A method for the estimation of the uncertainty of measurements for Gaussian outcomes of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is described using competitive and indirect foot and mouth disease (FMD) ELISAs. Assay repeatability was determined by random effects analysis of variance, and the normality of the residuals was checked. The standard errors of the individual predicted values were transformed into confidence intervals around the corresponding observed values and further transformed into probabilities of being above/below a cut-off. Logistic regression models were subsequently used to interpolate probability values for the whole range of possible assay values. The uncertainty of measurement of a test result was finally defined as the probability of not observing the same qualitative test result when retesting the same sample. For the competitive ELISA any sample with a percent inhibition 4% above the cut-off value had an uncertainty level (probability of a negative result in the case of retest) below 5%. In the indirect ELISA with a cut-off OD of 0.1, the uncertainty was below 5% for any sample with a normalised OD value above 0.22.


In a recent Senate hearing, Senator John McCain and Professor Washburn clashed about the federal role in tribal economic decisions involving Indian gaming. Professor Washburn, who was struck by decades of incompetent federal stewardship of tribal trust funds demonstrated so painfully in the Cobell litigation, questioned the wisdom of the existing gaming regulatory structure in which federal officials at the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) exercise oversight of tribal economic decisions involving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Senator McCain sharply disagreed. Following his investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, McCain was even more certain that tribes needed federal protection from outsiders like Abramoff. McCain argued that the need for such protection justified close federal oversight of tribal economic decisions. The dilemma inherent in this exchange between Senator McCain and Professor Washburn will haunt the relationship between the United States and Indian tribes in the post-Cobell (and post-Abramoff) era. The purpose of this panel discussion at Harvard Law School was to consider these issues in the context of the work of the NIGC. The NIGC reviews Indian gaming management contracts under strict statutory standards. It reviews other contracts for violation of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act's "sole proprietary interest" standard. In an era of tribal self-determination and self-governance, what is the justification for NIGC review of tribal economic decisions? Does the NIGC exercise a "trust responsibility" toward Indian tribes? What are the practical ramifications of having federal public servants reviewing tribal economic decisions worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars? Are the costs of such review justified by the benefits? Is federal oversight useful for tribal transactions in which tribes have obtained the advice of Wall Street investment banks and legal counsel at sophisticated law firms? Are federal public servants competent to review the increasingly complex financial arrangements created in such transactions? Is the NIGC accountable for its decisions? What remedy ought to be available to tribes if the NIGC makes an error? If such review is necessary to protect tribes, on what basis should federal public servants disapprove such agreements?


In an analytical study, the stability of the thermohaline circulation with respect to freshwater perturbations in high latitudes is investigated. The study is based on a coupled ocean and atmosphere box model in an idealized North Atlantic geometry. The box model provides a qualitative understanding of how the thermohaline circulation is affected by feedback mechanisms associated with changes in atmospheric transports of heat and moisture. Within a linear analysis, we examine the stability of the thermohaline circulation for a range of different atmospheric boundary conditions. The stability of the coupled system depends on the imposed transport parameterizations and the basic state. For the underlying non-linear system, we examine the sensitivity with respect to the strength of salinity perturbation. DOI: 10.1034/j.1600-0870.1996.t01-2-00008.x


Natural killer (NK) and NK T cells are tissue lymphocytes that secrete cytokines rapidly upon stimulation. Here, we show that these cells maintain distinct patterns of constitutive cytokine mRNAs. Unlike conventional T cells, NK T cells activate interleukin (IL)-4 and interferon (IFN)-γ transcription during thymic development and populate the periphery with both cytokine loci previously modified by histone acetylation. Similarly, NK cells transcribe and modify the IFN-γ gene, but not IL-4, during developmental maturation in the bone marrow. Lineage-specific patterns of cytokine transcripts predate infection and suggest evolutionary selection for invariant but distinct types of effector responses among the earliest responding lymphocytes.


As the Kauffman Campus Initiative reaches its conclusion, we at the Foundation see an opportunity to take a first cut at distilling the lessons learned from the widespread, but variegated, adoption of entrepreneurship education. As part of this effort, we solicited the views of academics and administrators at sixteen institutions with notable entrepreneurship education programs — some of them "Kauffman Campuses," some not — to discuss common practices and challenges. (Participating people and institutions are listed in appendix I.) In addition to gathering written submissions, we spent a day in four sessions of directed conversation about what is going well and not so well in their worlds. The themes, questions, and choices they discussed, plus the judgments and analysis of Foundation staff and others who were consulted along the way, are distilled here. This paper's methodology is deliberately qualitative. We make no effort to conduct a statistical census or a comprehensive survey of the field (which would be a formidable undertaking). The goal of this paper is simply to lay groundwork for a discussion of the state of entrepreneurship education as it leaves adolescence, so to speak, and enters its prime. We seek to clarify choices; to reflect on emerging norms and on successes and failures; to provide guidance for new entrants; and, above all, to spark a conversation about the next phase.


Sydney Harbour is a hotspot for diversity. However, as with estuaries worldwide, its diversity and functioning faces increasing threats from urbanisation. This is the first synthesis of threats and impacts in Sydney Harbour. In total 200 studies were reviewed: 109 focussed on contamination, 58 on habitat modification, 11 addressed non-indigenous species (NIS) and eight investigated fisheries. Metal concentrations in sediments and seaweeds are among the highest recorded worldwide and organic contamination can also be high. Contamination is associated with increased abundances of opportunistic species, and changes in benthic community structure. The Harbour is also heavily invaded, but invaders' ecological and economic impacts are poorly quantified. Communities within Sydney Harbour are significantly affected by extensive physical modification, with artificial structures supporting more NIS and lower diversity than their natural equivalents. We know little about the effects of fishing on the Harbour's ecology, and although ocean warming along Sydney is among the fastest in the world, we know little about how the ecosystem will respond to warming. The interactive and cumulative effects of stressors on ecosystem functioning and services in the Harbour are largely unknown. Sustainable management of this iconic natural system requires that knowledge gaps are addressed and translated into coherent environmental plans.


Background: Measuring patients' satisfaction shows the efficacy of care providers to meet patients' expectations and supplies the valuable data for health policy makers. This study was conducted to assess patients' satisfaction from hospital services and its relationship with responsiveness. Methods: This cross-sectional study was carried out at Zanjan University of Medical Sciences in 2013 -2014. A total of 486 were selected and World Health Survey (WHS) questionnaire data was used. Results: most of the inpatients (76. 4 %) and more than half of outpatient (54.2 %) rated overall hospitals services at level of average and high satisfaction. The most favorable dimension in terms of patients' satisfaction was quality of care from both group patients point of view. There was statistically significant relationship between responsiveness domains and patients' satisfaction (p < 0.01). The findings of this study showed that the majority of inpatients and half of outpatients were overall satisfied with hospitals services. Conclusion: Both inpatients and outpatients were satisfied with quality of delivered care, but there was low satisfaction from participation in decision- making for inpatients and access to services in outpatients.


The oxidative stress theory of aging offers the best mechanistic elucidation of the aging phe-nomenon and other age-related diseases. The susceptibility of an individual depends on the antioxidant status of the body. Objective of our study is to compare the antioxidant defense status in elderly individuals with the young people by measuring total antioxidant activity (AOA) in both the groups. Twenty five elderly people within the age group of 60± 10 yrs and 25 young individuals of 25 ± 7 yrs were chosen for the study. Sick and individuals on treatment were excluded from the study. Total AOA was estimated by a spectrophotometric method. We found a significant reduction in total AOA in elderly people with 1.06 ± 0.16 mmol/L as compared to 1.63 ± 0.25 mmol/L in young individuals. This reduction in AOA implies a defect in antioxidant system, may be due to a reduction in individual antioxidant or may be caused by a nonequilibrium or poor cooperation between them. Further studies need to be conducted to find out whether AOA levels can be used as a marker to predict any complications of old age.


This paper evaluates multidimensional poverty in European countries introducing two main novelties compared with the previous literature: first, the dimensions of poverty are selected on the basis of the shared values included in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union; second, the whole space of feasible weights is used to summarise the multidimensional information, in order to remain agnostic about the importance given to the different deprivations. Using data from four waves of EU-SILC, the methodological innovations introduced here have allowed to produce a family of measures that capture the individual probability of being multidimensionally poor. Individual probabilities are then used to analyse the within and between distribution of multidimensional poverty in ten countries. Finally, they get combined with the generalised Lorenz dominance techniques in order to derive socially preferred distributions with the minimum load of value judgments. The novel methods proposed in this analysis allow to move from a dual definition of poverty, where poor and non-poor individuals are classified in a mutually exclusive context, to a continuous measure of deprivation, which allows to capture both the extensive and intensive margin of multidimensional poverty.


