Abstract The paper analyses public subsidies aimed to enhance development and innovation in the Slovakian private sector. The paper reviews theoretical approaches of the necessity of public support to research and development activities in order to increase private investment in research and development. An overview of research and development support tools in Slovakia is presented. The analytical part of the work is oriented on a comparative analysis of two granting agencies in Slovakia [Agency for Research and Development (ARD) and Agency of Operational Program Research and Development (OPRD)]. Special attention is given to direct public financial support. Logit analysis showed a relationship between success of grant applicants and their characteristics. We find that the following have impact on success of the application: Age of the company, amount of the grant required, legal form of the company, and the agency to which the application for grant was submitted. Applicants with legal form Ltd. (limited liability company) have a higher chance of receiving grant than other legal forms. The highest chance of success has a request for a grant of up to 500.000 €. According to the results of our analysis, the chance to obtain a grant decreases with each passing year.


Many secure cache designs have been proposed in literature with the aim of mitigating di erent types of cache timing-based side-channel attacks. However, there has so far been no systematic analysis of how these secure cache designs can, or cannot, protect against di erent types of the timing-based attacks. To provide a means of analyzing the caches, this paper first presents a novel three-step modeling approach to exhaustively enumerate all the possible cache timing-based side-channel vulnerabilities. The model covers not only attacks that leverage cache accesses or flushes from the local processor core, but also attacks that leverage changes in the cache state due to the cache coherence protocol actions from remote cores. Moreover, both conventional attacks and speculative execution attacks are considered. With the list of all possible cache timing side-channel vulnerabilities derived from the three-step model, this work further analyzes each of the existing secure cache designs to show which types of timing-based side-channel vulnerabilities each secure cache can mitigate. Based on the security analysis of the existing secure cache designs, this paper further summaries di erent techniques gleaned from the secure cache designs and the technique's ability help mitigate di erent types of cache timing-based side-channel vulnerabilities.


REASONS FOR PERFORMING STUDY
Due to technical implementations and lack of sensitivity, pulmonary function tests are seldom used in clinical practice. Impulse oscillometry (IOS) could represent an alternative method.

OBJECTIVES
To define feasibility, methodology and repeatability of IOS, a forced oscillation technique that measures respiratory resistance (Rrs) and reactance (Xrs) from 5 to 35 Hz during spontaneous breathing, in horses.

METHODS
Using 38 healthy horses, Rrs and Xrs reference values were defined and influence of individual biometrical parameters was investigated. In addition, IOS measurements of 6 horses showing clinical signs of heaves were compared to those of 6 healthy horses.

RESULTS
Airtightness and minimal dead space in the facemask were prerequisites to IOS testing and standardisation of head position was necessary to avoid variations in Rrs due to modified upper airway geometry. In both healthy and diseased animals, measurements were repeatable. In standard-type breeds, the influence of the horse's size on IOS parameters was negligible. An increase in R5Hz greater than 0.10 kPa/l/sec and R5Hz>R10Hz, combined with negative values of Xrs between 5 and 20 Hz, was indicative of heaves crisis.

CONCLUSIONS
IOS is a quick, minimally invasive and informative method for pulmonary function testing in healthy and diseased horses.

POTENTIAL RELEVANCE
IOS is a promising method for routine and/or field respiratory clinical testing in the equine species.


Background Gaelic football and hurling are national sports of Ireland. The Gaelic Athletic Association has supported the development of an injury database as a platform for injury prevention. Objective To report on epidemiology of head injury, in teams registered to the National Injury Database (2007–2012). Design Prospective injury surveillance. Setting Elite level teams. Participants Male players selected for representative county teams were enrolled, with consent, to the database. Identities were concealed and data collected from January 1st each year until elimination from the inter-county competition. Assessment of risk factors Injury incidence was measured prospectively. Main outcome measures A time-loss injury definition was used, conforming to international consensus definitions. The team doctor or Chartered physiotherapist recorded date, type and circumstances of injury, as well as date of return to partial or full fitness. Injury incidence was expressed as rate per 1000 hours participation in match-play and training. Injury proportions were calculated. Results Thirty-five football and 28 hurling squads participated. There were 1188 football players and 914 hurlers in total over the 6 years. Injuries to the head region constituted 3.0% of football injuries and 2.4% of hurling injuries. The head injury incidence rate was 0.26 per 1000 hours of football and 0.19 per 1000 hours of hurling overall. Concussion was diagnosed in 0.8% football and 0.8% hurling injuries. Fractures to the nose constituted 0.7% football injuries and 0.3% hurling injuries. Fractured mandible was reported in football (0.2% injuries) and fractured maxilla/orbit in hurling (0.08%). Perforated eardrum was reported in both football (0.08%) and hurling (0.09%). Lacerations and contusions accounted for 0.9% injuries for football and 0.8% for hurling. There was an additional retinal bleed (0.09%) and dental injury (0.09%) in hurling. Conclusions The results provide reference data for head injury in these sports, against which injury prevention methods can be evaluated.


