Introduction: Obesity, a serious risk factor for chronic diseases, especially among women, is an important worldwide public health problem. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of Lcarnitine supplementation with or without moderate aerobic training on serum lipid profiles and body fat percentage in obese women. Materials and Methods: In this clinical trial, 44 obese women were randomly assigned to 4 groups (n=11 each) as follows: 1: L-carnitine supplementation (2 g/day), 2: aerobic training+placebo group, 3: L-carnitine supplementation + aerobic training and 4: placebo. All interventions had an 8 week period and subjects of aerobic training groups underwent 8-week aerobic training protocol (3 sessions a week [24 sessions]). Body mass index, body fat percentage, daily dietary intake and serum fasting free L-carnitine, total cholesterol, triglycerides, LDL and HDL cholesterol levels of each subjects were measured before and after interventions. Analysis of covariance was used for comparing of variables means between groups. Results: Body fat percentage decreased significantly in the aerobic training+placebo and in L-carnitine supplementation+aerobic training groups. In the L-carnitine supplementation group, aerobic training+placebo and the L-carnitine supplementation+aerobic training groups, significant reductions were observed in serum total cholesterol and triglyceride levels. LDL-C levels decreased significantly in the L-carnitine+aerobic training group. Conclusion: Results indicated beneficial effects of L-carnitine supplementation alone or combined with aerobic training on serum lipid profiles and effects of aerobic training in lowering of body fat percentage in obese women. Lcarnitine supplementation and aerobic training may be effective in delaying onset of chronic diseases in obese subjects.


This project sought to determine if there was a difference in treatment results of selected refractory hardwood species by comparing a heated solution of ammoniacal copper quaternary compound-Type B (ACQ-B) to an ambient solution of ACQ-B using three pressure period durations. Nominal 2-by-4 samples, 6 inches long, of red maple (Acer rubrum) and yellow-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) heartwood were end-sealed and vacuum/pressure treated with a 1 percent active ingredient solution of ACQ-B. Duration of pressure was varied as well as temperature of solution. Measurements were taken of minimum and maximum penetration, percentage of cross-sectional area penetrated, and retention of preservative as determined by x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy analysis (ASOMA). Statistical analysis indicated improved penetration into yellow-poplar heartwood when the preservative solution was heated. Red maple results were inconclusive in that there was difficulty in differentiating heartwood and confirming the refractory nature of the species.


Mary Callahan. Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. xxii + 268 pp. Andrew Selth. Burma's Armed Forces: Power without Glory. Norwalk, Conn.: EastBridge, 2002. xxxvii + 371 pp. Since independence from Great Britain in 1948, Burma (Myanmar) has remained one of the most strife-torn but little-researched countries in Asia. This is especially notable in military affairs. As a result, these two ground-breaking books on the Burmese armed forces by American political scientist Mary Callahan and Australian military analyst Andrew Selth fill a long-standing void in Asian studies. They are essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the complex sociopolitical problems of this deeply troubled land. In spite of the unpopularity of the armed forces implied in the titles of both books, they should also be required reading for the country's ruling officers, who have dominated Burma's political destiny for over four decades. Indeed this very scarcity of independent studies, especially those conducted in the field, symbolizes the twin lack of political space and depths of social malaise that have long existed within the country. There is nothing that is necessarily unique about Burma's postcolonial challenges of transition to a modern nation-state. What, perhaps, is more outstanding is how little these issues have been directly discussed among the leading protagonists themselves.


Restored grasslands comprise an ever‐increasing proportion of grasslands in North America and elsewhere. However, floristic studies of restored grasslands indicate that our ability to restore plant communities is limited. Our goal was to assess the effectiveness of restoration seeding for recovery of key plant community components on former exotic, cool‐season pastures using a chronosequence of six restoration sites and three nearby remnant tallgrass prairie sites in West‐Central Iowa. We assessed trends in Simpson's diversity and evenness, richness and abundance of selected native and exotic plant guilds, and mean coefficient of conservatism (mean C). Simpson's diversity and evenness and perennial invasive species abundance all declined with restoration site age. As a group, restoration sites had greater richness of native C3 species with late phenology, but lower richness and abundance of species with early phenology relative to remnant sites. Total native richness, total native abundance (cover), mean C, and abundance of late phenology C3 plants were similar between restoration and remnant sites. Observed declines in diversity and evenness with restoration age reflect increases in C4 grass abundance rather than absolute decreases in the abundance of perennial C3 species. In contrast to other studies, restoration seeding appears to have led to successful establishment of tallgrass prairie species that were likely to be included in seeding mixtures. While several floristic measures indicate convergence of restoration and remnant sites, biodiversity may be further enhanced by including early phenology species in seeding mixes in proportion to their abundance on remnant prairies.


Humanity is constantly confronted with the emergence and reemergence of infectious diseases. Many of them produce large or devastating epidemics, like AIDS (HIV) and Ebola. Others have been long neglected, yet pose immediate threats to global public health as evidences the abrupt emergence of Zika virus in South America and its association with microcephaly in babies. The examples illustrate, that many of these diseases are provoked by RNA viruses. One of the first steps in understanding and eliminating those threats is the development of sensitive and rapid diagnostic methods. A general and relatively rapid method is the direct detection and examination of the agent's genome. However, the nature of (re)emerging RNA viruses poses a series of very specific problems for the design of such methods. Therefore, a systematic approach was proposed for the design of DNA-hybridization-base methods to detect and characterize RNA viruses that will have both a high sensitivity and a specificity sufficiently broad to detect, per reaction, down to a single copy of any of the possible variants of the viral genome.
Following this approach a series of assays were designed, developed or adapted and put into use for detection and characterization of important RNA viruses. One of those viruses is West Nile virus (WNV), which after its explosive introduction into USA become the most widespread flavivirus throughout the world and, consequently, many countries began an intensive monitoring. While existing assay detected predominantly the Lineage 1, in Europa Lineage 2 was expected. Two new RT-qPCR for the detection of both lineages were developed, and reportedly used by independent laboratories. Due to more than 50000 associated deaths per year, the Hepatitis E virus also received an increasing attention to elucidate novel routes of transmission. This virus (especially genotype 3) has the zoonotic potential of transmission from pigs and wild boar to humans. RT-qPCR and nested qPCR for detection and characterization of this virus as well as a methodology for subtyping were developed and the first detected case of subtype 3b in a German wild animal was documented. In addition a novel assay for flaviviruses conformed by a RT-qPCR coupled with a low density DNA microarray was developed, which enabled the identification of WNV in mosquitoes from Greece. A RT-qPCR suitable for surveillance and diagnostic of all known variants of Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus was developed too. A causative agent of hemorrhagic infections, the Ngari virus, was detected and characterized in animal samples from Mauritania. These achievements were supported by the development of software applications for selection and visualization of primers and probes from aligned DNA sequences and for modeling of DNA hybridizations using unaligned sequences.
In conclusion a general methodology for rapid development of sensitive diagnostic methods based in DNA-hybridization technics (PCR, sequencing and microarray) was stablished and successful applications are reported.


Lung cancer is the first leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the world. Aberrant glycosylation in lung tumors leads to the expression of tumor-associated carbohydrate structures, such as the Tn antigen, consisting of N-acetyl-galactosamine (GalNAc) linked to a serine or threonine residue in proteins (α-GalNAc-O-Ser/Thr). The Tn antigen can be recognized by the Macrophage Galactose/GalNAc lectin (MGL), which mediates various immune regulatory and tolerogenic functions, mainly by reprogramming the maturation of function of dendritic cells (DCs). In this work, we generated two different Tn-expressing variants from the Lewis-type lung murine cancer cell line LL/2, which showed different alterations in the O-glycosylation pathways that influenced the interaction with mouse MGL2 and the immunomodulatory properties of DCs. Thus, the identification of the biological programs triggered by Tn+ cancer cells might contribute to an improved understanding of the molecular mechanisms elicited by MGL-dependent immune regulatory circuits.


Current pre-training works in natural language generation pay little attention to the problem of exposure bias on downstream tasks. To address this issue, we propose an enhanced multi-flow sequence to sequence pre-training and fine-tuning framework named ERNIE-GEN, which bridges the discrepancy between training and inference with an infilling generation mechanism and a noise-aware generation method. To make generation closer to human writing patterns, this framework introduces a span-by-span generation flow that trains the model to predict semantically-complete spans consecutively rather than predicting word by word. Unlike existing pre-training methods, ERNIE-GEN incorporates multi-granularity target sampling to construct pre-training data, which enhances the correlation between encoder and decoder. Experimental results demonstrate that ERNIE-GEN achieves state-of-the-art results with a much smaller amount of pre-training data and parameters on a range of language generation tasks, including abstractive summarization (Gigaword and CNN/DailyMail), question generation (SQuAD), dialogue generation (Persona-Chat) and generative question answering (CoQA). The source codes and pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE/ernie-gen.


