In this exposition the robust counterpart approach by Ben-Tal, El Ghaoui and Nemirovski is investigated with respect to its costs and benefits, with the focus on the costs of robustification. Although robust optimization has gained more and more interest among both academics and practitioners and although this certainly represents a well-established theory, it is to some extent unclear, if and what costs have to be beared when using the robust counterpart formulation. Further, it is not known if other benefits besides the obvious can be realized by robustification. Concerning benefits, there is only one theoretical result by El Ghaoui and Lebret in the special situation of robust least squares besides the obvious robustness in feasibility under perturbations. In addition, on the cost side, one of the earlier papers [3] by Ben-Tal and Nemirovski provides a stability analysis together with a result concerning costs for robust linear optimization under convex uncertainty. In the following, Ben-Tal and Nemirovski's results on costs are generalized to smooth convex conic problems under Lipschitz uncertainty, given reasonably mild regularity conditions. For robust linear optimization, it is shown that under affine uncertainty and ellipsoidal uncertainty set, uniqueness of the optimal robust solution may be achieved as additional benefit in most situations.


Background In the UK in 2005 there were 10 000 births to women aged 40 years or over. This phenomenon of delaying child birth is on the increase. There is a well described literature on the antenatal risks to these mothers, but a dearth of studies on the effects on child health of being born to an older mother. Aim We analysed four child health related outcomes in terms of maternal age, controlling for other covariates. Data from the Millennium Cohort Study and the National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS) study were combined for these analyses. Separate analyses were performed on the 9 months old and 3 years old data. Methods The outcomes considered were: Child has had accident. Child has had hospital admission. Child has had all immunisations. Child's body mass index (BMI). These last two outcomes were available for 3 year olds only. Analysis procedure Outcomes were compared between children of mothers under/over 40. Outcomes were modelled in terms of narrow bands of maternal age to give an overall picture of the outcome/maternal age relationship. A linear, curvilinear, or piecewise linear final model was selected using the AIC fit criterion. Covariates were controlled for in all cases (the exact list differed between 9 month and 3 year data). Results We studied 510 children born to mothers aged 40 years or over at age 9 months, and 463 such children at 3 years. These were compared to the 25 000 other children. In general, increased maternal age was associated with improved health outcomes. The only exception to this was the decline in complete immunisation rates among children of older mothers. Two further possible exceptions were not statistically significant: (a) the slight increase in hospital admission rates among the children of mothers over 35 (3 year old data) and (b) a slight increase in child's BMI with maternal age. Conclusion In this internationally unique and well powered study, in contrast to antenatal risks, older maternity confers health benefits to children, even those from socially deprived backgrounds (NESS dataset). Sponsor Wellcome Trust.


A new cell line, designated BSMZ, was established from a malignant pleural effusion from a woman with breast cancer. This line has a doubling time of 27 h and has now been cultured for over 120 passages. The large, rounded BSMZ cells grow as both a monolayer and as aggregations in suspension. Intracytoplasmic lumen, a finding consistent with results from cells derived from mammary tissue, was detected on ultrastructural analysis. Injection of BSMZ cells into nude mice resulted in the growth of solid tumors 4 weeks after inoculation. The solid tumor was identical to the original BSMZ cells in microscopic and electron microscopic studies. These cells possess an average of 80 chromosomes. Expression of erbB-2 and c-myc genes was increased by 10-fold, while there was no detectable overexpression of the N-ras and c-myb genes. Southern analysis has revealed amplification of the erbB-2 and c-myc loci. The BSMZ cell line may therefore provide a useful model for the study of human breast cancer and overexpression of the erbB-2 gene.


This study suggests the effects of perceived pervasiveness may be dynamic over time. The hypothesis was that participants who perceived discrimination to be highly pervasive would initially be more likely to engage in inactive coping strategies than those who perceived low pervasiveness. However, those who continued to perceive high pervasiveness over time would ultimately show greater evidence of using active strategies than those perceiving low pervasiveness. Using a 28-day diary, women and ethnic minorities described their daily experiences of discrimination and indicated their appraisals of its pervasiveness as well as their coping strategies. Results showed that participants who initially perceived low pervasiveness reported more active coping and religion use as well as less behavioral disengagement than those initially perceiving high pervasiveness. However, this pattern was reversed by the end of the study. Implications for integrating "time" into the assessment of coping with discrimination are discussed.


This book covers all you need to know to model and design software applications from use cases to software architectures in UML and shows how to apply the COMET UML-based modeling and design method to real-world problems. The author describes architectural patterns for various architectures, such as broker, discovery, and transaction patterns for service-oriented architectures, and addresses software quality attributes including maintainability, modifiability, testability, traceability, scalability, reusability, performance, availability, and security. Complete case studies illustrate design issues for different software architectures: a banking system for client/server architecture, an online shopping system for service-oriented architecture, an emergency monitoring system for component-based software architecture, and an automated guided vehicle for real-time software architecture. Organized as an introduction followed by several short, self-contained chapters, the book is perfect for senior undergraduate or graduate courses in software engineering and design, and for experienced software engineers wanting a quick reference at each stage of the analysis, design, and development of large-scale software systems.


Drip irrigation systems have become a major part of developing agriculture in Egypt and the aim of this research was to obtain the best performance from irrigation systems management using locally modified and original emitters. The experiments were carried out at the National Irrigation Laboratory of the Agricultural Engineering Research Institute. The emitters were tested and calibrated under different operating pressures (0.50, 0.75, 1 and 1.25 bar) to determine emitter flow rates and emitter emission uniformity (EU) and manufacturing variation coefficient (CV). The original emitter performance was determined using the relationship between emitter flow rate (2 lh −1 ) and operating pressure, with data indicating that the EU was 98.5%, at a CV of 2.3% and actual flow rate was 1.8 lh −1 for the original emitter. The EU was 93.8% with a CV of 5.2% and actual flow rate of 2.02 lh −1 for the modified emitter. For original emitter performance at 4 lh −1 , data indicated that the EU was 96%, with a CV of 4.8% and actual flow rate of 3.78 lh −1 . The EU for the modified emitter was 95% with a CV of 2.7% and actual flow rate of 4.5 lh −1 . The emitter exponent values were 0.41 to 0.44 for modified and 0.37 to 0.38 for original emitters.


The discovery of chlorinated volatile organic compounds (CVOCs) in the aquifer underlying a manufacturing facility prompted the initiation of an aggressive voluntary site wide soil and groundwater cleanup. Given a large number of potential source areas within the plant, delineation of CVOC impacts to the unsaturated zone was performed by the installation of an innovative soil vapor extraction system, rather than performing extensive soil sampling within the operating manufacturing facility. The system was designed with a pneumatically actuated valve manifold system to cycle the 120 extraction points which allowed for delineation of impacts, targeting hot spot source area removal, and overall contaminant reduction while remaining below regulatory discharge requirements, thereby eliminating the need for more costly air treatment. The innovative system design reduced equipment size by 80% while improving system recovery by operating in the most productive range of the removal curve. The groundwater remediation system, consisting of 6 extraction wells and 7 injection wells, is capable of extracting up to 600 gallons per minute (gpm) of groundwater. Up to 200 gpm of the extracted groundwater is treated by shallow tray air strippers with subsequent discharge via NPDES permitted outfall and re-injection of up to 400 gpm of substrate augmented groundwater into the upgradient portion of the plume. The net loss from the NPDES discharge provides capture and treatment of offsite groundwater downgradient of the site. The groundwater remediation system operates as a closed loop bioreactor allowing downgradient microbial seed to be recycled into the up gradient heart of the plume to increase the rate and effectiveness of CVOC removal via reductive dechlorination. Operations have so far have removed over 900 pounds of CVOCs from the unsaturated zone and over 1500 pounds CVOCs from the groundwater within the treatment zone. Groundwater treatment is ongoing.


Failure in wound healing is a common feature of diabetes mellitus which severely affects morbidity and mortality. We evaluated wound healing in the skin of transgenic mice (TgPED) over-expressing ped/pea-15, a gene over-expressed in patients with type 2 diabetes.Up to four days after the injury, the distance between wound edges was 3-fold higher in TgPED mice compared to their wild-type littermates (Wt). TgPED mice also presented significantly reduced granulation tissue formation as compared to Wt. Moreover, the wounded skin of TgPED exhibited also a reduced content of activated fibroblasts, collagen fibres and an increased detection of infiltrated inflammatory cells. These histological alterations were accompanied, in TgPED speciments, by an increased production of inflammatory cytokines and a defect of neo-angiogenesis process. Then we isolated endothelial cells and fibroblasts from TgPED and Wt mice, mainly involved in the formation of the granulation tissue, the first regenerative tissue that closes the skin gap. Endothelial cells and skin fibroblasts isolated from TgPED and Wt mice showed reduced healing ability in scratch wound healing assays compared to control cells. Furthermore, in time-lapse experiments, TgPED fibroblasts displayed about 2-fold lower velocity and diffusion coefficient, as compared with Wt. These changes were accompanied by reduced spreading and decreased formation of stress fibres and focal adhesion plaques. At molecular level, TgPED fibroblasts displayed decreased RhoA membrane content and increased cytosolic abundance of phosphorylated ERK1/2. Inhibition of ERK1/2 activity by PD98059 restored RhoA membrane translocation, cytoskeleton organization and cell motility and almost completely rescued wound healing ability of TgPED fibroblasts and can be expanded to endothelial cells. Interestingly, fibroblasts isolated from ped/pea-15 null mice (KO) displayed an increased motility and spreading compared to control cells. These results strongly support a role of PED/PEA-15 in the regulation of cell motility during skin wound healing. Moreover, the control exerted by PED/PEA-15 on cell migration is not restricted to fibroblasts. Considering the different known cellular function of PED/PEA-15 in a chronic disorder such as diabetes, the observation that PED/PEA-15 regulates cellular motility and skin wound healing in TgPED mice may suggest these mice as model to study the role of PED/PEA-15 in diabetic complications.