An FPGA implementation of an investigative many-core processor; Fynbos, in support of a Fortran autoparallelising software pipeline Janet Ruth Wyngaard June 2014 In light of the power, memory, ILP, and utilisation walls facing the computing industry, this work examines the hypothetical many-core approach to finding greater compute performance and efficiency. In order to achieve greater efficiency in an environment in which Moore's law continues but TDP has been capped, a means of deriving performance from dark and dim silicon is needed. The many-core hypothesis is one approach to exploiting these available transistors efficiently. As understood in this work, it involves trading in hardware control complexity for hundreds to thousands of parallel simple processing elements, and operating at a clock speed sufficiently low as to allow the efficiency gains of near threshold voltage operation. Performance is therefore dependant on exploiting a new degree of fine-grained parallelism such as is currently only found in GPGPUs, but in a manner that is not as restrictive in application domain range. While removing the complex control hardware of traditional CPUs provides space for more arithmetic hardware, a basic level of control is still required. For a number of reasons this work chooses to replace this control largely with static scheduling. This pushes the burden of control primarily to the software and specifically the compiler, rather not to the programmer or to an application specific means of control simplification. An existing legacy tool chain capable of autoparallelising sequential Fortran code to the degree of parallelism necessary for many-core exists. This work implements a many-core architecture to match it. Prototyping the design on an FPGA, it is possible to examine the real world performance of the compiler-architecture system to a greater degree than simulation only would allow. Comparing theoretical peak performance and real performance in a case study application, the system is found to be more efficient than any other reviewed, but to also significantly under perform relative to current competing architectures. This failing is apportioned to taking the need for simple hardware too far, and an inability to implement static scheduling mitigating tactics due to lack of support for such in the compiler.


The question of which factors are central in determining whether a cell will undertake a new round of mitosis or will decycle has been examined in the isolated thymic lymphocyte model. Such cell populations possess both in vivo and in vitro a subpopulation of quiescent lymphoblasts which may be induced to reinitiate their mitotic programme. In the intact animal the major determinant of proliferative activity is the plasma ionised calcium concentration. However it has been established in culture that a variety of hormones, ions, cyclic nucleotides, plant lectins and ionophores may like calcium elicit a mitogenic response. These agents do not appear however to initiate DNA synthesis in an identical fashion. Rather there are two distinct intracellular mitogenic axes. The first axis includes a number of adenylate cyclase stimulants, cyclic AMP, phosphodiesterase inhibitors and magnesium ions. It was found that all these mitogens required extracellular magnesium ions to exhibit their stimulatory capacity. This dichotomy in mitogenic activity was further emphasised by the observation that these mitogens are all inhibited by testosterone, whilst the magnesium-independent mitogens were insensitive to this androgen. Indeed this second group of stimulatory factors required the presence of calcium ions in the extracellular milieu for activity, and were, in contrast to the magnesium-dependent mitogens inhibited by the presence of oestradiol in the culture. By examining the interrelationships between these various mitogens and inhibitors it has been possible to propose a mechanism to describe the activation process in the thymocyte. Studies of the metabolism of cyclic nucleotides, membrane potential and transmembrane ion fluxes indicate that there may be a complex relationship between membrane fluidity, ion balance and cyclic nucleotide levels which may individually or in concert promote the initiation of DNA synthesis. A number of possible mechanisms are discussed to account for these observations.


Akin to Zinc Finger and Transcription Activator Like Effector based transcriptional modulators, nuclease-null CRISPR-Cas9 provides a groundbreaking programmable DNA binding platform, begetting an arsenal of targetable regulators for transcriptional and epigenetic perturbation, by either directly tethering, or recruiting, transcription enhancing effectors to either component of the Cas9/guide RNA complex. Application of these programmable regulators is now gaining traction for the modulation of disease-causing genes or activation of therapeutic genes, in vivo. Adeno-Associated Virus (AAV) is an optimal delivery vehicle for in vivo delivery of such regulators to adult somatic tissue, due to the efficacy of viral delivery with minimal concerns about immunogenicity or integration. However, present Cas9 activator systems are notably beyond the packaging capacity of a single AAV delivery vector capsid. Here, we engineer a compact CRISPR-Cas9 activator for convenient AAV-mediated delivery. We validate efficacy of the CRISPR-Cas9 transcriptional activation using AAV delivery in several cell lines.


Current trends in the automotive industry towards fuel efficient and low emission
vehicles, are dictated by more environmental friendly customers, more strict environmental
legislation, rising fuel costs and intensive competition. These factors are pressuring vehicle
manufacturers to speed up R&D and improve the efficiency and flexibility of their
manufacturing operations so that improved products can be introduced over shortened
timeframes. Recent advances have been focused on improving the design of internal
combustion engines, coupled with research into alternative fuels and related new forms of
vehicle propulsion. Natural impacts of these advances have been shorter engine lifetimes,
increased pace of engine innovations, and significant changes in propulsion type share: in
Europe the diesel engine share is increasing relative to that of petrol engines while in the
US and Japan hybrids are becoming popular. In the long-term fuel cell- and hydrogen-fuelled vehicles may largely make internal combustion engines obsolete. [Continues.]


In the highly competitive environment businesses invest big amounts of moneyinto the new product development. New product success potentially depends on differentfactors among which salespeople play an important role. The aim of this paper is to explorethe potential link between salespeople's personality, motivation to sell new products andperformance in selling new products. Based on the theoretical background of the Big Fivepersonality dimensions, motivation and selling performance hypotheses were formulated andtested using statistical methods of correlation and regression analysis. The data was collectedwithin one technologically intensive organization – ABB AB in Sweden using online webquestionnaire and self-assessment measurements. Total investigation was conducted amongorganization's salesforce. The findings confirm the importance of salesperson's personalityempirically showing that the latter significantly predicts both motivation and performance inselling new products. From all the Big Five Extraversion was confirmed to be the mostimportant predictor of both motivation and performance in selling new products. Extraversionwas found positively related with both motivation and performance in selling new products.Salespeople scoring high in Extraversion and especially possessing such characteristics asconfident, energetic and sociable tend to be more motivated to sell new products and showhigher performance results. Other personality dimensions such as Agreeableness,Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to experience complexly approached are notproved to be significantly related neither with motivation nor performance in selling newproducts. The results are explained by the extreme importance of Extraversion in new productselling situation which analyzing in combination with the other personality dimensionssuppresses the others. Finding regarding controlling for certain demographical characteristicsof salespeople reveal that performance in selling new products is determined by sellingexperience. Salespeople's age is not proved to be significantly related neither with motivationnor performance in selling new products. Findings regarding salespeople's gender thoughproposing that males are more motivated to sell new products cannot be generalized due to thestudy limitations.


We have studied a low energy building on a campus of the University of California. It has efficient heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, consisting of a dual-fan/dual-duct variable air volume (VAV) system. As a major building on the campus, it was included in two demand response (DR) events in the summers of 2008 and 2009. With chilled water supplied by thermal energy storage in the central plant, cooling fans played a critical role during DR events. In this paper, an EnergyPlus model of the building was developed and calibrated. We compared both whole-building and HVAC fan energy consumption with model predictions to understand why demand savings in 2009 were much lower than in 2008. We also used model simulations of the study building to assess pre-cooling, a strategy that has been shown to improve demand saving and thermal comfort in many types of building. This study indicates a properly calibrated EnergyPlus model can reasonably predict demand savings from DR events and can be useful for designing or optimizing DR strategies.


Achieving very large mode area is a key goal in current research on microstructure and solid fibers for high power amplifiers and lasers. One particular design regime of recent interest has effective area over 1000 square microns and has effectively-single-mode operation ensured by bend losses of the higher-order modes. Simulations show that these fibers are extremely prone to bend-induced distortion and reduction in mode area. The calculated area reduction would significantly impact nonlinear impairments for bend radii relevant to any reasonable spooled package, and can be over 50 percent for bend radii tighter than 10cm. The parabolic-profile design has a natural immunity to bend-induced mode distortion and contraction, and shows superior performance in simulated fair comparisons with other fiber families, including microstructure fibers.


Clostridium difficile is a Gram-positive bacterium that causes a toxin-mediated disease, typically in individuals whose normal intestinal flora has been compromised by antibiotic therapy. C. difficile is naturally resistant to many antibiotics and produces spores that can withstand harsh environmental conditions and many disinfectants, making the infection difficult to clear and easy to spread. The infection begins when spores from the environment are ingested and germinate upon exposure to taurocholate and glycine in the digestive tract. This germination process is required to initiate infection and thus represents a good target for the development of novel therapeutics. Although spore germination is necessary for disease transmission, the molecular mechanisms regulating this process are poorly understood. Germination relies on sensing a germinant and triggering degradation of the cortex layer of the spore, which is important for spore resistance. Once the cortex is degraded, the spore can undergo outgrowth to a vegetative cell and secrete toxins to cause disease symptoms. There are several discrete steps to the proteolytic cascade that ultimately lead to cortex hydrolysis. First, the pseudoprotease CspC acts as a germinant receptor for the bile salt taurocholate; CspC then relays this signal to the subtilisin-like serine protease, CspB. CspB is required for efficient cleavage and activation of the cortex hydrolase. SleC. Upon proteolytic activation of SleC, cortex hydrolysis can proceed, which allows subsequent outgrowth. To better understand the mechanistic basis of the germination process, we solved the 1.6 Å structure of the required germination protease, CspB, from C. perfringens (a related pathogen). This structure revealed that CspB is comprised of three domains: an associated prodomain, a subtilase domain, and a jellyroll domain. Our work significantly advanced our understanding of the proteolytic cascade that leads to germination; in particular the structure and function of the CspB protease, and the role of its three domains. We have described the four domains of the cortex hydrolase, SleC, and how they contribute to the activity of SleC. We have recently obtained diffraction-quality crystals of the pseudoprotease, CspC, from an organism more closely related to C. difficile, C. bifermentans. Our latest work, focusing on the germination receptor, CspC, has brought us closer to a three-dimensional structure of this protein, which will likely reveal how it binds ligands and functions in germination.


This is the first part of the Proceedings of the meeting 'School and Workshop on the Geometry and Topology of Singularities', held in Cuernavaca, Mexico, from January 8th to 26th of 2007, in celebration of the 60th Birthday of Le Dung Trang.This volume contains fourteen cutting-edge research articles on algebraic and analytic aspects of singularities of spaces and maps. By reading this volume, and the accompanying volume on geometric and topological aspects of singularities, the reader should gain an appreciation for the depth, breadth, and beauty of the subject, and also find a rich source of questions and problems for future study.


