management, they seldom addressed the problems of heterogeneity and dynamic adaptability. On the other hand, middleware solutions, like CORBA and Java/Jini, solve part of the heterogeneity problem by permitting seamless communication among different platforms. But, they do not address dynamic resource management and adaptability for applications requiring high-performance distributed computing. This paper presents 2K, an integrated operating system architecture that addresses the problems of resource management in heterogeneous networks, dynamic adaptability and configuration of component-based distributed applications.


As part of the the LINK Transport Infrastructure and Operations Programme, research was carried out to enable the use of secondary aggregates and binders in pavement foundations. This report describes laboratory testing of mixtures including secondary aggregates and binders, and a full-scale trial of six sub-bases constructed with these mixtures, carried out in TRL's Pavement Test Facility (PTF). The secondary materials investigated were confined to those of immediate interest to the industrial sponsors and were china clay sand, blastfurnace slags, basic oxygen steel (BOS) slags, pulverised fuel ash, gypsum and cement kiln dust. Initially thirteen mixtures of secondary materials, sometimes combined with conventional aggregates and binders, were selected for testing in the laboratory. The mixtures divided into three families, according to whether the major component was fine, medium or coarse aggregate. The fine aggregate was either pulverised fuel ash or gypsum, the medium was china clay sand and the coarse was either crushed granite or air-cooled blastfurnace slag. Each mixture was tested for compactability, compressive strength, indirect tensile strength and stiffness and durability. Six of the mixtures also underwent further testing, to examine the effect, on the structural properties, of small changes in both moisture content and the proportions of constituents. The effects of curing temperature and the workability time were also investigated. The components of these mixtures were: Pulverised fuel ash, gypsum and quicklime; Pulverised fuel ash, cement kiln dust and granulated blastfurnace slag; China clay sand, cement kiln dust and ordinary Portland cement; China clay sand, pulverised fuel ash, quicklime and sodium carbonate; Crushed granite, pulverised fuel ash, quicklime and gypsum; Air cooled blastfurnace slag, granulated blastfurnace slag and basic oxygen steel (BOS) slag. The mixtures were then laid as sub-base in full scale trials together with control sub-bases of unbound granular, Type 1 and CBM1 material. Each sub-base was laid as a wedge, on pre-shaped subgrade, the thickness varing along the direction of trafficking. The performance of the resulting foundations, under wheel loads representative of construction traffic, was assessed by measuring deformation in the wheelpath, ruts and the surface modulus of the foundation obtained from Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) testing. The results of the laboratory and full-scale trials are presented and demonstrate the potential for the use of secondary aggregates and binders in road pavement foundations. Based on these results, a procedure for the mix and thickness design of sub-bases comprising secondary material is proposed. The benefits of constructing foundations incorporating secondary materials are discussed. (A)


The bacterial flagellum has evolved as one of the most sophisticated self-assembled molecular machines, which confers locomotion and is often associated with virulence of bacterial pathogens. Variation in species-specific features of the flagellum, as well as in flagellar number and placement, results in structurally distinct flagella that appear to be adapted to the specific environments that bacteria encounter. Here, we used cutting-edge imaging techniques to determine high-resolution in situ structures of polar flagella in Pseudomonas aeruginosa and peritrichous flagella in Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium, demonstrating substantial variation between flagella in these organisms. Importantly, we observed novel flagellar subassemblies and provided additional insight into the structural basis of flagellar assembly and loss in both P. aeruginosa and S. Typhimurium. ABSTRACT The bacterial flagellum is a sophisticated self-assembling nanomachine responsible for motility in many bacterial pathogens, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Vibrio spp., and Salmonella enterica. The bacterial flagellum has been studied extensively in the model systems Escherichia coli and Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium, yet the range of variation in flagellar structure and assembly remains incompletely understood. Here, we used cryo-electron tomography and subtomogram averaging to determine in situ structures of polar flagella in P. aeruginosa and peritrichous flagella in S. Typhimurium, revealing notable differences between these two flagellar systems. Furthermore, we observed flagellar outer membrane complexes as well as many incomplete flagellar subassemblies, which provide additional insight into mechanisms underlying flagellar assembly and loss in both P. aeruginosa and S. Typhimurium. IMPORTANCE The bacterial flagellum has evolved as one of the most sophisticated self-assembled molecular machines, which confers locomotion and is often associated with virulence of bacterial pathogens. Variation in species-specific features of the flagellum, as well as in flagellar number and placement, results in structurally distinct flagella that appear to be adapted to the specific environments that bacteria encounter. Here, we used cutting-edge imaging techniques to determine high-resolution in situ structures of polar flagella in Pseudomonas aeruginosa and peritrichous flagella in Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium, demonstrating substantial variation between flagella in these organisms. Importantly, we observed novel flagellar subassemblies and provided additional insight into the structural basis of flagellar assembly and loss in both P. aeruginosa and S. Typhimurium.