This thesis investigates the measurement of spatial correlations of photon pairs generated through spontaneous parametric down-conversion with single-photon sensitive multi-pixel detectors. A custom designed and fabricated 8×1 fibre array detector for time to position multiplexing was characterised. This detector was then commissioned in an experiment measuring the spatial correlations of photon pairs in position, momentum and intermediate bases. The fibre array measured eight positions simultaneously with one Single-Photon Avalanche Diode, which led to an eight-fold increase in the data acquisition rate compared to traditional experiments, where a single SPAD was scanned across the detection plane. To capture all of the emitted light, an electron-multiplying CCD (EMCCD) camera was used. The spatial correlations were measured for the first time in momentum and position bases with a single-photon sensitive camera. Additionally, over 2500 spatial states were accessed, which, to date, is the highest number of accessed states, using the transverse positions of correlated photon pairs. The detected photon pairs were tested, if they fulfil the requirements of entanglement. The calculated variance product was 1 order of magnitude and almost three orders of magnitude below the classical limit of separability for the fibre array and the EMCCD camera respectively. Finally the image enhancement of using a correlated light source with a noise rejection algorithm was investigated experimentally and theoretically.


In the present thesis, a tissue engineering approach to treat bone defects was investigated. Such strategy was based on the use of patient own cultured bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs) in association with biomaterials to produce autologous living bone equivalents. When engineering such implants, three main factors had to be taken into account: (i) the cells, (ii) the culture technology and (iii) the biomaterial scaffolds. The capacity of BMSCs to proliferate, differentiate along the osteogenic lineage and form a bone like tissue was demonstrated in various in vitro assays making use of biochemical,
immunological, microscopic and gene expression techniques. The ability of the cells to produce bone in vivo was established using an ectopic (extra osseous) implantation model.
Results indicated that BMSC cultures were composed of a heterogeneous population
containing a subpopulation of cells with high proliferative capacity and with potential to differentiate into bone forming cells. Both the growth and the differentiation pattern of these cells could be manipulated, to a certain degree, through the use of bioactive factors during culture. After implantation, the bone forming capacity of the cultures proved to be related to the amount of early osteoprogenitors and precursors cells that could be induced into starting the osteogenic differentiation process. In bone marrow aspirates, this subpopulation appeared to decrease with donor age and to be strongly dependent on the donor, indicating that the aspiration procedure plays an important role in the obtained bone marrow cell population. In order to evaluate the in vivo bone formation capacity of BMSC cultures prior to implantation, an experimental method was developed in which the amount of early
osteoprogenitors and precursors cells could be quantified. With regard to the technology design, data indicated that the culture of cells on the biomaterial scaffolds prior to implantation resulted in implants with faster in vivo bone
forming ability as compared to scaffolds implanted after cell seeding. In addition, two biodegradable polymeric systems were proposed as scaffolds to be used in the described bone engineering approach after evaluating their ability to support bone marrow cell growth, differentiation and in vivo bone formation.
In summary, although the complete knowledge of the factors controlling BMSC rowth and osteogenic differentiation still needs to be further expanded, the obtained results suggest
that the bone tissue engineering approach described in this thesis presents a great potential
for the repair of bone defects and will become an advantageous alternative to the traditional
autologous bone grafting.


The hours were demanding but the pay was good. And the boozy lunches were even better. Australia's advertising agencies enjoyed their reputation as a glamorous and fun place to work. Not surprisingly, many of the nation's brightest and most creative young people were drawn to advertising. Behind Glass Doors ventures into their offices to reveal the inner workings of the Australian advertising agency business during its best decades: the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Drawing on interviews with over a hundred former admen and women across all agency departments, this study offers unprecedented access to the changing world of the advertising agency. It documents the different tasks performed by agency staff - from managing increasingly powerful clients to creating memorable campaigns - as well as the ways that these practices brought Australian agencies into closer contact with international trends and developments. By telling the story of Australian advertising's 'golden age' through the experiences of those men and women who were responsible for it, Behind Glass Doors reveals that a career in advertising was no ordinary office job.


Heparan sulphate (HS) proteoglycans, composed of a core protein and one or more negatively charged HS chains, are a major component of extracellular matrices and are located on the plasma membrane of all animal cells. The HS polysaccharide is synthesized by alternating addition of glucuronic acid (GlcA) and Nacetylglycosamine (GlcNAc) from corresponding UDP-sugar precursors. Due to subsequent modifications, including epimerization of GlcA to iduronic acid and sulphation the resultant polysaccharide is variously sulphate-substituted at different positions. Polymerization of HS chains is believed to be catalyzed by the EXT family of proteins. In humans, the EXT family consists of five members: EXT1, EXT2, EXTL1, EXTL2 and EXTL3. All members of exostoses family harbour in vitro glycosyltransferase activities related to HS chain elongation. EXT1-EXT2 form a heter-oligomeric complex involved in the chain elongation step in HS biosynthesis, but the biological roles of EXTLs are less clearly defined. The aim of the studies presented in this thesis was to investigate the roles of the three EXTLs in heparan sulphate biosynthesis. Down regulation of EXTL2 or EXTL3 expression in a human cell line resulted in increased HS chain length. Also overexpression of EXTL1 or EXTL3 resulted in increased chain length. In contrast, overexpression of EXTL2 resulted in shorter HS chains. The results indicate that these enzymes influence HS synthesis and that their expression levels control HS chain length. In addition, all three EXTL proteins were able to catalyze the addition of a single GlcNAc to [GlcAGlcNAc]n oligosaccharide acceptors, but did not show any detectable transfer of GlcA to GlcNAc[GlcA-GlcNAc]n oligosaccharide acceptors.


Get the definitive reference for deploying, configuring, and supporting Windows Vista with expert insights from Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and the Windows Vista Team at Microsoft. With additions and updates for SP1, this official Microsoft RESOURCE KIT provides more than 1,700 pages of in-depth technical guidance on automating deployment; implementing security enhancements, including Windows Firewall and Windows Defender; administering Group Policy, files, folders, programs, and devices; using Windows Internet Explorer 7; configuring network connections; and troubleshooting. You also get more than 170 timesaving scripts to help automate administrative tasks, additional job aids, and an eBook of the entire RESOURCE KIT with bonus chapters on a companion DVD.Key Book Benefits Provides the information that every Windows administrator needs about troubleshooting, security enhancements, group policy, and automating administration from the experts who know the technology best Includes new coverage and updates related to SP1 Features Direct from the Source sidebar contributions from more than 100 members of the Windows Vista team CD includes 170+ scripts, tools, and job aids, and a fully searchable version of the entire RESOURCE KIT book


— VPN networks running over MPLS have found widespread acceptance as both an efficient and cost effective means to provide connectivity for large organizations and companies. However, providing QoS is still a major challenge that needs to be addressed. Using realistic input traffic, a simulation model is built for a large network where various queueing policies are implemented and evaluated for the provision of certain QoS requirements. After a thorough analysis the merits and shortcomings of each policy are determined, and recommendations are given along with future research directions.


Supercritical CO2 cycles (sCO2) are recognized as a promising solution for the exploitation of different energy sources: from fossil fuel combustion and nuclear energy to solar energy and waste heat recovery. The large range of possible applications and the possible scarcity of water for sCO2 systems makes the use of direct air-cooled heat rejection units (HRU) of great interest. This paper deals with the numerical modelling, supported by experimental data provided by an HRU manufacturer, of a sCO2 system, equipped with a direct air-cooled HRU, exploiting a stream of 53 kg/s of flue gases at 550°C. The selected sCO2 cycle is a simple recuperative cycle, whose maximum/minimum pressure and maximum temperature are optimized in design conditions obtaining an overall recovery efficiency of 21.71%. The analysis of the system in off-design conditions is carried out for different ambient temperatures and the optimal HRU operational strategy is investigated considering the possibility of varying the HRU fan rotational speed with no variation of the working fluid inventory. Overall results are presented as the trend of minimum cycle pressure and minimum cycle temperature required to maximize the system power output at every considered ambient temperature. It is found that the plant performance is strongly penalized by high ambient temperatures for two main reasons: (i) the sharp increase of the compressor/turbine power ratio because of the loss of real gas effects in compression and (ii) the severe penalization of the compressor efficiency, which moves its operating point towards regions characterized by poor performance. For these reasons, more effective HRU solutions should be adopted in locations characterized by relatively high seasonal temperatures.


In the decade since OceanObs `99, great advances have been made in the field of ocean data dissemination. The use of Internet technologies has transformed the landscape: users can now find, evaluate and access data rapidly and securely using only a web browser. This paper describes the current state of the art in dissemination methods for ocean data, focussing particularly on ocean observations from in situ and remote sensing platforms. We discuss current efforts being made to improve the consistency of delivered data and to increase the potential for automated integration of diverse datasets. An important recent development is the adoption of open standards from the Geographic Information Systems community; we discuss the current impact of these new technologies and their future potential. We conclude that new approaches will indeed be necessary to exchange data more effectively and forge links between communities, but these approaches must be evaluated critically through practical tests, and existing ocean data exchange technologies must be used to their best advantage. Investment in key technology components, cross-community pilot projects and the enhancement of end-user software tools will be required in order to assess and demonstrate the value of any new technology.


This policy brief was prepared for the University of California Academic Senate and provides a general outline of the future role of the Senate's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) in setting universitywide undergraduate admissions policy. BOARS has the prerogative to act as the "lead agency" in this important area of educational policy, subject to the actions of the Regents, and recognizing the purview of the President and the Chancellors in coordinating the administrative process of selection and setting general enrollment limits, and the need to consult with the Vice President for Student Affairs and campus admissions officers. The term "lead agency" reflects the concept that admissions is an area of shared responsibility with the administration, and that other entities, including the office of the Assistant Vice President for Students Affairs, are crucial to implementing the admissions process. Yet it is important to separate the administrative tasks from educational policy issues. This brief provides a set of proposed "working rules" and an outline of university policies in the area of undergraduate admissions.