In studying any group of people in the past, it is natural to ask where they were active and how big their community was. For Rome's fourth-century Christians who are my subject, a good authority to answer both questions was and still is Richard Krautheimer. I remember him well, and two of his younger associates, Alfred Frazer and "Gus" Corbett. He and his team, over the course of forty years from the 1930s on, produced a set of five splendid volumes on the history and construction of the city's early basilicas.1 I. PROPORTIONS Krautheimer was especially struck by the dimensions of the buildings he studied and what they showed about the size of the city's congregation. From the period before 312, archaeology still can provide no generally accepted example of the socalled house churches, set either in private residences or in commercial premises; nor do we have any remains of the parish churches which got their name tituli from the plaques above their doors, and which gradually replaced house churches. Of early tituli, we know fifteen or more through written sources. Others were gradually added, many in a form still surviving and thus open to our estimate of their size.2 Their total even at the end of the fourth century remained, as Krautheimer says, "amazingly small," and they seem to have been, in his words, no more than "modest halls."3 On average they might have held 250 or 300 worshippers apiece, in their pre-Constantinian dimensions, if they were as large as those post- Constantine that survive to be measured. Collectively that would mean around forty-five hundred persons. If this represented the entire Christian population in a city of half a million we can understand Krautheimer's surprise.4 Was construction limited by a lack of funds? Apparently not. The extent of building is apparent in our sources beginning in 312. With a coreligionist on the throne in that year-and, moreover, one who had in his hand the spoils of a civil war-suddenly the Christian community was rich, and Constantine was more than open to suggestions from their leader about the spending of those spoils.5 A request for a residence, a papal palace adjoining a cathedral church, was predictably submitted and approved6-so also, that this church should be dedicated to the Savior with silver statues of Christ prominent within. It was also natural that a great building should be raised to St. Peter on whose connection with Rome rested the primacy of its bishop. Yet the Lateran and the Vatican basilicas together provided new room for no more than fifty-two hundred worshippers, an "astonishingly limited provision" in Krautheimer's words.7 That is a first oddity. A second is surely the construction of St. Peter's in a cemetery, however natural this seems today. As to these two surprising matters, first, regarding the quite limited increase in space made available to the laity, a model can be offered that includes various obstructions and areas reserved to clergy and liturgical procedures. How it would look can be shown in S. Giovanni. Five-meter squares are marked off for ease of comprehension, with human figures drawn to scale. How much space each would need may be left for explanation elsewhere;8 but we may count no more than 150 seated in the middle of the nave and another 2,000 who stood, if they were so close-packed as the sample showing them in one corner of the church. All together, they cannot have amounted to more than 2,200. In St. Peter's we may imagine another 3,000-hence my suggested total of 5,200 for both basilicas, a figure arrived at by the same method I used also for the tituli. As to the second matter of surprise, namely, the choice of a cemetery as the site for St. Peter's: however strange this was to Roman ideas of public honoring, we should recall the report that the bishop Fabian (236-250) "directed many buildings, fabricae, to be put up" in the cemeteries. What were those buildings, I wonder? …


Plasma turbulence in the tokamak scrape-off layer (SOL) region, where magnetic field lines intersect the reactor inner walls, determines the heat load on the limiter or divertor targets. This is one of the most crucial issues on the way towards a fusion reactor. To tackle this problem we have improved the turbulent model in the GBS code, a new formulation of the vorticity equation that allow us to relax the Boussinesq approximation is implemented. The energy conservation properties of the new system of equations are evaluated. Also results of turbulent simulations in the SOL with and without the Boussinesq approximation are compared. In addition turbulent simulations across the last closed flux surface taking into account a cold and a hot ion regime are shown. These last simulations show a pressure gradient increase at the separatrix in the hot ion case at low resistivity.


This paper describes the radiation effects in integrated systems and discusses some techniques to mitigate these effects. The main circuits analyzed are SRAM memories and SRAM-based FPGAs. New techniques used to protect these circuits against these effects are also proposed in this work. One of the presented techniques to protect FPGAs is based on a combination of Double Modular Redundancy (DMR) with Concurrent Error Detection (CED) that can reduce overheads comparing to Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR). In the case of SRAM memories, a technique based on the Reed-Solomon Code and Hamming Code was developed, as well as a tool to generate a core for fault-tolerance that minimizes the area cost of the code. Some results are presented.


Alcohol is involved in a substantial number of family violence incidents recorded by police. However, there is a paucity of Australian research on the relative contribution of alcohol use by perpetrators and/or victims to whether or not the incident results in the perpetrator being arrested for or charged with a criminal offence. This study involved statistical analysis of a sample of 121,251 family violence incidents recorded by Victoria Police over a two-year period from 2014 to 2015. Twelve percent of incidents were noted by police as involving only perpetrator alcohol use, two percent were noted as involving only victim alcohol use and eight percent were noted as inolving alcohol use by both parties. A regression model was constructed to examine the contribution of alcohol involvement to predicting whether a criminal offence will be recorded, controlling for other factors known to be related to whether a perpetrator is arrested. Perpetrator alcohol use was not found to contribute to predicting whether an offence would be recorded while incidents where victims used alcohol and where both parties used alcohol were less likely to have an offence recorded.


In the early second century AD four extraordinary imperial deifications are recorded. The first took place during the reign of the emperor Trajan (r. 98-117), who deified his sister, Ulpia Marciana, immediately following her death in 112. Next, in 119, Marciana's daughter, Matidia, was deified by Hadrian (r. 117-138), who was married to Matidia's daughter, Vibia Sabina. The usual interpretation of these two deifications is that the honours paid these women bolstered imperial prestige within a political atmosphere that later allowed Hadrian to use their deifications as a means of creating a fictive dynastic connection to legitimize his succession. Similar motivations are applied by scholars to the deifications of Pompeia Plotina, the dowager empress of the emperor Trajan, who died during the tenure of his successor, Hadrian, in 123, and of Hadrian's own wife, Vibia Sabina, who died in 136 or 137, little more than a year before her husband. Intriguingly, none of these women is much remembered in extant historical records, though other evidence for their prominence — statues, coins, inscriptions, buildings in Rome's centre — is striking in its abundance. The rationale for the deifications of these women therefore remains the subject of a debate that ultimately engages questions of female involvement and the meaning of that involvement within Rome's traditional hierarchies of power and prominence. This paper seeks a culturally relevant context for the mystery of these deifications, proposing that the theoretical underpinnings for female deification lie as much in the implications of female involvement in the public sphere as they do in dynastic considerations. Using a social and ethnographic approach, it investigates evidence for the wealth, social standing, and public presence of these early second century women and connects these to the Romans' need to uphold traditional mores and morals in the face of social change and shifting political realities.


Ni and Ti elemental powders have been mechanically alloyed within a horizontal attritor to produce a Ni-50at% Ti product that is amorphous upon XRD analysis. Heat treatment of this product at 500 °C within an Ar atmosphere has been shown to promote crystallisation into a Ni-Ti intermetallic of CsCl type parent phase crystallography. Upon cooling this parent phase undergoes a solid state thermoelastic shape memory type of phase transformation producing a monoclinic B 19' martensite. This reversible phase transformation has been characterised by differential scanning calorimetry and displays a Ms ←→ As transformation temperature hysteresis of less than 10 °C. This is significantly lower than that associated with commercially produced ingot origin parent phase Ni-Ti, for which a 30 °C transformation hysteresis is expected. XRD analysis of the crystallised Ni-Ti indicates an increase in the parent phase lattice parameter when compared to Ni-Ti synthesised by ingot route. It is proposed that the increased parent lattice parameter effectively reduces the overall lattice strain required for the martensitic phase transformation, enabling the transformation to occur at reduced undercoolings and superheats.


Abstract. Methane emissions from boreal and arctic wetlands, lakes, and rivers are expected to increase in response to warming and associated permafrost thaw. However, the lack of appropriate land cover datasets for scaling field-measured methane emissions to circumpolar scales has contributed to a large uncertainty for our understanding of present-day and future methane emissions. Here we present the Boreal-Arctic Wetland and Lake Dataset (BAWLD), a land cover dataset based on an expert assessment, extrapolated using random forest modelling from available spatial datasets of climate, topography, soils, permafrost conditions, vegetation, wetlands, and surface water extents and dynamics. In BAWLD, we estimate the fractional coverage of five wetland, seven lake, and three river classes within 0.5 × 0.5° grid cells that cover the northern boreal and tundra biomes (17 % of the global land surface). Land cover classes were defined using criteria that ensured distinct methane emissions among classes, as indicated by a co-developed comprehensive dataset of methane flux observations. In BAWLD, wetlands occupied 3.2 × 106 km2 (14 % of domain) with a 95 % confidence interval between 2.8 and 3.8 × 106 km2. Bog, fen, and permafrost bog were the most abundant wetland classes, covering ~28 % each of the total wetland area, while the highest methane emitting marsh and tundra wetland classes occupied 5 and 12 %, respectively. Lakes, defined to include all lentic open-water ecosystems regardless of size, covered 1.4 × 106 km2 (6 % of domain). Low methane-emitting large lakes (> 10 km2) and glacial lakes jointly represented 78 % of the total lake area, while high-emitting peatland and yedoma lakes covered 18 and 4 %, respectively. Small (< 0.1 km2) glacial, peatland, and yedoma lakes combined covered 17 % of the total lake area, but contributed disproportionally to the overall spatial uncertainty of lake area with a 95 % confidence interval between 0.15 and 0.38 × 106 km2. Rivers and streams were estimated to cover 0.12 × 106 km2 (0.5 % of domain) of which 8 % was associated with high-methane emitting headwaters that drain organic-rich landscapes. Distinct combinations of spatially co-occurring wetland and lake classes were identified across the BAWLD domain, allowing for the mapping of "wetscapes" that will have characteristic methane emission magnitudes and sensitivities to climate change at regional scales. With BAWLD, we provide a dataset which avoids double-accounting of wetland, lake and river extents, and which includes confidence intervals for each land cover class. As such, BAWLD will be suitable for many hydrological and biogeochemical modelling and upscaling efforts for the northern Boreal and Arctic region, in particular those aimed at improving assessments of current and future methane emissions. Data is freely available at https://doi.org/10.18739/A2C824F9X (Olefeldt et al., 2021).


