[About the book]

The Handbook of Design in Educational Technology provides up-to-date, comprehensive summaries and syntheses of recent research pertinent to the design of information and communication technologies to support learning. Readers can turn to this handbook for expert advice about each stage in the process of designing systems for use in educational settings; from theoretical foundations to the challenges of implementation, the process of evaluating the impact of the design and the manner in which it might be further developed and disseminated


The Constitution premises Congress's copyright power on promoting "the Progress of Science." The word Science therefore seems to define the scope of copyrightable subject matter. Modern courts and commentators have subscribed to an originalist view of Science, teaching that Science meant general knowledge at the time of the Framing. Under this interpretation, all subject matter may be copyrighted because expression about any subject increases society's store of general knowledge. Science, however, did not originally mean general knowledge. In this Article, I examine evidence surrounding the Copyright Clause and conclude that at the Framing of the Constitution, Science meant a system of knowledge that comprises distinct branches of study. This historically accurate meaning casts doubt on whether a distinct group of expression may be copyrighted — namely, expression that the First Amendment does not protect. I argue that the original meaning of Science cannot support a constitutional copyright of unprotected speech.


Inhibition of a soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) enzyme leads to high levels of epoxyeicosatrienoic acids which are involved in the regulation of blood pressure and vascular inflammation. The most potent sEH inhibitors reported in the literature are urea-based ones which often have poor bioavailability. In this study, a series of amide derivatives with a dihydropyrimidinone ring as a novel secondary pharmacophore against the sEH enzyme were designed, synthesized and biologically evaluated. Most of the synthesized compounds have considerable in vitro sEH inhibitory activity in comparison with 12-(3-adamantan-1-yl-ureido)-dodecanoic acid (AUDA), a potent urea-based sEH inhibitor. The docking results revealed that the designed compounds fit in the active site pocket properly and have suitable distances for effective hydrogen binding from three important amino acids, e.g. Tyr383, Tyr466 and Asp335. In agreement with the docking studies, most of the synthesized compounds have considerable in vitro sEH inhibitory activity in comparison with AUDA. Moreover, ADME properties of the compounds were analyzed in silico, and the results showed good predictions.


This paper describes CMEIAS Quadrat Maker, a new digital computing tool designed to alleviate the nontrivial problem of optimizing the grid-lattice dimensions and automating the production of size-optimized quadrat images for plot-based spatial pattern analysis in landscape ecology. The program is written for 32-bit and 64-bit Window's operating systems and handles both 8-bit grayscale and 24-bit color input images. Following a brief user interaction, the software application transforms a copy of the input landscape image into an annotated, color index image with optimized grid overlay and column-row labeling of individual quadrats, cuts a copy of the landscape image into quadrats defined by the optimized grid raster, and then saves each individual quadrat image with a file name indicating its unique location within the landscape domain, now ready for stack building and automated image analysis. Version 1.0 of this computing technology is implemented into a software package containing the executable file, user manual and tutorial images that will be freely available at http://cme.msu.edu/cmeias/. This new computing technology will facilitate quadrat-based analyses of how spatial patterns vary with the scale at which they are measured, and will also strengthen microscopy-based approaches for understanding the spatial ecology of microbial biofilm communities.


In a letter that she wrote to her childhood governess and religious mentor Maria Lewis in 1839, George Eliot describes a pervading and distressful mental anxiety – one that would come to greatly influence both the constitution and development of her fiction. Still within the throes of her evangelical ardor, Eliot laments in this letter that the "disjointed specimens" of history, poetry, science, and philosophy have become "all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast thickening every day accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations" (Eliot, Letters 1: 29). The letter illustrates more the disjointed nature of Eliot's own mind than the disjointed nature of the things occupying it. Apparently under the weight of some religious guilt, she retracts this complaint and apologizes for it; but, then she immediately contradicts her retraction and defends her struggle by expanding her own individual failure into the larger realm of universal human failure: How deplorably and unaccountably evanescent are our frames of mind, as various as the forms and hues of the summer clouds. A single word is sometimes enough to give an entirely new mould to our thoughts; at least I find myself so constituted, and therefore to me it is pre-eminently important to be anchored within the veil, so that outward things may only act as winds to agitating sails, and be unable to send me adrift. (Letters 1: 30) Possibly fearing a rebuke from Lewis, Eliot finds it necessary to call upon the evanescence of "our frames of mind" to characterize her early struggle with the painful inconsistency of her own consciousness. On the one hand, Eliot feels a sense of evangelical guilt that her consciousness can be so influenced by "a single word" that her household duties and her spiritual life suffer. She equates this aspect of her mind to a deplorable, moral failing that threatens to set her adrift from her religious foundation. But on the other hand, Eliot contradicts this sense of failure with her resentment at the household anxieties and everyday vexations that are able to smother and petrify the extraordinary workings of her mind. To prevent herself from "saying anything still more discreditable to my head and heart," she imagines herself as a child "wand'ring far alone, / That none might rouse me from my waking dream" (Letters 1: 30). But Eliot awakes from this dream to the disheartening revelation of "life's dull path and earth's deceitful hope" (Letters 1: 30). For a time, this painful deceit compels her to remain solidly within the confines of her duty and faith, but it simultaneously begins to unravel the binding that so ardently holds her.


Merging haloes with similar masses (i.e. major mergers) pose significant challenges for halo finders. We compare five halo-finding algorithms' (ahf, hbt, rockstar, subfind, and velociraptor) recovery of halo properties for both isolated and cosmological major mergers. We find that halo positions and velocities are often robust, but mass biases exist for every technique. The algorithms also show strong disagreement in the prevalence and duration of major mergers, especially at high redshifts (z > 1). This raises significant uncertainties for theoretical models that require major mergers for, e.g. galaxy morphology changes, size changes, or black hole growth, as well as for finding Bullet Cluster analogues. All finders not using temporal information also show host halo and subhalo relationship swaps over successive timesteps, requiring careful merger tree construction to avoid problematic mass accretion histories. We suggest that future algorithms should combine phase-space and temporal information to avoid the issues presented.


The experiences of Latin American countries are not fully incorporated into current debates concerning the age of mass migration, even though 13 million Europeans migrated to the region between 1870 and 1930. This survey draws together different aspects of the Latin America immigration experience. Its main objective is to rethink the role of European migration to the region, addressing several major questions in the economics of migration: whether immigrants were positively selected from their sending countries, how immigrants assimilated into the host economies, the role of immigration policies, and the long‐run effects of immigration. Immigrants came from the economically backward areas of southern and eastern Europe, yet their adjustment to the host labour markets in Latin America seems to have been successful. The possibility of rapid social upgrading made Latin America attractive for European immigrants. Migrants were positively selected from origin according to literacy. The most revealing aspect of new research is showing the positive long‐run effects that European immigrants had in Latin American countries. The political economy of immigration policies deserves new research, particularly for Brazil and Cuba. The case of Argentina shows a more complex scenario than the classic representation of landowners constantly supporting an open‐door policy.


**Winner, Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title 2015** This Japanese design book presents the arts, aesthetics and culture of Japan with over 160 stunning color photos and extensive historical and cultural commentary. The Japanese sensibility often possesses an intuitive, emotional appeal, whether it's a silk kimono, a carefully raked garden path, an architectural marvel, a teapot, or a contemporary work of art. This allure has come to permeate the entire culture of Japan-it is manifest in the most mundane utensil and snack food packaging, as well as in Japanese architecture and fine art. In Japanese Design, Asian art expert and author Patricia J. Graham explains how Japanese aesthetics based on fine craftsmanship and simplicity developed. Her unusual, full-color presentation reveals this design aesthetic in an absorbing way. Focusing on ten elements of Japanese design, Graham explores how visual qualities, the cultural parameters and the Japanese religious traditions of Buddhism and Shinto have impacted the appearance of its arts. Japanese Design is a handbook for the millions of us who have felt the special allure of Japanese art, culture and crafts. Art and design fans and professionals have been clamoring for this-a book that fills the need for an intelligent, culture-rich overview of what Japanese design is and means. Topics explored in Japanese Design include: The Aesthetics of Japanese Design The Cultural Parameters of Japanese Design Early Promoters of "Artistic Japan" 1830s-1950s


Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed safety measures in every industry, including the construction industry Thus, the construction companies have instituted safety measures at the construction sites to curve the disease's spread among the workforce This paper aims to examine the challenges encountered by construction firms in implementing COVID-19 safety measures at construction sites Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative research approach was adopted for this study using open-ended interview questions to solicit data from 19 construction professionals currently working on a construction project in South Africa Content analysis with the assistance of an Excel spreadsheet was used to analyse the data collected Findings: The findings indicate that there are numerous challenges such as ignorance of COVID-19, the supply of poor personal protective equipment (PPEs) by contractors, lack of compliance, sanitising construction materials, difficulty in sharing tools and equipment, public transport usage by workers, superstition (COVID-19 is for a particular group of people), complying with social distancing rules, among others in the implementation of the COVID-19 safety measure at the construction site to curb the spread of the disease among the workers These challenges have, therefore, hampered their effort to strictly adhere to the safety measures in accordance with the COVID-19 safety protocol at the project sites currently under construction Research limitations/implications: The interviewees were construction professionals working in the South African construction industry during the COVID-19 period Practical implications: The implication is that, due to the challenges faced in implementing the COVID-19 safety measures, workers on the construction site are not adequately protected from contracting COVID-19 The workers may thus contract the disease at the project sites and transmit it to their families and vice versa, which may have further implications on the spread of the disease within the communities and society Originality/value: The study has identified implementation challenges of the COVID-19 safety measures at construction sites of which the construction stakeholders must institute measures to overcome since COVID-19 has become part of our daily life The study also recommends some preventive measures to the owners of construction companies to help overcome or minimise these COVID-19 safety implementation hurdles to minimise the spread of the disease among the construction site workers © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited


Interactions between aboveground vertebrate herbivores and subterranean yellow meadow ants (Lasius flavus) can drive plant community patterns in grassland ecosystems. Here, we study the relative importance of the presence of ants (L. flavus) and ant mounds under different simulated grazing regimes for biomass production and species composition in plant communities. We set up a greenhouse experiment using intact soil cores with their associated vegetation. We found that plant biomass production in the short term was affected by an interaction between simulated grazing (clipping) and ant mound presence. Clipping homogenized production on and off mounds, while in unclipped situations production was higher off than on mounds. During the experiment, these differences in unclipped situations disappeared, because production on unclipped mounds increased. Plant species richness was on average higher in clipped treatments and patterns did not change significantly over the experimental period. Plant community composition was mainly affected by clipping, which increased the cover of grazing-tolerant plant species. The actual presence of yellow meadow ants did not affect plant community composition and production. We conclude that the interaction between ant mounds and clipping determined plant community composition and biomass production, while the actual presence of ants themselves was not important. Moreover, clipping can overrule effects of ant mounds on biomass production. Only shortly after the cessation of clipping biomass production was affected by ant mound presence, suggesting that only under low intensity clipping ant mounds may become important determining plant production. Therefore, under low intensity grazing ant mounds may drive the formation of small-scale plant patches.


The importance of studying economic growth cannot be overstated. Though it does not guarantee a better standard of living, economic growth offers unrivalled potential to reduce poverty in developing countries and improve the fortunes of those lucky enough to be bom in the developed world. The aim of this thesis is to explore the relationship between three 'open-economy' factors that are believed to strongly influence economic growth: regional integration agreements (RIAs), foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade. We employ the well-known gravity model as the empirical framework in which to analyse the interplay between these three factors. We also conduct a case study analysis of Mexico; this allows us to further explore some of our empirical findings in the context of a developing country that has been heavily influenced by trade, investment, and membership of a regional integration agreement. In addition to evidence that integration agreements stimulate intra-regional investment and trade, our empirical analysis is clear that there are also significant and varied effects on non-member countries. Such effects should not be overlooked by policymakers when assessing the merits of a particular RIA. We also report results which indicate that outward FDI and exports are complements, not substitutes. This suggests that fears that outward investment leads to a loss of employment at home are overblown. There is evidence, however, that the strength of the complementary relationship depends on the characteristics of the countries involved. The case study ably demonstrates the significant influence that integration agreements can have on countries and economies. One of the key impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was simply its ability to legitimise and deepen the liberalisation policies that Mexico had begun to implement some years before. It is also evident, however, that NAFTA has induced serious spatial effects on the Mexican economy. Such effects may have contributed to income inequality and again highlight that policymakers must be aware that integration agreements can have profound, unintended effects on both member and non-member countries.


Since the connection to the Internet has becoming a fundamental issue to the development of the society more and more improvements and new access technologies have appeared. Guifi.net proposes a free, neutral and open community wireless network with the principal aim to arrive to users that doesn't have many other options. The optimization of the resources of the network becomes more important for this kind of connections. This study pretends to analyze and learn the behavior of the principal Internet access figure of this network, the proxies. This network element allows to the final user that is properly registered to access Internet with an authentication. Proxies in Guifi.net are administrated by organizations and public institutions and they are commonly federated what means that all the users registered in a proxy can access to another federated proxy with the same authentication. So, final users have several options to connect. To proceed with the performance analysis of these network elements two differentiated stretches have been defined, the step between the final client and the proxy and the step between the proxy and the web server where the content is. To analyze the first stretch, ping tool has been used while to analyze the second step wget tool has been selected. Ping is based in the IP layer meanwhile wget works in the TCP layer so some readjustment have to be done to compare the results obtained. In this sense, a calibration of the ping method with a TCP based tool as iperf has been applied, doing the test to some iperf servers available in the network. The required figures to evaluate the performance are latency, throughput, packet loss, intermediate nodes between client and proxy and distance. Tests reveal that not all the federated proxies are available to a single user due to the singular topology of the network. Also reveal that there is a direct connection between the number of intermediate nodes and the latency, throughput and packet loss performance, meanwhile distance doesn't follows any relation. So, it is possible to conclude that for these tests the proper criterion for the proxy election is the number of intermediate nodes instead the distance which is the commonly used.


Legal ethics complaints have been filed against several of the high-ranking lawyers in the Trump Administration. While individual complaints have caught the public eye, the collective movement to use legal ethics to resist Trumpism has escaped attention. This is not altogether surprising: legal ethics rules have not historically been an attractive tool for political change. Perhaps, desperate times have called for desperate measures.
This "Ethics Resistance" will face significant opposing forces. Legal ethics complaints seldom result in punishment. Further, the agencies that are asked to investigate these high-profile and controversial matters will not be eager to leave their comfort zone; they are accustomed to complaints from clients who are unhappy with their lawyers over straightforward matters like unreturned phone calls or high fees. There will also be loud dissenting voices from those who will see the movement as the weaponization of a tool designed for the modest task of lawyer self-governance. Finally, the complaints will have to navigate between powerful constitutional protections of lawyer speech and federal power.
But we should not dismiss this movement simply because it is unusual or challenging. The wisdom of the Ethics Resistance can only be judged after we understand its distinctive qualities and consider how they further or hinder our legal, institutional, and pragmatic interests.
In this Article, I undertake that analysis and conclude that the movement has the capacity to be legally permissible, institutionally sound, and prudent. I further offer a list of best practices for future complaints.


Abstract Vitamin E (VitE) additives are important in treating osteoarthritis inclusive cartilage regeneration due to their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. The present research study focuses on the ability of biological antioxidant VitE (alpha-tocopherol isoform) to reduce or minimize oxidative degradation of soft implantable polyurethane (PU) elastomers after extended periods of time (5 months) in vitro. The effect of the oxidation storage media on the morphology of the segmented PUs was evaluated by mechanical softening, crystallization and melting behavior of both soft and hard segments (SS, HS) using dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA). Bulk mechanical properties of the potential implant materials during ageing were predicted from comprehensive mechanical testing of the biomaterials under tension and compression cyclic loads. 5-months in vitro data suggest that the prepared siloxane-poly(carbonate-urethane) formulations have sufficient resistance against degradation to be suitable materials for chondral long-term bio-stable implants. Most importantly, the positive effect of incorporating VitE (0.5 or 1.0% w/w) as bio-antioxidant and lubricant on the bio-stability was observed for all PU-types. VitE-additives protected the surface layer from erosion and cracking during chemical oxidation in vitro as well as from thermal oxidation during extrusion re-processing.


—The paper discusses actual task of ensuring the quality of services in information networks with fractal traffic. The generalized approach to traffic management and quality of service based on the account of multifractal properties of the network traffic is proposed. To describe the multifractal traffic properties, it is proposed to use the Hurst exponent, the range of generalized Hurst exponent and coefficient of variation. Methods of preventing of network overload in communication node, routing cost calculation and load balancing, which based on fractal properties of traffic are presented. The results of simulation have shown that the joint use of the proposed methods can significantly improve the quality of service network.


For linear textures, widely exist on 3D engineering surfaces, a method for characterization based on the spectrum analysis is proposed. Through an angular spectrum analysis of the power spectrum of 3D surface signals, the directional characteristic parameters of the linear texture distribution on the surface are extracted. By using the directional parameters, the engineering surface can be roughly identified. A texture detector based on the directional Gabor wavelet transformation is used to detect the texture signals. The linear texture features of different directions and scales on a complex engineering surface can be decomposed. A weighting multi-scale correlative analyzing method is presented. The correlation analysis results of the texture features of different scales are weighted according to the significance and summed to obtain the final correlation results. Through Laplacian differential operation of the correlative output, a sharper correlative peak is obtained. This method has been successfully used to extract and identify bullet marks.


Limited partnerships (LPs) and limited liability companies (LLCs) permit formation with a unique management structure in that these entities may be managed by another limited liability entity, such as a corporation. Thus, the true managers are those individuals who manage the manager. It is well settled that the managing entity, such as a corporate general partner, owes default fiduciary duties, but what of these second-tier managers? Technically, it is the managing entity that owes the duties, not the managing entity's owners, officers, and directors, yet courts have struggled with strict adherence to this separation when it would seem inequitable to do so. Unfortunately, courts and commentators have failed, thus far, to articulate a clear rule as to when fiduciary duties should attach to second-tier managers that also makes allowances for countervailing concerns regarding the scope of such a duty. This article offers an approach aimed at resolving this problem by simply re-examining what it is that courts are doing when they attach liability. In the process of doing so, this article makes three major contributions to the existing scholarship. First, it is the only article describing the three main approaches courts have adopted to address the problem. Second, the article explains why alternate equitable theories, as currently applied, are inadequate to address this issue. Finally, this article offers a unique solution as to when fiduciary duties should attach to second-tier managers. Specifically, this article posits that liability should attach under a form of piercing the corporate veil. Unlike traditional piercing, which focuses on the abuse of the corporate form, this limited form of piercing, which I dub "piercing the fiduciary veil," should focus on the abuse of the control exercised by second-tier managers.