Microgel particles display an interesting duality with properties attributed typically both to polymeric and colloidal systems. When adsorbed at a liquid‐liquid interface, this duality becomes particularly apparent as the various phenomena at play are governed by different aspects of these soft and responsive particles. The introduction of a solid, fluorescently labeled, polystyrene core into the microgels allows direct and accurate visualization without the necessity of potential perturbing sample preparation techniques. By combining in‐situ imaging and tensiometry, we determine that composite microgels at a wide variety of oil‐water interfaces anchor strongly, with adsorption energies of approximately 106 kBT, typical for particle adsorption, yet accumulate at the interface spontaneously without any energy barrier, which is more typical for polymers. The high adsorption energies allow the particle to spontaneously form very dense crystalline packings at the liquid interface in which the microgels are significantly compressed with respect to their swollen state in bulk solutions. Finally, we demonstrate the unique nature of these particles by producing highly stable and monodisperse microgel‐stabilized droplets using microfluidics.


Transposition of teeth is a severe problem, which usually affects the cuspid-first premolar area. It is frequently associated with other dental anomalies such as tooth agenesis, peg-shaped maxillary lateral incisors, retained deciduous teeth, malpositions of the adjacent teeth and other teeth malformations. This paper describes the orthodontic management with fixed appliances of a case of bilateral upper cuspidfirst premolar transposition associated with congenital absence of an upper lateral incisor and a lower second premolar and a peg-shaped upper lateral incisor.


Introduction Obesity has become one of the biggest public health problems of the 21st century. Prevalence of obesity in children and adolescents has increased dramatically worldwide over the last 20 years, and this trend is expected to continue. Obesity in childhood is concerning as it predicts obesity in adulthood, a common risk factor for a wide array of chronic diseases and poor health outcomes. Obesity is preventable and a vast but fragmented body of evidence on preventative interventions is now available. This article outlines the protocol for a scoping review of published literature reviews on interventions to prevent obesity in children. The scoping review addresses the broad research question 'What is the evidence on interventions to prevent childhood obesity?'. It aims to give an overview of the various interventions available, understand those which are effective and identify barriers and facilitators to their effectiveness. Methods and analysis The six-staged Arksey and O'Malley methodology framework is used to guide the scoping review process: following the definition of the research questions (stage 1); the eligibility criteria and search strategy are defined (stage 2); the study selection process based on the eligibility criteria identified will follow (stage 3); a framework developed for this review will then inform the extraction and charting of data from the included reviews (stage 4); results will be aggregated and summarised with criteria relevant for health professionals and policy-makers (stage 5); and the optional consultation (stage 6) exercise is not planned. Ethics and dissemination Since the scoping review methodology aims at synthetising information from available publications, this study does not require ethical approval. An article reporting the results of the scoping review will be submitted for publication to a scientific journal, presented at relevant conferences and disseminated as part of future workshops with professionals involved in obesity prevention.


We wanted to find out whether people who suffer from dizziness take longer than people who do not, to perform a motor imagery task that involves implicit whole body rotation. Our prediction was that people in the "dizzy" group would take longer at a left/right neck rotation judgment task but not a left/right hand judgment task, because actually performing the former, but not the latter, would exacerbate their dizziness. Secondly, we predicted that when dizzy participants responded to neck rotation images, responses would be greatest when images were in the upside down orientation; an orientation with greatest dizzy-provoking potential. To test this idea, we used a case-control comparison design. One hundred and eighteen participants who suffered from dizziness and 118 age, gender, arm pain, and neck pain-matched controls took part in the study. Participants undertook two motor imagery tasks; a left/right neck rotation judgment task and a left/right hand judgment task. The tasks were completed using the Recognise program; an online reaction time task program. Images of neck rotation were shown in four different orientations; 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270°. Participants were asked to respond to each "neck" image identifying it as either "right neck rotation" or a "left neck rotation," or for hands, a right or a left hand. Results showed that participants in the "dizzy" group were slower than controls at both tasks (p = 0.015), but this was not related to task (p = 0.498). Similarly, "dizzy" participants were not proportionally worse at images of different orientations (p = 0.878). Our findings suggest impaired performance in dizzy people, an impairment that may be confined to motor imagery or may extend more generally.


[In the context of their recent dispersion, Russian-speaking Jews have become the vast majority of Germany's longstanding Jewry. An entity marked by permeable boundaries, they show commitment to world Jewry, including Israel, but feeble identification with their hosts. While Jewish singularity is understood here more as "belonging" than "believing", Jewish education is viewed as a must., In the context of their recent dispersion, Russian-speaking Jews have become the vast majority of Germany's longstanding Jewry. An entity marked by permeable boundaries, they show commitment to world Jewry, including Israel, but feeble identification with their hosts. While Jewish singularity is understood here more as "belonging" than "believing", Jewish education is viewed as a must.]


Biomineralizing organisms frequently precipitate minerals in small phospholipid bilayer-delineated compartments. We have established an in vitro model system to investigate the effect of confinement in attoliter to femtoliter volumes on the precipitation of calcium carbonate. In particular, we analyze the growth and stabilization of liposome-encapsulated amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC) nanoparticles using a combination of in situ techniques, cryo-transmission electron microscopy (Cryo-TEM), and small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). Herein, we discuss ACC nanoparticle growth rate as a function of liposome size, carbon dioxide flux across the liposome membrane, pH, and osmotic pressure. Based on these experiments, we argue that the stabilization of ACC nanoparticles in liposomes is a consequence of a low nucleation rate (high activation barrier) of crystalline polymorphs of calcium carbonate.