With big data growing rapidly in importance, academics and practitioners have been considering the means through which they can incorporate the shifts these technologies bring into their competitive strategies. Drawing on the emerging importance of information governance, this study examines the mechanisms through which it can facilitate competitive performance by aligning organizational capabilities. To test our proposed research model, we used survey data from 158 chief information officers and IT managers working in Norwegian firms. By means of partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), results show that information governance helps strengthen a firms' dynamic and operational capabilities, which in turn lead to competitive performance gains. The results are discussed in relation to their theoretical and practical implications.


Presents findings of an empirical study on incidental learning in which 48 subjects were presented with adjectives with different emotional content and then asked to judge whether the adjectives described their feelings and thoughts during exam situations. Subsequently the adjectives were to be reproduced. At the end of the experiment, the test anxiety inventory (TAI) by Hodapp, Laux and Spielberger was administered to measure worry and emotionality. The results of analysis of covariance show that persons with high scores on worry or emotionality judge negatively toned adjectives as more descriptive of themselves than persons low on worry or emotionality. High-worry subjects recall more adjectives and make more reproduction errors (intrusions) than persons with low-worry scores. These findings are discussed in the context of a semantic interpretation of test anxiety.


We present a program analysis for verifying quantitative robustness properties of programs, stated generally as: "If the inputs of a program are perturbed by an arbitrary amount epsilon, then its outputs change at most by (K . epsilon), where K can depend on the size of the input but not its value." Robustness properties generalize the analytic notion of continuity---e.g., while the function ex is continuous, it is not robust. Our problem is to verify the robustness of a function P that is coded as an imperative program, and can use diverse data types and features such as branches and loops.
 Our approach to the problem soundly decomposes it into two subproblems: (a) verifying that the smallest possible perturbations to the inputs of P do not change the corresponding outputs significantly, even if control now flows along a different control path; and (b) verifying the robustness of the computation along each control-flow path of P. To solve the former subproblem, we build on an existing method for verifying that a program encodes a continuous function [5]. The latter is solved using a static analysis that bounds the magnitude of the slope of any function computed by a control flow path of P. The outcome is a sound program analysis for robustness that uses proof obligations which do not refer to epsilon-changes and can often be fully automated using off-the-shelf SMT-solvers.
 We identify three application domains for our analysis. First, our analysis can be used to guarantee the predictable execution of embedded control software, whose inputs come from physical sources and can suffer from error and uncertainty. A guarantee of robustness ensures that the system does not react disproportionately to such uncertainty. Second, our analysis is directly applicable to approximate computation, and can be used to provide foundations for a recently-proposed program approximation scheme called {loop perforation}. A third application is in database privacy: proofs of robustness of queries are essential to differential privacy, the most popular notion of privacy for statistical databases.


In the era of globalization, the economic contribution of the tourism, hospitality and leisure industry to the world's GDP is significant. Tourism represents one of the main sources of income for many countries; tourism creates jobs, enhances exports and contributes to the economic welfare of a host country. Although the contribution of tourism, hospitality and the leisure industry in the era of globalization has been broadly recognized, there are also numerous challenges that this industry faces. Higher Learning Research Communications is publishing this special issue with articles focusing particularly on the development of tourism, hospitality and leisure in the globalized world. The issue consists of a selection of 4 papers from authors that contribute to the understanding of recent developments in this industry, as well as strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities for the tourism, hospitality and leisure industry in the globalized world. "Challenges and Opportunities of the World Tourism from the view Point of Ecotourism", by Fredy Gonzalez Fonseca, analyses the potential options of ecotourism as a key driver of sustainable economic development for local communities. Despite the benefits this sector presents to local communities in Mexico, the author argues that there is non-existent support from the national or local governments and no equitable tourism legislation protecting potential natural resources, which could be used for future ecotourism activities. On "Economic Competition, Sustainability and Survival of the Dodo: The Eastern Island Case and the Tragedy of the Common Effects", Pedro Moreira examines the results of a series of decision games obtained under a quasi-experimental design.  Behavioral patterns were analyzed and extrapolated to explore the terminal effects of competition trends on the survival and economic viability of organizations and travel destinations in restricted environments. Marina Mattera & Alberto Moreno Melgarejo write on the "Strategic Implications of Corporate Social Responsibility in the Hotel Industry:  a comparative research between NH Hotels and Melia Hotels International". The study outlines the best practices of two leading Spanish hotel corporations: NH Hotels and Melia Hotels International. By identifying actions undertaken by the most important firms of the sector, these hotels can serve as an exemplar and be replicated by other firms. The authors note that a firm can enhance their positive impact on their operating environment by increasing sustainability practices, improving understanding of the triple bottom line and minimizing negative social as well as environmental footprints. Finally, "Lifestyle entrepreneurs: Insights into Blackpool's small hotel sector", by William Rowson and Conrad Lashley, examines branded chains that dominate sections of commercial hospitality provision. The study acknowledges that those managing small accommodation properties, in the form of guest houses and small hotels, have more lifestyle ambitions for their commercial operation rather than classical entrepreneurial motives. We would like to thank Carmen M. Mendez for all her support during the development process of this issue and also Higher Learning Research Communications for giving us this opportunity to publish the special issue. We thank all the reviewers for their assistance and support in the review process of the papers for this special issue. Ruth Rios-Morales, Les Roches-Gruye University of Applied Sciences Ian Jenkins, Glion Institute of Higher Education


Given that the synthesis of cumulated knowledge is an essential condition for any field to grow and develop, we believe that the enhanced role of IS reviews requires that this expository form be given careful scrutiny. Over the past decade, several senior scholars have made calls for more review papers in our field. While the number of IS review papers has substantially increased in recent years, no prior research has attempted to develop a general framework to conduct and evaluate the rigor of standalone reviews. In this paper, we fill this gap. More precisely, we present a set of guidelines for guiding and evaluating IS literature reviews and specify to which review types they apply. To do so, we first distinguish between four broad categories of review papers and then propose a set of guidelines that are grouped according to the generic phases and steps of the review process. We hope our work will serve as a valuable source for those conducting, evaluating, and/or interpreting reviews in our field.


In the real data world, there are various clustering algorithms available in data mining. The data available from the different data sources may be huge in instances, attributes and in different formats. The clustering algorithms available are assessed based on how the algorithm cluster the given data and find its parametric values. The clustering of data may end in inappropriate results if the algorithm is not chosen wisely. This paper proposes a comparison between diverse clustering algorithms such as K Means clustering, Mini-Batch K Means clustering, Hierarchical clustering, Bagging and Boosting by figuring out clustering strategies using high dimensional datasets on each algorithm above. After the process of data cleaning in dataset, we have clustered the datasets and compared the summary of each to showcase the comparability of difference in their strategical values such as Clustering tendency, clustering quality and data driven approach for evaluating the number of clusters, Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) metric and provide an idea to choose the algorithm for clustering the data effectively. And as a result, Local Clustering Coefficient (LCC) with K-means clustering bunching method performs better than the other clustering algorithms and the results are reported.


Some of the most pressing concerns of our time, such as crises connected to migration, the welfare state, international law and terrorism, are part of the Swedish upper secondary school subject Social Science. This means that Social Science teaching easily generates intense emotions, sparks of which are lit in the encounter between the students, the teacher, and the specific content of the school subject Social Science. This aim of this dissertation is to examine what emotions do in the teaching of the school subject Social Science (samhallskunskap) and what the subject Social Science does to emotions. This is examined through an ethnographic exploration of Social Science teaching in four different Swedish upper secondary schools. Barbara Rosenwein's concept emotional communities is central to the analysis, as are Sara Ahmed's emotion-oriented conceptualisations of movement, attachment and contact.In the study, it is shown how an emotional community of Social Science teaching emerges that in part is different from comparable emotional communities in other school subjects, such as History and Religious Education. There is furthermore a dissonance between the role emotions are supposed to play in the teaching and the role emotions actually do play. Despite being clearly related to the specific subject content of Social Science, it is also important to note that emotions are always relational, which leads to attachments and detachments in the group of teacher and students. Emotions in Social Science teaching are moreover connected to conflictuality, multiperspectivity, ideas about 'the good citizen', and the subject's inherent contemporaneity.An important result of the dissertation is that in emotionally intense teaching situations, teachers' attempts to use a 'traditional', rationality-oriented Social Science analysis do not resonate with the students. The examined cases of Social Science teaching therefore seem to suffer from a traditional division between rationality and emotionality that largely has characterized political analysis in the 20th century. A rapprochement between the students' lifeworld and the school subject's disciplinary analysis would benefit from an increased use of the emotional dimension and community of Social Science teaching. (Less)


Mast cell contribution to neoangiogenesis during tumorigenesis in oral squamous cell carcinoma is not determined yet. Objectives: To associate numerical mast cell density (MCD) to numerical microvessel density (MVD) during the progression of oral leukoplakia without dysplasia and leukoplakia with dysplasia to squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Materials and methods: MVD was analysed immunohistochemically (mouse monoclonal anti-human CD34) in 49 paraffin-embedded specimens, 35 OSCCs, 9 leukoplakias and 5 normal oral tissues. Toluidine blue counterstaining revealed mast cells. MCD and MVD were assessed at the same optical field. Results: MVD increased between: normal oral mucosa, dysplasia (p=0.004), OSCC (p=0.001), leukoplakia and OSCC (p=0.041). MCD increased between: normal oral mucosa, dysplasia (p=0.003), OSCC (p=0.000), leukoplakia and OSCC (p=0.007). MVD was found to depend on MCD (p=0.000) in a percent 28.3% (power curve fit model). Conclusions: Mast cells are attracted at the lesion site and may turn on an angiogenic switch during tumorigenesis in OSCC.