Improving the risk assessment of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) requires that uncertainties in their potential releases during their complete life cycle are quantified and, as far as possible, reduced. To date, most research has focused on releases of ENM during their use and from wastewater treatment plants. Few studies have considered releases during solid waste treatment, despite the high potential for releases during these processes. This work presents an assessment of ENM flows to waste treatment processes for each European country (EU28, Norway and Switzerland). Probabilistic material flow analysis was used to model the flows of ENMs from production, manufacturing and use to waste management processes (landfilling, incineration and recycling). Modelling was based on information on the occurrence of ENMs in product applications and on the life cycles of these nanoproducts, focusing on the flows in solid waste. Data were collected to calculate the proportions of ENM-containing waste products that enter landfills, incineration and recycling plants, considering the uncertainties associated with each data source. Results show that solid wastes containing nano-Ag, -TiO2 and -ZnO mostly flow to sorting and recycling plants, while solid waste containing carbon nanotubes is most often directly disposed. Due to low data availability, many uncertainties remain in the model and its output. Most reliable results were obtained for Austria and Switzerland. These results are useful to highlight hotspots of ENM releases during waste management. However, knowledge about ENM behaviour in waste treatment processes needs to be implemented in the model to obtain final results regarding ENM flows to the environment and possibly back to reprocessing.


Ergothioneine (ERGO) is a potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory amino acid that is produced in nature mainly by non-yeast fungi, cyanobacteria, and mycobacteria. Mounting evidence suggests that ERGO can be considered a longevity vitamin that can mitigate chronic diseases of aging and thereby increase life expectancy. Humans must obtain ERGO from their diet, and it is therefore important to know which foods contain it. Although ERGO is not produced by plants it is found in plant products such as grain, apparently because detrital or symbiotic soil fungi pass on ERGO to plants through their roots. Besides differences between plant species in their ability to accumulate ERGO, how they are managed might also affect its concentration. Soil tillage has been shown to reduce soil fungal biomass, and therefore ERGO contents in maize, soybeans, and oats grown in soil managed with annual moldboard plowing (most intensive), chisel/disking (less intensive), or no-tillage (least intensive) in crop rotation were compared. ERGO concentrations declined in all three crops as tillage intensity increased, with reductions from no till to moldboard plow of approximately 30% in all three crops. Because crop yield was also negatively impacted by intensive tillage, ERGO yield per hectare was reduced even more due to increasing tillage intensity. This study is one of the first to show that soil health improving practices that minimize soil disturbance can directly enhance a key dietary factor associated with long-term human health.


How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as primarily a question of state-building; that is, violence experts use their skills in an attempt to regulate economic transactions or to extract and redistribute resources via protection rents either for themselves or at the behest of political elites. In an alternative view, this article demonstrates that historical gunfighters active in the late 19th-century American Southwest were actually market actors—the possessors of valuable skills cultivated through participation in the Civil War and diffused through gunfighting and reputation building in key market entrepôts. Neither solely state-builders nor state-resisters, as they have traditionally been interpreted, gunfighters composed a professional class that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s and who moved frequently between wage-paying jobs, seizing economic opportunities on both sides of the law and often serving at the behest of powerful economic, rather than political, actors. I establish this claim by examining a dataset of over 250 individuals active in the "gunfighting system" of the post-bellum West, demonstrating that the social connections forged through fighting, and diffused through social networks, helped generate a form of organized violence that helped bring "law and order" to the frontier but as a byproduct of market formation rather than as state-building.


The TPF dump analyzer (TDA) was conceived in an effort to create an intelligent programming assistant for the transaction-processing facility (TPF) programming environment where IBM System/370 assembly language is used. This particular program represents the first component of the system, which provides expert advice in the domain of solving run-time control dumps (software exceptions) in the TPF environment. This program is used by the application development, run-time cover-age, and stability staff members at Covia Technologies to provide more rapid problem diagnosis and resolution to a set of common TPF programming errors. The system has an installed base of nearly 750 users and has proven to be a useful tool in diagnosing commonly occurring errors in the TPF environment.


Time-frequency based methods have been shown to outper-form other methods in dealing with newborn EEG. This is due to the fact that newborn EEG is nonstationary and multicomponent. This paper presents a new time-frequency based EEG seizure detection method. It uses the distribution of the interspike intervals of a high frequency slice of the time-frequency representation of an EEG epoch to discriminate between seizure and non-seizure activities. The seizure detected through this method is then tracked throughout all the available EEG channels by cross-correlating the binary encoded signals of both the detected seizure and the subsequent EEG epochs in all channels. This approach allows the study of the migrating behavior of seizure using EEG signals.


Computational modeling of scientific discovery has been emer~/ng as an important research field in artificial intelligence. Building theoretical models for scientific development has until recently been the exclusive domain for philosophers of science. With the advances in artificial intelligence and especially in machine l arning, opportunities have arisen for researchers in this field to test the learning methods developed in modeling scientific discovery. In the last fifteen years, a number of systems have been developed modeling various discoveries ranging from 17th to 20th century physics and chemistry. However, a methodology for building and evaluating such models has still not been developed. This paper focuses on the elements of historical discovery models, and the methods for their systematic construction and evaluation.


We review some results in the area of using meta techniques to generate language-oriented programming environments. We focus on environments for languages having a two-dimensional syntax based on attribute grammars and constraints. We introduce edit-semantic attributes, a new classof attributes which control the user interaction and graphic presentation. We present LOGGIE, a prototype tool implementing some of the meta techniques discussed. The tool generates interactive language-oriented graphical editors.


The British Council in Shiraz was established in 1960 and Paul Bevan Gotch was appointed as its regional director until 1966. During this time, he regularly met, hosted and corresponded with archaeologists working in the Fars region. These relationships as well as the reports of the archaeological fieldworks conducted on the Fars, especially in the Kor River Basin, inspired Gotch to do some regional surveys on the Persepolis and Shiraz plains. He identified a total of six prehistoric sites on the Shiraz plain, of which the site of Kutahi was one of the most important. As Gotch mentioned this site as being ploughed and regularly bulldozed during his surveys, it is likely that it was later levelled and subsequently vanished forever due to the growth of the city of Shiraz. However, Gotch collected some sherds during his 1966 survey and also during a repeated visit in 1972. The location of the 1966 survey collection is unclear, but the 1972 collection is kept at the Narenjestan museum in Shiraz. Gotch's notes on the Narenjestan collection show that he has separated some diagnostic sherds for reference as he was aware of the ensuing destruction of the site. This collection kept in a small box was reviewed by the author in 2016. Closer scrutiny shows that Kutahi was a local Pottery Neolithic culture dating to the first half of the sixth millennium BC.


Collections of fossil vertebrate remains from the Sangiran area in Java have recently been presented to the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie by Mr. H. R. van Heekeren and by Mr. J. H. Houbolt. They form a most welcome addition to the Museum collection of fossil vertebrates made by Eugene Dubois in Java in the 189o's; Sangiran is a site known to but not collected at by Dubois. We are grateful to Messrs. Van Heekeren and Houbolt for their generous gift to the Museum; the more important specimens in the Sangiran collection will be the subject of the present note. The Sangiran dome (for the geology of the area see Van Es, 1931: 55-68, and Von Koenigswald, 1940: 26-39), situated approximately 12 km north of Solo (Soerakarta) between the Kali Brangkal and the Kali Tjemoro in Central Java, has been extensively collected at by Dr. G. H. R. von Koenigswald during the 1930's. The cranial and mandibular remains of hominids retrieved from this site between 1936 and 1941 by that indefatigable collector rank among the most important fossil hominid specimensever found in Asia. In the course of his investigations in Java Von Koenigswald established a succession of faunas two of which, the Djetis and the Trinil fauna, are of special interest here as both do occur at Sangiran. The former has been assigned a Lower Pleistocene age, the latter a Middle Pleistocene age by Von Koenigswald; it is even possible that the Sangiran succession extends downward to include an earlier fauna, the Kali Glagah (originally placed in the Upper Pliocene by Von Koenigswald), as a molar fragment of the mastodont described by Van der Maarel (1932) as Tetralophodon bumiajuensis has been recovered, too (Von Koenigswald, 1940: 30). This mastodont, considered characteristic of the


ABSTRACT Introduction The tumor-draining lymph node (TDLN) plays a role in tumor immunity. Intratumorally administered microspheres (MS) that encapsulate immunomodulatory agents have emerged as a treatment strategy capable of causing profound changes in the tumor microenvironment (TME) and eliciting potent antitumor effects. We hypothesized that local delivery of MS to the TME may also drain to and therefore target the TDLN to initiate antitumor immune responses. Methods Fluorescent MS were injected into orthotopically implanted murine pancreatic tumors, and tissues were examined by whole-mount microscopy and imaging flow cytometry. The role of the TDLN was investigated for mice treated with intratumoral interleukin-12 (IL-12)-encapsulated MS in combination with stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) by cytokine profile and TDLN ablation. Results Fluorescent AF-594 MS delivered intratumorally were detected in the tumor, peritumoral lymphatics, and the TDLN 2 h after injection. Phagocytic cells were observed with internalized fluorescent MS. SBRT + IL-12 MS-induced upregulation of Th1 and antitumor factors IL-12, IFN-γ, CXCL10, and granzyme B in the TDLN, and excision of the TDLN partially abrogated treatment efficacy. Conclusions Our results demonstrate that intratumorally administered MS not only target the TME, but also drain to the TDLN. Furthermore, MS encapsulated with a potent antitumor cytokine, IL-12, induce an antitumor cytokine profile in the TDLN, which is essential for treatment efficacy.