To estimate the causal effect of employment protection on firms' worker selection, we study a policy change that reduced dismissal costs for the employers of over a tenth of Sweden's workforce. Our difference-in-differences analysis of firms' hiring uses individual ability measures including estimated worker fixed effects and cognitive test scores. We find that the reform reduced minimum hire quality by 5% of a standard deviation, half of which we can attribute to firms' hiring becoming more selective. Our results help discriminate between existing theories, supporting the prediction that firms shift their hiring standards in response to changes in dismissal costs.


Most professionals, actively engaged in design, live in a world of trade-offs. The most typical compromise is that reducing the cost of design causes quality to suffer, but there are many others as well. This paper summarizes current use of one of the most popular approaches to improving the new offering development process: design reuse. In the present study 42 companies were surveyed, of which 23 were in manufacturing and 19 were in services—but all were actively engaged in technology and design reuse in new offerings. It was hypothesized that policies for design reuse and internal sourcing would promote the complexity and breadth of reuse (here the combination of modular and architectural substitution), which, in turn would dampen the percentage of substitution and reduce the negative impact on innovativeness of new offerings. These predictions were generally supported. Adoption of policies for encouragement or to mandate design reuse were significantly correlated with the extent of reuse (application of both architectural and modular design vs. just one or the other) among manufacturers but not services firms in the sample. Internal sourcing of ideas for design reuse was significantly correlated with extent of reuse for the total sample, and especially for services. Design reuse percentage and extent of design reuse were significantly and inversely associated for manufacturing, as predicted, but not for services. Novelty of new offerings was significantly and inversely related to percentage of reuse, as predicted, for manufacturing, but not for services. It was found that sector also makes a difference in likelihood of adopting higher levels of reuse with service company respondents reporting significantly higher levels (average of 42% reuse for services and 28% for manufacturing applications). Perhaps one of the most interesting preliminary findings to emerge was that the tipping point of negative impact from design reuse percentage on innovativeness for all firms in the sample of new offerings was 43%, beyond which novelty suffers. For manufacturing, the tipping point was lower: Novelty begins to suffer after 33% design reuse, which has important management implications. The conclusion was drawn, based on these preliminary results, that much can be done to relieve some of the negative consequences of the typical trade-offs commonly encountered in development programs for new offerings, especially when cost, timing, and innovation are the target goals. However, services and manufacturing are quite different in their approach to design reuse and substitution. Further development of the concept of design reuse strategy appears to be warranted based on these preliminary findings. The findings raise the distinct possibility that mesolevel strategic aggregation issues might lead research into areas that help explain how complex systems realize their full self-organizing potential and why corporate strategy considerations, alone, have failed to explain the success and failure of organizations coping in rugged landscapes.


Using data from a randomized control trial in Uruguay, we evaluate the impact of an economic and financial education program targeted to senior high-school students. The program is based on an innovative playful approach workshop about monetary policy and financial supervision. We find that the workshop has a positive and significant impact on student knowledge. Our results shed light on the importance of economic and financial education for the youth in developing countries.


Established populations of invasive apple snails have been documented in seven southeastern states, including Georgia. Based on recent morphological and genetic analyses, the invasive apple snails collected in Georgia thus far have been identified as Pomacea insularum, the island apple snail. P. insularum is an herbivorous gastropod native to slow-flowing rivers and wetlands of South America. Several species of apple snails are popular aquarium pets, and P. insularum was most likely introduced to the U.S. via aquarium releases. P. insularum has a deep, channeled suture and often exceeds 100 mm in height. Island apple snails lay conspicuous bright pink egg masses on emergent vegetation, which commonly exceed 2000 eggs per clutch. Dense populations of invasive snails are often associated with an absence of aquatic plants, high nutrient concentration, and high phytoplankton biomass in the affected aquatic system. UGA and GA DNR have initiated a project to map the current distribution of P. insularum in Georgia and to evaluate the possible spread and impact of this species on Georgia's aquatic ecosystems.


Both liquid and solid culture-media based methods for drug susceptibility testing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis are slow, labour-intensive, expensive, and not fully standardised for all drugs. Microtitre plates have the potential to reduce cost and improve throughput. We have designed a 96-well microtitre plate containing serial dilutions of 14 anti-tuberculosis drugs, and two control wells. Such plates have hitherto required reading by experienced operators; here we present some software, the Automated Mycobacterial Growth Detection Algorithm (AMyGDA), that identifies which wells in the plate contain bacterial growth, thereby elucidating the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs). We demonstrate that AMyGDA is consistent, and that the MICs measured are comparable to a reference method.


In the past few years, Hyperspectral image analysis has been used for many purposes in the field of remote sensing and importantly for land cover classification. Land cover classification is a challenging task and the production of accurate thematic maps is a common goal among researchers. A hyperspectral image is composed of hundreds of spectral channels, where each channel refers to a specific wavelength. Such a large amount of information may lead us to a deeper investigation of the materials on Earth's surface, and thus, a more precise interpretation of them. In this work, we aim to produce a thematic map that is more accurate by combining multiple classification methods. Three feature representations based on spectral and spatial data and two learning algorithms (Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP)) were used to produce six different classification methods to perform the combination. Our combining approach is based on Weighted Linear Combination (WLC), in which weights are found using a Genetic Algorithm (GA)-WLC-GA. Experiments were carried out with two well-known datasets: Indian Pines and Pavia University. In order to evaluate the robustness of the proposed combiner, experiments using different training sizes were conducted. They show promising results for both datasets for our WLC-GA proposal and are better than the widely used Majority Vote (MV) and Average rules in terms of accuracy. By using only 10% of training samples, our proposal was able to find the best weights and overcome the drawbacks of the traditional combination rules.


Does the new European outlook on financial markets, as voiced by the EU Commission since the beginning of the Capital Market Unions imply a movement of the EU towards an alignment of market integration and direct supervision of common rules? This paper sets out to answer this question for the case of common supervision for Central Counterparties (CCPs) in the European Union. Those entities gained crucial importance post-crisis due to new regulation which requires the mandatory clearing of standardized derivative contracts, transforming clearing houses into central nodes for cross-border financial transactions. While the EU-wide regulatory framework EMIR, enacted in 2012, stipulates common regulatory requirements, the framework still relies on home-country supervision of those rules, arguably leading to regulatory as well as supervisory arbitrage. Therefore, the regulatory reform to stabilize the OTC derivatives market replicated at its center a governance flaw, which had been identified as one of the major causes for the gravity of the financial crisis in the EU: the coupling of intense competition based on private risk management systems with a national supervision of European rules. This paper traces the history of this problem awareness and inquires which factors account for the fact that only in 2017 serious negotiations at the EU level ensued that envisioned a common supervision of CCPs to fix the flawed system of governance. Analyzing this shift in the European governance architecture, we argue that Brexit has opened a window of opportunity for a centralization of supervision for CCPs. Brexit aligns the urgency of the problem with material interests of crucial political stakeholder, in particular of Germany and France, providing the possibility for a grand European bargain.


It was the goal of the present work to synthesize a series of well-defined pentablock copolymers of styrene (S), [1]dimethylsilaferrocenophane (FS) and methyl methacrylate (MMA) by sequential addition of monomers. Lithium naphthalide was used as difunctional initiator and a 1,1-dimethylsilacyclobutane (DMSB) mediated 1,1-diphenylethylene (DPE) end-capping technique was applied to ensure high block efficiency. The PMMA-b-PFS-b-PS-b- PFS-b-PMMA systems have molecular weights of Mn = 50,000 g/mol, polydispersity indices of PDI ≤ 1.12 and PFS volume fractions of around φ PFS=0.15. First, the difunctional middle block of PS was formed, followed by triblock PFS-b-PS-b-PFS, which then - after appropriate end-capping - was employed as a macroinitiator to polymerize MMA, leading to the final pentablock copolymer. The block copolymers were characterized by SEC and NMR. Under optimum reaction conditions - i.e. when chain termination during DPE/DMSB end-capping is minimized - the pentablock copolymer was obtained in approximately 75 % purity: the crude product contained - in addition to the pentablock - some tetrablock (20%) and triblock (5%) copolymers. This raw material, however, could be purified by selective precipitation procedures which addressed the differences in polarity of the constituents. By that method, almost quantitative removal of the triblock was possible whereas a small amount of the tetrablock remained in the pentablock fraction. Fortunately the presence of such small amounts of tetrablock copolymers did not influence the pentablock copolymer micromorphologies in an irreproducible way. Thus, profound investigations were possible to analyze the bulk properties of the materials. The pentablock copolymers were examined with the help of TEM and SAXS for their microphase behavior. The self-assembly was studied starting from dichloromethane, tetrahydrofuran and toluene solutions, after taking into consideration the solubility parameters. The formation of thermodynamically stable micromorphologies was forced by storing the solvent cast films in the saturated atmosphere of the corresponding solvent for 3-4 weeks followed by annealing at elevated temperatures 180 DegC - 220 DegC. Prior to this, it was ensured by TGA and DSC analysis that the pentablock copolymers are of sufficient thermal stability for this treatment. Annealing under various conditions followed by TEM analysis revealed good phase separation and the formation of highly ordered microstructures, such as spheres-on/in-spheres, spheres on lamellar interface, biphasic lamellar, cylinders and spheres on cylinders micromorphologies. These morphologies were further verified and supported by SAXS scattering profiles. Conductivity measurements on original and doped samples (I2 and TCNE) of PFS containing homo and block copolymers with/without microphase separation were carried out by dielectric spectroscopy (DRS). The maximum conductivity observed for the doped PFS sample (10-7 S/cm) decreased to 10-10 S/cm on dilution by domains of PS and PMMA in the block copolymers of various architectures.