In this thesis we study quantum-like representation and simulation of quantum algorithms by using classical computers.The quantum--like representation algorithm (QLRA) was introduced by A. Khrennikov (1997) to solve the ``inverse Born's rule problem'', i.e. to construct a representation of probabilistic data-- measured in any context of science-- and represent this data by a complex or more general probability amplitude which matches a generalization of Born's rule.The outcome from QLRA matches the formula of total probability with an additional trigonometric, hyperbolic or hyper-trigonometric interference term and this is in fact a generalization of the familiar formula of interference of probabilities. We study representation of statistical data (of any origin) by a probability amplitude in a complex algebra and a Clifford algebra (algebra of hyperbolic numbers). The statistical data is collected from measurements of two dichotomous and trichotomous observables respectively. We see that only special statistical data (satisfying a number of nonlinear constraints) have a quantum--like representation. We also study simulations of quantum computers on classical computers.Although it can not be denied that great progress have been made in quantum technologies, it is clear that there is still a huge gap between the creation of experimental quantum computers and realization of a quantum computer that can be used in applications. Therefore the simulation of quantum computations on classical computers became an important part in the attempt to cover this gap between the theoretical mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics and the realization of quantum computers. Of course, it can not be expected that quantum algorithms would help to solve NP problems for polynomial time on classical computers. However, this is not at all the aim of classical simulation. The second part of this thesis is devoted to adaptation of the Mathematica symbolic language to known quantum algorithms and corresponding simulations on classical computers. Concretely we represent Simon's algorithm, Deutsch-Josza algorithm, Shor's algorithm, Grover's algorithm and quantum error-correcting codes in the Mathematica symbolic language. We see that the same framework can be used for all these algorithms. This framework will contain the characteristic property of the symbolic language representation of quantum computing and it will be a straightforward matter to include future algorithms in this framework.


Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been proposed as an interconnection framework for connecting large number of cores for a System-on-Chip (SoC). Assuming a mesh-based NoC, we investigate application mapping and NoC configuration optimization using a hybrid optimization scheme. Our technique, Hybrid Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (HDPSO), combines Tabu-search, communication volume based core swapping, and swarm intelligence. We employ a Tabu-list to discourage swarm particles to re-visit the explored search space and propose an alternative route towards the intended movement direction. In each iteration of swarm, a sub-swarm containing configuration solutions (sub-particles) searches for optimal configuration for the parent particle (mapping solution). Optimization goals include minimum average communication latency, power, area, credit loop latency, and maximum average link duty factor. The proposed technique is tested for well-known multimedia application core graphs and several large synthetic cores-graphs. It was found that on average our hybrid scheme generates high quality NoC mapping and configuration solutions when compared to some existing stochastic optimization techniques.


'The Father of Canadian Transportation' is a term commonly associated with William Hamilton Merritt. Although he is most known for being one of the driving forces behind the building of the first Welland Canal, he was many things throughout his life; a soldier, merchant, promoter, entrepreneur and politician to name a few. Born on July 3, 1793 at Bedford, Westchester County, N.Y. to Thomas Merritt and Mary Hamilton, Merritt's family relocated to Canada shortly after in 1796. The move came after Merritt's father petitioned John Graves Simcoe for land in Upper Canada after serving under him in the Queen's Rangers during the American Revolution. The family quickly settled into their life at Twelve Mile Creek in St. Catharines. Merritt's father became sheriff of Lincoln County in 1803 while Merritt began his education in mathematics and surveying. After some brief travel and further education Merritt returned to Lincoln County, in 1809 to help farm his father's land and open a general store.

While a farmer and merchant, Merritt turned his attention to military endeavours. A short time after being commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Lincoln militia, the War of 1812 broke out. Fulfilling his duty, Merritt fought in the Battle of Queenston Heights in October of 1812, and numerous small battles until the Battle of Lundy's Lane in July 1814. It was here that Merritt was captured and held in Cheshire, Massachusetts until the war ended. Arriving back in the St. Catharines area upon his release, Merritt returned to being a merchant, as well as becoming a surveyor and mill owner.

Some historians hypothesize that the need to draw water to his mill was how the idea of the Welland Canals was born. Beginning with a plan to connect the Welland River with the Twelve mile creek quickly developed into a connection between the Lakes Erie and Ontario. Its main purpose was to improve the St. Lawrence transportation system and provide a convenient way to transport goods without having to go through the Niagara Falls portage. The plan was set in motion in 1818, but most living in Queenston and Niagara were not happy with it as it would drive business away from them. Along with the opposition came financial and political restraints. Despite these factors Merritt pushed on and the Welland Canal Company was chartered by the Upper Canadian Assembly on January 19, 1824. The first sod was turned on November 30, 1824 almost a year after the initial chartering. Many difficulties arose during the building of the canal including financial, physical, and geographic restrictions. Despite the difficulties two schooners passed through the canal on November 30, 1829. Throughout the next four years continual work was done on the canal as it expended and was modified to better accommodate large ships.

After his canal was underway Merritt took a more active role in the political arena, where he served in various positions throughout Upper Canada. In 1851, Merritt withdrew from the Executive Council for numerous reasons, one of which being that pubic interest had diverted from the canals to railways. Merritt tried his hand at other public works outside transportation and trade. He looked into building a lunatic asylum, worked on behalf of War of 1812 veterans, aided in building Brock's monument, established schools, aided refugee slaves from the U.S. and tried to establish a National Archives among many other feats.