Animal signals evolve by striking a balance between the need to convey information through particular habitats and the limitations of what types of signals can most easily be produced and perceived. Here, we present new results from field measures of undisturbed behavior and biochemical analyses of scent marks from 12 species of Sceloporus lizards to explore whether evolutionary changes in chemical composition are better predicted by measures of species behavior, particularly those associated with visual displays, chemoreception, and locomotion, or by measures of habitat climate (precipitation and temperature). We found that more active lizard species used fewer compounds in their volatile scent marks, perhaps conveying less specific information about individual and species identity. Scent marks from more active lizard species also had higher proportions of saturated fatty acids, and the evolution of these compounds has been tracking the phylogeny closely as we would expect for a metabolic byproduct. In contrast, the proportions of unsaturated fatty acids were better explained by evolutionary shifts in habitat temperature (and not precipitation), with species in warmer climates using almost no volatile unsaturated fatty acids. The proportion of aldehydes was explained by both behavior and environment, decreasing with behavioral activity and increasing with habitat temperature. Our results highlight the evolutionary flexibility of complex chemical signals, with different chemical compounds responding to different elements of the selective landscape over evolutionary time.


An objective method is developed to monitor the stability of spaceborne instruments, aimed at distinguishing climate trend from instrument drift in satellite-based climate observation records. This method is based on four-years of Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) broadband observations of deep convective cloud systems with cloud-top temperature lower than 205 K and with large optical depths. The implementation of this method to the CERES instrument stability analysis reveals that the monthly albedo distributions are practically the same for deep convective clouds with CERES measurements acquired from both the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and Terra satellite platforms, indicating that CERES instruments are well calibrated and stable during both missions. Furthermore, with a nonlinear regression neural network narrowband-broadband conversion, this instrument-stability monitoring method can also be applied to narrowband instruments such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the Visible Infrared Scanner (VIRS). The results show that the drifts associated with both VIRS and MODIS instruments are less than 1% during a four-year period. Since the CERES albedo measurements are highly accurate, the absorptance of these opaque clouds can be reliably estimated. The absorptions of these clouds from observations are around 25%, whereas the absorptions from theory can be as low as 18%, depending on ice cloud microphysics.


Background Bile acids, end products of the pathway for cholesterol elimination, are required for dietary lipid and fat-soluble vitamin absorption and maintain the balance between cholesterol synthesis in the liver and cholesterol excretion. They are composed of a steroid structure and are primarily made in the liver by the oxidation of cholesterol. Cholesterol is also highly abundant in the human ovarian follicle, where it is used in the formation of the sex steroids. Methodology/Principal Findings Here we describe for the first time evidence that all aspects of the bile acid synthesis pathway are present in the human ovarian follicle, including the enzymes in both the classical and alternative pathways, the nuclear receptors known to regulate the pathway, and the end product bile acids. Furthermore, we provide functional evidence that bile acids are produced by the human follicular granulosa cells in response to cholesterol presence in the culture media. Conclusions/Significance These findings establish a novel pathway present in the human ovarian follicle that has the capacity to compete directly with sex steroid synthesis.


INTRODUCTION AND AIMS
The aim of the current study is to look for differences in drink choice and drinking location between a recent heavy drinking occasion (RHDO) and usual low-risk occasions among those that recently had both types of drinking occasion.

DESIGN AND METHODS
Seven hundred and seventy-four respondents to a population-based survey reported having a RHDO [8 + Australian standard drinks (ASD) for females, 11 + ASD for males] in the past six months also reported that their usual drinking occasion in at least one location involved less than five ASD. Drink choice and drinking locations for the RHDO and usual low-risk occasions were compared using confidence intervals.

RESULTS
The RHDO was more likely than usual low-risk occasions to occur away from licensed premises (59%), despite a higher percentage of respondents reporting drinking at a pub, bar or nightclub on a RHDO (28%) than on a usual low-risk night (12%). A higher percentage of respondents nominated bottled spirits (33%) as their main drink for their RHDO, with 11% primarily drinking bottled spirits on a usual low-risk occasion; the converse was true for bottled wine (20% and 33%, respectively).

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
While the high proportion of RHDOs that occurred at least in part at pubs or nightclubs was not surprising, a high proportion also occur in private homes. Previously found links between heavy drinking and beer may be a reflection of the usual drink choice of heavier drinkers, rather a choice specific to a particularly heavy occasion.


Background: Bacterial DNA released upon bacterial autolysis or killed by antibiotics, hence, many inflammatogenic reactions will be established leading to serious tissue damage. Aim: the present work aimed to elucidate the histopathological changes caused by prokaryotic (bacterial) DNA and eukaryotic (candidal) DNA. Materials and Methods: twenty one Staphylococcus aureus and 36 Candida albicans isolates were isolated from UTI patients. Viable cells and DNA of the highest antibiotic sensitive isolates were injected, intraurethraly, in mice. Results were evaluated via histopathological examination. Results: Mildest reactions were obtained from mice challenged with viable C. albicans compared with those challenged with viable S. aureus. Dose-dependent histological changes were observed for both eukaryotic and prokaryotic DNA. However, the eukaryotic C. albicans DNA developed less intense histological changes than S. aureus DNA. Conclusion: microbial DNA has the ability to cause damage in murine renal system. Nevertheless, bacterial DNA caused more intense damage than candidal DNA.


This paper is concerned with a class of algorithms that perform exhaustive search on propositional knowledge bases. We show that each of these algorithms defines and generates a propositional language. Specifically, we show that the trace of a search can be interpreted as a combinational circuit, and a search algorithm then defines a propositional language consisting of circuits that are generated across all possible executions of the algorithm. In particular, we show that several versions of exhaustive DPLL search correspond to such well-known languages as FBDD, OBDD, and a precisely-defined subset of d-DNNF. By thus mapping search algorithms to propositional languages, we provide a uniform and practical framework in which successful search techniques can be harnessed for compilation of knowledge into various languages of interest, and a new methodology whereby the power and limitations of search algorithms can be understood by looking up the tractability and succinctness of the corresponding propositional languages.


The arguments which promote the use and potential of open data in education can trace their roots back to scholarly communication communities. The close symbiosis between the Web as we know it and the values and working practices of scholars in higher educational institutions has been acknowledged. The work of HEIs is complex and extends well beyond research and education. Education is a costly and increasingly competitive business. Costs are associated not only with research and education but with a vast array of back office administrative functions and demands to publish performance indicators to the public domain. This presentation will argue that HEIs are in a powerful position to couple the insights which accrue thanks to their roles as creators and early adopters of open data. Open data practices afford gains which complement the exchange of new knowledge, and the sharing of knowledge and information for public good - especially if it has been funded by the public purse. Internally, insightful use of private open data had the potential to streamline administrative and educational processes. Evolving understandings of the potential and power of data driven approaches may enable institutions to gain economic and repetitional advantage potentially driving down internal costs, streamlining aspects of the research process, making positive contributions to teaching and the support of teaching and learning, along with enhancing services which promote educational choice and student recruitment.


This document specifies how to use Elliptic Curve Digital Signature
Algorithm (ECDSA) with XML Signatures. The mechanism specified
provides integrity, message authentication, and/or signer
authentication services for data of any type, whether located within
the XML that includes the signature or included by reference. This
memo provides information for the Internet community.


The books in this series from the editors of the Food Service Professional are the best and most comprehensive books for serious food service operators available today. These step-by-step guides on a specific management subject range from finding a great site for your new restaurant to how to train your wait staff and literally everything in between. They are easy and fast -to-read, easy to understand and will take the mystery out of the subject. The information is "boiled down" to the essence. They are filled to the brim with up-to-date and pertinent information. The books cover all the bases, providing clear explanations and helpful, specific information. All titles in the series include the phone numbers and web sites of all companies discussed. What you wont find are wordy explanations, tales of how someone did it better, or a scholarly lecture on the "theory". Every paragraph in each of the books is comprehensive, well researched, engrossing, and just plain fun-to-read, yet are packed with interesting ideas.


Free-form surfaces are increasingly used in optical and mechanical devices due to their superior optical and aerodynamic properties. The form quality plays an essential role in the characteristics of a free-form component. In order to assess the form error, it is necessary to fit the measurement data with a nominal template or analytical function. This thesis focuses on investigating and developing appropriate fitting (matching) algorithms for different kinds of free-form surfaces.