Simply feeding of a last hidden layer of the deep neural network (DNN) back to the input layer recently found to be effective for noise robust acoustic modeling. Such high level feature strengthens the robustness of DNN based acoustic model while paying approximately twice the computational cost. In this paper, we proposed to feed such high level feature iteratively back to lower layers, which is referred as multi-scale feedback connection. With this intention, we firstly extract the high level feature at the last hidden layer of DNN. Second, this high level feature feed back to a lower scale features, they then generates a subsequent prediction as well as a subsequent high level feature. This subsequent high level feature is further feed down to a lower layers. We evaluated the proposed approach on both TIMIT and a large scale internal dataset. The large scale internal dataset includes voice search and far field dataset. Our finding is two aspects. First, at equivalent computational costs, the multiscale feedback connection outperforms the DNN, the DNN with skip connection and the DNN with feedback connection. The improvement is larger on the far field dataset. Second, pair layers-wise pretraining helps the proposed approach to converge better.


What is the consequence on the costs of generating electricity when a new technology is introduced into a country's power system? There could be large consequences for aggregate production costs if (i) the new technology is producing at a higher cost compared to the existing technologies in the power system; (ii) existing technologies cannot be phased-out at a similar pace as the new technology is phased in, leading to over-capacity in the power system; and (iii), the requirements of the existing power system to meet certain types of electricity demand change. These are all important questions to address when countries decide to move towards new technologies for generating electricity. Leading examples include introducing renewable energy sources like wind or the substitution of conventional energy sources like natural gas instead of coal. The main objective of this book is to study the costs of generating electricity in the Danish power system. Specifically, calculating and then comparing the costs of generating electricity across different types of generation technologies provides an opportunity to measure the trade-offs involved when new technologies are introduced into a power system. By investigating the case of Denmark, this study provides important insights on the costs of overall electricity generation. Specifically, the actual average unit costs are estimated for the full generating capacity of the Danish power system. Denmark is a particularly interesting case to study because it is a world leader in terms of wind power penetration rates. In 2012, the wind power penetration rate in electricity consumption was equal to 30 percent, whereas it was equal to 34 percent for production, see International Energy Agency (2013). For comparisons, other regions are dwarfed by the Danish rates: The corresponding values were six percent for Europe, 3.5 percent for the US, two percent for China, and 2.5 percent for the world. The countries that are closest to Denmark in terms of wind power penetration rates are Portugal with 20 percent and Spain with 18 percent. Important lessons can be learned about the consequences of rapidly phasing-in a large amount of wind power on the electricity generating system. Studying wind power in Denmark is also interesting because wind penetration rates increased over a short period of time. In 1985, the share of wind power's generating capacity was essentially equal to zero. By 2012, the penetration rate of wind power in electricity consumption had increased to 30 percent. The results on the costs of generating electricity obtained in this study are also of policy interest because the dynamics of the costs of generating electricity is an important determinant of the sustainability of Denmark's progress towards substituting away from electricity generated from fossil fuels. It is clear that the production cost of electricity must be an important consideration for policies designed to minimize greenhouse gas emissions{ particularly policies involving subsidies. For example, if using renewable generation technologies increases the production cost of electricity too drastically, then the support for such investment may erode because the standard of living of Danish consumers as well as the global competitiveness of Danish firms could deteriorate through increasing producer and consumer prices. Importantly, energy prices might change to such an extent that the political support for further progress towards a fossil fuel independent society vanishes. In other words, there are important trade-off between progress towards a fossil fuel independent society and the increase in the production cost of electricity. The purpose of [chapter 1] is to present a summary devoted to describing the main findings of the study presented in the present study paper and in Levitt and Sorensen (2014). This chapter is written with the purpose to present the main results in such a manner that the study can be well understood without reading the other chapters of the book. Of course, having said that, we hope that this chapter inspires readers to continue reading. Power system economics and the economics of energy in general, is an important part of a country's macro-economy as well as the economy of individual households. It is without question that issues concerning energy and the environment, and power systems specifically, compose a large part of public debate and policy discussions at various levels of national governments as well as international institutions. The outcomes of the various policy debates concerning energy affects everyone: It pays to be informed. Our study of the costs of electricity generation in Denmark can be viewed as an important document for understanding the nature of costs of the electricity generation sector in its power system. Indeed, our analysis of the various costs of generating electricity has produced a number of interesting findings. However, determining the cost of generating electricity in Denmark involved many computations involving thousands of generating units. The good news is that the chapters in this book detail the many calculations as well as the assumptions involved with computing the costs of generating electricity. In addition, Levitt and Sorensen (2014) is technical companion document which details the many calculations for specific types of generating units. Analysis of the results of the many calculations are also included in the various chapters of the present paper as well as in Levitt and Sorensen (2014). These are important because knowledge of the details of the calculations, and the accompanying assumptions, are important for interpreting the reported results. [The eCite database entry for the Technical Companion to this report can be found here .]


The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodology which can be used to set X-factor under price cap schemes, when the number of observations is limited. We firstly apply a panel index approach across Water and Sewerage companies (WaSCs) over time to decompose unit-specific index number based productivity growth as a function of the productivity growth achieved by benchmark firms, and the catch-up to the benchmark firm achieved by less productive firms. We then calculate the potential productivity catch-up of laggard firms and an estimate of how the top performing company improved its productivity over time (technical change). Both estimates are used to propose X-factor for the industry over a particular period. The results indicated that significant gains in productivity occurred after 2000, when Ofwat set tighter price cap reviews in order to pass previous productivity benefits to consumers. However, average WaSC still needs to improve its productivity towards the benchmark firm (reduce their costs in real terms) by 2.69%, while the most productive firm needs to continue to improve its productivity by 0.95% over a period of five years. This technique is of great interest to researchers who are interested in developing comparative performance measurement under regulation and setting appropriate regulated prices when sample sizes are extremely limited.


Dreamweaver is the industry standard software for professional website design. Introduction to Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 with ACA Certification, written by expert instructors, provides a complete introduction to Adobe Dreamweaver and provides all the classroom tools needed to teach a complete certification program. Using this textbook, students master the foundational skills needed when working with style sheets, dynamic HTML, multimedia, databases, project management and much more. This text includes essential skills required for designing, developing, and maintaining websites as well as project management. Students gain valuable skills that further their careers in website development by learning to design and maintain fully functioning sites using the newest version of Dreamweaver. This curriculum, created by a team of Adobe experts who have developed training programs for Adobe Systems, offers your students the opportunity to confidently prove their skills mastery and gain this job-focused certification to give them the needed edge on their career path. Adobe Certified Associate exam vouchers are available for bundling for an additional fee.


Chondral and osteochondral lesions represent one of the most challenging problems in the orthopedic field, as these types of injuries lead to disability and worsened quality of life for patients and have an economic impact on the healthcare system. The aim of this in vivo study was to develop a new tissue engineering approach through a hybrid scaffold for osteochondral tissue regeneration made of porous polyurethane foam (PU) coated under vacuum with calcium phosphates (PU/VAC). Scaffold characterization showed a highly porous and interconnected structure. Human amniotic mesenchymal stromal cells (hAMSCs) were loaded into scaffolds using pectin (PECT) as a carrier. Osteochondral defects in medial femoral condyles of rabbits were created and randomly allocated in one of the following groups: plain scaffold (PU/VAC), scaffold with hAMSCs injected in the implant site (PU/VAC/hAMSC), scaffold with hAMSCs loaded in pectin (PU/VAC/PECT/hAMSC), and no treated defects (untreated). The therapeutic efficacy was assessed by macroscopic, histological, histomorphometric, microtomographic, and ultrastructural analyses at 3, 6, 12, and 24 weeks. Histological results showed that the scaffold was permissive to tissue growth and penetration, an immature osteocartilaginous tissue was observed at early experimental times, with a more accentuated bone regeneration in comparison with the cartilage layer in the absence of any inflammatory reaction.


A small-wavelength, quasi-geometric optics is developed. The approach is based on an amplitude wave function that represents both the probability amplitude of the geometrical rays and the physical-optics disturbance. All ray paths contribute phases to the amplitude function proportional to their optical paths, measured in units of normalized wavelength. However, the dominant contributions are due to those rays that satisfy Fermat's principle. This formulation leads to an integral equation for the wave-amplitude function with a kernel function that is a path integral. The integral equation reduces, in weakly focusing paraxial media, to a solution of a Schrodinger type of partial differential equation. The classical ray variables are operators with expectation values satisfying the geometric-optics equations. The second moments of the ray operators, with minimum-uncertainty initial wave packet, define second-order optical parameters. A special case of the quasi-geometric-optics integral equation is the quasi-optical laser-mode equation, allowing the interpretation of the stationary modes as probability amplitudes. For media with arbitrary inhomogeneous index of refraction, a matrix wave equation with a two-component wave function is derived. The matrix ray operators also satisfy a correspondence principle. A physical interpretation of the new wave function is presented.