He was described by some as having "policy too liberal – conceptions too vast – views too comprehensive to be comprehensible by all", but he still made a great difference in the society in which he lived. After his great contributions, Merritt died aboard a ship in the Cornwall canal on July 5, 1862.

Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online http://www.biographi.ca/EN/ShowBio.asp?BioId=38719
retrieved October 2006

Today numerous groups carry on the legacy of Merritt and the canals both in the past and present. One such group is the Welland Canals Foundation. They describe themselves as:
". . . a volunteer organization which strives to promote the importance of the present and past Welland Canals, and to preserve their history and heritage. The Foundation began in 1980 and carries on events like William Hamilton Merritt Day. The group has strongly supported the Welland Canals Parkway initiative and numerous other activities".
The Welland Canals Foundation does not work alone. They have help from other local groups such as the St. Catharines Historical Society. The Society's main objective is to increase knowledge and appreciation of the historical aspects of St. Catharines and vicinity, such as the Welland Canals.

http://www.niagara.com/~dmdorey/hssc/dec2000.html - retrieved Oct. 2006
http://www.niagara.com/~dmdorey/hssc/feb2000.html - retrieved Oct. 2006


T-slide linear actuators use gear bearing differential epicyclical transmissions (GBDETs) to directly drive a linear rack, which, in turn, performs the actuation. Conventional systems use a rotary power source in conjunction with a nut and screw to provide linear motion. Non-back-drive properties of GBDETs make the new actuator more direct and simpler. Versions of this approach will serve as a long-stroke, ultra-precision, position actuator for NASA science instruments, and as a rugged, linear actuator for NASA deployment duties. The T slide can operate effectively in the presence of side forces and torques. Versions of the actuator can perform ultra-precision positioning. A basic T-slide actuator is a long-stroke, rack-and-pinion linear actuator that, typically, consists of a T-slide, several idlers, a transmission to drive the slide (powered by an electric motor) and a housing that holds the entire assembly. The actuator is driven by gear action on its top surface, and is guided and constrained by gear-bearing idlers on its other two parallel surfaces. The geometry, implemented with gear-bearing technology, is particularly effective. An electronic motor operating through a GBDET can directly drive the T slide against large loads, as a rack and pinion linear actuator, with no break and no danger of back driving. The actuator drives the slide into position and stops. The slide holes position with power off and no brake, regardless of load. With the T slide configuration, this GBDET has an entire T-gear surface on which to operate. The GB idlers coupling the other two T slide parallel surfaces to their housing counterpart surfaces provide constraints in five degrees-of-freedom and rolling friction in the direction of actuation. Multiple GB idlers provide roller bearing strength sufficient to support efficient, rolling friction movement, even in the presence of large, resisting forces. T-slide actuators can be controlled using the combination of an off-the-shelf, electric servomotor, a motor angle resolution sensor (typically an encoder or resolver), and microprocessor-based intelligent software. In applications requiring precision positioning, it may be necessary to add strain gauges to the T-slide housing. Existing sensory- interactive motion control art will work for T slides. For open-loop positioning, a stepping motor emulation technique can be used.


The amnioserosa (AS) is an epithelium that plays major roles in two crucial morphogenetic processes during Drosophila embryogenesis: Germ Band Retraction (GBR) and Dorsal Closure (DC). The AS is extra-embryonic and as such, it does not contribute to the mature embryo but is eliminated during development by programmed cell death. In this thesis, a comprehensive investigation of the timing and characteristics of the AS death and degeneration is performed. It is demonstrated that AS elimination occurs in two phases: "cell extrusion" during DC, embryonic stages 12 to 14, and "tissue dissociation" following DC, embryonic stages 15 to 16. Ten percent of AS cells are eliminated during phase one while the remaining ninety percent are removed during phase two. It is found that both cell extrusion and tissue dissociation are absent in apoptotic defective backgrounds, as well as in genetic backgrounds associated with increased class I phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) activity, a key regulator of autophagy. It is also found that extrusion is enhanced two-fold in embryos expressing the pro-apoptotic reaper gene product, and that tissue dissociation also accelerates in this background. Interestingly, our observations suggest that the activation of caspase cascade is not complete until AS cells have lost apical contacts with neighboring cells. Shortly after the loss of apical contact, an apoptotic morphology including membrane blebbing, cell fragmentation, and macrophage engulfment is readily observed. Measurements of the rate of DC demonstrate that this process is protracted in backgrounds lacking extrusion, leading to the conclusion that extrusion contributes towards generating adequate AS tension required for normal DC rates. Overall, our data suggest that phase one extrusion and phase two dissociation are manifestations of the same cellular event and that both are caspase dependent. It is also demonstrated that autophagy is a key component of AS death that acts upstream of apoptosis. Strikingly, our results lead to the suggestion that autophagy may function to trigger apoptosis during the programmed elimination of this extra-embryonic tissue.