This Ph.D. thesis dissertation addresses seismic data processing techniques in the active seismic experiment context, a key issue in the study of the Earth's structure and of the physical properties of the materials that form the Earth.
The seismic data processing is an area where have been traditionally applied the most advanced processing tools to overcome problems of filtering, separation and monitoring of seismic waves with the most demanding specifications. This dissertation thesis examines techniques of analysis in the time-frequency/time-scale domain and of filtering in slowness (inverse of velocity) most commonly used in geophysics. The latter are better known in other fields as directional filters.
Starting in this context, new slowness adaptive filters are developed combining the windowed Radon transform (local slant-stack) with the estimators of the instantaneous slowness of the wavefronts based on measurements of the degree of coherence. These filters are then extended combining the wavelet transform and the windowed Radon transform to build a new type of directional filters called adaptive slowness filters in the time-scale domain. In both cases, a special attention is given to provide objective criteria to allow the selection of the optimal parameters for each application, and the performance of the filters is compared to the most commonly used techniques.
With these new tools, a wide variety of slowness adaptive filters can be designed to make the most of the high lateral coherence of the seismic waves and to process the seismic record sections in a simple and flexible way. The two main applications of these tools are to automatically separate or filter the seismic waves from complex seismic record sections without having an accurate measure of their slownesses, and to distinguish the low-energy wavefields from the background noise and from the other seismic waves.
After some objective tests on a wide range of synthetic data, the adaptive slowness filters in the time and time-scale domains have been employed with great success on several real record sections from large marine seismic profiles of wide-angle experiments to smaller, but not less complex, ground seismic profiles. In the wide-angle seismic profiles, the refracted waves have been successfully separated from the background noise and other interfering signals, and high-energy water waves have been attenuated causing minimal distortion to the other signals, and in particular to the low-energy refracted waves under study. In the ground seismic profiles, the high-energy surface waves, such as the Rayleigh waves, have been separated to see the P (pressure) and S (shear) waves of interest.


Obesity in combination with unhealthy life style may increase the risk of chronic diseases. Objectives: This study aimed to determine the gender difference of body composition and respiratory functions among medical students and its relationship with their life style. This study was performed on 165 male and female students. Body mass index (BMI) and body composition parameters were assessed using bioelectric impedance. Respiratory function, fasting blood glucose, lipid profile and sex hormones were assessed. A questionnaire was distributed among the participants to determine the association between the different variables and risk of obesity. The rate of overweight and obesity among male and female students were 16.9% and 15%. Overweight and obesity among male and female students were (24.6% and 21.3% vs. 12.1% and 11.1 %, respectively). Total fat mass and total fat percentage were higher in female students, whereas, free fat mass was higher in male students. The total fat percentage exceeded its normal limits in overweight and obese females and in 11.7% of those with normal BMI. High levels of total fat% were observed in obese and in 66.7% of the overweight male students. Thus, 37.7% in male and 35.6% in female students were obese according to the body fat percentage when used for defining adiposity rather than BMI. Forced vital capacity (FVC) was increased in male students and a positive correlation between FVC and free fat mass among male students was found. These data demonstrate that overweight and obesity are a problem among medical students of Taibah University.


For arcs at atmospheric pressure which have cathodes that are thermionic emitters, it is possible to calculate the major properties of the arc and the electrodes as a function of current, by accounting for electrode shape and the heat transfer processes occurring at the surface of the electrodes. Such processes occur due to electron and ion emission and absorption and also from radiation emission and absorption. Electrical resistance of the plasma near the electrodes is calculated either by taking account of ambipolar diffusion or simply using the local plasma value, with mesh sizes sufficiently large to account for ambipolar diffusion. Derived temperature profiles are in fair agreement with experiment. Results of electrode temperatures and arc melting effects, including such phenomena as the transition from globular to spray modes in arc welding, are also in good agreement with experiment. Prediction of properties for non-thermionic cathodes still constitute a major problem. Approximate calculations indicate that electrons at the surface of the non-thermionic cathodes may be produced by photo ionisation of neutral atoms rather than by field emission.


Considerable attention has been focused on addressing construction health and safety risks in developed economies. Sadly, the same cannot be said of developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where accident figures are extremely high. The aim of this study is to examine the influence of the contextual environment within which Ghanaian construction Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) manage Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S). A questionnaire survey was administered to construction SMEs to better understand the health and safety management practices and associated problems followed up by field interviews to explore key issues identified by the survey. The results of the study highlight the institutional structure for implementing OH&S standards, prevailing economic climate, and extended family culture as challenges to the management of OH&S. The study identifies low literacy levels, low socioeconomic status of workers, owner/managers' ignorance of their OH&S responsibilities, commitment to extended family obligations, and ineffective OH&S administration as key factors limiting the capacity of construction SMEs to manage OH&S effectively. The study concludes that effective institutional structure and an enabling socioeconomic environment are needed to enhance the OH&S performance of SMEs and advocates for more proactive OH&S management that take into consideration the work cultures of SMEs.


The purpose of this thesis is to use real option methodologies to assess
capital investment decisions of near future projects that will be made in Korea.
I compare two base load plants burning different fuels such as coal and
uranium within the CO2 allowance trading context to provide prominence to a
nuclear power plant. Nuclear power plants have recently been rising to the
surface as one of the leading alternatives to the generation plants using fossil
fuels. To consider the flexibilities and uncertainties in a competitive market
environment, I employed the real options approach, due to its superiority in
dealing with uncertainties and incorporating management's flexibilities into the
valuation process. Furthermore, I tried to evaluate the investment opportunity
contingent on at least two underlying assets featuring different price evolution
behaviours. As main pricing skeletons, I adopted the mean reversion model for
the evolution of electricity prices and the gBm model for that of the COi
allowance prices and construction costs of a nuclear power plant. In addition, I
used the Monte Carlo simulation approach as the approximation tool to
overcome a limitation of the analytic approach. Our findings confirmed that the
real options approach uncovered hidden strategic value and provided critical
insights to the investment decision making process.
Keywords: Investment Analysis, Real Option Approach, Base Load Plant, CO2
Allowance, Electricity Price


Jordan faces a number of pressing economic challenges: low growth, high unemployment, rising debt levels, and continued vulnerability to regional shocks. After a decade of fast economic growth, the economy decelerated with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. From then onwards, various external shocks have thrown its economy out of balance and prolonged the slowdown for over a decade now. Conflicts in neighboring countries have led to reduced demand from key export markets and cut off important trade routes. Foreign direct investment, which averaged 12.7% of gross domestic product (GDP) between 2003-2009, fell to 5.1% of GDP over the 2010-2017. Regional conflicts have interrupted the supply of gas from Egypt – forcing Jordan to import oil at a time of record prices, had a negative impact on tourism, and also provoked a massive influx of migrants and refugees. Failure to cope with 50.4% population growth between led to nine consecutive years (2008-2017) of negative growth rates in GDP per capita, resulting in a cumulative loss of 14.0% over the past decade (2009-2018). Debt to GDP ratios, which were at 55% by the end of 2009, have skyrocketed to 94%.

Over the previous five years Jordan has undertaken a significant process of fiscal consolidation. The resulting reduction in fiscal impulse is among the largest registered in the aftermath of the Financial Crises, third only to Greece and Jamaica, and above Portugal and Spain. Higher taxes, lower subsidies, and sharp reductions in public investment have in turn furthered the recession. Within a context of lower aggregate demand, more consolidation is needed to bring debt-to-GDP ratios back to normal. The only way to break that vicious cycle and restart inclusive growth is by leveraging on foreign markets, developing new exports and attracting investments aimed at increasing competitiveness and strengthening the external sector. The theory of economic complexity provides a solid base to identify opportunities with high potential for export diversification. It allows to identify the existing set of knowhow, skills and capacities as signaled by the products and services that Jordan is able to make, and to define existing and latent areas of comparative advantage that can be developed by redeploying them. Service sectors have been growing in importance within the Jordanian economy and will surely play an important role in export diversification. In order to account for that, we have developed an adjusted framework that allows to identify the most attractive export sectors including services.

Based on that adjusted framework, this report identifies export themes with a high potential to drive growth in Jordan while supporting increasing wage levels and delivering positive spillovers to the non-tradable economy. The general goal is to provide a roadmap with key elements of a strategy for Jordan to return to a high economic growth path that is consistent with its emerging comparative advantages.


Abstract The issue of lower than expected mathematics achievement is a concern to education leaders and policymakers at all levels of the U.S. PK–12 education system. The purpose of this quantitative, quasi-experimental study was to determine if there was a measurable difference in achievement on the mathematics section of the state test for students (n = 121) from a middle school in New Jersey who received computer-assisted instruction (CAI) in drill and practice computation related to the eighth grade mathematics curriculum standards compared to students (n = 163) who did not receive the CAI. The results suggest that the CAI intervention did not improve student achievement significantly (p > .05). In two categories, students who received the CAI performed significantly lower than their peers in the comparison group. Students in the control group who scored in the 25th percentile on the seventh grade CTB/McGraw Hill TerraNova pretest outperformed their peers in the treatment group on the New Jersey Grade Eight Proficiency Assessment (GEPA) mathematics section. Likewise, Asian students in the control group outperformed all other students in treatment and control groups. The results fit within the existing knowledge on the subject of computer- assisted instruction and add support to the idea that practitioners should evaluate curriculum and instruction interventions for demonstrated success before they bring them into the learning environment.