A new algorithm called the Structured Region Signature (SRS) is proposed to provide a rough matching between the data and template. SRS is a global generalised feature which represents the surface shape by a one dimensional function. The candidate location which occupies the most similar signature with the measurement data is considered to be a correct matching position.

The fitted result is then refined to improve its accuracy and robustness. The widely used Iterative Closest Point technique suffers from a slow convergence rate and the local minimum problem. In this thesis the nominal template is reconstructed into a continuous representation using NURBS or radial basis functions if provided as a CAD model or a discrete-point set. The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is then applied to calculate the final result. The solution of the traditional algebraic fitting may be biased. The orthogonal distance fitting techniques can effectively overcome this problem. If the template function is explicit, the projection points can be updated simultaneously with the motion and shape parameters; whereas a nested approach is adopted to update the projection points and motion parameters alternately when the template is in a parametric form.

A proper error metric should be employed according to the distribution of the measurement noise, so that the solution can be guaranteed robust and unbiased. Simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the developed algorithms and techniques.


BradyGames Borderlands 2 Signature Series Strategy Guide includes the following: Shoot, Loot & Joy Puke Your Face Off! Crimson Raiders Path of Most Resistance - A complete walkthrough of the main story, featuring maps for every area, collectible locations, expert tips from the development team at Gearbox, and an A-to-Z index of all the optional missions. Marcus Munitions Monthly - The massive Borderlands 2 arsenal is described as only Marcus couldwith expertise and snark! Its all here: damage calculators, weapon generation, the specialties of each manufacturer, and choosing the best weapon for your class. Plus, coverage of black market items (SDUs), class mods, relics, and more! Sir Hammerlocks Almanac of Pandoran Beasts - A bestiary of all creatures, big and bigger, in Pandora. Sir Hammerlock imparts his insights and observationsincluding a symposium on each species and mob family. Spawning locations, critical hit diagrams, likely drops, and loads of valuable stats! Hyperions Most Wanted- A breakdown of all four classes. Get to know each characters personality and history, as well as the special abilities, skilltrees, and possible builds for solo play and co-op roles that will make your Vault Hunter unique. Claptraps Secret Vault - A quick reference to all challenges and Achievements/Trophies, along with a customizable heads gallery. Plus secrets! About the game - Borderlands 2 follows the story of four new Vault Hunters as they fight to free Pandora from the clutches of Handsome Jack, the brilliant, charismatic, and utterly despicable CEO of the Hyperion Corporation. Players will fight across the whole of Pandora to stop Jack from awakening an ancient alien evil known only as "the Warrior." Their quest will bring them into contact with some familiar faces from the old game- most notably, the original four Vault Hunters: Roland, Lilith, Brick and Mordecai. They, along with some brand new characters, will help players defeat Jack, destroy the Warrior, and save Pandora.


The systematic review of information systems is an essential part of the IT strategic planning process. In the context of maintenance management systems this process is normally performed by the maintenance manager. However, many maintenance managers are ill prepared for this task and, as such, new opportunities may be missed or poorly performing computerised systems accepted as the norm. This paper describes the development of a set of practical guidelines in the form of benchmarks which could be used to assist maintenance managers when they review their systems. The benchmarks were based on an evaluation matrix methodology which was used in conjunction with a substantive questionnaire survey of maintenance managers to identify and evaluate the importance and performance of key computerised maintenance functions. The performance of computerised maintenance management systems was evaluated using an evaluation grid and areas of weakness were identified. The potential use of the benchmarks in the strategic review of computerised maintenance management systems is discussed. The paper concludes that the evaluation matrix method can be a useful tool to establish the general level of performance of computerised systems and thus it can inform the IT strategic planning process. In the context of maintenance management systems the evaluation method identified weaknesses in key maintenance processes and these may need to be fundamentally reengineered.


The objective of this study is to review the recently introduced cashless policy in Nigeria and in particular, assess peoples' behaviours and attitudes towards the policy in Lagos where it is operational. It is found that while 92% of the sample is aware of the cashless policy, only 58% actually understands it; that most of the respondents use ATMs and that they do so because of convenience and safety while those who avoid the cashless channels do so because of fraud and operational lapses. As an interim verdict, 72% of the respondents believe that the cashless policy is necessary; only 40% believe that the CBN approach to its implementation is the best but only 36% believe that the policy will succeed. The 64% who believe that the policy would fail justify their doomful predictions on the power supply situation, poor implementation and non availability of cashless channels in the rural areas. The study recommends that the CBN builds on the shortcomings as revealed in the study to fine-tune the policy going forward while banks should improve their cashless channel operations and be willing to share the gains of cashlessness with their customers.


New records of phytoplankton (acritarchs), ichnofossils and olenellid trilobites have been studied from the autochthonous upper Neoproterozoic–Lower Cambrian successions along the Caledonian Thrust Front in the Laisvall–Storuman region of northern Sweden. The fossils are from a newly examined natural outcrop at Bergmyrhobben near Lake Storuman, and from previously described fossiliferous outcrops at Delliknäs and Mt. Assjatj, the Laisvall mine and the Maiva borehole successions in the Laisvall area. Acritarch assemblages are recorded throughout the Grammajukku Formation. They are age-diagnostic for the Skiagia–Fimbriaglomerella acritarch Zone, time-equivalent to the Schmidtiellus mickwitzi trilobite Zone (the lower part of the formation), and the Heliosphaeridium–Skiagia acritarch Zone corresponding to the Holmia kjerulfi trilobite Zone (the upper part of the formation). The acritarch record from the Storuman area documents the presence of strata contemporaneous to the Schmidtiellus mickwitzi Zone for the first time in the Scandinavian Caledonides. This zone was previously only recognized in the platform regions of the Baltica palaeocontinent. The ichnofossils from the upper Såvvovare Formation, including ?Harlaniella, Phycodes, Gyrolithes and Palaeophycus ichnogenera, allowed the base of the Cambrian System to be determined within the Maiva Member and the coeval Kautsky Ore Member in the subsurface successions, and to attribute this part of the formation to the Lower Cambrian Platysolenites antiquissimus faunal Zone of Baltica. The trilobite fauna from the Storuman area, attributed tentatively to Holmia sp., occurs at the lowermost stratigraphic level among olenellids in the Caledonides. The range of this species, estimated from the concurrent acritarch biostratigraphy, is within the Schmidtiellus mickwitzi Zone. The stratigraphic significance of the acritarch assemblages and ichnofossils is analysed and the biochronology of the Grammajukku Formation and the upper Såvvovare Formation is discussed in detail in the context of Lower Cambrian zonation in Baltica.


The United States (US), a world leader in medical technology, ironically also happens to be home to one of the least efficient healthcare systems in the world. The country's mammoth, unsustainable spending on healthcare has triggered several key healthcare reforms to put the country's healthcare system on the path for a major overhaul. One such reform was the HITECH Act of 2009 which made provision for incentives for adoption of Electronic Health Records by physicians and hospitals. The ultimate goal of this reform was to forge connectivity across the country's fragmented healthcare system in the hope that it would lead to efficiency and consequently, a drop in the country's healthcare expenditure. Although the reform no doubt spurred EHR adoption, its intended goal of connectivity has not been fully realized. A set of critical success factors has been proposed to overcome these issues and make the ecosystem both patient-centric and sustainable.


The trial of Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch (Case 001), at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) was the first in the history of international criminal justice in which surviving victims of alleged crimes could participate directly in international criminal proceedings as civil parties. In this study, we interviewed all 75 civil parties residing in Cambodia, including those who had ultimately been denied civil party status at the conclusion of the trial in Case 001. The objective was to learn about their experiences in participating in the ECCC proceedings. The results are compared with data from a nationwide survey of the general population. The results show that the Cambodian civil parties viewed positively their overall experience of participating and testifying. However, civil parties who had their status denied felt anger, helplessness, shame, and worthlessness. Compared to the overall population who lived under the Khmer Rouge, civil parties were more negative about the impact of the trial on their (1) acceptance of loss and reaching closure, (2) forgiveness of the perpetrators, and (3) perceptions as to whether the trial had improved the rule of law in Cambodia. Many civil parties lacked understanding about key aspects of the trial, including sentencing. The results emphasize the importance of victims' participation in the proceedings, but also suggest that participation alone is unlikely to bring about healing, closure, and reconciliation for the victims. Future international courts must develop the resources and mechanisms that ensure a meaningful and effective participation of victims, and engage participants in a dialogue over procedures and expectations.


Background: Anemia and iron deficiency are universal problems in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). However, decisive indicator to guide the further gastrointestinal (GI) workup has not been determined. Methods: We included 104 anemic patients with nondialysis-dependent CKD stages 3-5 (38 patients at stage 3, 26 patients at stage 4, and 40 patients at stage 5). Hemoglobin, serum ferritin, transferrin saturation (TSAT), mean corpuscular volume (MCV), and corrected reticulocyte count data were assessed to evaluate diagnostic utility for bleeding-related GI lesions, which were identified by esophagogastroduodenoscopy and colonoscopy. Results: Bleeding-related GI lesions were found in 55 (52.9%) patients, and patients with stage 5 CKD had a higher prevalence of gastric lesions than patients with CKD stage 3 or 4 (all p < 0.05). The areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves used to predict bleeding-related lesions were 0.69 for TSAT (p = 0.002) and 0.61 for serum ferritin (p = 0.085). The sensitivity and specificity of a cutoff value for TSAT < 20% were 0.59 and 0.74, respectively. Hemoglobin, MCV, and corrected reticulocyte levels had no significant diagnostic utility. On multivariable logistic regression, the chance of GI lesions increased by 6% for each 1% reduction in TSAT and increased 4.1-fold for patients with CKD stage 5 (all p < 0.05). Conclusions: TSAT is a useful indicator for determining the GI workup in anemic patients with nondialysis-dependent CKD stages 3-5. Stage 5 CKD is independently associated with bleeding-related lesions and TSAT should be used cautiously in these patients.