Management of intraoperative fluid balance and blood conservation in adult cardiac surgery Eleftheriadis S, Stamoulis K, Ieropoulos Ch, Flossos A The reduction of homologous blood transfusions remains an important goal. The actual blood loss and the positive fluid balance during cardiac operations involving CPB result in a fall in the haematocrit and represent major risk factors for blood transfusions. Methods and techniques which lead to a decrease of haemodilution are important when aiming at fewer transfusions in such operations. Considering volume load as modifiable, a number of efforts have been made to reduce the resulting positive fluid balance under CPB. The minimization of the prime volume with or without the use of hyperoncotic solutions is crucial in the attenuation of haemodilution. The beneficial effect of minimized circuits on inflammation and haemodilution and the retrograde autologous priming of the cardiopulmonary bypass circuit have a positive result in a reduce need for allogeneic blood. Autologous blood cell salvage and intraoperative autotransfusion decreases requirements for homologous blood. Experience in these techniques increases their effectiveness and reduces their possible dangers. A multimodal approach and change in physician transfusion practices is deemed necessary for reducing homologous blood transfusion during cardiac operations.


Sarah Moon is a contemporary photographer of international renown. A former model, she has taken award-winning photos for such magazines as "Vogue", "Harpers Bazaar" and "Nova". The images she has created for several brands, among them Chanel, Comme des Garcons and Cacharel, all share her poetic sense of place and personality. This publication, which includes an example of Moon's cinematic work on a DVD, is a personal memoir in pictures, evoking her life, friends and fantasies. Distinguished writers Dominique Edde, Ilona Suschitsky, Magali Jauffret, Alain Fleischer and Robert Delpire provide commentaries on her work in still and cinema photography, drawing out her thoughts on colour, contemporaries, influences and, in her own words, her unique approach to her subject. This is an unparalleled celebration of the vision of a gifted and individual photographer.


AIM To explore and explain the causal (mechanisms) relationships between nurse's actions and behaviours in Facebook groups. BACKGROUND Online Social Networks such as Facebook have rapidly diffused through the nursing profession with an estimated 60% using social media every day. There have been a range of concerns linked to unprofessional behaviours on Facebook despite professional guidance being in place. However, there is little evidence that explores the causal and influencing factors that lead to nursing behaviour and actions on Facebook. METHOD Bhaskarian critical realist ethnography (CRE) employing structured observation and reflective field notes of publicly accessible, groups and profiles on Facebook explicitly relevant to the nursing profession. For ethical approval reasons, these groups and pages will remain anonymous.
Observations were conducted over a 6 month period during 2015-2016 by applying a selective case sampling approach to post. Observations occurred at two time points during the 6 month period by a single researcher. This allowed for a range of 'typical' and more extreme behaviours to be observed. CRITICAL REALISM & DATA ANALYSIS Causal mechanisms are a 'reality' that cannot be directly observed (this is not the same as cause-effect; reality is much more complex). However, the components and outcomes of this reality can be observed and measured. Components for coding data were: morphostatic and morphogenic structures, entities, tendencies, events, behaviours and outcomes. These were then 'mapped' to explain how they interacted. Theories based on past research and other theoretical models were established and the maps were used to test which of these best explained nurses' actions and behaviours in the Facebook environment. RESULTS Components from the data were mapped (e.g. figure.1). This identified that despite having awareness of being professional and being in the domain of the professional group with other nurses a shift from professional-unprofessional seemed to occur. Indicating that awareness (self-efficacy) does not always result in professional behaviours and actions. For example, swearing would be deemed to be unprofessional but heightened emotions in response to politicians and policy changes that affect nursing created resulted in offensive language being 'accepted' within the group. Figure.2 provides an example framework illustrating how personal-professional-social values can create conflict and a shift in one may then affect the behaviours of an individual or group in the online environment. CONCLUSION Personal-professional-social values overlap in the Facebook environment and triggers in one domain may result in unprofessional or unacceptable behaviours in another. Further research needs to examine the nature of these and methods by which awareness of professionalism translates into action (i.e. the areas where conflicting values may occur).


Recently, deep learning methods have achieved good results in dependency parsing for many natural languages. In this paper, we investigate the use of bidirectional long short-term memory network models for both transition-based and graph-based dependency parsing for the Vietnamese language. We also reportour contribution in building a Vietnamese dependency treebank whose tagset conforms to the Universal Dependency schema. Various experiments demonstrate the efficiency of this method, which achieves the best parsing accuracy in comparison to other existing approaches on the same corpus, with unlabeled attachment score of 84.45% or labeled attachment scoreof 78.56%.


The expansion project of the ''Port de la Nautique'' and the creation of adjacent new beaches on the ''Lac Leman'' in Geneva is currently under survey. In the conceptual and study phase, numerical- and physicalscaled models have been exploited at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). The objectives are to analyze the courantology and the wave's field inside the protected zone of the harbor and their influence on the stability of the new beaches. The numerical modeling is driven by two models at different scales. The large scale model provides the boundary conditions to the small one which is used to estimate the circulation of water in the new harbor and to predict the erosion and deposition processes inside the harbor and along the beaches. The physical model is built using distorted scale factors inside an experimental wave tank that covers the same area as the small numerical model. It aims to optimize the project and to confirm the numerical results concerning notably the wave heights inside the harbor and the sediment transportation processes all along the beaches. The results obtained by the complicity of the numerical and physical simulations helped to converge toward an optimal design locations, orientations, and types of the protective dikes of the port as well as the geometric configuration and number of groins and the choice of the suitable backfill grain size for the new beaches.