Classical H-measures introduced by Tartar (1990) and independently by Gérard (1991) are not well suited for the study of parabolic equations. Recently, several parabolic variants have been proposed, together with a number of applications. We introduce a new parabolic variant (and call it the parabolic H-measure), which is suitable for these known applications. Moreover, for this variant we prove the localisation and propagation principle, establishing a basis for more demanding applications of parabolic H-measures, similarly as it was the case with classical Hmeasures. In particular, the propagation principle enables us to write down a transport equation satisfied by the parabolic H-measure associated to a sequence of solutions of a Schrödinger type equation. Some applications to specific equations are presented, illustrating the possible use of this new tool. A comparison to similar results for classical H-measures has been made as well.


Intensity of bee visitation (honeybees and wild bees), foraging behaviour of honeybees and nectar parameters (nectar production, sugar concentration, sugar content in nectars) were inspected at 18 apple cultivars for three consecutive years. Honeybee visitation was calculated to be some 3.07 bee visits at a single apple flower a day but wild bee activity was very low, only some 0.11 wild bee visits per flower per day.
The nectar production (nectar content) of apple flowers was fairly different according to the cultivars and the nectar production (nectar content) of flowers was negatively correlated with the sugar concentration in nectar. Interestingly, at the majority of the inspected 18 cultivars the nectar production has shown minor or no changes in the morning and at the afternoon. The nectar production (nectar content) of flowers clearly encouraged the total bee activity at the inspected cultivars (r = 0.54). Bees visited abundant nectars with greater sugar concentration most intensely than lees abundant nectars with smaller sugar concentration.
Nectar parameters, however, affected the activity of honeybees with different types of gathering behaviour in different way. More intense activity by pollen gatherer and mixed behaviour honeybees was observed at cultivars producing abundant nectar (pollen gatherers: r = 0.65, mixed behaviour: r = 0.79). The activity of pollen gatherer honeybees and of mixed behaviour bees, on the other hand, was negatively correlated to the sugar concentration in nectar (pollen gatherers: r = -0.51, mixed behaviour: r = -0.73). This can be explained by the fact that their behaviour was much more affected by the amount of pollen than by any nectar parameters. Accordingly, "mixed behaviour honeybees" should probably rather be called as "pollen gatherers with nectar load" instead of "nectar gatherers with pollen load", as widely used in literature. The activity of ineffective side worker nectar gatherers was greatly encouraged by the sugar concentration in nectar (p = 0.63), similarly to the pure (top) nectar gatherer honeybees (r = 0.72). There was a negative relationship between the nectar production (nectar content) of flowers and the activity of these behaviour classes (nectar gatherers: r = -0.47, side workers: r = -0.36).
Concluding the findings we can state that the activity of pollen gatherers and mixed behaviour honeybees is strongly encouraged by greater nectar production (greater nectar content) of apple flowers. Their activity, however, is mostly dependent firstly on the amount of pollen. This is the reason why the sugar concentration is in a negative relationship to the activity of pure pollen gatherers and mixed behaviour bee. On the other hand, pure nectar gatherers and side worker nectar gatherers are greatly encouraged by the sugar concentration of apple nectar the amount of nectar was not a definite influence on their activity.
Side worker honeybees occurred at each cultivar inspected, however, their ratio varied widely among cultivars. So we can draw the conclusion that, in contradiction with earlier believes, side worker nectar gathering is a general phenomenon at apple flowers. The activity of side workers depends first of all on the relative position of stamens and petals; however, low sugar concentration of nectars can probably moderate their activity but probably do not affect pollen gatherers and mixed behaviour bees.
Wild bee visitation was very low; the wild bee species observed (Osmia cornuta, Andrena flavipes, Anthophora acervorum, Bombus terrestris, Bombus lapidarius and Halictus simplex) comprised some 3.44 per cent of the total bee visitation at apple flowers only. Wild bee visitation was in a positive correlation with the nectar production (nectar amount) of flowers (r = 0,4) and with the sugar content of nectar (r = 0.46) but it was negatively correlated with the sugar concentration in nectar (r = -0,27).
Our result calls the attention to the importance of nectar parameters in the effective honeybee pollination of apple plantations. Most effective pollinating activity of honeybees can be expected in plantations with cultivars of high nectar production because this feature seem so encourage the activity of those behaviour classes (pure pollen gatherers and mixed behaviour bees) that are the most effective pollinating agents among honeybees.


We propose a new image segmentation technique called strings. A string is a variational deformable model that is learned from a collection of example objects rather than built from a priori analytical or geometrical knowledge. As opposed to existing approaches, an object boundary is represented by a one-dimensional multivariate curve in functional space, a feature function, rather than by a point in vector space. In the learning phase, feature functions are defined by extraction of multiple shape and image features along continuous object boundaries in a given learning set. The feature functions are aligned, then subjected to functional principal components analysis and functional principal regression to summarize the feature space and to model its content, respectively. Also, a Mahalanobis distance model is constructed for evaluation of boundaries in terms of their feature functions, taking into account the natural variations seen in the learning set. In the segmentation phase, an object boundary in a new image is searched for with help of a curve. The curve gives rise to a feature function, a string, that is weighted by the regression model and evaluated by the Mahalanobis model. The curve is deformed in an iterative procedure to produce feature functions with minimal Mahalanobis distance. Strings have been compared with active shape models on 145 vertebra images, showing that strings produce better results when initialized close to the target boundary, and comparable results otherwise.


In corporate law, the derivative action mechanism allows minority shareholders and, in certain jurisdictions, single directors or even creditors to file and litigate on behalf of the corporation a lawsuit against an insider or a third party whose action has allegedly injured the corporation. The derivative action is a mechanism that corporate law furnishes to tackle agency problems because the corporate insiders who should initiate such claims occasionally become caught in a conflict of interests. Obviously, each jurisdiction decides whether to employ a derivative action mechanism and on what terms. However, in a globalized world that offers many attractive places in which investors can incorporate their businesses, corporate law regulation has become increasingly affected by surrounding regulatory environments. In many respects, conflict-of-laws rules manage the interaction between local and foreign regulatory rules. The purpose of this Article is to discuss the regulation of derivative actions when this mechanism is evoked in the context of a foreign corporation. This rather common scenario creates a choice-of-law question: should the terms and conditions for filing a derivative action on behalf of a foreign corporation (as opposed to the cause-of-action itself) be regulated by the law of the forum or by the law of the place of incorporation? For example, should the forum court enable plaintiffs to rely on the forum's local derivative action mechanism when the foreign law of the place of incorporation rules out completely the possibility of derivative actions being filed? This Article analyzes the doctrinal contexts that may serve as a legal platform for resolving this question, as well as the relevant considerations to be taken into account. The Article subsequently argues that, in contrast to a prevailing perception, the law of incorporation should not always be applied. It is further argued that the public policy doctrine, rather than any other doctrinal context, is best suited to serve as a platform for adjudicating the choice-of-law question and that forum shopping concerns should be excluded from this question and confined to the context of jurisdiction ascertainment.


Several projects are currently underway to obtain large galaxy redshift surveys over the course of the next decade. The aim of this thesis is to study how well the resultant three-dimensional maps of the galaxy distribution will be able to constrain the various parameters of the standard Big Bang cosmology. The work is driven by the need to deal with data of far better quality than has previously been available. Systematic biases in the treatment of existing datasets have been dwarfed by random errors due to the small size of the sample, but this will not be the case with the wealth of data that will shortly become available. We employ a set of high-resolution /V-body simulations spanning a range of cosmologies and galaxy biasing schemes. We use the power spectrum of the galaxy density field, measured using the fast Fourier transform process, to develop models and statistics for extracting cosmological information. In particular, we examine the distortion of the power spectrum by galaxy peculiar velocities when measurements are made in redshift space. Mock galaxy catalogues are drawn from these simulations, mimicking the geometries and selection functions of the large surveys we wish to model. Applying the same models to the mock catalogues is not a trivial task, as geometrical effects distort the power spectrum, and measurement errors are determined by the survey volume. We develop methods for assessing these effects and present an in-depth analysis of the likely confidence intervals we will obtain from the surveys on the parameters that determine the power spectrum. Real galaxy catalogues are prone to additional biases that must be assessed and removed. One of these is the effect of extinction by dust in the Milky Way, which imprints its own angular clustering signal on the measured power spectrum. We investigate the strength of this effect for the SDSS survey.


This essay advances a morality of defensive harm, which I call "Rule-SD." Rule-SD resolves in a new way two types of difficult cases. It entails that if certain conditions are met, a defender has the right to kill a man who is innocently falling on her, if this is necessary for her survival. Moreover, Rule-SD yields the "free competition resolution" in some symmetrical cases; it implies that, two people who innocently threaten each other, whose position vis-a-vis each other is identical in every factual and (therefore) normative respect, might have a right to kill each other if necessary for their survival.