The Regional Policy Dialogue has commissioned a two-stage research program focused at understanding national, integrated, government-directed systems. This report constitutes Phase I of this project and it is based on: a review of existing literature, three case studies completed by the authors, and consultation with experts on existing practice in Latin America on natural disaster programs. The report is focused around the following three research areas: the characteristics of existing national systems and institutional mechanisms, political sustainability of national systems, and the financial sustainability of national systems. This paper was presented at the Regional Policy Dialogue's First Meeting of the Natural Disasters Dialogue held on November 15th and 16th, 2001 in Washington, DC.


This map shows the original Khoekhoegowab place names of sites in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park as recounted by ǂKhomani and other San informants, includes an inset map of the Northern Cape province (bordering with Namibia and Botswana). The place names usually reflect the characteristics or the use of the area. The map includes photographs of San contributors and archival images from D.F. Bleek and A.M. Duggan-Cronin. [Scale included]. [Coordinates estimated]


For years, people have bemoaned executives' zealous focus on short-term results, which often leads CEOs to make moves that undermine their firms' long-term prospects and, some say, act irresponsibly. But all the talk won't change anything if the business world doesn't adopt a new way of measuring performance. Three professors from France's Insead believe they have the answer: an innovative scorecard that evaluates CEOs on the basis of the results they delivered over their entire tenures in office. It incorporates three metrics: industry-adjusted shareholder returns, country-adjusted shareholder returns, and increase in market capitalization over that time frame. Using this scorecard, the authors have studied and objectively ranked the performance of thousands of CEOs of major corporations around the world. In this issue, we reveal who made it into the top 100. This is the second installment of the ranking, which we published for the first time three years ago. Since then, the authors have expanded the group of CEOs studied, making it even more global. And, recognizing the growing sentiment that great financial performance is no longer enough, they also looked at social and environmental ratings to see which of the top CEOs also did well on those metrics. Accompanying this year's list is an interview with Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, whose well-known focus on the long term has served his company extremely well-earning him the #2 spot in the ranking. INSETS: Jeffrey P. Bezos;The Legacy Litmus Test;How We Created the Scorecard.


A prospective study was performed to evaluate the presence of colonization factor antigens (CFAs) in enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) strains isolated from 1,211 children with diarrhea in Argentina. One hundred nine ETEC strains that were isolated from seven different laboratories in various regions of the country were tested for CFAs by using monoclonal antibodies against CFA/I and E. coli surface antigens CS1, CS2, and CS3 of CFA/II and CS4 and CS5 of CFA/IV; a polyclonal antiserum against CS6 was used. The CFAs searched for were found in 52% of the ETEC strains: 23% of the strains carried CFA/I, 17% carried CFA/IV, and 12% carried CFA/II. All of the CFA/I strains produced heat-stable enterotoxin, and several of them were of the prevalent serotypes O153:H45 and O78:H12. Among the 19 strains expressing CFA/IV, 16 expressed CS5 and CS6 and produced the heat-stable enterotoxin and most were of serotype O128:H21; the remaining 3 strains produced CS6 only. No ETEC strains expressing CS4 were found. Most (11 of 13) of the CFA/II-carrying ETEC strains expressed CS1 and CS3, and 10 of them were of the O6:K15:H16 serotype and produced both heat-labile and heat-stable toxins. As many as 24 of the 109 CFA-negative ETEC strains gave mannose-resistant hemagglutination with erythrocytes from different species; 4 strains had high surface hydrophobicity, suggesting the presence of additional, as yet undefined, colonization factors in up to 25% of the ETEC isolates.


This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking, ICDCN 2011, held in Bangalore, India, during January 2-5, 2011. The 31 revised full papers and 3 revised short papers presented together with 3 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 140 submissions. The papers address all current issues in the field of distributed computing and networking. Being a leading forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and share best practices, ICDCN also serves as a forum for PhD students to share their research ideas and get quality feedback from the well-renowned experts in the field.


Introduction: Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is a Zoonosis disease. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of educational intervention on practice improvement of employees in healthcare centers and meat distribution centers of Ilam province in relation to Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever. Materials and methods: Participants in present quasi-experimental study were 200 employees of healthcare centers and 75 workers of meat distribution centers that were selected through simple random sampling. Data were collected at baseline and 6-weeks after intervention using two 38-item and 50-item questionnaires. Data were analyzed by the SPSS software. P<0.05 were considered to be statistically significant. Results: Before the educational intervention, 20.6% of the healthcare centers employees had poor knowledge, 61.8% and 17.6% had average and good knowledge, respectively. After educational intervention, these percentages were 2%, 22.1% and 76%; in that order. The workers' knowledge level in centers of meat processing-distribution before training was 64% poor, 34.7% average, and 1.3% good; but after education, the knowledge levels reached to 5.3%, 45.3% and 49.3%; respectively (P<0.05). Moreover, Attitude of employees in healthcare centers and meat distribution centers significantly increased after intervention (P<0.05). But, there were not significant changes in performance of two groups before and after educational intervention Conclusion: The results of present study showed the effect of educational intervention on improvement the knowledge, attitude of employees in healthcare and meat distribution centers. So, implementation of an educational program for employees at a wider scale could promote their health.


To date, boundary spanning has primarily been conceived of as an activity relating an organization to its environment, including other organizations with which it cooperates and competes. In contrast, this study focuses on the boundary spanning practices of individuals acting as change agents to implement boundary-shaking change initiatives across intra-organizational boundaries. These boundary-shaking individuals all work for blue-chip organizations in sectors as diverse as pharmaceuticals, consultancy and automotive. The change initiatives are equally diverse, including post-merger integration, exploitation of across-business synergies and implementing more integrative structures. Through our examination of boundary-shakers we are able to extend what we know about internal change agency and change agent skills and practices. Our starting point is that organizations are comprised of networks of people with a degree of common interest. Our research shows our research subjects to be active movers and shakers in these networks, using their knowledge of the organizational political context and the motivations of others to create new networks (or new meanings within old networks), which then enables them to pursue their change objectives.


The production of poly-[(N-2-hydroxyethyl)-aspartamide] (PHEA)-based materials is hampered by the unsatisfactory synthesis and low reactivity in terms of post-modification. Herein, we report the controlled synthesis of PHEA-based polymers, unraveled the hydrogen bonding in PHEA, developed effective approaches to enhance the reactivity of PHEA by improving the temperature, and further demonstrated the desired aqueous solubility as well as the lyophilization stability of PHEA-based amphiphiles. This study will provide insights into the design of useful and functionalized polypeptide-based biomaterials.


Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness held in 2005 emphasized the role of Aid for Trade (AFT) on capacity building of developing nations. Past literature showed mixed results regarding the aid effectiveness of foreign aid both theoretically and empirically. To test the impact of foreign aid thoroughly, we first focus on the AFT which purposes are not only stimulating the volume of trade flow but also facilitating the construction of robust infrastructure and environment for developing nations to participate in the global economy independently. Second, we disaggregate bilateral trade into the extensive and intensive margin of international trade to examine whether AFT affects more on the new products traded or incumbent good. Lastly, we conduct Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) estimation to control for zero-value observations and possible heteroskedasticity stemming from the sample. With different sample groups, the results indicate that AFT overall benefits the exports of aid recipients. Particularly, AFT from European Union (EU) shows the most considerable and consistent effect on both the new export and incumbent relationships. Furthermore, AFT from the EU facilitates the new export relationship between developing nations with other developing nations, specifically with those without a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) relationship, indicating that the aid from the EU is relatively effective in establishing new trade partners.


With a strong focus on Australian practice and interpretation of international law, this comprehensive cases and materials textbook will provide readers with a contemporary understanding of an area of law that has seen major changes in recent years. Written by a team of pre-eminent experts, International Law: Cases and Materials with Australian Perspectives is unique in reflecting the Australian context, perspectives and values on international law. Each chapter covers a substantive area of the law with specialist topics on human rights, law of the sea, and international environmental law. Students will be able to readily identify the key principles, rules and distinctive learning points and will benefit from the clear exposition of state practice in the field, how it has contributed to the development of the law, and how Australian governments have viewed and interpreted international law.


2 Maccabees 7 forms part of a corpus of Septuagintal texts that seemingly challenge the traditional way in which God works. These conceptual revolutions are normally induced within times of hardship and persecution. This is logical when considering that these irregular times lead to questions regarding the consistency of God and his statutes. Accordingly, this article proposes 2 Maccabees 7 to be such a text. It introduces progress through an explicit doctrinal demonstration of life after death, as well as the ritual of using one's body as sanctification/redemption of an entire nation. It is the aim of this article to extract these, and possibly other religious breakthroughs. It attempts to portray the way in which 2 Maccabees 7 makes sense of God through modified doctrine in times of suffering and sells it through emotional appeal.