Depth map compression is important for compact representation of 3D visual data in "texture-plus-depth" format, where texture and depth maps of multiple closely spaced viewpoints are encoded and transmitted. A decoder can then freely synthesize any chosen inter-mediate view via depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) using neighboring coded texture and depth maps as anchors. In this work, we leverage on the observation that "pixels of similar depth have similar motion" to efficiently encode depth video. Specifically, we divide a depth block containing two zones of distinct values (e.g., foreground and background) into two sub-blocks along the dividing edge before performing separate motion prediction. While doing such arbitrarily shaped sub-block motion prediction can lead to very small prediction residuals (resulting in few bits required to code them), it incurs an overhead to losslessly encode dividing edges for sub-block identification. To minimize this overhead, we first devise an edge prediction scheme based on linear regression to predict the next edge direction in a contiguous contour. From the predicted edge direction, we assign probabilities to each possible edge direction using the von Mises distribution, which are subsequently inputted to a conditional arithmetic codec for entropy coding. Experimental results show an average overall bitrate reduction of up to 30% over classical H.264 implementation.


Increased interest in indigenous-led natural resource management (NRM) on traditionally owned land in northern Australia has raised important questions in relation to policies that compensate indigenous Australians for providing environmental services. A choice experiment survey was mailed out to respondents across the whole of Australia to assess if and to what extent Australian people think that society benefits from these services and how much they would pay for them. More than half the respondents would in principle support indigenous NRM in northern Australia, with a high willingness to pay for carbon, biodiversity, and recreational services. Social aspects of indigenous NRM, however, were not valued by the society, emphasizing the need for awareness raising and clarifications of benefits that indigenous people gain while carrying out land management on their traditional country. Any marketing campaign should take into account preference variation across Australian society, which this research shows is substantial, particularly between people from the north and those from the south. People from the south were more likely to support indigenous NRM, a significant finding for campaigns targeting potential donors.


In this article, novel joint semiparametric spline-based modeling of conditional mean and volatility of financial time series is proposed and evaluated on daily stock return data. The modeling includes functions of lagged response variables and time as predictors. The latter can be viewed as a proxy for omitted economic variables contributing to the underlying dynamics. The conditional mean model is additive. The conditional volatility model is multiplicative and linearized with a logarithmic transformation. In addition, a cube-root power transformation is employed to symmetrize the lagged response variables. Using cubic splines, the model can be written as a multiple linear regression, thereby allowing predictions to be obtained in a simple manner. As outliers are often present in financial data, reliable estimation of the model parameters is achieved by trimmed least-square (TLS) estimation for which a reasonable amount of trimming is suggested. To obtain a parsimonious specification of the model, a new model selection criterion corresponding to TLS is derived. Moreover, the (three-parameter) generalized gamma distribution is identified as suitable for the absolute multiplicative errors and shown to work well for predictions and also for the calculation of quantiles, which is important to determine the value at risk. All model choices are motivated by a detailed analysis of IBM, HP, and SAP daily returns. The prediction performance is compared to the classical generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) and asymmetric power GARCH (APGARCH) models as well as to a nonstationary time-trend volatility model. The results suggest that the proposed model may possess a high predictive power for future conditional volatility. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.


Chemical analyses and crystal structure refinements were performed on lithian siderophyllite-3 T crystals from granitic pegmatites of the anorogenic Pikes Peak batholith (Colorado) to characterize the crystal chemistry and relations with trioctahedral lithium-bearing micas showing different stacking sequences. Chemical data show that the studied samples fall on the siderophyllite-polylithionite join, closer to the siderophyllite end-member. Single-crystal X-ray refinements were carried out on three samples (two of which were taken from core and rim of the same crystal) in space-group P 3 1 12 (the agreement factor, R obs , varies between 0.034 and 0.036). Mean bond distances and mean electron counts of M1, M2 and M3 octahedral sites indicate an ordered cation distribution with M1 and M3 positions substantially larger than M2. In the sample with the largest iron content, the M2 mean electron count increases as well as the mean distance, whereas remains smaller than or . The tetrahedral cation-oxygen atom mean distances range from 1.614 to 1.638 A and from 1.663 to 1.678 A for T1 and T2 sites, respectively, being consistent with Al 3+ enrichment in the T2 sites. The tetrahedral rotation angle, α, is generally small (3.1 ≤ α ≤ 4.6°) and decreases with siderophyllite content. As Fe increases, the T1 tetrahedron becomes flatter (112.4 ≤ τ T1 ≤ 110.5°), whereas T2 tetrahedron distortion appears unchanged (110.7 ≤ τ T2 ≤ 110.9).


Electricity systems are facing a major transition process from fossil based generation to renewable energy sources (RES). In the European Union target quotas for renewable energy generation have been agreed for the 2030 horizon. While there is consensus about the need for this transition, the future role of nuclear power is highly uncertain. This work explores the role of nuclear energy in an electricity system complying with elevated RES generation quotas. The impact of the long-term operation (LTO) of the Spanish nuclear fleet on the electricity system costs, the revenue of nuclear operators, investment decisions in new generation capacity and the CO2 balance are also analysed. Furthermore, the benefits of the flexible operation of nuclear plants are studied. Results indicate that the nuclear LTO drastically reduces the CO2 intensity of electricity production, but the system requires additional generation and storage capacity investments to reach high RES quotas diminishing the revenue of the nuclear generators.


This thesis sets out to portray the pastoral standards,
conditions, and aspirations of the London parish clergy in the
Elizabethan period. The first two chapters are concerned with
their social and geographical backgrounds; they are followed by
chapters dealing with educational, preaching, and residential
standards. Prospects of preferment are discussed in Chapter VI
which treats upon the subtle mechanism of clerical patronage.
Three subsequent chapters help to explain the attraction of
London to the aspiring cleric. Rectorial income and expenditure
are analysed, and the increase in gross income during the period
explored; the endless controversy over tithe is assessed.
Discussed in detail are the parish lectureships, lucrative
sources of augmentation of clerical income. The multifarious
opportunities for unbeneficed ministers in the capital are
brought out, and the comparative comfort of the preaching curate
is contrasted with the indigence of his less-qualified
counterpart.
Finally, the course of clerical nonconformity is traced in
two concluding chapters. The first assesses the strength of
the movement in the early years of the reign- under the
leadership of the ex-Marian exiles, and its disruption by Parker
in the vestiarian controversy. Chapter XI dwells upon the
fluctuations of the radical movement post-1566, emphasising the ever-widening gap between the mass of parish clergy and the
Puritan nucleus holding lectureships, or positions in the
Minories, the most important nonconformist enclave in the city.
A section on Bishop Aylmer's disciplinary activities helps to
explain the virtual eclipse of organised clerical radicalism by
1592.
The appendices are composed largely of biographical data,
including additions to Hennessy's lists of London clergy.


The scleractinian family Acroporidae reaches its greatest diversity in the Indo-Pacific region, where it has six extant genera and around 250 valid species, and dominates coral species composition on many reefs. Only one genus, Acropora, represented by only two species, survives in the Caribbean, although at least four other genera, Astreopora, Alveopora, Dendracis and Isopora are present in the Caribbean fossil record. Using fossil specimens from museum collections, this study reviews the Caribbean genera and species of Acroporidae and their relevance to the evolution and biogeography of the family. Two turnover periods (late Oligocene/early Miocene and Plio-Pleistocene) have been recognised as major influences on the post-Tethyan fossil history of Caribbean reef-building Scleractinia. Because of the importance of Acroporidae in the Indo-Pacific today, the successive origination and loss of taxa as well as unique taxon characteristics in the Caribbean setting are of interest in assessing the challenges faced by extant taxa under a regime of global climate change.


In case of Seoul city in Korea, the level of water leakage from any distribution system is evaluated by comparison of measured minimum night flows (NFMs) with a fixed allowable leakage level. However, infrastructure condition of District Metered Areas (DMAs) could be misjudged, because characteristics of the system are not considered properly. Therefore the components of NFM were estimated in residential and business DMAs by using data of night uses collected by modified option A test and real losses from water balance analysis. A new background minimum night flow equation was developed by the components of NFM. Applicability of the equation was tested on various revenue water % residential and business DMAs. As a result, it is concluded that the new background night flow developed in this study is more reasonable in Korea and could be used to judge whether the DMAs have economically recoverable unreported bursts prior to leakage detection activity.


In this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium "Fuzzy Studies," the authors, all of whom work in the field of science, technology, and society, begin from the assumption that, as Bruno Latour has put it, "we have never been modern." They accept the STS thesis that, while modern practices purport to be entirely rational and coherent, on closer inspection they turn out to be as much noncoherent as coherent. This article poses the question of what forms "noncoherences" take and how they are managed. The basic argument is that there is a range of styles of noncoherence or "modes of syncretism." In small case studies, the authors identify six such modes or styles, which they term denial, domestication, separation, care, conflict, and collapse. Given that consistency and coherence seem less important now than they were once taken to be—and given that the conditions of possibility for purity are, in any case, in decline—this list and its supporting case studies, while not meant to be definitive, are offered as a way of understanding how practices that do not cohere may still function and fit together admirably.


In multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) networks, receivers decode multiple concurrent signals using successive interference cancellation (SIC). With SIC, a weak target signal can be deciphered in the presence of stronger interfering signals. However, this is only feasible if each strong interfering signal satisfies a signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio (SINR) requirement. This necessitates the appropriate selection of a subset of links that can be concurrently active in each receiver's neighborhood; in other words, a subtopology consisting of links that can be simultaneously active in the network is to be formed. If the selected subtopologies are of small size, the delay between the transmission opportunities on a link increases. Thus, care should be taken to form a limited number of subtopologies. We find that the problem of constructing the minimum number of subtopologies such that SIC decoding is successful with a desired probability threshold is NP-hard. Given this, we propose MUSIC, a framework that greedily forms and activates subtopologies in a way that favors successful SIC decoding with a high probability. MUSIC also ensures that the number of selected subtopologies is kept small. We provide both a centralized and a distributed version of our framework. We prove that our centralized version approximates the optimal solution for the considered problem. We also perform extensive simulations to demonstrate that: 1) MUSIC forms a small number of subtopologies that enable efficient SIC operations; the number of subtopologies formed is at most 17% larger than the optimum number of topologies, discovered through exhaustive search (in small networks); 2) MUSIC outperforms approaches that simply consider the number of antennas as a measure for determining the links that can be simultaneously active. Specifically, MUSIC provides throughput improvements of up to four times, as compared to such an approach, in various topological settings. The improvements can be directly attributable to a significantly higher probability of correct SIC based decoding with MUSIC.


This is a personal testimony of someone who has experienced significant suffering for the sake of her love for Christ. She is the wife of theologian Josef Ton, a renowned Romanian Christian leader and theological educator. The editors met her on the occasion of the Bad Urach Consultation on "Developing an evangelical theology of suffering, persecution and martyrdom," held on 16-18 September 2009 in Germany. They were impressed by her deep spirituality and felt it would not be adequately captured by the consultation statement. Mirjam Scarborough conducted and edited the interview.


CO2 capture and storage (CCS) has been proposed as a climate change mitigation strategy. The basic principle is to prevent CO2 which would normally be emitted from large point sources, such as power stations, from entering the atmosphere. This is achieved by capturing the CO2 at source and storing it in a location where it will be trapped and unable to enter the atmosphere. This work looks specifically at geological storage of CO2 in deep saline formations.

Dynamic simulations can be used to investigate the fundamental physical and chemical processes which occur when CO2 is injected into geological formations. They can also be used to determine the suitability of a particular site for CO2 storage. The scale of the processes being simulated is important when building a dynamic model. Here dynamic simulations have been used to explore three different aspects of geological CO2 storage in deep saline formations. The first model investigates large scale CO2 migration and pressure build up at a potential CCS site. The second model concentrates on the small scale processes of CO2 dissolution and convection. The third model attempts to accurately model both the large scale processes of CO2 injection and migration and the small scale processes of CO2 dissolution and convection.

Dynamic simulations have been used to model storage capacity, CO2 migration and pressure buildup at a potential CO2 storage site in the UK North Sea. There are large uncertainties in the input data so various models have been run using a range of parameters. The primary control on pressure buildup at the site is the permeability of the unit directly beneath it. The plume diameter is primarily controlled by the porosity and permeability of the reservoir unit. Despite uncertainties in the input data, the use of a full three-dimensional (3D) numerical simulation has been extremely useful for identifying and prioritizing factors that need further investigation.

Dissolution of CO2 into existing formation waters (brine) leads to an increase in brine density proportional to the amount of dissolved CO2. This can lead to gravitational instabilities and the formation of convection currents. Convection currents, in turn, will increase CO2 dissolution rates by removing CO2 saturated brine from the CO2-brine interface. The dissolution and subsequent convection of CO2 which has leaked through a fracture is investigated using dynamic simulations. The instigation of convection currents due to flow through a fracture increases dissolution rates. Comparison of our results with fracture flow rates shows that for typical fracture apertures dissolution from a fracture is small relative to the amount of CO2 flowing through the fracture.

Two phase flow effects and the currents caused by an advancing plume of injected CO2 can affect patterns of CO2 dissolution and convection within a reservoir. Most existing models of CO2 dissolution and convection use a static boundary layer or do not involve two phase flow effects. A radial, two phase, two component model has been built to model the injection process along with convection enhanced dissolution. The model performs well compared to analytical solutions in terms of the large scale processes of CO2 migration and pressure buildup but modelled convection is highly dependent on grid resolution. Numerical instabilities are also present. Further work is needed to increase the accuracy of the model in order to allow higher resolution modelling to be carried out and modelling of the smaller scale processes to be improved.


Application of RFID technology to intraocular instrumentation requires an understanding of the reliability of propagation through optical tissues and fluids. In this study, the working distance for passive RFID operation is measured in a simulated intraocular environment using porcine eyes. Results are obtained in three common RFID ranges: low frequency, high frequency and ultra-high frequency. Several media were tested to assess the possible impact of intraocular materials. Variations in the possible working distance were observed for certain media, but the data suggest that reliable RFID operation for intraocular sensors is possible at a range of 2-4 cm.


The 3-D finite element analysis model of beam-edge structure with spaced multiple layers under bird impact is established. Numerical simulations are implemented by using the non-linear contact-impact code ANSYS/LS-DYNA when the birds collide at three locations of the structure respectively. The failure process of the structure and the equivalent plastic strain at supports are obtained. The residual strength of the structure after impact is predicted. The results show that the front spars are penetrated or cracked after the leading edge is perforated. The equivalent plastic strain at the support is much higher when the bird impacts the structure at the central location. Both the structure deformation and failure mode from the simulation are consistent with the results of full scale test, which proves the validity of the method proposed in this paper.


Purpose: This article was adapted from an unpublished essay previously submitted by the author as a course requirement for SAB 634: Ethics in Sports at the United States Sports Academy in Daphne, Alabama. The essay is intended to provide coaches and athletics administrators—specifically those operating within the frameworks of high school, club, and non-profit-generating collegiate programs—with a sound functional overview of existing research related to the influence of the program climate on the moral development of athletes and to offer suggestions for the implementation of research-supported techniques aimed at eliciting high levels of positive moral development. Methods: A broad range of existing literature related to the moral development of athletes was compiled, examined, analyzed, and disseminated. Results: The examined research findings suggest that moral development is rooted in emotional contexts and develops from a high level of externalization toward autonomy. Furthermore, existing research clearly supports a strong positive correlation between the social environment, the motivational orientation of athletes, and moral development. Specifically, coaches who model and support autonomous moral behaviors maintain the most positive influence on the healthy moral development of athletes; and athletes possessing high task-ego goal orientations tend to have the highest levels of moral functioning. Conclusions: Due to their inherently emotional constructs and the progressive development of skills toward autonomy associated with sports, athletics serve as an ideal environment for moral development. By deemphasizing winning as an end goal in order to support task goal orientation and healthy competition, sports programs can effectively promote positive moral development. Applications in Sports: Athletics organizations that claim to exist for the developmental benefit of the participating athletes—specifically non-revenue generating athletics entities—must examine and implement sound research-supported strategies associated with the moral development of athletes. By developing an understanding of the concepts identified and incorporating the practices prescribed within this essay, coaches and athletics administrators may establish sports programs that effectively promote positive moral development.


Many question the value of accounting scholarship to society. We compare the attention the general public, policymakers, and academics give to academic accounting research relative to other business disciplines and other more general disciplines (economics, psychology, and other sciences). The results indicate that accounting research receives significantly less attention from the general public than all other disciplines and also performs relatively poorly in receiving policymakers' attention compared to both economics and finance. Within accounting subtopics, tax research receives more attention from the general public and policymakers than other topic areas. We also find that articles in other disciplines' elite journals cite relatively few of accounting's elite-level publications, but non-elite journal articles cite accounting research in similar numbers to other disciplines. Finally, we rank scholars, institutions, and journals by the attention they receive. We discuss how these findings could impact accounting education.
 Data Availability: Requests for data may be made to the authors.


Because of the uproar over "carried interests," it seems that almost everyone knows that the tax law currently allows private equity managers to pay capital gains taxes on a substantial part of the (often substantial) income generated by their services. While this result raises significant tax policy concerns, the basic tax law governing carried interests is well-settled, and legislative action therefore would be necessary to address these concerns. In contrast, a little-known technique utilized by private equity managers to convert the character of their remaining compensation income is extremely aggressive and subject to serious challenge by the IRS. Private equity managers regularly attempt to convert their fixed annual two percent management fees into additional carried interest through so-called fee waivers. The tax result, if this technique is successful, is the conversion of current ordinary income into deferred capital gains. Despite the recent spotlight on the taxation of private equity management compensation, surprisingly little attention has been paid to this particular tax minimization strategy. This article attempts to fill that void. Its purpose is twofold. First, it will describe the mechanics of fee waivers, which are pervasive within the private equity community but not widely appreciated or understood outside of it. Second, it will discuss the tax issues stemming from fee waivers, focusing on the IRS arguments that could be made to disallow their intended tax results.