B70 African American (AA) women are less likely than Caucasian women to have breast cancer but are more likely to die from it. Recent research has indicated that breast tumor biology in AA women is different from that in Caucasian women. AA women are more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer at an earlier age and with more aggressive form of the disease, characterized by higher grade and negative estrogen and progesterone receptor status. The purpose of this study was to profile the serum proteins from healthy and cancer patients in order to identify differentially expressed proteins between the two groups, and complement the LC/MS data to the protein expression data obtained previously from 2D-DIGE/MS analysis on similar type of samples. This pilot study included six AA breast cancer women and six healthy AA controls. Hypothesis: We expected that changes taking place in the mammary gland prior to the appearance of breast cancer will be reflected in proteins that will appear in the blood. Methods: The serum samples were processed on IgY12 (Beckman) antibody column to remove the top 12 proteins. The flow through fraction was digested using trypsin for LC/MS analysis. The protein digest serum samples were analyzed in triplicates on a high performance LTQFT (Thermo Electron) mass spectrometer coupled to an online Surveyor LC system equipped with an autosampler. Samples were loaded on to a trap column using sample pump. MS pump was used for eluting the peptides onto an analytical column for further separation and online nano-ESI LC/MS/MS analysis. The raw MS data files were imported into DeCyderMS (GE Healthcare) module and data were processed for peptide/protein expression analysis. Results: DeCyderMS analysis revealed significant altered expression of 215 peptides between the two groups (t-test: 2). Most of these peptides were mapped to 28 proteins in the Swiss-Prot database. DecyderMS analysis on all the replicates from each sample are underway to identify the peptide pattern differences between the healthy and cancer samples. In addition to high abundant proteins identified by 2-D DIGE/MS in our earlier study, we identified low abundant proteins such as Angiotensinogen precursor, Insulin-like growth factor-binding protein complex acid labil, Hemopexin precursor and others. Some of these proteins have been implicated in breast cancer and served as individual biomarkers. Conclusions: A panel of proteins differed in abundance in the sera of AA cancer patients vs. healthy controls; these could serve as biomarkers of early-stage breast cancer. Future efforts will focus on further validation of this panel of biomarkers to gain insight into their role(s) in the etiology of aggressive breast tumors in AA women.
 Funded by The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.


Firms with very similar products often present their products in different ways. This makes it difficult for consumers to find out which product fits their needs best, or which one is the cheapest. Why is there no convergence toward common ways to present products? Is it possible for firms to maintain high prices by confusing consumers? We run a market experiment to investigate those questions. In our market, firms choose how to present their products in addition to choosing their price. We find that firms maintain different ways to present their products and that this allows them to maintain high prices. This behavior is not consistent with competitive behavior, such as when firms adopt best responses to each other, imitate the most successful firm, or learn the best strategy over time. Rather, our results are only consistent with cooperation between firms. Firms cooperate by not imitating the way other firms present their products. Cooperation is maintained by the threat of tough competition if a firm makes its product easy to compare with others. Firms are all the more likely to maintain such cooperation if their products do not actually differ much. This is because in that case, maintaining differences in the presentation of their products is the only way to maintain profits.


Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress brings together recent essays and reporting by labor journalist Steve Early. The author illuminates the challenges facing U.S. workers, whether they re trying to democratize their union, win a strike, defend past contract gains, or bargain with management for the first time. Drawing on forty years of personal experience, Early writes about cross-border union campaigning, labor strategies for organizing and health care reform, and political initiatives that might lessen worker dependence on the Democratic Party. Save Our Unions contains vivid portraits of rank-and-file heroes and heroines, both well-known and unsung. It takes readers to union conventions and funerals, strikes and picket-lines, celebrations of labor s past and struggles to insure that unions still have a future in the 21st century. The book s insight, analysis and advocacy make this an important contribution to the project of labor revitalization and reform. "


Contrary to their modern reputation as egalitarian liberals, many of the original progressive architects of American labor reform were partisans of human inequality. The labor legislation they pioneered was, in important respects, designed to exclude immigrants, women, and African Americans from some or all of the labor market. The first part of this article discusses the origins and development of a progressive economic ideology that favored, indeed demanded, the exclusion of various so-called "defective" groups from the American labor market. Xenophobia, race prejudice, and sexism certainly were not new to the United States in the Progressive Era. What was new was, first, the idea that protecting deserving workers required the social control of undeserving workers, enough so that labor-legislation advocates defended the exclusion of purportedly unfit minority workers not as an ostensibly necessary evil, but as a positive social benefit. Second, the exclusion of undesirables acquired a new scientific legitimacy: the Progressive Era marked not only the advent of the welfare state but also an extraordinary vogue for race thinking and for eugenics, the social control of human breeding. The new science of eugenics turned "undesirables" into the "hereditarily unfit" and elevated exclusion to a matter of national and racial health. And the new sciences of society, especially economics, showed how unfit workers wrongly lowered the wages and employment of racially superior groups. The second part of this article discusses the practical impact progressive ideology had on labor reform in the 1930s. The intellectual heirs of progressivism used the prevailing economic crisis to promote previously unachievable government involvement in the labor market to the detriment of those deemed excludable. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which regulated the wages paid on construction projects paid for by the federal government, was designed to exclude African Americans and other workers deemed "defective" from the labor market for federal construction projects. The influence of the progressive economists' belief that low-paid African American workers were "defectives" who should not be permitted to compete on price with white workers continued during the New Deal. Like jobs held by women and children, jobs held by African Americans were often considered "substandard" by New Dealers and were slated for permanent elimination. This mentality was reflected in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which imposed a high uniform national minimum wage, even though its architects knew that this would lead to substantial unemployment among African Americans. Finally, the 1930s witnessed the resurrection and expansion of single-sex, state minimum-wage laws in the 1930s. These laws were upheld by a Progressive Supreme Court in 1937. The Court adopted the conventional wisdom in contemporary liberal circles: women who could not command a "living wage" as defined by statute should be expunged from the labor force. In short, in the early 20th century American labor reformers promoted an ideology that advocated excluding from the workplace those they regarded undesirable, undeserving, or defective. Once progressive ideology came to dominate government policy during the Great Depression, labor legislation was enacted that intentionally set out to exclude "undesirable" workers from the workplace.


Preface. 1 EViews workfile and descriptive data analysis. 1.1 What is the EViews workfile? 1.2 Basic options in EViews. 1.3 Creating a workfile. 1.4 Illustrative data analysis. 1.5 Special notes and comments. 1.6 Statistics as a sample space. 2 Continuous growth models. 2.1 Introduction. 2.2 Classical growth models. 2.3 Autoregressive growth models. 2.4. Residual tests. 2.5 Bounded autoregressive growth models. 2.6 Lagged variables or autoregressive growth models. 2.7 Polynomial growth model. 2.8 Growth models with exogenous variables. 2.9 A Taylor series approximation model. 2.10 Alternative univariate growth models. 2.11 Multivariate growth models. 2.12 Multivariate AR(p) GLM with trend. 2.13 Generalized multivariate models with trend. 2.14 Special notes and comments. 2.15 Alternative multivariate models with trend. 2.16 Generalized multivariate models with time-related effects. 3 Discontinuous growth models. 3.1 Introduction. 3.2 Piecewise growth models. 3.3 Piecewise S-shape growth models. 3.4 Two-piece polynomial bounded growth models. 3.5 Discontinuous translog linear AR(1) growth models. 3.6 Alternative discontinuous growth models. 3.7 Stability test. 3.8 Generalized discontinuous models with trend. 3.9 General two-piece models with time-related effects. 3.10 Multivariate models by states and time periods. 4 Seemingly causal models. 4.1 Introduction. 4.2 Statistical analysis based on a single time series. 4.3 Bivariate seemingly causal models. 4.4 Trivariate seemingly causal models. 4.5 System equations based on trivariate time series. 4.6 General system of equations. 4.7 Seemingly causal models with dummy variables. 4.8 General discontinuous seemingly causal models. 4.9 Additional selected seemingly causal models. 4.10 Final notes in developing models. 5 Special cases of regression models. 5.1 Introduction. 5.2 Specific cases of growth curve models. 5.3 Seemingly causal models. 5.4 Lagged variable models. 5.5 Cases based on the US domestic price of copper. 5.6 Return rate models. 5.7 Cases based on the BASICS workfile. 6 VAR and system estimation methods. 6.1 Introduction. 6.2 The VAR models. 6.3 The vector error correction models. 6.4 Special notes and comments. 7 Instrumental variables models. 7.1 Introduction. 7.2 Should we apply instrumental models? 7.3 Residual analysis in developing instrumental models. 7.4 System equation with instrumental variables. 7.5 Selected cases based on the US-DPOC data. 7.6 Instrumental models with time-related effects. 7.7 Instrumental seemingly causal models. 7.8 Multivariate instrumental models based on the US-DPOC. 7.9 Further extension of the instrumental models. 8 ARCH models. 8.1 Introduction. 8.2 Options of ARCH models. 8.3 Simple ARCH models. 8.4 ARCH models with exogenous variables. 8.5 Alternative GARCH variance series. 9 Additional testing hypotheses. 9.1 Introduction. 9.2 The unit root tests. 9.3 The omitted variables tests. 9.4 Redundant variables test (RV-test). 9.5 Nonnested test (NN-test). 9.6 The Ramsey RESET test. 9.7 Illustrative examples based on the Demo.wf1. 10 Nonlinear least squares models. 10.1 Introduction. 10.2 Classical growth models. 10.3 Generalized Cobb-Douglas models. 10.4 Generalized CES models. 10.5 Special notes and comments. 10.6 Other NLS models. 11 Nonparametric estimation methods. 11.1 What is the nonparametric data analysis. 11.2 Basic moving average estimates. 11.3 Measuring the best fit model. 11.4 Advanced moving average models. 11.5 Nonparametric regression based on a time series. 11.6 The local polynomial Kernel fit regression. 11.7 Nonparametric growth models. Appendix A: Models for a single time series. A.1 The simplest model. A.2 First-order autoregressive models. A.3 Second-order autoregressive model. A.4 First-order moving average model. A.5 Second-order moving average model. A.6 The simplest ARMA model. A.7 General ARMA model. Appendix B: Simple linear models. B.1 The simplest linear model. B.2 Linear model with basic assumptions. B.3 Maximum likelihood estimation method. B.4 First-order autoregressive linear model. B.5 AR(p) linear model. B.6 Alternative models. B.7 Lagged-variable model. B.8 Lagged-variable autoregressive models. B.9 Special notes and comments. Appendix C: General linear models. C.1 General linear model with i.i.d. Gaussian disturbances. C.2 AR(1) general linear model. C.3 AR(p) general linear model. C.4 General lagged-variable autoregressive model. C.5 General models with Gaussian errors. Appendix D: Multivariate general linear models. D.1 Multivariate general linear models. D.2 Moments of an endogenous multivariate. D.3 Vector autoregressive model. D.4 Vector moving average model. D.5 Vector autoregressive moving average model. D.6 Simple multivariate models with exogenous variables. D.7 General estimation methods. D.8 Maximum likelihood estimation for an MGLM. D.9 MGLM with autoregressive errors. References. Index.