Flood-induced scour is among the most common external causes of bridge failures worldwide. In the United States, scour is the cause of 22 bridges fails every year, whereas in the UK, it contributed significantly to the 138 collapses of bridges in the last century. Scour assessments are currently based on visual inspections, which are time-consuming and expensive. Nowadays, sensor and communication technologies offer the possibility to assess in real time the scour depth at critical bridge locations; yet, monitoring an entire infrastructure network is not economically feasible. A way to overcome this limitation is to instal scour monitoring systems at critical bridge locations, and then extend the piece of information gained to the other assets exploiting the correlations present in the system. In this article, we propose a scour hazard model for road and railway bridge scour management that utilises information from a limited number of scour monitoring systems to achieve a more confined estimate of the scour risk for a bridge network. A Bayesian network is used to describe the conditional dependencies among the involved random variables and to update the scour depth distribution using data from monitoring of scour and river flow characteristics. This study constitutes the first application of Bayesian networks to bridge scour risk assessment. The proposed probabilistic framework is applied to a case study consisting of several road bridges in Scotland. The bridges cross the same river, and only one of them is instrumented with a scour monitoring system. It is demonstrated how the Bayesian network approach allows to significantly reduce the uncertainty in the scour depth at unmonitored bridges.


This paper compares and contrasts the delivery and assembly processes of power distribution equipment on three projects. Included are switchboards, panelboards, and motor control centers. Two projects were from the US and one was from Finland, which also gave an opportunity to compare the American National Electrical Manufacturing Association (NEMA) standard with the European Standard (EN) with respect to power distribution equipment and the delivery process. Data was collected by observation, records analysis, and interviews or workshops with owners, users/operators, architects, electrical engineers, project management firms/ general contractors, electrical contractors, and equipment manufacturers. Identifying and exploring the similarities and differences between projects, has greatly broadened the understanding about the delivery process for this type of engineered-to-order product for both the researchers and industry participants. 24 process performance measures were developed. The causes of the main differences among the measures were investigated. Even though the components of the equipment are acquired mostly from the same manufacturers, there were notable differences in the engineering and manufacturing methodologies in the U.S. and Finland. This had a significant impact on engineering lead time, manufacturing cycle time, and design changes and/or errors. Also the procurement methodology has a large impact on the power distribution equipment delivery lead time. Some of the areas of weaknesses identified are incomplete and uncertain input data, lack of systematically collecting input data throughout the process, lack of knowledge and resources to process information, adversarial process environments, and destructive incentives.


This paper takes as its starting point a period before the 1967 Referendum
which gave full citizenship rights to Australian Aborigines and the Federal
Government a mandate over Aboriginal Affairs. During the 40's and 50's the
Aboriginal people of Tasmania, represented by the people of Cape Barren
Island, stubbornly resisted the assimilation policies of the day. In briefly
examining the thesis of resistance as proposed by Lyndall Ryan in her 1981
edition of The Aboriginal Tasmanians, and the proposition that the Government
sought to abandon the Island, the paper draws upon new material.
Despite the referendum the State government like the wider community saw
little relevance to Tasmania, denying the existence of Aborigines as such, but
joining in the Commonwealth/State Conferences of Aboriginal Affairs to
safeguard State interests, obtain funds to prop up services to the Island,
particularly health, and to secure housing finance.
Support for the Aboriginal cause, however, was not lacking. The Aboriginal
Advancement League based in Devonport, the Communist Party of Tasmania
and Abschol, which was to become the Australian Union of Students action
group for Aboriginal rights, were to play a role in sensitising the Tasmanian
community to Aboriginal issues and in seeking justice for Tasmanian
Aborigines. It was Abschol, however, which was to become the dominant non-
Aboriginal organisation in the pursuit of Aboriginal rights.
In the early '70's the Tasmanian Aboriginal people decided to take over their
own destiny. This assertion was led by Rosalynd Langford, a Victorian
Aborigine of Tasmanian descent. In 1972 the Aboriginal Information Centre
(later the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre) was established. This paper looks at
the history of TAC over the next 20 years. It was to become one of the most
forceful and successful black political organisations in Australia and we
examine the reason for that success. Whilst the figure of Michael, Mansell
emerges on the local, national and eventually the international scene, the record
would not be complete if it neglected reference to other contributors to the
struggle.
Neither would the story be complete without reference to the genealogical work
of Mollison et al, the whole question of Aboriginality, the reworking of
Aboriginal history from the people's perspective, cultural renewal and
Aboriginal spirituality. Central to this issue of history and identity is the world
wide quest for the skeletal remains of the Van Diemen's Land people and their return to Tasmania, which the paper identifies as a brilliant strategy of
unification and consciousness raising, but one full of emotional and spiritual
overtones.
This paper concludes with an examination .of the struggle for Land Rights in
Tasmania. At this point in time some form of Land Rights legislation seems
inevitable, although as the story tells, Aboriginal people have had their previous
hopes dashed on a number of occasions. *There is, however, a further matter
on the Aboriginal agenda; self government. To underestimate these later
aspirations is to fail to recognise the power and commitment of the Tasmanian
Aboriginal people.
* Note: In November 1995 an Aboriginal Lands Bill passed through the
Tasmanian Parliament (proclaimed 6 December, 1995), 'transferring certain
lands to the Aboriginal people and establishing an Aboriginal Lands trust.


The vigor of peanut seeds (Arachis hypogaea L.) assessed by the conductivity test shows close relationship with performance in the field, but some factors may affect the outcome of the electrical conductivity, being one of that the initial water content of seeds. The objective of this study was to evaluate the seed water content most appropriate for evaluating the seed vigor through electrical conductivity test in peanut. Four seed lots of 'IAC Tatu ST' cultivar and four 'IAC Runner 886' were initially evaluated for their physiological potential and subsequently the seed water content was adjusted to 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and 15% by the method of controlled atmosphere. A completely randomized design with treatments arranged in a 4×6 factorial design (seed lots × seed water content levels) for each cultivar and four replications were used. The results for the factor seed water content were subjected to the analysis regression. The higher relationship of electrical conductivity and seed vigor occurred when the seed lots presents seed moisture content varying from 9 to 15%. Seeds with 5-7% moisture should not be subjected to electrical conductivity test, because lots express high standard germination and vigor. The electrical conductivity of peanut seeds is influenced by the seed moisture content and the stabilization of the results occurs when the seeds have moisture content between 10 and 14%.


Drawing on appraisal theory, this paper aims to analyze how the attitudinal positioning of writers of the editorials of business newspapers can be construed by means of lexical metaphors. The focus is on judgment, the evaluation of human actors, because it indicates the subjective presence of a writer. Based on a dataset o3f 32 editorials of two Finnish business newspapers, the results show that the lexical metaphors used during assessments are mostly dead metaphors, representing the source domains of competition and sports, humans and animals, and war, battle, and violence. The most common targets of judgment are institutional actors that are described by the meanings of capacity, tenacity, and propriety. Economic actors are mostly evaluated positively while political actors are mostly evaluated negatively. Cases where economic actors are evaluated negatively and where individual persons are mentioned are unusual but do arise. In general, judgments in editorials reflect the shared values and ideological beliefs of the papers and their readers. Lexical metaphors offer a subtle way of praising and criticizing institutions and individual people, which makes them an important way of communicating as expected in a discourse community.


We are delighted to announce the inauguration of a new column at Journal of Thoracic Disease ( JTD ), the Grand Rounds (GR). The GR is designed to become one of the most featured columns in our journal. Currently, GR articles at JTD replay the sessions where a typically intractable case was discussed among a panel of physicians, radiologists, pathologists, thoracic surgeons, oncologists and other healthcare professionals.


The work described in this report is about developing a framework for the design of concept of operations (CONOP), which use small uninhabited aerial systems (SUAS) to support of intelligent transportation system (ITS) application of highway and transportation infrastructure monitoring. In these envisioned applications, these vehicles will be used for tasks such as remote collection of traffic data or inspection of roads and bridges. As such, a risk that has to be managed for these applications is that of vehicle-infrastructure collision. Various solutions to ensure safe separation between the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and the object being inspected have been proposed. However, most, if not all, of these solutions rely on a multi-sensor approach, which combines digital maps of the infrastructure being inspected with an integrated Global Position System (GPS)/Inertial navigator. While ``turn key" solutions for such multi-sensor systems exist, the performance specifications provided by their manufacturers does not provide sufficient information to allow precisely quantifying or bounding the collision risk. Furthermore, size, weight and power (or SWAP) constraints posed by these small aerial vehicles limits the use of redundant hardware and/or software as a risk mitigation strategy. The purpose of the work reported here was to develop a framework for the design of CONOPs, which take these SUAS limitations into account. The method outlined shows, in part, how these vehicle/infrastructure collision risks can be estimated or conservatively bounded.


Son preference and its implication for skewed sex ratio is well documented phenomenon in India. The ways embraced to have son preference would be sex selection abortion, female infanticide and abandoning the female new born. Aims: To see effect of PCPNDT act over abandoned babies and various factor associated with abandoned babies. Study design: Retrospective cross - sectional descriptive study. Methodology : Study was conducted in Government Medical College and Hospital, Akola, and Lady Harding District Hospital for women, Akola (Maharashtra, India). The information regarding abandoned babies was collected from the records of Neonatal intensive care units of both hospitals. All abandoned babies who were admitted in NICU of both hosp itals from 1 January, 2003 to 31 December, 2014, were included in study (total duration 12 years). Result: From year 2003 to 2014 in total 69 babies were abandoned (rescued), out of 69 abandoned babies 32 were males and 37 were females. Difference between gender of abandoned Childs and implementation of PCPNDT was found statistically significant. Of all babies 2 had injuries and 2 had congenital anomaly. During hospital stay none of babies were claimed by parent or relatives. Conclusion: It becomes obviou s that when the choice sex selection before birth ends, then societies is forced to get rid of females by abandoning them as one of the options, though gender selection of any form should be discouraged. The findings of abandoning more females should be in vestigated further to uncover possible reasons for the bias.