In the present study, a high energy pulsed laser is used to generate a millimetric cavitation bubble within a water flow over a symmetric hydrofoil. The bubble is initiated at different locations in the vicinity of the hydrofoil leading edge. A high-speed camera is used to observe the motion and the deformation of the bubble as it travels along the hydrofoil suction side. We have found that the pressure gradient plays a major role on the bubble dynamic and subsequent phenomena. For a specific region of the flow, the micro-jet initiated at the collapse of the bubble is no more directed towards the hydrofoil surface, as commonly observed in still water. In this case, we also observe a spectacular behaviour of the cavity rebound, which migrates towards the solid surface despite of the outward direction of the micro-jet.


The next grand challenges for society and science are in the brain sciences. A collection of 60+ scientists from around the world, together with 10+ observers from national, private, and foundations, spent two days together discussing the top challenges that we could solve as a global community in the next decade. We eventually settled on three challenges, spanning anatomy, physiology, and medicine. Addressing all three challenges requires novel computational infrastructure. The group proposed the advent of The International Brain Station (TIBS), to address these challenges, and launch brain sciences to the next level of understanding.


Empirical evidence suggests that the natural-resource curse operates through the behavior of the political elite, yet there are few models that convincingly illustrate the mechanism at work. I present a model where natural-resource abundance generates power struggles, thereby increasing the effective discount rate of the governing group. As a result, the elite makes fewer investments in the long-run development of the country.


Since 1999 the New Zealand secular school curriculum has included a statement on fostering children's spirituality in classrooms. This statement defines spirituality in a broad fashion and includes reference to Maori (indigenous New Zealander) views on spirituality. The implications of this for classroom teachers have not been researched in this country and therefore this paper reports on a study that examined teachers' views on spirituality and the implications for the children they teach. The methodology focused on the experiences of nine teachers in two multicultural secular primary schools. The classroom experiences of a spiritual nature that the teachers recounted, while many and varied, revealed some common themes that related to the climate of the classrooms. Such classrooms were characterized as being non-judgemental and non-self-conscious and as places where a community of spiritual discourse was encouraged and where deeply meaningful activities and events occurred. The findings suggest that while teachers cannot plan and predict precisely what will foster spirituality in classrooms, teachers can cultivate a climate that enhances children's spirituality.


INTRODUCTION
The Orthognathic Quality of Life Questionnaire (OQLQ) was developed in 2000 and validated in 2002, aiming at assessing the impact and the benefits of orthosurgical treatment on patients' quality of life.

OBJECTIVE
Cross-culturally translate into Brazilian Portuguese and back-translate into English a quality of life instrument, assuring maintenance of its properties.

METHODS
At first, equivalence of concepts and items was discussed by a group of specialists who scrutinized all questionnaire items. Additionally, four patients in need of orthosurgical treatment were interviewed by means of the focus group methodology. Relevance of the questionnaire items was assured prior to its translation which was carried out by two translators who worked independently. Both translations were tested in 20 patients and then consolidated. The consolidated questionnaire version was back-translated into English by two translators who worked independently, and the consolidated back-translation was assessed by the authors of the original questionnaire as well as by the researchers.

RESULTS
The OQLQ was translated into Brazilian Portuguese. This translation was tested in a pilot study comprising 12 patients, aged between 16 and 34 years old.

CONCLUSION
The OQLQ Brazilian Portuguese translation proves to be an appropriate instrument to assess the impact of dentofacial deformities on the quality of life of patients in the Brazilian public health system and who are in need of orthosurgical treatment.


The Zambia Mining Investment and Governance Review (MInGov) collects and shares informationon mining sector governance, its attractiveness to investors and how its activities affect nationaldevelopment. It reviews sector performance from the perspective of three main stakeholder groups– government, investors in the mining value chain and civil society – and identifies gaps betweendeclared and actual government policy and practice. The review's key findings are: Performance across the value chain is strongest in topics most closely associated with mining and which are related to the content of laws and regulations, though implementationof these is wanting in some instances; Sector development is constrained by a number of bottlenecks; According to investors, a number of areas are constraining mining investment and returns; The three key stakeholder groups agree on a number of topics they believe areparticularly important to strengthen sector governance, investment and development impact; Civil society believes there is a number of weaknesses sector governance, including the poor handling of environment and social impacts of mining; problems with human rights associated with the sector; ineffective development planning as it relates to mining; issues concerning land access, compensation and resettlement; and the absence of revenue sharing between national and local government.MInGov's methodology focuses on the status of governance and investment conditions in the mining sector from the perspective of stakeholders, and as reported in primary and secondary sources. However, less-well covered areas include the quality of its infrastructure services, the security of property from theft, the underlying strength of institutions, and ways to enhance mining's contribution to local and national development.This report presents data on mining investment and governance indicators for Zambia that are current as of October 2015.


This essay offers a response to the current discussion concerning the possible rescission of ABA Accreditation Standard 603 governing tenure-track appointment of the law library director. Part I reviews this discussion, highlighting the terms and arguments on all sides of the debate. Part II offers a defense of the current standard, based upon the need for the director both to receive the protections of academic freedom and to participate in faculty governance of the law school. The need for tenure to perform a director's professional duties, however, does not make one automatically tenureable. Part III examines the skeptical attitude that librarians have expressed concerning whether they are either willing or able to perform at the added expectations of tenured faculty, especially scholarly production. A comparison of Leiter's scholarly impact scores shows that directors tend to perform well below the faculty averages of their schools, shedding possible light on the law school deans' expressed desire to eliminate 603. Additional data for new director hires, however, suggests that this trend may be changing, and that rising library directors are better preparing themselves to succeed under the traditional criteria of tenure review. This result gives promise that the concerns of the deans can be addressed not by lowering the bar and making directors simple administrators, in the process weakening their ability to perform their library oversight duties, but by raising the quality of candidate chosen to assume the role.


Both recognizing human behavior and understanding a user's mobility from sensor data are critical issues in ubiquitous computing systems. As a kind of user behavior, the transportation modes, such as walking, driving, etc., that a user takes, can enrich the user's mobility with informative knowledge and provide pervasive computing systems with more context information. In this paper, we propose an approach based on supervised learning to infer people's motion modes from their GPS logs. The contribution of this work lies in the following two aspects. On one hand, we identify a set of sophisticated features, which are more robust to traffic condition than those other researchers ever used. On the other hand, we propose a graph-based post-processing algorithm to further improve the inference performance. This algorithm considers both the commonsense constraint of real world and typical user behavior based on location in a probabilistic manner. Using the GPS logs collected by 65 people over a period of 10 months, we evaluated our approach via a set of experiments. As a result, based on the change point-based segmentation method and Decision Tree-based inference model, the new features brought an eight percent improvement in inference accuracy over previous result, and the graph-based post-processing achieve a further four percent enhancement.


Quartz and felspar porphyries and associated
greenschists of the West Coast Range are described.Felspar
porphyries are considered to have
originated by the felspathising of spilitic lavas,
lava breccias and related greywackes during a
period of progressive metamorphism. Metamorphic
mineral assemblages of the greenschist and albiteepidote-
amphibolite facies are recognized in the
porphyries and are identified with increasing
degrees of porphyritising of host rocks. Sharp contacts
between chlorite-sericite schists and quartzites
are regarded as metamorphic in origin and
as indicating the replacing action of a chloritising
and sericitising front. Haematite rich rocks and
low grade pyritic ores which respectively occupy
narrow zones above and below the schist quartzite
contact are regarded as representing minor haematlsing
and pyritising fronts.
Sulphide and silicate metasomatism are closely
related to the structure of the range and it appears
that the advance of fronts has been engendered
and controlled by the upward fiow of heated waters
through fault fissures and pore spaces. Metasomatic
replacement was effected by diffusion and
exchange through intergranular films. This
mechanism is thermodynamically efficient and
allows adequate explanations of growth, and also
of corrosion structures, of quartz and felspar
crystals in the porphyries. During the advance of
fronts there was extensive transport of material;
metamorphism was not merely an adjustment to
changed isogradial conditions. In particular,
migrating solutions leached iron, copper and suiphur
from the basic rocks and precipitated them in
specific zones where they now form low grade ores.
After a period of rising temperatures and progressive
metamorphism there followed an interval
of cooling and retreat of thermal zones. Because
of the presence of abundant water there was during
this cooling phase an intense retrograde metamorphism
of the recently formed felspathic rocks.
Hydration of these rocks resulted in the liberation
of silica and thus gave rise to quartz porphyries
and quartz sericite schists. Extreme pneumatolysis
and leaching of silica from the porphyries gave rise
to kaoJinised rocks and to veins of quartz and chert.
A similar kind of leaching of sulphides from the low
grade ores, and of selective precipitation of sulphides
in pipes and veins, gave rise to rich ore
bodies.