This paper argues that the progression of Mark Rotho's painting, from his early, surrealist work to his more famous and more abstract Classical paintings, can be read as following the same structure as outlined by Pseudo-Dionysius' apophatic theology.  In his Divine Names and Mystical Theology , Pseudo-Dionysius describes a process whereby one speaks, and fails to speak, the divine.  He describes a process that begins in sensory experience and ends up, after ascending by way of negation, in an ";unknowing"; beyond the intellect, a ";darkness beyond light.";  This ascension is motivated by what he describes as ";yearning"; and ";beauty.";  I argue that both Rothko and Pseudo-Dionysius begin their accounts of beauty in corporeality and recognition only to, through negation, move beyond it.  That is, I read Rothko's paintings' progress from specifically religious subject matter into almost pure monochromatic abstraction to mirror the progression of the mystic ascending towards God; Rothko, like Pseudo-Dionysius, negates  the form of the body, the form of religious imagery, in his attempts to give the viewers of his painting an experience of transcendence.


We have reported a new class of artificial α-helices in which a pre-organized α-turn nucleates the helical conformation [R. N. Chapman, G. Dimartino, and P. S. Arora, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2004, 126, 12252 and D. Wang, K. Chen, J. L. Kulp, III, and P. S. Arora, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2006, 128, 9248]. This manuscript describes the effect of the core nucleation template on the overall helicity of the peptides and demonstrates that the macrocycle which most closely mimics the 13-membered hydrogen-bonded α-turn in canonical α-helices also affords the most stable artificial α-helix. We also investigate the stability of these synthetic helices through classical helix–coil parameters and find that the denaturation behavior of HBS α-helices agrees with the theoretical properties of a peptide with a well-defined and stable helix nucleus.


In the field of Teacher Education, the management of supervisory practices is often viewed as a
critical role of a supervisor in internship programmes such as the Teaching Practicum. Therefore,
the aim ofthis study was to investigate the management ofsupervisory practices as perceived by
TESL trainee teachers undergoing a three month Teaching Practicum. This study explored
aspects such as the trainee teachers' perceptions towards the overall process of supervision, the
roles of supervisor, their relationship between supervisees and supervisors and contribution of
supervision, The study was conducted at the Faculty uf Education in Ui'TM Shah Alam - a
public university located in the state of Selangor in Malaysia. The study involved the total
population of Semester Seven and Semester Eight TESL students who had undergone their threemonth
teaching practicum. Therefore a total of fifty eight (58) trainee teachers were involved in
this study. The instruments used to collect data included a questionnaire and semi structured
interviews. The interviews were conducted with six trainee teachers to triangulate the results
obtained from the questionnaire . The findings in this study revealed though positive responses
were obtained from the qualitative data, the qualitative data presented rather contradictory
findings on a number of aspects. The quantitative findings of the study revealed that a majority
of the respondents viewed the supervision process positively as it helped improve their teaching
skills and strategies that enhanced their teaching and learning process. They also felt that they
had a good relationship with their supervisors. They indicated that their supervisors motivated
them and gave them the confidence needed to become effective teachers. On the other hand,
qualitative data obtained from interview sessions indicated that some supervisors were not
committed in helping students enhance their skills and knowledge during the practicum and a
few supervisors were viewed as incompetent, lacking in field experience and demotivating.
These findings imply that the management ofsupervisory practices leave much to be desired and
hence the relevant authorities concerned need to look into the role and commitment of
supervisors and where possible only competent and experienced supervisors be placed to guide
young teacher trainees. This study also recommends that supervisors be provided with
continuous training for professional development. Finally, if possible further similar research be
conducted involving'a larger population sample.


We propose that words can be an object of systematic study in the field of economics and outline an approach to the study of word choice in behavioral economics. We consider words as strategic instruments of influence and review how they can impact behaviors in several subtle and distinctive ways, namely through their capacity to elicit affect, support identity and social belonging, evoke linguistic associations, and generate bias arising from variations in fluency. We provide a variety of examples to illustrate the behavioral impacts of words through these mechanisms and provide practical recommendations regarding how words can be harnessed by policymakers to reach socially desirable goals through a consideration of how word‐related behavioral anomalies shape incentives.


This methodological article serves as an introduction to this special issue, which is meant to encourage more and better interaction between empirical studies and computer modeling with regard to the study of language evolution. We argue that research into the field of language evolution is so complex that computer modeling forms an essential tool to generate predictions based on some, possibly descriptive, theory in order to falsify that theory. Falsification should be carried out by comparing the generated predictions with empirical data. In order to improve the quality of the predictions and thus the reliability of the falsification process, we stress the importance of initializing the computer model with empirical data. The papers in this special issue provide some concrete examples and new proposals of applying the suggested methodology.


Physical phenomena in the real world are often described by energy-based modeling theories, such as Hamiltonian mechanics or the Landau theory, which yield various physical laws. Recent developments in neural networks have enabled the mimicking of the energy conservation law by learning the underlying continuous-time differential equations. However, this may not be possible in discrete time, which is often the case in practical learning and computation. Moreover, other physical laws have been overlooked in the previous neural network models. In this study, we propose a deep energy-based physical model that admits a specific differential geometric structure. From this structure, the conservation or dissipation law of energy and the mass conservation law follow naturally. To ensure the energetic behavior in discrete time, we also propose an automatic discrete differential algorithm that enables neural networks to employ the discrete gradient method.