Owen Clayton, "London Eyes: William Dean Howells and the Shift to Instant Photography"(pp. 374––394)

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, one of William Dean Howells's many avid readers, finally meeting him in the flesh, expressed surprise that the famed writer was not dead. Although he had not actually departed from the world, it was true that by this time the venerable "Dean"was at a low ebb. While younger authors were taking the novel in directions about which he was, at the least, ambivalent, Howells was aware that his own best work was behind him. Yet, throughout his career, he maintained a desire to test different literary approaches. In England in 1904, Howells tested a conceit that would allow him to keep pace with the literary movements of the day. This consisted of an extended photographic metaphor: an association of himself with the Kodak camera. He used this figuration to move beyond the philosophical foundations of his previous work. Criticism has largely overlooked this endeavor, which Howells buried away in the somewhat obscure travelogue London Films (1905). This essay shows how London Films used its photographic metaphor to question positivistic observational assumptions, the way in which this was a response to William James's Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), and, finally, why Howells ultimately went back on his attempt to create a Kodak school in fiction.


Introduction In vivo imaging provides a window into the spatially complex, rapidly evolving physiology of the cell that structural imaging alone cannot. However, observing this physiology directly involves inevitable tradeoffs of spatial resolution, temporal resolution, and phototoxicity. This is especially true when imaging in three dimensions, which is essential to obtain a complete picture of many dynamic subcellular processes. Although traditional in vivo imaging tools, such as widefield and confocal microscopy, and newer ones, such as light-sheet microscopy, can image in three dimensions, they sacrifice substantial spatiotemporal resolution to do so and, even then, can often be used for only very limited durations before altering the physiological state of the specimen. Lattice light-sheet microscopy. An ultrathin structured light sheet (blue-green, center) excites fluorescence (orange) in successive planes as it sweeps through a specimen (gray) to generate a 3D image. The speed, noninvasiveness, and high spatial resolution of this approach make it a promising tool for in vivo 3D imaging of fast dynamic processes in cells and embryos, as shown here in five surrounding examples. Lattice light-sheet microscopy. An ultrathin structured light sheet (blue-green, center) excites fluorescence (orange) in successive planes as it sweeps through a specimen (gray) to generate a 3D image. The speed, noninvasiveness, and high spatial resolution of this approach make it a promising tool for in vivo 3D imaging of fast dynamic processes in cells and embryos, as shown here in five surrounding examples. Rationale To address these limitations, we developed a new microscope using ultrathin light sheets derived from two-dimensional (2D) optical lattices. These are scanned plane-by-plane through the specimen to generate a 3D image. The thinness of the sheet leads to high axial resolution and negligible photobleaching and background outside of the focal plane, while its simultaneous illumination of the entire field of view permits imaging at hundreds of planes per second even at extremely low peak excitation intensities. By implementing either superresolution structured illumination or by dithering the lattice to create a uniform light sheet, we imaged cells and small embryos in three dimensions, often at subsecond intervals, for hundreds to thousands of time points at the diffraction limit and beyond. Results We demonstrated the technique on 20 different biological processes spanning four orders of magnitude in space and time, including the binding kinetics of single Sox2 transcription factor molecules, 3D superresolution photoactivated localization microscopy of nuclear lamins, dynamic organelle rearrangements and 3D tracking of microtubule plus ends during mitosis, neutrophil motility in a collagen mesh, and subcellular protein localization and dynamics during embryogenesis in Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster. Throughout, we established the performance advantages of lattice light-sheet microscopy compared with previous techniques and highlighted phenomena that, when seen at increased spatiotemporal detail, may hint at previously unknown biological mechanisms. Conclusion Photobleaching and phototoxicity are typically reduced by one to two orders of magnitude relative to that seen with a 1D scanned Bessel beam or the point array scanned excitation of spinning disk confocal microscopy. This suggests that the instantaneous peak power delivered to the specimen may be an even more important metric of cell health than the total photon dose and should enable extended 3D observation of endogenous levels of even sparsely expressed proteins produced by genome editing. Improvements of similar magnitude in imaging speed and a twofold gain in axial resolution relative to confocal microscopy yield 4D spatiotemporal resolution high enough to follow fast, nanoscale dynamic processes that would otherwise be obscured by poor resolution along one or more axes of spacetime. Last, the negligible background makes lattice light-sheet microscopy a promising platform for the extension of all methods of superresolution to larger and more densely fluorescent specimens and enables the study of signaling, transport, and stochastic self-assembly in complex environments with single-molecule sensitivity. From single molecules to embryos in living color Animation defines life, and the three-dimensional (3D) imaging of dynamic biological processes occurring within living specimens is essential to understand life. However, in vivo imaging, especially in 3D, involves inevitable tradeoffs of resolution, speed, and phototoxicity. Chen et al. describe a microscope that can address these concerns. They used a class of nondiffracting beams, known as 2D optical lattices, which spread the excitation energy across the entire field of view while simultaneously eliminating out-of-focus excitation. Lattice light sheets increase the speed of image acquisition and reduce phototoxicity, which expands the range of biological problems that can be investigated. The authors illustrate the power of their approach using 20 distinct biological systems ranging from single-molecule binding kinetics to cell migration and division, immunology, and embryonic development. Science, this issue 10.1126/science.1257998 A new microscope allows three-dimensional imaging of living systems at very high resolution in real time. Although fluorescence microscopy provides a crucial window into the physiology of living specimens, many biological processes are too fragile, are too small, or occur too rapidly to see clearly with existing tools. We crafted ultrathin light sheets from two-dimensional optical lattices that allowed us to image three-dimensional (3D) dynamics for hundreds of volumes, often at subsecond intervals, at the diffraction limit and beyond. We applied this to systems spanning four orders of magnitude in space and time, including the diffusion of single transcription factor molecules in stem cell spheroids, the dynamic instability of mitotic microtubules, the immunological synapse, neutrophil motility in a 3D matrix, and embryogenesis in Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster. The results provide a visceral reminder of the beauty and the complexity of living systems.


With the wide acceptance of forest‐protection policies in the developing world comes a requirement for clear demonstrations of how deforestation may erode human well‐being and economies. For centuries, it has been believed that forests provide protection against flooding. However, such claims have given rise to a heated polemic, and broad‐scale quantitative evidence of the possible role of forests in flood protection has not been forthcoming. Using data collected from 1990 to 2000 from 56 developing countries, we show using generalized linear and mixed‐effects models contrasted with information‐theoretic measures of parsimony that flood frequency is negatively correlated with the amount of remaining natural forest and positively correlated with natural forest area loss (after controlling for rainfall, slope and degraded landscape area). The most parsimonious models accounted for over 65% of the variation in flood frequency, of which nearly 14% was due to forest cover variables alone. During the decade investigated, nearly 100 000 people were killed and 320 million people were displaced by floods, with total reported economic damages exceeding US$1151 billion. Extracted measures of flood severity (flood duration, people killed and displaced, and total damage) showed some weaker, albeit detectable correlations to natural forest cover and loss. Based on an arbitrary decrease in natural forest area of 10%, the model‐averaged prediction of flood frequency increased between 4% and 28% among the countries modeled. Using the same hypothetical decline in natural forest area resulted in a 4–8% increase in total flood duration. These correlations suggest that global‐scale patterns in mean forest trends across countries are meaningful with respect to flood dynamics. Unabated loss of forests may increase or exacerbate the number of flood‐related disasters, negatively impact millions of poor people, and inflict trillions of dollars in damage in disadvantaged economies over the coming decades. This first global‐scale empirical demonstration that forests are correlated with flood risk and severity in developing countries reinforces the imperative for large‐scale forest protection to protect human welfare, and suggests that reforestation may help to reduce the frequency and severity of flood‐related catastrophes.


Surgery is about to undergo a massive transformation, an independent review has predicted, because a wave of new technologies and better understanding of human biology will change the way all types of surgery are provided and how surgeons are trained.

These innovations will mean safer, less invasive, and more personalised treatment for patients, as well as more predictable outcomes and faster recovery, said the Future of Surgery report,1 from a commission established by the Royal College of Surgeons.

Surgical training must adapt for the future to allow surgeons to evaluate and embrace change, the report said, including distant and virtual learning.

The role of some surgeons is likely to become increasingly wide ranging and collaborative. Surgeons will need to understand the language of genetics, surgery, radiotherapy, and bioengineering, said the report, and in the future they may be the first healthcare professionals to discuss genetic analysis with patients.