Due to their high fault-tolerance, ease of installation and scalability to large networks, distributed algorithms have recently gained immense popularity in the sensor networks community, especially in computer vision. Multi-target tracking in a camera network is one of the fundamental problems in this domain. Distributed estimation algorithms work by exchanging information between sensors that are communication neighbors. Since most cameras are directional sensors, it is often the case that neighboring sensors may not be sensing the same target. Such sensors that do not have information about a target are termed as ''naive'' with respect to that target. State-of-the-art distributed state estimation algorithms (e.g., the Kalman Consensus Filter (KCF)) in the sensor networks community are not directly applicable to tracking applications in camera networks mainly due to this naivety issue. In our work, we propose generalized distributed algorithms for state estimation in a sensor network taking the naivety issue into account.
For multi-target tracking, along with the tracking framework, a data association step is necessary where the measurements in each camera's view are associated with the appropriate targets' tracks. At first, under the assumption that the data association is given, we develop distributed state estimation algorithms addressing the naivety issue. In this process, first, we propose the Generalized Kalman Consensus Filter (GKCF) where an information-weighting scheme is utilized to account for the naivety issue. Next, we propose the Information-weighted Consensus Filter (ICF) which can achieve optimal centralized performance while also accounting for naivety. This is the core contribution of this thesis. Next, we introduce the aspect of multi-target tracking where a probabilistic data association scheme is incorporated in the distributed tracking scheme resulting the Multi-Target Information Consensus (MTIC) algorithm. The incorporation of the probabilistic data association mechanism makes the MTIC algorithm very robust to false measurements/clutter.
The aforementioned algorithms are derived under the assumption that the measurements are related to the state variables using a linear relationship. However, in general, this is not true for many sensors including camera sensors. Thus, to account for the non-linearity in the observation model, we propose non-linear extensions of the previous algorithms which we denote as the Extended ICF (EICF) and the Extended MTIC (EMTIC) algorithms. In-depth theoretical and experimental analysis are provided to compare these algorithms with existing ones.


With the introduction of 4G LTE, multiple new technologies were introduced. MIMO is one of the important technologies introduced with fourth generation. The main MIMO modes used in LTE are open loop and closed loop spatial multiplexing modes. This thesis develops an algorithm to calculate the threshold values of UE speed and SNR that is required to implement a switching algorithm which can switch between different MIMO modes for a UE based on the speed and channel conditions (CSI). Specifically, this thesis provides the values of UE speed and SNR at which we can get better results by switching between open loop and closed loop MIMO modes and then be scheduled in sub-channels accordingly. Thus, the results can be used effectively to get better channel capacity with less ISI. The main objectives of this thesis are: to determine the type of MIMO mode suitable for a UE with certain speed, to determine the effects of SNR on selection of MIMO modes, and to design and implement a scheduling algorithm to enhance channel capacity.


This work studies dynamic properties of molecular and supramolecular strands on both molecular and supramolecular levels. Self-organisation of molecules into single helical architectures is a pervasive phenomenon in biomolecular structures. Recently, interest has grown for artificial oligomers and polymers which mimic self-organisation observed in nature. It has come to light that oligopyridinedicarboxamide strands can exist in helical conformations both in solution and in the solid state. The longest oligopyridinedicarboxamide helical strand reported to date and new chiral foldamers which adopt a helical conformation due to the intramolecular hydrogen bonding and aromatic stacking, have been synthesized. Their reversible structural interconversion between helical and extended forms induced by protonation/deprotonation was revealed by NMR, mass spectrometry and X-ray diffraction studies. Such molecular motions play a very important role in biological phenomena, and may lead to the design of functional molecular machines. Induced circular dichroism phenomenon as well as amplification of the molecular chirality revealed by helical strands is discussed in this work. Another part of the work presents a new two component homoditopic supramolecular polymer system, which was found to form an organogel at thermodynamic equilibrium. The main result obtained in the rheological study is the observation of a shear banding type instability in the flow experiments. This instability, that has been predicted theoretically for both regular covalently bonded polymers and equilibrium polymers has been observed for wormlike micellar systems. In the last part of the work, a novel type of supramolecular polymers is presented. Implementing dynamic character simultaneously on the molecular and supramolecular levels in the same system results in the formation of double dynamers – polymers, where molecular components are connected through reversible covalent as well as non-covalent interactions. The formation of such supramolecular polymer systems was corroborated by electron microscopy studies, which showed extensive branched fibrous aggregates, a feature in agreement with the formation of polymer chains. Component exchange in these double dynamers allows for the generation of dynamic constitutional diversity on both molecular and supramolecular levels.


Summary Despite the recent rapid decline of many grassland bird species, the relative importance of habitat configuration to population persistence is unclear. We used Southeastern American Kestrels Falco sparverius paulus in north-central Florida as a model system to explore the relative influence of landscape structure components on site occupancy patterns at two spatial scales, and for two different time periods. We focused on the dynamic processes of site-level population expansion or contraction. We modelled the occupancy of 131 American Kestrel nest boxes with Bayesian state-space dynamic occupancy models that considered both the partially observed process of true occupancy and the probability of detection of occupancy. We used reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) algorithms to identify variables that described the continued occupancy of nest boxes, or ϕ, and the probability of colonisation of nest boxes between time periods, or γ3. Changes in open habitat patch isolation at a fine scale, as estimated by the variability of nearest neighbour distance, predicted site colonisation between decades, and patch shape variability was related to ϕ during the early time period (1992–93). We found no strong effects of landscape structure on ϕ during the later time period (2008–2010). We also found no evidence for effects of loss of open habitat on box occupancy or colonization. Our results indicate that continued habitat fragmentation would be deleterious for this threatened subspecies. Additionally, certain land cover management practices recommended for the Florida sandhills, such as frequent low-intensity controlled burns, will likely help conservation attempts.


Relativism is one of the most tenacious theories about truth, with a pedigree as old as philosophy itself. Nearly as ancient is the chief criticism of relativism, namely the charge that the theory is self-refuting. This paper develops a logic of relativism that (1) illuminates the classic self-refutation charge and shows how to escape it; (2) makes rigorous the ideas of truth as relative and truth as absolute, and shows the relations between them; (3) develops an intensional logic for relativism; (4) provides a framework in which relativists can consistently promote ethical, mathematical, scientific, religious, and political truths (among others) as being relative; (5) argues that the notion of incommensurability is far less troubling than is commonly thought; and (6) argues that the concept of a perspective as needed by the theory is not prey to Davidson's well-known critique of conceptual schemes. The paper will not defend relativism as the correct theory of truth, nor will it provide a fully satisfying theory about the nature of a perspective. The logic of relativism is primarily meant to provide a formal framework in which relativists can consistently develop their theories. This alone is a considerable step forward, since the debate about relativism often founders upon the rock of self-refutation. It is argued that while "everything is relative" is inconsistent, "everything true is relatively true" is not. The latter is all a relativist really needs.


Objective: To study the effect of after-dinner quick walking on patients with community fatty liver.
Method: Research methods including experiment and mathematical statistics were used in the group experiment of 64 cases of patients with community fatty liver.
Result: The data of the experimental group were as follows: Aspartate Transaminase (AST) (20.54 ± 3.04), Alanine Aminotransferase (ALT) (12.21 ± 2.01), Alkaline Phosphatase (ALP) (74.54 ± 5.69), and γ- Glutamyl Transpeptidase (γ-GGT) (13.24 ± 2.13), with total effect of 93.75%; which were significantly better than the control group: AST (28.57 ± 2.54), ALT (20.54 ± 3.17), ALP (93.57 ± 4.68), and γ-GGT (40.59 ± 6.37), with total effect of 75.00%. The differences were statistically significant, with P<0.05.
Conclusion: The effect of after-dinner quick walking is significant in the treatment of community fatty liver and it may improve liver function, which makes it a simple intervention measure that meets the community requirements.


The opportunities and threats that digital technologies like SMACIT (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and Internet of Things) bring to organizations are increasingly being explored by the academia and industry. Organizations face the challenge not only to use new technologies but to gain competitive advantage from such embracement in order to stay relevant in the market. This study aims to provide practical insights on how Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can prepare to embrace Digital Technologies. For this, it proposes that a combination of both IT and Organizational capabilities can be the foundation for achieving Business Value with Digital Technologies or "Digital Business Value". IT capabilities are evaluated by the IT capability maturity framework (IT-CMF) and Organizational Intelligence Quotient (Mendelson and Pillai, 1999) is used to evaluate organizational capabilities. Digital Business Value is defined as the achievement of business objectives using Digital Technologies (Riera & Iijima, 2017). The target population was one hundred Japanese SMEs which were awarded by The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry due to their effective utilization of IT supporting business performance in the list of "Competitive IT Strategy SME Selection 100" over the years 2015, 2016 and 2017. Data collection was done with questionnaires sent to all the awarded organizations and collected 34 responses. A quantitative approach was used and the data analysis was done with correlation and regression analysis. Empirical evidence demonstrated that IT and Organizational capabilities are linked to Digital Business Value. A subset of IT capabilities like Risk Management, Business Planning among others was indeed related to Digital Business Value. In addition, Internal Knowledge Dissemination and Continuous Innovation dimensions from Organizational IQ showed relationship with Digital Business Value. This study unveiled that the combination of IT and Organizational capabilities leverage the value from Digital technologies. The outcomes from this study may be of reference to SMEs that look to embrace Digital Technologies as it shows which particular capabilities may be of interest for developing. This study extends the Digital Transformation literature in particular how dynamic capabilities work together in order to enable Digital Business Value