Precedent has often been analyzed along the rationalist line and touted for its market-friendly and efficiency-enhancing properties. Yet this consequentialist approach can hardly demonstrate that precedent is in fact a product of habit and custom. This article approaches precedent as a social phenomenon and explains its ostensibly unquestioned compliance pull in terms of system, language and symbol. The linguistic structure of precedent, as a reproductive mechanism, collectively represents the preexisting normative structure that is largely taken-for-granted in a Bourdieuvian sense. Markedly, the social framework on precedent is paradoxically salient in international law, which lacks a centralized, sophisticated legal-institutional complex as seen in a domestic legal system. This article applies this social framework to the jurisprudence of the World Trade Organization (WTO).


Lambda encodings (such as Church encoding, Scott encoding and Parigot encoding) are methods to represent data in lambda calculus. Curry-Howard correspondence relates the formulas and proofs in intuitionistic logics to the types and programs in typed functional programming languages. Roughly speaking, Type theory (Intuitionistic Type Theory) formulates the intuitionistic logic in the style of typed functional programming language. This dissertation investigates the mechanisms to support lambda encodings in type theory. Type theory, for example, Calculus of Constructions (CC) does not directly support inductive data because the induction principle for the inductive data is proven to be not derivable. Thus inductive data together with inductive principle are added as primitive to CC, leading to several nontrivial extensions, e.g. Calculus of Inductive Constructions. In this dissertation, we explore alternatives to incorporate inductive data in type theory. We propose to consider adding an abstraction construct to the intuitionistic type to support lambdaencoded data, while still be able to derive the corresponding induction principle. The main benefit of this approach is that we obtain relatively simple systems, which are easier to analyze and implement.


It is well known that the dietary intake of blueberries has a positive and profound impact on human health, performance, and disease. The total phenolic contents (TPC), antioxidant and free radical&scavenging properties of aqueous extracts prepared from the berries of two rabbiteye (Vaccinium ashei) and two highbush (V. corymbosum) genotypes of blueberry, were studied in vitro. The results showed that for the highbush genotypes, extracts from the 'Jersey' cultivar had higher TPC than extracts from 'Dixi' berries. Among the rabbiteye genotypes, 'Tifblue' had higher TPC than 'Ono'. Antioxidant and radical&scavenging activities among the rabbiteye and highbush genotypes were in accordance with the results of TPC for all genotypes studied which indicates that the antioxidant activity is related to the TPC. An animal model was used to assess the effects of orally administered aqueous berry extracts on the proliferation of lactobacilli and bifidobacterial species and some undesirable bacteria in the caeca of rats. Gavaging rats with aqueous extracts from inulin, 'Ono', 'Tifblue' and 'Jersey' genotypes but not 'Dixi' 3 times weekly for 4 weeks resulted in a significant increase in the numbers of bifidobacteria while the extracts from all the genotypes but not from inulin were able to significantly increase the numbers of lactobacilli in comparison with the control group gavaged with water. A significant decrease in the numbers of bacteroides and clostridia was observed in the caeca of rats gavaged with the blueberry genotypes when compared with the water&gavaged control rats. Moreover, rats gavaged with inulin, 'Ono', 'Tifblue', 'Jersey' and 'Dixi' showed 15.1%,10.5%, 21.9%, 22.9% and 5.6% reduction in the activity of β&glucuronidase and 17.6%, 27.2%, 49%, 25.2% and 15.8% increase in the activity of β&glucosidase when compared to the control group gavaged with water, respectively. In conclusion, significant differences were found in antioxidant/antiradical activities and TPC among various genotypes of blueberries. Furthermore, we hypothesize that blueberry extracts could positively modify the bacterial profile by increasing the numbers of beneficial bacteria and thereby improve gut health.


ABSTRACT Abundant calcareous tubeworms have been found in both shallow platform and deep basin deposits after the end-Permian mass extinction in the Cili area, South China. Tubeworms from the microbialites deposited on the shallow platform appear to be cone-shaped tubes with diameters ranging from 0.5 to 1.8 mm (mean 1.1 mm), while those attached to Claraia, the most abundant bivalve fossil preserved in the deep basin deposits after the mass extinction, are planispiral tubes with smaller diameters (0.5–1.5 mm, mean 0.9 mm). The calcareous tubeworms are identified as Microconchida (Tentaculita) according to the typical laminated sheet texture of the tubeworms found on the shallow platform. The difference in morphology between the cone-shaped tubeworms found in the microbialites and the planispiral tubeworms attached to Claraia in deeper water deposits may be related to differences in how fast the surrounding sediments were accumulating. Bacterially mediated precipitation of calcium carbonate led to rapid accumulation of the microbialites that forced the tubeworms to grow upward so as to keep up with the rate of microbialite growth and led to the cone-shaped tubes found there, whereas the slowly accumulating sediments surrounding the tubeworm-encrusted Claraia led to the development of the planispiral forms in basin deposits. Calcareous tubeworms found in the shallow platform and colonizing the shells of bivalve Claraia in basin deposits indicates calcareous tubeworms, as a significant disaster form, should have benefited from the opening of ecological space by the extinction of most marine invertebrates. Widespread oceanic anoxia has long been considered to be one of the extraordinary conditions after the end-Permian mass extinction. Tubeworm fossils flourishing in basin deposits within the short interval near the Permian-Triassic boundary implies that the deepwater environment immediately after the end-Permian mass extinction may not have been as anoxic as previously thought.


This article presents a new multiscale modeling approach proposed to predict the impact response of a biomedical niobium-zirconium alloy by incorporating both geometric and microstructural aspects. Specifically, the roles of both anisotropy and geometry-based distribution of stresses and strains upon loading were successfully taken into account by incorporating a proper multiaxial material flow rule obtained from crystal plasticity simulations into the finite element (FE) analysis. The simulation results demonstrate that the current approach, which defines a hardening rule based on the location-dependent equivalent stresses and strains, yields more reliable results as compared with the classical FE approach, where the hardening rule is based on the experimental uniaxial deformation response of the material. This emphasizes the need for proper coupling of crystal plasticity and FE analysis for the sake of reliable predictions, and the approach presented herein constitutes an efficient guideline for the design process of dental and orthopedic implants that are subject to impact loading in service.


The Al Ansab sewage treatment plant (STP) serves the central area of Muscat, the capital of Oman. When commissioned in 2010, the plant was the largest flat-plate membrane bioreactor facility in the world, with an initial capacity of 55,000 m 3 /day. Expansion to 125,000 m 3 /day is under design and when operational in 2016 the plant will once again be one of the largest MBRs of its kind in the world. With limited space available, and a desire for consistent high quality effluent for full public access applications, the membrane bio-reactor (MBR) process was selected as the treatment technology for the plant. The plant equipment and tankage installed under the first phase was sized to serve a maximum month average flow rate of 55,000 m 3 /day, while buildings, hydraulics, interconnecting piping and electrical power supply were sized to serve the second phase total capacity of 84,000 m 3 /day. Kubota EK400 flat sheet membranes of 0.4 μm pore size were selected for the MBR. Eight membrane tanks were provided in the first phase, each having 40 double stacked membrane units. Each double stacked unit has 400 membrane panels making the total membranes sheets installed in the first phase over 120,000 panels. Al Ansab MBR plant expansion to the second phase is currently under detailed design and the new Kubota membranes module RW400 will be used in this phase. The plant was designed to accept sewage delivered by sewer networks. Due to delay in completing the sewer network the new plant was commissioned using trucked sewage diverted from the old plant. This is a non-standard condition for the MBR plant, and Haya implemented several modifications in anticipation of this situation. The high volume of trucked wastewater was addressed with flow and load equalization systems to dampen the impact of shock loading. The Al Ansab STP is performing very well and complying with all the required effluent standards. Many lessons have been learned in both the design and operation of such a large MBR plant.


Nowadays every company has to store almost every sheet of paper that is produced during its day-to-day business. In almost every process one or multiple documents have to be printed out to ensure correct book keeping. All these various papers have to be stored for over ten years. The amount of paper constantly grows over each working day and after a short period of time, this mass of files takes up a lot of space already and most of the companies need an extra storageroom for these files. This kind of archiving could be avoided with the current technical possibilities. In this bachelor thesis I evaluate a valid approach and try to implement a simple digital archive. A lot of processes could be optimized especially when the company is already using an enterprise resource planning system. During the process of planning and developing I encountered multiple challenges and tried to describe different approaches for a solution. The result of this bachelor thesis was a working solution, however with some drawbacks and unfinished requirements.