Although shared memory programming models show good programmability compared to message passing programming models, their implementation by page-based software distributed shared memory systems usually suffers from high memory consistency costs. The major part of these costs is inter-node data transfer for keeping virtual shared memory consistent. A good prefetch strategy can reduce this cost. We develop two prefetch techniques, TReP and HReP, which are based on the execution history of each parallel region. These techniques are evaluated using offline simulations with the NAS Parallel Benchmarks and the LINPACK benchmark. On average, TReP achieves an efficiency (ratio of pages prefetched that were subsequently accessed) of 96% and a coverage (ratio of access faults avoided by prefetches) of 65%. HReP achieves an efficiency of 91% but has a coverage of 79%. Treating the cost of an incorrectly prefetched page to be equivalent to that of a miss, these techniques have an effective page miss rate of 63% and 71% respectively. Additionally, these two techniques are compared with two well-known software distributed shared memory (sDSM) prefetch techniques, Adaptive++ and TODFCM. TReP effectively reduces page miss rate by 53% and 34% more, and HReP effectively reduces page miss rate by 62% and 43% more, compared to Adaptive++ and TODFCM respectively. As for Adaptive++, these techniques also permit bulk prefetching for pages predicted using temporal locality, amortizing network communication costs and permitting bandwidth improvement from multi-rail network interfaces.


In Hindi-speaking northeastern India, mothers whose daughters are afflicted with a psychosomatic illness referred to locally as "the teeth have clenched" employ standard tropes pertaining to Indian femininity to negotiate their daughters' agency against the backdrop of new aspirations. An inquiry into two cases I encountered during fieldwork in Varanasi psychiatric clinics in 2001–04 demonstrates how girls' symptomatic bodies mediated social concerns pertaining to the challenges that women's education and work in public spaces present to non-elite middle-class domestic orders. While these illnesses may have been born of previous traumas or household conflicts, and sometimes were acknowledged as such, mothers' and daughters' own concerns about the illnesses focused on what they indicated about the daughters' potential for social and academic success. In particular, mothers regarded their daughters as possessing either too much or too little "power" or "strength," and these attributions attached to their anxieties and hopes for their daughters' futures. In the drama of clenched teeth, disordered bodies, disruptive behavior, and possible futures were folded into the same metaphors of agency.


Voting on multiple related issues is an important and difficult problem. The key difficulty is that the number of alternatives is exponential in the number of issues, and hence it is infeasible for the agents to rank all the alternatives. A simple approach is to vote on the issues one at a time, in sequence; however, a drawback is that the outcome may depend on the order in which the issues are voted upon and decided, which gives the chairperson some control over the outcome of the election because she can strategically determine the order. While this is undeniably a negative feature of sequential voting, in this paper we temper this judgment by showing that the chairperson's control problem is, in most cases, computationally hard.


Throughout the world, baby selling is formally prohibited. And throughout the world babies are bought and sold each day. As demonstrated in this Essay, the legal baby trade is a global market in which prospective parents pay, scores of intermediaries profit, and the demand for children is clearly differentiated by age, race, special needs, and other consumer preferences, with prices ranging from zero to over one hundred thousand dollars. Yet legal regimes and policymakers around the world pretend that the baby market does not exist, most notably through prohibitions against baby selling - typically defined as a prohibition against the relinquishment of parental rights in exchange for compensation. This Essay explores the costs of societal pretense that legal baby markets do not exist. Those costs include scarcity, foregone opportunities to address market failures, an inability to develop regulations designed to further particular public policies unlikely to be advanced solely through the goal of profit-maximization, and the promotion of rent-seeking. This Essay focuses specifically on the rent-seeking problem, arguing that, although frequently defended by those who contend that commercial markets in parental rights commodify human beings, compromise individual dignity, or jeopardize fundamental values, bans against baby selling (at least as currently written and enforced) serve little purpose other than enabling anti-competitive behavior by the most economically and politically powerful baby market participants.


We propose a beamforming scheme for ultrasound imaging leading to the generation of two sets of images, one with oscillations only in the axial direction and one with oscillations only in the lateral direction. Applied to tissue elasticity imaging, this leads to the development of a specific displacement estimation technique that is capable of accurate estimation of two components of the displacement. The mean standard deviation for the axial displacement estimates is 0.0219 times the wavelength of the axial oscillations, and for the lateral estimates, it is equal to 0.0164 times the wavelength of the lateral oscillations. The method is presented and its feasibility is clearly established by a simulation work.


Historians have long viewed the massive reshaping of the American landscape during the New Deal era as unprecedented. This book uncovers the early twentieth-century history rich with precedents for the New Deal in forest, park, and agricultural policy. Sara M. Gregg explores the redevelopment of the Appalachian Mountains from the 1910s through the 1930s, finding in this region a changing paradigm of land use planning that laid the groundwork for the national New Deal. Through an intensive analysis of federal planning in Virginia and Vermont, Gregg contextualizes the expansion of the federal government through land use planning and highlights the deep intellectual roots of federal conservation policy.