Jill Randall's work is firmly rooted in contemporary sculpture practice, making and materiality. Conceptually driven, her work incorporates sculpture, prints, video and drawings and often responds to a particular site or place. It also exploits the specific qualities of different materials – currently metals and found objects - often reusing materials invested with history and narrative through their past use.
Her work questions notions of material value and reveals an interest in the unfinished and the incomplete, the broken and the damaged. Randall is also interested in exploring ideas around what is the minimum a sculpture can be made from.
Place/Displace draws together recent and new work focusing on place – work physically made in a specific place such as the wall-based sculpture 'Found Drawing, Irwell Series' and the video 'Eye of the River' or in response to specific places as in the 'Sheds of Rossendale' series.
The exhibition explores the importance of context in how we think about place and how when removed from its original context, it creates a disjuncture and we are forced to examine our sense of a place anew. Commissioned new work specific to and in response to Rochdale and the North West allows the chance to scrutinise familiar places and buildings in new way.
It is also an exhibition about the relationship of people to place, re-examining land and landscape, people and industry, the ethic of work and its effect on our lives.
Randall is drawn to post-industrial landscapes and sites of industry and has undertaken a number of residencies creating interventions in non-art situations such as at Parys Mountain Copper Mine in Anglesey, North Wales and the Magnesium Elektron factory, Salford. She is interested in the harnessing of this post-industrial legacy to create artworks and to use contemporary fine art as an alternative perspective on industrial heritage. Responding to the place and the people, a process the artist describes as "slow burn", often resulting in collaborative new works with the workforce and industrial processes. This work is often about reinventing and reinvesting the forgotten and neglected, revealing the underbelly of place and people.
This interest led Randall to undertake a research residency at Tate Britain's archives in 2012 to study the APG (Artist Placement Group). Between 1966 and the turn of the eighties, APG negotiated placements for artists lasting from a few weeks to several years with industry and government departments.
Randall lives and works in the Rossendale Valley and exhibits her work nationally and internationally. She is a Senior Lecturer on the B.A. Visual Arts course at the University of Salford, Leader of the Contemporary Fine Art & Public Engagement Research Centre in the School of Arts & Media and is a member of the European Sculpture Network.


Abstract Extreme weather events have been increasingly in the news, accompanied by images. At the end of 2011, when such reports were ever present, the International Panel on Climate Change published a draft report on extreme weather and climate change adaptation. This report itself was covered in the news and illustrated with images. Some of these depicted 'extreme weather', in particular with relation to floods, droughts and heat waves, hurricanes and ice/sea-level rise. For this article, these images were studied using visual thematic analysis, with a focus on examining the way they may symbolise certain emotional responses, such as compassion, fear, guilt, vulnerability, helpless, courage or resilience. Climate change communicators have examined the way that evoking such emotions in verbal communication can lead to engagement or disengagements with the topic of climate change. However, while researchers have also become increasingly interested in climate change images, they have not yet studied them with respect to symbolising certain emotions. Various typologies of images have been proposed in the past, distinguishing, for example, between human and natural impact images or iconic and geographically specific images. The images studied here do not neatly map onto these distinctions. They symbolise human suffering and loss and they are sometimes geographically and socially distinctive, but they are also iconic of climate change and they are symbols of its natural impacts. They all, to some extent, symbolise helplessness and may thus lead to disengagement rather than engagement with the issue of climate change.


The first and only book on Oracle's revolutionary workflow management toolOracle Workflow allows Oracle E-Business Suite users to automate and continuously improve business processes, routing information of any type--according to easily modifiable business rules--to people inside or outside an organization. By using Oracle Workflow, businesses can get the most out of their multimillion dollar investments in Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle Workflow Handbook begins by covering the setup of both the Oracle Workflow client and server. Using sample business issues and case studies, the book walks you through the implementation, development, and administration of Oracle Workflow including advice on defining best practices, debugging, and troubleshooting.


BACKGROUND
The long-term effects of sibutramine treatment on the rates of cardiovascular events and cardiovascular death among subjects at high cardiovascular risk have not been established.

METHODS
We enrolled in our study 10,744 overweight or obese subjects, 55 years of age or older, with preexisting cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes mellitus, or both to assess the cardiovascular consequences of weight management with and without sibutramine in subjects at high risk for cardiovascular events. All the subjects received sibutramine in addition to participating in a weight-management program during a 6-week, single-blind, lead-in period, after which 9804 subjects underwent random assignment in a double-blind fashion to sibutramine (4906 subjects) or placebo (4898 subjects). The primary end point was the time from randomization to the first occurrence of a primary outcome event (nonfatal myocardial infarction, nonfatal stroke, resuscitation after cardiac arrest, or cardiovascular death).

RESULTS
The mean duration of treatment was 3.4 years. The mean weight loss during the lead-in period was 2.6 kg; after randomization, the subjects in the sibutramine group achieved and maintained further weight reduction (mean, 1.7 kg). The mean blood pressure decreased in both groups, with greater reductions in the placebo group than in the sibutramine group (mean difference, 1.2/1.4 mm Hg). The risk of a primary outcome event was 11.4% in the sibutramine group as compared with 10.0% in the placebo group (hazard ratio, 1.16; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.03 to 1.31; P=0.02). The rates of nonfatal myocardial infarction and nonfatal stroke were 4.1% and 2.6% in the sibutramine group and 3.2% and 1.9% in the placebo group, respectively (hazard ratio for nonfatal myocardial infarction, 1.28; 95% CI, 1.04 to 1.57; P=0.02; hazard ratio for nonfatal stroke, 1.36; 95% CI, 1.04 to 1.77; P=0.03). The rates of cardiovascular death and death from any cause were not increased.

CONCLUSIONS
Subjects with preexisting cardiovascular conditions who were receiving long-term sibutramine treatment had an increased risk of nonfatal myocardial infarction and nonfatal stroke but not of cardiovascular death or death from any cause. (Funded by Abbott; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00234832.)


This paper analyses the channels through which the economic and financial crisis of 2008-2009 is transmitted to fragile countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Trade stands out as the main direct channel, even though intra-Africa remittances play a relevant role, given that most migrants in Sub-Saharan Africa fragile countries cannot afford the cost of mi-grating to Europe or to the United States and stay close, remaining in the continent. Whether reduced aid flows also act as a crisis transmission channel remains an open question, even though preliminary estimates suggest that, at least in the medium run, OECD countries are likely to lower aid, with potentially very damaging effects on fragile countries. The paper also shows that fragile countries are characterised by very low re-silience and capacity to cope with shocks. It concludes, by highlighting how Sub-Saharan Africa fragile countries' policymakers' room for manoeuver is limited in periods of crisis because of low fiscal space and limited institutional capacity. It advocates that the right response to the crisis would be to mobilise domestic resources, although this will require functional institutions able to offset the potential trade-offs between adverse short-term shocks and a long-term perspective.


We introduce the Sparkle family of permutations operating on 256, 384 and 512 bits. These are combined with the Beetle mode to construct a family of authenticated ciphers, Schwaemm, with security levels ranging from 120 to 250 bits. We also use them to build new sponge-based hash functions, Esch256 and Esch384. Our permutations are among those with the lowest footprint in software, without sacrificing throughput. These properties are allowed by our use of an ARX component (the Alzette S-box) as well as a carefully chosen number of rounds. The corresponding analysis is enabled by the long trail strategy which gives us the tools we need to efficiently bound the probability of all the differential and linear trails for an arbitrary number of rounds. We also present a new application of this approach where the only trails considered are those mapping the rate to the outer part of the internal state, such trails being the only relevant trails for instance in a differential collision attack. To further decrease the number of rounds without compromising security, we modify the message injection in the classical sponge construction to break the alignment between the rate and our S-box layer.


Recent developments in supercomputing have brought us massively parallel machines. With the number of processors multiplying, the appetite for more powerful applications that can take advantage of these large scale platforms has never ceased growing. Modern parallel applications typically have complex structure and dynamic behavior. These applications are composed of multiple components and have interleaving concurrent control flows. The workload pattern of these applications shifts during execution, causing load imbalance at run-time. Programming productivity, or the effectiveness and efficiency of programming high performance applications for these parallel platforms, has become a challenging issue.
One of the most important observations during our pursuit of high productivity with scalable performance for complex and dynamic parallel applications was that adaptive resource management can and should be automated. The PPL research group has developed an Adaptive Run-Time System (ARTS) and a parallel programming language called Charm++ for automatic resource management via migratable objects.
There are two obstacles in our pursuit of high productivity with the ARTS. The first is effective expression of global view of control in complex parallel programs. Traditional paradigms such as MPI and Global Address Space (GAS) paradigms, although popular, suffer from a drawback in modularity. For applications with multiple modules, they do not allow the runtime control over resource management of individual modules. Although Charm++ provides resources management capabilities and logical separation of multiple modules, its object-based message-driven model tends to obscure the global flow of control. We will explore new approaches to describing the flow of control for complicated parallel applications. As a reference implementation, we introduce a language Charisma for expressing the global view of control that can take advantage of the ARTS. We carry out productivity and performance study of Charisma, with various examples and real-life applications.
The second issue is to efficiently accommodate existing prevalent programming paradigms. Different programming models suit different types of algorithms and applications. Also the programmer proficiency and preference may result in the variety of choices of programming languages and models. In particular, there are already many parallel libraries and applications written with prevalent paradigms such as MPI. In this thesis, we explore research issues in providing adaptivity support for prevalent paradigms. We will evaluate important existing parallel programming languages and develop virtualization techniques that bring the benefits of the ARTS to applications written using them. As a concrete example, we evaluate our implementation of Adaptive MPI in the context of benchmarks and applications.
As applications grow in size, their development will be carried out by different teams with different paradigms, to best accommodate the expertise of the programmers and the requirements of the different application components. These paradigms include the new paradigm as represented by Charisma's global description of control, as well as existing ones such as MPI, GAS and Charm++. Charm++'s adaptive run-time system is a good candidate for a common environment for these paradigms to interoperate, and this thesis demonstrates the effectiveness of our research work for interoperability across multiple paradigms. The ultimate goal is to unify these various aspects and support multi-paradigm parallel programming on a common run-time system for next-generation parallel applications.