Gene copy number variation (CNV) has been associated with phenotypic variability in animals and plants, but a genomewide understanding of their impacts on phenotypes is largely restricted to human and agricultural systems. As such, CNVs have rarely been considered in investigations of the genomic architecture of adaptation in wild species. Here, we report on the genetic mapping of gene CNVs in white spruce, which lacks a contiguous assembly of its large genome (~20 Gb), and their relationships with adaptive phenotypic variation. We detected 3,911 gene CNVs including de novo structural variations using comparative genome hybridization on arrays (aCGH) in a large progeny set. We inferred the heterozygosity at CNV loci within parents by comparing haploid and diploid tissues and genetically mapped 82 gene CNVs. Our analysis showed that CNVs were distributed over 10 linkage groups and identified four CNV hotspots that we predict to occur in other species of the Pinaceae. Significant relationships were found between 29 of the gene CNVs and adaptive traits based on regression analyses with timings of bud set and bud flush, and height growth, suggesting a role for CNVs in climate adaptation. The importance of CNVs in adaptive evolution of white spruce was also indicated by functional gene annotations and the clustering of 31% of the mapped adaptive gene CNVs in CNV hotspots. Taken together, these results illustrate the feasibility of studying CNVs in undomesticated species and represent a major step towards a better understanding of the roles of CNVs in adaptive evolution.


Sulawesi comprises of about 182,870 km² of land and fewer botanical specimens (about 23 specimens per 100 km², Whitten et al., 1987) have been collected here than in any other major island in Indonesia. This island is up to date botanically poorly explored and according to Van Steenis (1950) about 32,500 specimens of plants were recorded, the number is probably only a rough estimation and certainly in the precomputer era not based on real specimens. Within the framework of STORMA (Stability of Rainforest Margins) we analyzed the vegetation in several plots of one hectare of different land use systems at the Lore Lindu National Park, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Rapidly we were faced with the problem that the identification of the mostly sterile trees would be almost impossible without a sound basic checklist. Because previous hardcopies (Hildebrand, 1950; Soewanda & Tantra, 1973; Whitmore et al., 1989) were either outdated or incomplete (especially for the small diameter trees) we decided to create a new one using data of actual plant specimens housed at the National Herbarium of the Netherlands, Universiteit Leiden branch (with duplicate specimens in several other herbaria like BO, E, K and others), and enter them in the BRAHMS (Botanical Research and Herbarium Management Systems) database developed by Denis Filer, University of Oxford. More than 120 woody families have been screened and the label information of all specimens (c. 13,000) checked and partly analysed. The density index calculated from our figures is very low (7) but for the first time underpinned by hard, retrievable data. As we did not include species — and specimens rich herbaceous families in our calculations (Orchidaceae, Poaceae, Zingiberaceae, ferns, etc.) the much lower collection index can be at least partially explained.


The efficacy of antipredator behaviours may depend on both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. We experimentally studied the effects of predator species and prey age on the immediate survival value of swimming and lamellae loss in larval damsel-flies. Four predators: two invertebrates (the notonectid, Notonecta viridis and the dragonfly larva Aeshna cyanea), and two vertebrates (the three-spined stickleback Gasterosteus aculeatus and the sunfish Lepomis gibbosus) were tested with all combinations of two instars of the damselfly Lestes sponsa (F-0 and F-2). The number of escapes by swimming away were much lower when larvae were attacked by the two fishes than by the two invertebrates. Moreover Lepomis never removed lamellae and killed all larvae. The instars did not differ in the number of escapes by swimming, but F-0 instars were caught more at the lamellae than F-2 instars. All larvae that survived a capture were caught at the lamellae and the majority (90 %) did so by autotomy. The ontogenetic increase in the immediate survival value of this antipredator behaviour was dependent upon the predator species. It was highest in captures by the Notonecta (40 %), and lower when larvae were caught by the Aeshna or Gasterosteus (ca. 17 %). This was probably because the biological relevance of the magnitude of the speed difference between damselfly instars depends upon the predator's attack performance, We discuss the consequences of these findings for the macrohabitat distribution of the larvae and for the multicomponent antipredator behaviours prey may use.


We introduce a new extracavity pulse-compression technique suitable for generating high-energy femtosecond pulses. This technique is based on spectral broadening by self-phase modulation in bulk media followed by far-field spatial filtering, which provides a uniform spectral broadening over the spatial profile combined with a transmission of 50%. In principle, this technique allows compression of pulses with energy up to ∼100 mJ by a factor of 3–5. In a proof-of-principle experiment, we compressed a 42-fs, 480-μJ pulse to a 14-fs, 220-μJ pulse.


This article provides a description of translations and stage adaptations of Golden Age Spanish theatre from early 19th century to the present day. Fluctuations in taste, expectations and changing preferences of audiences, as well as the political context influenced the choice of which play was to be translated. Moreover, the degree of fidelity to the source text varies, as some are very faithful (written in verse, for example) while others are very free adaptations, and can be described as reinventions or rewritings rather than true translations. In spite of these infinite disparities between the texts considered, it is possible to detect a hierarchy that appears quite early between plays and Spanish authors, with Calderón playing a predominant role.


(1) Background: Flying in instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) carries an elevated risk of fatal outcome for general aviation (GA) pilots. For the typical GA flight, aerodrome-specific forecasts (Terminal Aerodrome Forecast (TAF), Localized Aviation Model Output Statistics Program (LAMP)) assist the airman in pre-determining whether a flight can be safely undertaken. While LAMP forecasts are more prevalent at GA-frequented aerodromes, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recommends that this tool be used as supplementary to the TAF only. Herein, the predictive accuracy of LAMP for ceiling flight categories of visual flight rules (VFR) and instrument flight rules (IFR) was determined. (2) Methods: LAMP accuracy was evaluated for the period of July–December 2018 using aviation-specific probability of detection (PODA), false alarm ratio (FARA) and critical success scores (CSSA). Statistical differences were determined using Chi-Square tests. (3) Results: LAMP forecasts (n = 823) across 39 states were accrued. LAMP PODA for VFR (0.67) and IFR (0.78) exceeded (p < 0.031) the corresponding TAF scores (0.57 and 0.56). For VFR, the LAMP showed a non-significant (p = 0.243) higher FARA (0.25) than the TAF (0.19). For IFR forecasts, the LAMP FARA was lower (p < 0.001) (0.48 and 0.81, respectively). LAMP CSSA scores exceeded the TAF for VFR (p = 0.012) and IFR forecasts (p < 0.001). (4) Conclusion: These findings support the greater integration of LAMP into pre-flight weather briefings.


ABSTRACT Whales living within seismically active regions are subject to intense disturbances from strong sounds produced by earthquakes that can kill or injure individuals. Nishimura & Clark (1993) relate the possible effects of underwater earthquake noise levels in marine mammals, adducing that T-phase source signal level (10- to 30- Hz range) can exceed 200 dB re: 1 μPa at 1 m, for a magnitude 4–5 earthquake, sounds audible to fin whales which produce low frequency sounds of 16–20/25–44 Hz over 0.5–1s, typically of 183 dB re: 1 μPa at 1 m. Here we present the response of a fin whale to a 5.5 Richter scale earthquake that took place on 22 February 2005, in the Gulf of California. The whale covered 13 km in 26 min (mean speed = 30.2 km/h). We deduce that the sound heard by this whale might have triggered the costly energy expenditure of high speed swimming as a seismic-escape response. These observations support the hypothesis of Richardson et al. (1995) that cetaceans may flee from loud sounds before they are injured, when exposed to noise in excess of 140 dB re: 1 μPa 1 m.


Protonated phenol-formaldehyde condensation products of sodium lignosulfonate and lignocellulose derived aldehydes were first reported as cost-effective catalysts for the hydroxyalkylation/alkylation (HAA) of 2-methylfuran and furfural. Among them, the LF resin which was prepared with sodium lignosulfonate and formaldehyde exhibited the best performance. With the LF resin, higher activity, catalytic efficiency and stability than those of Amberlyst resins were observed, which can be rationalized by its higher acidic strength. The HAA product of 2-methylfuran and furfural was further converted to diesel and jet fuel range alkanes by the solvent-free hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) over the Ni/H-ZSM-5 catalysts prepared by conventional or complexation impregnation methods. It was found that the presence of complex agents can promote the dispersion of Ni, which leads to the higher HDO activity of Ni/H-ZSM-5 catalysts.


Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy is an experimental technique used initially for qualitative and quantitative analysis of organic compounds, providing specific information on molecular structure, chemical bonding and molecular environment. For many years, FTIR has been successfully employed for studying a wide variety of proteins, enzymes, nucleic acids, lipids and glycolipids and photobiological systems. Time-resolved (tr)-FTIR spectroscopy can monitor reactions of the amino acids, the ligands and specific water molecules in the active centre of a protein in the time range from nanoseconds to seconds, thereby providing a detailed understanding of the molecular reaction mechanism.

Key Concepts:

FTIR provides several advantages compared to other spectroscopic techniques.

FTIR spectroscopy is widely used for the investigation of secondary protein structure.

To obtain information on individual groups, we have to look at difference spectra.

In order to derive information on the reaction mechanism, the infrared bands have to be assigned to molecular groups of the protein.

The QM/MM (quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics) approach can be used to calculate the infrared spectra of proteins.

With the ATR (attenuated total reflection) technique it is possible to immobilise a protein on a surface and study reactions with ligands or other proteins.

Biochemical changes of tissues and body fluids can be monitored using FTIR.

By means of infrared microscopes spatial resolved information with a resolution of a few micrometer can be obtained.

Keywords:

secondary protein structure;
lipid characterisation;
pKa determination;
medicinal biology;
proteins;
molecular reaction mechanism;
time-resolved spectroscopy