The ability of monovalent IgG and F(ab')2 antivenoms to neutralize lethality, phospholipase A2, and coagulant activities induced by Daboia siamensis venom was studied. Both antivenoms were produced from the same batch of hyperimmune horse plasma and were adjusted to the same potency against the lethal effect of D. siamensis venom in experiments involving preincubation of venom and antivenom. Intact neutralization experiments involving independent injection of venom and antivenoms showed that the F(ab')2 antivenom was slightly more effective. Significant differences in favour of F(ab')2 antivenom were observed with respect to neutralization of phospholipase A2 and coagulant activities. Both IgG and F(ab')2 antivenoms were able to activate human complement in vitro. IgG antivenom had a significantly higher anticomplementary activity than F(ab')2 antivenom.


The main concern of this thesis is the role of the architect in the design and production of public housing. The argument presented here is that the method of procurement of architectural skills affects the architectural quality of the product, and that architectural design is driven by more than professional 'idealism'. The case studies that form the basis for the discussion are two middle income housing projects built by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). One was designed in-house by DDA architects and the second by a private architect. Working within similar constraints of economy, bureaucratic requirements and time, the results produced were very different. On the basis of the difference in architectural quality, I analyse the methods of procurement of architectural skills, for both the private and the in-house architect. The issues that were raised by the case studies as being the part of the process of procurement were categorized into four broad areas: (i) The DDA and its administration of architectural skills; (ii) the nature of housing as the product; (iii) the nature of the professional establishments; and (iv) the architects , themselves as professionals. The process of procuring architectural skills had implications on the architect's performance and his response to design issues. Thus, the qualities of livability, efficiency of land use and aesthetic design that were present in one project and not in the other were linked to the fragmentation of work in the professional system, the manner in which compensation for work was made, the nature of the project itself, in terms of visibility. They also had to do with the staffing of the architectural offices and the research carried out by them. Rather than make normative judgments about the quality of the projects, this thesis identifies the constraints under which decisions were made by the architects in both cases and highlights the issues that lay behind them. Thesis Supervisor: John deMonchaux Title: Dean, School of Architecture and Planning


1. In order to confirm and investigate the hypotensive effect of a high potassium intake we compared mean arterial pressure (MAP), water and electrolyte balance, plasma and urinary noradrenaline (NA), plasma renin activity (PRA) and plasma aldosterone concentration (PAC) in 20 inpatients with mild or moderate essential hypertension on a control diet (Na: 260, K: 75 mmol/day), and after high (K: 175 mmol/day) and low potassium diets (K: 25 mmol/day). 2. After potassium loading, urinary volume (UV) and urinary excretion of sodium ( U Na V ) and of potassium ( U K V ) were elevated, and MAP, body weight, plasma volume (PV), extracellular fluid volume (ECFV) and total exchangeable sodium (Na e ) were reduced significantly. 3. After potassium loading, PRA, PAC, plasma and urinary NA increased and the pressor response to infused noradrenaline and angiotensin II decreased significantly. 4. The reduction of MAP after potassium loading correlated positively with PV and ECFV during the control period. In addition, significant correlations were found between ΔUV and Δ U Na V , —ΔPV and Δ U / Na V , —ΔPV and Δ plasma NA, and Δ plasma NA and Δ PRA. 5. Patients with low PRA had high PV, ECFV and Na e during the control period, and showed greater reductions of MAP, PV, ECFV and Na e after potassium loading. 6. After potassium restriction, U Na V , PRA and urinary NA decreased and PV increased, and MAP did not change significantly. 7. These results suggest that the hypotensive effect of high potassium intake may be caused by reduction of body fluid volume via augmentation of Na excretion.


Presented here for the first time is a compendium of one hundred hieroglyphs that are also building blocks of ancient Maya painting and sculpture. Organized thematically, the symbols touch on many facets of the Maya world, from the natural environment animals, plants, the heavens to the metaphysical landscape of gods, myths and rituals. Using over five hundred line drawings and photographs, Andrea Stone and Marc Zender show how to identify these signs, understand their meaning, and appreciate the novel ways they appear in art. In addition to providing a clear and accessible introduction to Maya art, linguistics and writing, the authors also offer many new and exciting interpretations. Lavishly illustrated, fully cross-referenced and indexed, this remarkable and innovative guide will prove an invaluable tool for those wishing to see Maya art, perhaps for the first time, through the eyes of ancient scribes and artists.


The German government and especially Wolfgang Schaeuble were heavily criticized for the harsh policy against Greece not only because of damaging Greece but also because of damaging German reputation. The article argues that they just follow German interests: Germany is economically and politically the big winner of the crisis. The German export economy is fueled by the weak Euro and the German state saves since 2010 more than 100 Billion by extremely low interest rates for German bonds. The Eurozone is formed according to the German austerity model and will be used by German capital and export-oriented factions of the European capital as a strong basis in global competition. The conflict with Greece shows that any economically weak member of the Euro-zone has no chance against the coalition between Germany and the ECB, they have to submit. Who wants to enter Euro-zone should have this in mind.


Abstract In recent years, there has been more and more interaction and engagement between "faith-based" organizations (FBOs) and secular humanitarian organizations. While humanitarian organizations operate under the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence, it is often believed that faith-based organizations cannot be neutral or impartial due to their religious identity and agenda. Drawing on the research of Islamic Relief Worldwide, this article looks critically at connections that can be drawn between Islamic religious principles and those upheld as key to secular humanitarian action. The article outlines the Islamic maqasid al-Shari'ah framework as an example of how religious-based approaches can provide a basis for humanitarian action that is both relevant to Islamic communities and complementary to humanitarian principles.