Background: Enterococcus faecalis (Ef) is a multidrug-resistant pathogenic bacteria associated with hospital-acquired infections. Ef is involved in a number of infectious diseases. It generally infects patients with the weekend immune system, i.e. a person mostly acquires Ef infections in the hospital, especially in intensive care units and thus, is more likely to be resistant to many antibiotics. Development of resistance against various antibiotics and emergence of drug-resistant strains is a growing global concern. Objective: Due to the unselective use of antibiotics for a long time multidrug resistant bacteria and extensively drug-resistant, which is now posing a new challenge to the medical community. To treat infections caused by Ef, the synergistic effect of different antibiotics with silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) was tested against Ef. Materials and Methods: In the present study, synthesis of AgNPs was carried out from the cell-free supernatant of Klebsiella pneumoniae. AgNPs were characterized using various techniques, namely, ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometry, transmission electron microscopy, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Moreover, process optimization was done for enhanced production of AgNPs. In addition, antimicrobial activity of the nanoparticles was also tested. Furthermore, the nanoparticles were evaluated for their antimicrobial activities in combination with gentamicin and chloramphenicol, against Ef. Results: The results showed that the combination of gentamicin and chloramphenicol with AgNPs has a better antibacterial effect. To add to this, hemolytic activity of AgNPs was evaluated against human red blood corpuscles (RBCs). AgNPs were found to be nontoxic to RBCs. Conclusion: The collective effect of AgNps with Gentamicin and Chloramphenicol was more as compared to AgNps alone which indicate the synergistic effect of these components. These observations show the potential of AgNPs in combination with above-stated antibiotics against Ef infections. Abbreviations used: Ef: Enterococcus faecalis, MDR: Multidrug resistance, AgNPs: Silver nanoparticles, Kp: Klebsiella pneumoniae, RBCs: Red blood corpuscles, ENPs: Engineered nanoparticles, FTIR: Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, TEM: Transmission electron microscopy, AgNO3: Silver nitrate, EDTA: Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, PBS: Phosphate-buffered saline.


The Internet consists of economically selfish players in terms of access/transit connection, content distribution, and users. Such selfish behaviors often lead to techno-economic inefficiencies such as unstable peering and revenue imbalance. Recent research results suggest that cooperation in revenue sharing (thus multi-level ISP settlements) can be a candidate solution for the problem of unfair revenue share. However, it is unclear whether providers are willing to behave cooperatively. In this paper, we study the interaction between how content-oriented traffic scheduling at the edge is and how stable the intended cooperation is. We consider three traffic scheduling policies having various degrees of content-value preference, compare them in terms of implementation complexity, network neutrality, and stability of cooperation, and present interesting trade-offs among them.


Background: Angiopteris helferiana is used as a traditional medicine in some parts of Nepal and South-Asian countries. It is also used in traditional Chinese medicine system. Objective: In this study, we evaluated its anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-obesity, and antidiabetic activity in cell and animal mode. Materials and Methods: The rhizome of A. helferiana was extracted with methanol and fractionated to give dichloromethane, ethyl acetate (EA), butanol (BuOH), and water fractions. The residue was again re-extracted with water to give water extract. The anti-oxidant property was measured using 1, 1-diphenyl-2-picryl-hydrazyl assay. The extract and fractions were evaluated for the α-glycosidase inhibition activity. The antiadipogenic and anti-inflammatory activity was studied in 3T3-L1–L1 and RAW 264.7 cells, respectively. The inhibition of expression of adipogenic markers peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPARγ), CCAAT enhancer binding protein alpha (C/EBPα) was studied in 3T3-L1 cells. The anti-obesity and antidiabetic study was done in high-fat diet mice model. Results: The EA, BuOH fraction, and water extract showed good anti-oxidant and α-glycosidase inhibition activity. EA fraction showed good anti-inflammatory activity. EA and BuOH fraction showed good antiadipogenic activity, reducing significantly, the lipid and adipogenic markers (PPARγ, C/EBPα) in 3T3-L1 cells. The BuOH fraction at 300 mg/kg/day dose showed good anti-obesity and antidiabetic activity in the in-vivo study after the evaluation of body weight, blood lipid, blood glucose, and lipid accumulation in adipose tissue and liver. Conclusion: Overall, A. helferiana is a good source of anti-oxidative, anti-inflammatory, anti-obesity, and antidiabetic component.


The same method of investigation as stated in part Ⅰ was used on 4 cases of the monkey brain (Macaca muletta). 1) The extent of the center for the hind limb responded to electric stimulation was almost as same as or a little narrower than the extent with the Betz cells, while the extent of the center for the fore limb was much wider than the extent with the Betz cells. 2) The extent with motor response first appeared like islands at the threshold voltage, became larger as the voltage increased and then the extents for the upper and lower limbs became doubled, thus making the mixed area. 3) This enlargement of the mixed area by increased stimulation had a tendency to move
towards the center for the lower limb. 4) The threshold of stimulation was the lowest at the center for the upper limb, then at that for the lower limb, and the highest at the mixed area. And even in the same center, the threshold was lower at the central part with more Betz cells and higher at the peripheral part with less Betz cells. From these facts, it would appear that the extent of the motor cortex determined physiologically is not always the same as the extent of the distribution of the Betz cells, but is due to the density and sensitivity of the original nerve cells of the pyramidal tract, regardless of the size of the cells.


The Escherichia coli peptide methionine sulfoxide reductase gene (msrA) encodes a single-subunit polypeptide of 212 amino acid residues (M. A. Rahman, H. Nelson, H. Weissbach, and N. Brot, J. Biol. Chem. 267:15549-15551, 1992). RNA blot analysis showed that the gene is transcribed into an mRNA of about 850 nucleotides. The promoter region was characterized, and the transcription initiation site was identified by primer extension. The synthesis of the MsrA protein increased about threefold in a growth-phase-dependent fashion. In an attempt to define the in vivo role of msrA, a chromosomal disruption was constructed. This mutant was more sensitive to oxidative stress, suggesting that oxidation of methionine in proteins plays an important role in oxidative damage.


On February 25, 2016, President Barack Obama appointed United States District Court Judge Lucy Haeran Koh for a judicial emergency vacancy on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The jurist has served professionally for more than six years in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, ably resolving major litigation. Thus, White House efforts to confirm her were unsurprising. Nevertheless, 2016 is a presidential election year when delay infuses many court appointments. That conundrum was exacerbated because the United States Senate Republican majority refused to even consider United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Chief Judge Merrick Garland, the experienced, moderate candidate, whom President Obama nominated to replace Justice Antonin Scalia. Because Judge Koh is an exceptional, consensus nominee—and the Ninth Circuit must have its entire judicial complement to resolve promptly, inexpensively, and equitably the nation's largest appellate docket—her confirmation process merits scrutiny. This piece analyzes Koh's impressive record, judicial selection under President Obama, and the Ninth Circuit's present circumstances. The paper concludes that Judge Koh is a highly accomplished, mainstream candidate and the appellate court desperately needs all twenty-nine of its members. Republican senators, however, did not cooperate, particularly after they had * Williams Chair in Law, University of Richmond. I wish to thank Margaret Sanner for valuable suggestions, Katie Lehnen for exceptional research and editing, the editors of the Washington and Lee Law Review for expeditious, careful editing, Leslee Stone for excellent processing, as well as Russell Williams and the Hunton Williams Summer Endowment Fund for generous, continuing support. Remaining errors are mine. 73 WASH. & LEE L. REV. ONLINE 449 (2016) 450 captured an upper chamber majority in the 114th Congress, a situation that this presidential election year significantly aggravates. The last section, therefore, proffers recommendations for Judge Koh's approval.


This offering for one (1) contact hour is sponsored by the National Association of Orthopaedic Nurses, which is accredited as a provider of continuing education in nursing by the Eastern Regional Accrediting Committee of the American Nurses' Association. NAON has been approved as a provider of continuing education by the California Board of Registered Nursing (BRN Provider Number 03432), and the Florida Board of Registered Nursing (Provider Number 2751007), and the Iowa Board of Nursing (Provider Number 180). Awarding of contact hours is contingent upon successful (75% correct) completion of the test questions.


BACKGROUND
The association between depression and increased mortality risk in older persons may depend on the severity of the depressive disorder and gender.

AIMS
To investigate the association between major and mild depressive syndromes and excess mortality in community-living elderly men and women.

METHOD
Depression (Geriatric Mental State AGECAT) was assessed in 4051 older persons, with a 6-year follow-up of community death registers. The mortality risk of neurotic and psychotic depression was calculated after adjustment for demographic variables, physical illness, cognitive decline and functional disabilities.

RESULTS
A total of 75% of men and 41% of women with psychotic depression had diet at follow-up. Psychotic depression was associated with significant excess mortality in both men and women. Neurotic depression was associated with a 1.67-fold higher mortality risk in men only.

CONCLUSIONS
In the elderly, major depressive syndromes increase the risk of death in both men and women, but mild depression increases the risk of death only in men.