The purpose of the present research is to study the effects of educational multimedia in dictation and its role in improving dysgraphia in students with dictation difficulty. Research methodology is categorized as being quasi-experimental. The statistical population of the study includes students with dictation difficulty of the second grade of primary schools of Arak in the 2011-2012 academic year. The population (including 39 students) is selected through utilization of Poisson sampling procedure. From the designated sample, 20 members are selected to be put in the experiment group and the remaining 19 members are put in the control group. Clinical interview, dictation test, and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children- Revised (WISC-R) are utilized to distinguish students with dictation difficulty from normal-progress students in learning disability center. Dictation test for data compilation and Man-Whitney- Wilcoxon U-Test (MWW) for data analysis are used. The findings of the study depict that the level of improvement of dysgraphia of those students who rely on educational multimedia in dictation has a positive statistical significance in comparison with those who rely on normal educational procedures (p<.001). Therefore, educational multimedia in dictation has a positive impact in improving dysgraphia in students with dictation difficulty.


We present a declarative authorization language. Policies and credentials are expressed using predicates defined by logical clauses, in the style of constraint logic programming. Access requests are mapped to logical authorization queries, consisting of predicates and constraints combined by conjunctions, disjunctions, and negations. Access is granted if the query succeeds against the current database of clauses. Predicates ascribe rights to particular principals, with flexible support for delegation and revocation. At the discretion of the delegator, delegated rights can be further delegated, either to a fixed depth, or arbitrarily deeply.

Our language strikes a careful balance between syntactic and semantic simplicity, policy expressiveness, and execution efficiency. The syntax is close to natural language, and the semantics consists of just three deduction rules. The language can express many common policy idioms using constraints, controlled delegation, recursive predicates, and negated queries. We describe an execution strategy based on translation to Datalog with Constraints, and table-based resolution. We show that this execution strategy is sound, complete, and always terminates, despite recursion and negation, as long as simple syntactic conditions are met.


In 2011, scientists in the Netherlands and Japan announced that they had created a modified variant of the H5N1 avian influenza virus that was transmissible via aerosol, raising fears of a new, highly lethal H5N1 virus that could cause a deadly global pandemic. Soon, government officials and the media were raising alarms about the wisdom of publishing such experimental methods and results in the open scientific literature. Their concerns sparked a large public controversy about the H5N1 experiments and their potential publication. In the midst of this controversy, U.S. intelligence analysts began assessing the potential security implications of the H5N1 manuscripts, including whether a terrorist, criminal, or state could easily replicate these experiments and create mutated viruses for bioweapons use. An in-depth look at this controversy reveals that, first, U.S. intelligence analysts do not have adequate social and material resources to identify and evaluate the tacit knowledge, or know-how, that underpins dual-use experiments such as those in the H5N1 case. Second, they lack dedicated structures and methods to understand the politics that characterize the use of technical expertise in such controversial biosecurity issues. Third, they require new types, structures, and uses of expert knowledge to enable them to make more informed and balanced assessments of biosecurity threats.


In processing large quantities of data, a fundamental problem is to obtain a summary which supports approximate query answering. Random sampling yields flexible summaries which naturally support subset-sum queries with unbiased estimators and well-understood confidence bounds. Classic sample-based summaries, however, are designed for arbitrary subset queries and are oblivious to the structure in the set of keys. The particular structure, such as hierarchy, order, or product space (multi-dimensional), makes range queries much more relevant for most analysis of the data. Dedicated summarization algorithms for range-sum queries have also been extensively studied. They can outperform existing sampling schemes in terms of accuracy on range queries per summary size. Their accuracy, however, rapidly degrades when, as is often the case, the query spans multiple ranges. They are also less flexible---being targeted for range sum queries alone---and are often quite costly to build and use. In this paper we propose and evaluate variance optimal sampling schemes that are structure-aware. These summaries improve over the accuracy of existing structure-oblivious sampling schemes on range queries while retaining the benefits of sample-based summaries: flexible summaries, with high accuracy on both range queries and arbitrary subset queries.


BACKGROUND
Both unintended and adolescent childbearing disproportionately impact the Hispanic population of the United States.

METHODS
We used the 2006-2010 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) to provide the most recent, nationally representative description of pregnancy, childbearing, and contraception for Hispanic females aged 15-44. We determined baseline fertility data for self-identified Hispanic female respondents. Among those reporting a pregnancy history, we calculated the proportion of pregnancies identified as unintended and their association with sociodemographic variables. We also assessed outcomes and estimates of relative risk for unintended pregnancy. Finally, we examined contraceptive use prior to self-reported unintended pregnancies.

RESULTS
Approximately 70% of Hispanic women reported ever being pregnant, including 18% of teenagers. Over half (51%) of those pregnancies were unintended, including 81% among teenagers. The adjusted risk of unintended pregnancy was highest in women 15 to 19 years old and those with three or more pregnancies (incidence rate ratio [IRR] 1.64, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.44-1.88 and IRR 1.77, 95% CI: 1.53-2.06, respectively). Half of unintended pregnancies were preceded by no contraception. The most common reason for unintended pregnancy preceded by contraception was "improper use" (45%) and among pregnancies without use, the most common response (37%) was "I did not think I could get pregnant."

CONCLUSIONS
There is a high frequency of unintended pregnancy and lack of contraceptive use among Hispanic women. These findings highlight the need for improved reproductive education and contraceptive counseling in this population.


This article juxtaposes anti-radicalisation policy in the United Kingdom, one of the pioneers in the field, with Greece, one of the latecomers. Drawing on localisation theory, our aim is to understand how 'common knowledge' of radicalisation and counter-radicalisation has materialised in the United Kingdom and Greece by exploring the development and use of radicalisation-related risk and vulnerability assessment tools. We argue that the radicalisation 'knowledge' was localised more seamlessly in the United Kingdom, which can be attributed to the country's 'norm producer' status on the field of European counter-radicalisation. By contrast, the 'knowledge' was subjected to significant 're-framing' and 'stretching' to fit with the Greek context. This is associated with the country's 'norm adopter' status on the field of European counter-radicalisation, as well as with a 'spill-over effect' from a national context of deeply polarising and contentious counter-terrorism policies. We maintain that these localisation processes reveal two distinct assemblages of governing radicalisation.


This dissertation presents a study of figurative language, metaphor in particular, in Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom (2013 [1994]). Nelson Mandela is undoubtedly a symbol of the struggle for justice, dignity and equality all around the world, but he is also famous for the way he handles language. The study focuses on metaphorical linguistic expressions broadly related to the conceptual domains of war/destruction, religion and nature/environment. The first hypothesis is that expressions which are related to the domain of war/destruction are encountered the most during the narration of the first years of his activity (early adulthood and especially when he went underground, created Umkhonto we Sizwe and joined the communist party) and decrease in frequency as he grows older (expressly during his imprisonment and then when he was released and became the president of South Africa). The second hypothesis is that the frequency of metaphorical expressions connected with the domains of religion and nature/environment remains stable during the narration of his lifetime. The third and final hypothesis is that the frequency of the use of such metaphorical expressions is influenced by the social roles that the leader adopted in each part of his life. His life was eventful and turbulent and the social roles he carried out were numerous.
In order to provide evidence for my hypotheses, I carried out a close reading of the autobiography in order to find all the relevant expressions and then proceeded to a qualitative and quantitative analysis. Based on Emmott's typology of 'split selves' in narrative, I analyzed Mandela's character, outlined the different social roles he adopted in his lifetime, and established the extent of the mapping between the metaphorical expressions and these social roles. Indeed, my first hypothesis, concerning the frequency of metaphors from the conceptual domain of war/destruction was verified; as for the data for metaphors related to religion and nature/environment, the results gave a more complex picture and can be explained by Mandela's experiences at specific times in his life. Finally, my third hypothesis was also broadly confirmed, as the frequency of metaphors can be seen to match to the examined social roles.


The Surgeon General's Call to Action report in 2000 established the problem of oral health disparities as an important public health issue. Because of its widespread prevalence and preventable nature, the problem of untreated dental caries and poor oral health has been called a "neglected epidemic." As in other areas of health, the poor often carry a disproportionate burden of oral health problems. The purpose of this research was to examine the patient population who utilized the dental clinic at the Good Neighbor House, a health and human service organization that serves as a safety net clinic, to determine the dental needs of patients there and how those needs change among different income levels, races, and ages. Previous literature on oral health disparities identified these characteristics as having a statistically significant relationship with untreated and more severe dental needs. The charts of all dental patients receiving care at the clinic between August 2011 and August 2012 were reviewed to document patient demographic characteristics, including income, age, and race. Treatment plans, developed by dentists at the patients' initial visit, were also reviewed to document the specific treatment needs of the patients. These needs were then categorized by severity level. Chi-square analysis was used to determine any statistically significant relationships. The findings were consistent with previous literature that a significant relationship exists between income and dental care needs, while age and race were had no statistically significant relationship to dental care needs.