The commission comprises some of the …


Cyanide is a toxic compund widely used in mining. Naturally some bacterias are capable to degrade this molecules. CynD is a type of prokaryote enzyme able to degrade cyanide and its active form seems to be an oligomer. Several attempts to obtain structural models of CynD by crystallography has not success mainly due the insolubility of the oligomeric state of this protein. In this work we aimed to use in silico tools to identify the aminoacids implied in the oligomerization surfaces. These knowledge could lead us to rationally design CynD variants that are not able to form tights oligomers stabilizing other forms such as dimers or monomers that could be better in purification and crystallization assays. For this, we prepared structural models using SWISS-MODEL, PHYRE2, I-TASSER and ROBETTA. Then, we analyzed chemical parameters of the models using RAMPAGE, PDBsum and ModFold6. Next, we did dimer models using dockings in Hex. The monomer and dimer models were used to perform molecular dynamics simulation in order to determine flexible regions, important aminoacids stabilizing the dimeric interface and the stability of the dimer form. We obtain models with good chemical parameters to perform the dynamics simulation. These assays allow us to identify flexible regions that could be removed to stabilize the dimer or monomer in solution. Finally, the docking showed us which are the probable aminoacids stabilizing the dimer interface. Experimental data is now neccesary to confirm those hypotheses.
JANDHYLA, D.; Berman, M.;Meyeres, P.; Sewell, B.; Willson, R.; Benedik, M. cynD, the Cyanide Dihidratase from Bacillus pumilus: Gene Cloning and Structural Studies. Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Vol 69, No. 8. Aug. 2003. p 4794 – 4805
Crum, M. A. N., Park, J. M., Mulelu, A. E., Sewell, B. T., & Benedik, M. J. (2015). Probing C-terminal interactions of the Pseudomonas stutzeri cyanide-degrading CynD protein. Applied microbiology and biotechnology, 99(7), 3093-3102.


This paper explores the financial impact of medical problems, using data from Phase III of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a survey of 1,974 individual bankruptcy petitioners conducted during the first quarter of 1999 in eight federal judicial districts. Although the questionnaire covered a variety of topics, this paper focuses on debtors' identification of illness or injury as a reason for filing, medical debts, and health insurance coverage. One out of four debtors, or an estimated 326,441 families in 1999, identified an illness or injury as a reason for filing for bankruptcy. One third of the debtors said that they had substantial medical bills, i.e., that they had incurred $1,000 or more in medical bills not covered by insurance. Combining those identifying medical reasons with those indicating substantial medical debts (an overlapping but not perfectly coextensive group), the financial consequences of medical problems were a factor in the bankruptcy cases of an estimated 596,198 families in 1999. Health insurance coverage was sparse for the group, with one in five debtors reporting that they had no health insurance for any family member. The absence of insurance, however, did not correlate with a debtor's identifying a medical problem. Those who had insurance and those who did not were about equally distributed among those who identified a medical problem and those who did not. The data were re-analyzed by separating the responses of single filing men, single filing women, and joint filing married couples. Households without a male present were nearly twice as likely to file for bankruptcy giving a medical reason or identifying a substantial medical debt as households with a male present. The proportion of debtors providing medical reasons for filing also varied with the debtors' age. Of debtors 65 or older, 47.6 percent listed a medical reason, as compared with 7.5 percent of debtors under 25. Previous studies considering medical problems and bankruptcy in the United States are summarized, although the methods used and results obtained are not directly comparable with the current findings.


Gold nanoparticles (NPs) have highly efficient multi-photon-induced luminescence. In this paper, we record the two-photon images of gold NPs, lymphoma cell line Karpas 299, and Karpas 299 incubated with 30-nm-diameter gold NPs and ACT-1 antibody conjugates (Au30-ACT-1 conjugates) by using a multi-photon microscopy system. Due to the specific conjugation of ACT-1 antibody and cell membrane receptor CD25, gold NPs are only bound to the surface of cell membrane of Karpas 299. The luminescence intensity of gold NPs is higher than that of cells at 750-nm laser excitation. By comparing the images of Karpas 299 cells incubated with and without gold NPs, it is found that by means of gold NPs, we can get clear cell images with lower excitation power. Their excellent optical and chemical properties make gold NPs an attractive contrast agent for cellular imaging.


T.R. Reid's The healing of America is an engaging but thin epistle for universal health insurance coverage in the US. It is engaging because Reid, a long-time correspondent for the Washington Post, knows how to tell a good story. His book details his international quest for relief for his stiff shoulder. The cures he encounters range from a Tibetan-style urine tasting and Ayurvedic therapy in India, to the "wait and see" attitude of the Brits, to the surgical zeal of the US, the arch villain of the piece. His vignettes of some of the important, colorful figures who shaped national health care systems, such as Germany's Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, also add zest.

But where Reid succeeds in the journalist's metier — stories about personal encounters and people — he overreaches when he attempts to weave these episodes into a compelling comparison of the value for money of different health care systems.

Reid's data about the quality of health care consist mostly of his personal encounters, but can Reid, a well-seasoned journalist, be so naive as to believe that the medical care he receives as the employee of a world-famous newspaper is similar to that of the average Joe, Abir, or Heinz? Perhaps for this reason, Reid ignores the brutal inequity of the government-controlled health-care systems he so admires: rich, well-connected, and articulate people have much better access to health care. As the British and Canadian governments have long openly bemoaned, universal coverage does not mean equal access. Reid also ignores the fact that more than 10% of the population in single-payer countries such as the UK and Spain spurn single-payer coverage, opting instead to buy private health insurance that enables them to use private sector medical care providers.

The statistics Reid offers are thin gruel. They do not consist primarily of raw data — the stuff of genuine scientific analysis — but rather of other people's opinions of what constitutes excellence. Because a primary component of these quality ratings is whether a country has universal health care, the US cannot rate well. The conclusions he draws from his few data are dubious. For example, Reid asserts that infant mortality, a statistic for which the US rates poorly, is caused primarily by the absence of universal coverage. But surely the following additional explanations, neither of them considered, have some explanatory value: US cultural attitudes translate into more high-risk pregnancies coming to term (compared to other countries in which they would likely be terminated before birth) and these statistics are likely considerably affected by the diverse US population.

The cited data are also notable for what they do not contain. Absent are statistics for areas in which US health care excels, such as risk-adjusted age at death from cancer, results achieved in part because of the willingness to spend more on expensive cancer drugs and other therapies. Rather, Reid dismisses problems that occur in single-payer countries because of stringent funding — impossibly long waiting lists, doctor strikes (and, unmentioned by him, doctor fraud), and the death of thousands due to a shortage of resources during a heat wave in France — as inevitable but not very consequential artifacts of not spending as much as the US.

I grew particularly wary of Reid's data as I read his account of US private health insurers (page 37). Reid erroneously avers that they use the term "medical loss" to describe their medical care expenses. But, after I made this observation more than a decade ago, US insurers stopped using this term. More alarming was Reid's statement that most insurers spend 20% of their revenues on administrative expenses. Although Reid cites US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings in the text, his reference to this (largely incorrect) statement does not cite the SEC but rather a Wall Street Journal story about one insurer and a 2005 industry insider newsletter. The SEC filings of the insurer cited in the Wall Street Journal story contain a different administrative expense from that cited (I could not verify his other source because there is no public access to that newsletter).

Last, Reid displays either a healthy dose of financial naivete or knee jerk anti-business attitudes when he singles out nonprofit insurers as the sine qua nons of the ideal system of universal coverage. In his view, nonprofits have no incentive to use their money for other than their clients. This view ignores many nonprofit scandals, such as nonprofit US hospitals that earn millions in profits while neglecting the uninsured. Consumers are protected only when they are fully informed and government vigorously prosecutes fraud and abuse, not by preferring one organizational form to others.

If you are wondering, I too have long supported universal coverage and am no fan of noncompetitive private health insurers. But, sadly, this thin book did nothing to reinforce the validity of these views.


The development in the practice of international commercial arbitration, it appears, is such that a convergence is emerging in terms of procedural similarities, practice of arbitral tribunals, and judicial approaches in setting aside and enforcing cases, irrespective of the legal seat. This has in turn molded the expectations of users and hence the revision and updating of institutional arbitration rules and national laws to meet these expectations. At the risk of stating the obvious, there are two universal and overarching principles that underpin the legality and efficacy of international commercial arbitration--parties' consent and the New York Convention, which may be aptly described as the constitutional framework of international arbitrations, for without them, the system of international commercial arbitration would not exist nor would its use be on the ascent. The other factor that gives international commercial arbitration its efficacy is the practice generally adopted by the experienced arbitrators in dealing with procedural, jurisdictional, or substantive (where awards are published) issues. This practices does not in any way form binding precedents or have formal jurisprudential weight, but decisions have strong persuasive effects in shaping subsequent decisions on similar issues by others, and some may argue that they will eventually form a system of "customary laws." Through exchanges in international forums and discussions, experiences are shared (on an anonymous basis, needless to say) and the practice adopted can be criticized, enhanced, and gradually formulated systematically into "norms." These norms have, it is submitted, two further far-reaching effects. First, they create an expectation in the users about how issues would generally be dealt with, and in turn reinforces the adoption of such norms. Second, they create the basis on which institutional arbitration rules are updated and national arbitration laws revised. The third important element to the institution of international arbitration is the legal seat itself. The importance of the choice of seat in relation to the process of arbitration itself is perhaps somewhat overstated. The convergence of arbitration laws (manifested generally through the adoption of the UNCITRAL model law), and institutional rules and practice of tribunals in international arbitrations have rendered the differences in the arbitration process in different seats less significant. Yet the distinction in the national laws on recourse against awards and judicial approaches to the same remains significant, and it is that which, it is submitted, ought to be the consideration for the choice of the seat. There are generally three types of approaches in respect of recourse against awards: UNCITRAL model law jurisdictions such as Hong Kong where the only recourse is to set aside on basis of procedural defects; England and Wales where, apart from setting aside on procedural defects, the court also retains a right to confirm, set aside, or vary an award if it contains an error of law, irrespective whether it is a domestic or international award; and jurisdictions which make a distinction between domestic and international arbitrations, such as in mainland China and Singapore, where international awards can only be set aside on procedural grounds, and domestic awards can be reviewed by a national court on errors of law. The choice of seat may therefore depend on whether a party prefers the preservation of the correctness of the substantive law and its jurisprudential development by the national courts of the seat, or simply prefers finality of awards. The factors identified above interact to enhance and reinforce the convergence of the system of international arbitrations. Some examples and comments are set out below. In Plakito Inv. Ltd. v. Klockner East Asia Ltd., (1) the CIETAC tribunal received a tribunal's expert report and relied on it to render an award without giving the parties an opportunity to view or comment on it. …


Virtual Telescopes in Education is providing the services required to operate a virtual observatory comprising distributed telescopes, including an interactive, constraint-based scheduling service, data and resource archive, proposal preparation and review environment, and a VTIE Journal. A major goal of VTIE is to elicit from learners questions about the nature of celestial objects and the physical processes that give rise to the spectacular imagery that catches their imaginations. Generation of constrained science questions will assist learners in the science process. To achieve interoperability with other NSDL resources, our approach follows the Open Archives Initiative and the W3C Semantic Web activity.