Applications such as robot control and wireless communication require planning under uncertainty. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) plan policies for single agents under uncertainty and their decentralized versions (DEC-POMDPs) find a policy for multiple agents. The policy in infinite-horizon POMDP and DEC-POMDP problems has been represented as finite state controllers (FSCs). We introduce a novel class of periodic FSCs, composed of layers connected only to the previous and next layer. Our periodic FSC method finds a deterministic finite-horizon policy and converts it to an initial periodic infinite-horizon policy. This policy is optimized by a new infinite-horizon algorithm to yield deterministic periodic policies, and by a new expectation maximization algorithm to yield stochastic periodic policies. Our method yields better results than earlier planning methods and can compute larger solutions than with regular FSCs.


The ability of Escherichia coli to express the K88 fimbrial adhesin was satisfactorily indicated by the combined techniques of ELISA, haemagglutination and latex agglutination. Detection of expression by electron microscopy and the ability to metabolize raffinose were unsuitable. Quantitative expression of the K88 adhesin was determined by ELISA. Expression was found to vary according to the E.coli strain examined, media type and form. In general it was found that the total amount was greater, while the amount/cfu was less on agar than in broth cultures. Expression of the K88 adhesin during unshaken batch culture was related to the growth rate and was maximal during late logarithmic to early stationary phase. A combination of heat extraction, ammonium sulphate and isoelectric precipitation was found suitable for both large and small scale preparation of purified K88ab adhesin. Extraction of the K88 adhesin was sensitive to pH and it was postulated that this may affect the site of colonisation of by ETEC in vivo. Results of haemagglutination experiments were consistent with the hypothesis that the K88 receptor present on erythrocytes is composed of two elements, one responsible for the binding of K88ab and K88ac and a second responsible for the binding of the K88ad adhesin. Comparison of the haemagglutinating properties of cell-free and cell-bound K88 adhesin revealed some differences probably indicating a minor conformational change in the K88 adhesin on its isolation. The K88ab adhesin was found to bind to erythrocytes over a wide pH range (PH 4-9) and was inhibited by αK88ab and αK88b antisera. Inhibition of haemagglutination was noted with crude heparin, mannan and porcine gastric mucin, chondrosine and several hexosamines, glucosamine in particular. The most potent inhibitor of haemagglutination was n-dodecyl-β-D-glucopyranoside, one of a series of glucosides found to have inhibitory properties. Correlation between hydrophobicity of glucosides tested and degree of inhibition observed suggested hydrophobic forces were important in the interaction of the K88 adhesin with its receptor. The results of Scatchard and Hill plots indicated that binding of the K88ab adhesin to porcine enterocytes in the majority of cases is a two-step, three component system. The first K88 receptor (or site) had a K2. of 1.59x1014M-1 and a minimum of 4.3x104 sites/enterocyte. The second receptor (or site) had a K2 of 4.2x1012M-1 with a calculated 1.75x105 sites/enterocyte. Attempts to inhibit binding of cell-free K88 adhesin to porcine enterocytes by lectins were unsuccessful. However, several carbohydrates including trehalose, lactulose, galactose 1→4 mannopyranoside, chondrosine, galactosamine, stachyose and mannan were inhibitory. The most potent inhibitor was found to be porcine gastric mucin. Inhibition observed with n-octyl-α-D-glucopyranose was difficult to interpret in isolation because of interference with the assay, however, it agreed with the results of haemagglutination inhibition experiments.


Cell suspensions from 8-day chick embryo neural retina give rise to different populations in monolayer culture depending upon the combinations of substrata and media used. If a substratum of low adhesiveness is used, cell reaggregation takes place before attachment to the substratum, thus originating ''clumped'' cultures. In the presence of horse serum the clumps remain well contained and grow neuritic processes, but flat cells fail to appear. If fetal calf serum is present instead of horse serum, ''flat'' cells migrate out of the clumps and form a confluent monolayer. The clumps can be mechanically removed giving rise to a purified flat cell population. Clump formation can be prevented by seeding the cells at low density on highly adhesive substrata. In the resulting ''sparse'' cultures, flat cells do not develop even if fetal calf serum is present in the medium. Purified populations of process-bearing cells can thus be obtained on either polyornithine or highly adhesive collagen, with media containing either serum or the serum-free ''N1'' supplement. On polyornithine, however, cell survival in serum-free medium only takes place if the substratum is preexposed to serum before cell seeding. The cells present in the different monolayer cultures described above were further characterized using 3H-thymidine (3HT) incorporation as an indicator of mitotic activity, and tetanus toxin (TT) immunofluorescence as a neuronal ''marker''. The neuronal identity of the process-bearing cells present in clump-free, flat cell-free cultures was supported by the finding that 100% of them failed to incorporate thymidine and 95% or more were TT(+). In clump-containing cultures, TT(+) and 3HT(+) cells could be seen within the clumps with either horse or fetal calf serum. All of the flat cells which develop in the presence of fetal calf serum in these cultures appeared TT(–) and 3HT(+), a behaviour indicative of their non-neuronal nature.


The efficiency of tooth movement associated with some orthodontic mechanics can be compromised by friction between archwire and bracket. This study examined the effects of bracket ligation forces (F(N Ligation)) and mastication on friction when sliding a bracket along an archwire. Preliminary data from 5 orthodontists and 5 orthodontic residents characterized average tight and loose stainless steel F(N Ligation). These values were reproduced by a calibrated operator in a custom device used to estimate changes in the measurement of ex vivo and intraoral frictional forces, represented by mu(a), the apparent coefficient of static friction. Ten subjects chewed gum with the device in place to determine whether vibration eliminated friction when compared to ex vivo measurements. Nested analysis of variance and Tukey HSD tests determined the effects of ligation type and environmental variables. No significant differences (P >.01) were found between ex vivo and intraoral mu(a) values for tight and loose stainless steel ligation. Intraoral mu(a) values for elastic ligation were significantly greater than ex vivo mu(a) values (P <or=.001). The results suggested that vibration introduced by mastication did not eliminate friction when sliding a bracket along an archwire. In addition, there was considerable intraoperator variation in F(N Ligation), although ligation techniques were well controlled. Variations in clinical ligation forces are likely to be equal or greater than these experimental data. These variations could affect treatment efficiency.


Additional information Abstract The simulations were conducted using actual data and virtual data. The actual data were recorded in the period of 1986 – 2005 at 16 localities representing 16 regions of Poland. The virtual data were obtained after transformation of the recorded data to reflect a temperature changes under RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and RCP8.5 scenarios according to giss_e2_r climate model. The model used in the study was based on scientific reports describing the influence of temperature on acceleration of the onset of egg laying and on successive stages of Colorado potato beetle as well as publications on the effects of photoperiod on the pest diapause. The study showed a growing threat to potato from Colorado potato beetles as a result of the temperature rise. The fastest development of the pest appeared in simulations under RCP8.5 scenario. Of 16 regions surveyed in the study, the south-western part of Poland was found to be most threat- ened by Colorado potato beetle as a result of anticipated climate change.


In this paper, a novel skeleton-based approach to human time-varying mesh (H-TVM) compression is presented. The topic of TVM compression is new and has many challenges, such as handling the lack of obvious mapping of vertices across frames and handling the variable connectivity across frames, while maintaining efficiency, which are the most important ones. Very few works exist in the literature, while not all of the challenges have been addressed yet. In addition, developing an efficient and real-time solution, handling the above, obviously is a difficult task. We attempt to address the H-TVM compression problem inspired from video coding using different types of frames and trying to efficiently remove inter-frame geometric redundancy utilizing the recent advances in human skeleton tracking. The overall approach focuses on compression efficiency, low distortion, and low computation time enabling for real-time transmission of H-TVMs. It efficiently compresses geometry and vertex attributes of TVMs. In addition, this paper is the first to provide an efficient method for connectivity coding of TVMs, by introducing a modification to the state-of-the-art MPEG-4 TFAN algorithm. Experiments are conducted in the MPEG-3DGC TVM database. The method outperforms the state-of-the-art standardized static mesh coder MPEG-4 TFAN at low bit-rates, while remaining competent at high bit-rates. It gives a practical proof of concept that in the combined problem of geometry, connectivity, and vertex attribute coding of TVMs, efficient inter-frame redundancy removal is possible, establishing ground for further improvements. Finally, this paper proposes a method for motion-based coding of H-TVMs that can further enhance the overall experience when H-TVM compression is used in a tele-immersion scenario.


BACKGROUND
So far, several studies were conducted to estimate the prevalence of cigarette smoking in Iran, but none of them used a statistical model to deal with unobserved smokers. The present study planned to estimate the accurate prevalence of cigarette smoking using mixture of truncated Poisson distribution.

METHODS
A cross-sectional study was conducted in Hamadan, west of Iran in 2009, using cluster sampling and 1146 men and women aged ≥18 years were enrolled. The data collection was done by an expert group of psychologists and sociologists. A truncated mixture Poisson distribution was fitted to the daily number of cigarettes smoked by smokers. The number of components of the mixture model and related mean and weight were specified using Bayesian information criteria. Accordingly, the number of cigarette smokers who answered incorrectly to the relevant question was estimated. To investigate the validity of the results, a simulation study was conducted using CAMCR software.

RESULTS
Mixture Poisson distribution with four components was the most appropriate model fitted to the count data. After correction for underestimation, the prevalence rate of cigarette smoking in the population was 20.6%, including 36.2% for men and 3.3% for women. According to the simulation study, the bias of estimated prevalence was about zero and the root mean square error was estimated 2.5.

CONCLUSION
The number of unobserved data can be estimated by fitting model to truncated count data. The mixture of truncated Poisson distribution is particularly useful to estimate population size when the main objective of the study is to investigate negative traits to which the participants may answer incorrectly.