Only a limited number of proteins from Mycobacterium tuberculosis have so far been shown to possess species-specific epitopes as defined by monoclonal antibodies. One such protein is protein antigen b (Pab) of molecular weight 38,000, which binds the monoclonal antibodies HYT 28, HAT 2, HBT 12, HGT 3, TB 71, and TB 72. The gene encoding this protein was isolated from a lambda gt11 M. tuberculosis DNA library. The nucleotide sequence of the recombinant mycobacterial insert was determined, and an open reading frame of 374 amino acids was identified. The amino acid sequence exhibited 30% homology to a phosphate-binding protein, PstS, from Escherichia coli. The pab gene was subcloned into pBR322 in conjunction with the lacZ gene, and deletions were obtained from the 3' end. The anti-Pab monoclonal antibodies were used to probe crude protein lysates of E. coli transformed with the deletion plasmids. The monoclonal antibodies showed two reactivity patterns; one group of antibodies were dependent on the presence of the ultimate 91 amino acids of the protein, whereas another group of antibodies recognized an antigenic domain located on the middle portion of the molecule. None of the antibodies bound to the N-terminal 117-amino-acid peptide.


Taking advantage of the multimode ability of modern mobile terminals, cellular operators are investing in alternate access networks (e.g., IEEE802.11 and IEEE802.16) to complement the increasingly overloaded cellular accesses. Complementing this, IP mobility support is gradually being introduced into network architectures, providing session continuity. To facilitate and optimize handover procedures between different access technologies in a seamless way, the IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover Services standard provides technology agnostic mechanisms to obtain information and control link layers. Implementations of the standard are appearing, but since support of IEEE 802.21 primitives directly at the link driver level is not yet realized, they have to revert to proprietary wrapping mechanisms or use specific operating system solutions to circumvent this issue. In this article we present ODTONE, an IEEE 802.21 implementation that is operating-system-independent and open source, and offers a novel approach to interfacing with different link layers that facilitates the deployment of IEEE 802.21 mobility mechanisms in multiple scenarios. We present a scenario where we integrate our middleware with an IP mobility management protocol, Proxy MIP IPv6, highlighting ODTONE¿s supporting features and impact while providing an open handover control architecture for network- based localized mobility management.


A megajournal is an open‐access journal that publishes any manuscript that presents scientifically trustworthy empirical results, without asking about the potential scientific contribution prior to publication. Megajournals have rapidly increased their output and are currently publishing around 50,000 articles per year. We report on a small pilot study in which we looked at the citation distributions for articles in megajournals compared with journals with traditional peer review, which also evaluate articles for contribution and novelty. We found that elite journals with very low acceptance rates have far fewer articles with no or few citations, but that the long tail of articles with two citations or less was actually bigger in a sample of selective traditional journals in comparison with megajournals. This indicates the need for more systematic studies, because the results raise many questions as to how efficiently the current peer review system in reality fulfils its filtering function.


In 2005, insured losses from hurricanes and other catastrophes were greater than in any other year in U.S. history. NOAA's National Hurricane Center estimates that $85 billion of total damages resulted from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita alone. One year later, the region affected by these two hurricanes still struggles to recover, both as a place to live and as a viable economy. Using data from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the National Ocean Economics Program has developed a data series that allows the economic damage to coastal regions to be seen in a new light: what happens to the economic value derived from the ocean when the ocean turns from resource and respite to a massive engine of destruction? The ocean economy is defined as industries in marine construction, living resources (seafood processing and marketing, plus aquaculture), shipbuilding and boatbuilding, minerals (primarily oil and gas exploration and production), marine transportation and related goods and services, and, finally, tourism and recreation industries whose establishments are located close to the shore of the ocean or the Great Lakes. In 2004, the ocean economy of the region encompassing Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, stretching from Franklin County, Florida, to Brazoria County, Texas, employed 291,830 people in wage and salary jobs paying nearly $7.7 billion in wages. (See table 1.) The affected States accounted for 13 percent of employment and wages in the U.S. ocean economy. This article is available at Digital Commons @ Center for the Blue Economy: https://cbe.miis.edu/noep_publications/15 76 Monthly Labor Review Augustl 2006 Hurricane Damage to the Ocean Economy Hurricane Damage to the Ocean Economy Charles S. Colgan is a professor in the National Ocean Economics Program, Muskie School of Public Service, University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine, and chief economist for Market Data for the National Ocean Edonomics Program; Jefferey Adkins is an economist and program manager with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coastal Services, Charleston, SC. Counties and parishes of the gulf coast ocean economy affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita saw the greatest insured dollar losses in 1 year from suchlike catastrophes in U.S. history; the region has yet to recover fully a year after the maelstrom Charles S. Colgan and Jefferey Adkins Hurricane damage to the ocean economy in the U.S. gulf region in 2005 In 2005, insured losses from hurricanes and other catastrophes were greater than in any other year in U.S. history. NOAA's National Hurricane Center estimates that $85 billion of total damages resulted from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita alone. One year later, the region affected by these two hurricanes still struggles to recover, both as a place to live and as a viable economy. Using data from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the National Ocean Economics Program has developed a data series that allows the economic damage to coastal regions to be seen in a new light: what happens to the economic value derived from the ocean when the ocean turns from resource and respite to a massive engine of destruction?1 According to Federal disaster declarations, Hurricane Katrina affected the entire States of Mississippi and Louisiana, plus 22 counties in Alabama and 9 in Florida. Rita affected all of Louisiana, plus 26 counties in Texas. The greatest effects were in the counties (parishes in Louisiana) closest to the coast, where the storm's effects were at their maximum intensity. Coastal counties and parishes include those designated as such by each State under the Federal Coastal Zone Management Program, as well as those designated as coastal watershed counties or parishes by the U.S. Geological Survey. Virtually all of the coastal zone and watershed counties2 or parishes of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, plus the coastal counties in Texas from Houston eastward, were affected by the two hurricanes. The coastal zone counties or parishes of the four States account for nearly a quarter of employment and wages in those States. In Louisiana, the coastal parishes are more than half of the State's economy. The combined coastal zone and watershed counties and parishes on the Gulf of Mexico constituted 14 percent of employment in Alabama, 4 percent in Mississippi, 6 percent in Florida, a considerably greater 33 percent in Texas, and fully 80 percent in Louisiana. The ocean economy is defined as industries in marine construction, living resources (seafood processing and marketing, plus aquaculture), shipbuilding and boatbuilding, minerals (primarily oil and gas exploration and production), marine transportation and related goods and services, and, finally, tourism and recreation industries whose establishments are located close to the shore of the ocean or the Great Lakes. In 2004, the ocean economy of the region encompassing Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, stretching from Franklin County, Florida, to Brazoria County, Texas, employed 291,830 people in wage and salary jobs paying nearly $7.7 billion in wages. (See table 1.) The affected States accounted for 13 percent of employment and wages in the U.S. ocean economy. However, these gross figures mask a key fact about the region: it is the industrial heartland of the U.S. ocean economy. As the following tabulation shows, the region accounts for more than a third of U.S. employment in marine construction, more than a fifth of employment in fisheries (living resources), shipbuilding, and boatbuilding, and more than half of employment


Groundwater pollution may occur due to human activities, industrial effluents, cemeteries, mine spoils, etc. This paper deals with one-dimensional mathematical modeling of solute transport in finite aquifers. The governing equation for solute transport by unsteady groundwater flow is solved analytically by the Laplace transform technique. Initially, the aquifer is subjected to the spatially dependent source concentration with zero-order production. One end of the aquifer receives the source concentration and is represented by a mixed-type boundary condition in the splitting time domain. The concentration gradient at the other end of the porous media is assumed to be zero. The temporally dependent velocity and the dispersion coefficients are considered. A numerical solution is obtained by using an explicit finite difference scheme and compared with the analytical result. Accuracy of the solution is discussed by using the root mean square error method. Truncation error is also explored for the parameters like numerical dispersion and velocity terms. The impact of Peclet number is examined. For graphical interpretation, unsteady velocity expressions (i.e., such as exponential, sinusoidal, asymptotic, and algebraic sigmoid) are considered. The work may be used as a preliminary predictive tool for groundwater resource and management.