We provide the first systematic, large-scale exploration of user counts by age, gender, and location on Weibo, the world's largest microblogging platform, using data from its advertising platform. Digital platforms potentially give access to information, economic opportunities, and social participation to underserved groups, and can be used for information dissemination during emergency situations and hu-manitarian response. The trace data that they produce is potentially more timely, of higher spatial or temporal resolution, and available for difficult-to-reach populations, than data from traditional sources. Whether this potential is fully realized however depends on who actually participates in these online spaces. We contribute to a growing body of research investigating the demographic characteristics of social media platforms, and on the population generalizability of digital trace data in non-Western, non-English-language contexts. We show that Weibo users are disproportionately young, female, and urban. Use of Weibo is higher in areas that are more economically prosperous and with a more educated population.


This thesis is dedicated to demosaicing and deblurring problems in digital image processing and their solution exploiting signal adaptive ltering. In particular, we use ltering based on the local polynomial approximation (LPA) and the paradigm of the intersection of con dence intervals (ICI) for the adaptive selection of the scales of LPA. This ltering is nonlinear and spatially-adaptive with respect to the smoothness and irregularities of the image. In the rst part of the thesis, demosaicing is studied. It refers to the problem of interpolation of complete red, green, and blue values for each pixel, to make a color RGB image, from downsampled gray-scale mosaic-like raw data recorded by a singlechip digital camera. We propose a novel technique for demosaicing that shows results that, to the best of our knowledge, are a signi cant improvement over the state of the art. Traditionally, in demosaicing the input signal is assumed to be noise-free. However, the raw data is always noisy and thus pre ltering has commonly been used prior to demosaicing. We show that the demosaicing and denoising designed as a single procedure can be signi cantly more e cient than analogous independent procedures. In this thesis, we do not restrict ourselves to the conventional stationary Gaussian noise model. In the developed technique, we also take into account the signal-dependant Poisson noise which is much more relevant for digital imaging sensors. As a result, we achieve higher quality of image restoration as demonstrated by extensive experiments for both arti cial and real data taken directly from the sensor of a camera phone. The second part of the thesis is dedicated to image deblurring. We develop several techniques as an evolution from conventional deconvolution with a known blur to blind deconvolution with an unknown blur. We propose techniques for digital optical sectioning, multi-channel and single-channel blind deconvolution, and techniques for automatic selection of the regularization parameter.


Adult female sand flies are the vectors for the medically important protistan Leishmania spp. It is known that Leishmania develops within the midgut of Phlebotomine sand flies, however, very little research exists pertaining to the immune response and physical effects of Leishmania infection within the sand fly. We have studied two interlinked aspects of the sand flies response to the parasite; immune response and gut cell proliferation. This is a vital area for research as a detailed understanding of the Leishmania -sand fly relationship could potentially aid the prevention and control of leishmaniasis. To explore the immune response of sand flies to Leishmania infection two immune genes were investigated. The Protein Inhibitor of Activated Stat (PIAS), which plays a major role as a negative regulator of JAK/STAT, and Dual Oxidase (Duox),which plays an important role in infection-induced reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation in insects including sand flies. Quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) was utilised to measure relative gene expression of the two genes. Gene expression for Leishmania-infected blood-fed flies were conducted for various time points and entomopathogenic bacteria Serratia marcescens was used for comparison. There was no significant difference in PIAS and Duox expression in Leishmania or Serratia infected flies. However, Duox and PIAS expression showed a significant increase at 48 h after blood feeding regardless of being infection or uninfected. The potentially pivotal role of PIAS and Duox in maintaining gut homeostasis during blood digestion is discussed. The physical response of the gut towards Leishmania infection, measured by midgut epithelial cell proliferation was also investigated. Anti-phosphohistone3 (PH3) antibody was used to assess midgut cell proliferation within sand flies after Leishmania or Serratia infection. Cell proliferation was significantly different between all life stages investigated, with a peak percentage in newly emerged adult females. There was an increase in cell proliferation after Leishmania infection in contrast to Serratia infection which resulted in a decrease in cell proliferation. It is likely that damaged gut cells due to parasite attachment are replaced via cell proliferation. It is suggested that Serratia infection may actively prevent cell proliferation alternatively the extent of intestinal stem cell (ISC) damage may be prohibitive to cell proliferation. Risk assessment relies on accurate information on the vector-disease relationship and surveillance. Surveillance plays an important role in vector control programs. Therefore, access to affordable and efficient surveillance traps and diagnostics is necessary. A diagnostic tool, InBios CL strips, has proven to be an efficient means to identify cutaneous leishmaniasis at the clinical level. The ability to utilise this tool to identify Leishmania infected flies within the field would be greatly beneficial to sand fly control programs. The present study found that CL strips can detect Leishmania within a single infected fly. The efficiency of the strips to detect Leishmania in pools of flies was variable, depending on number of infected flies and day post infection. Only 75% of strips gave a positive detection in pools of 10 flies. Additionally, only 75% of infected flies 2-4 days post infection were detected with the CL strips. It was concluded that the CL strips, as currently presented, are not sensitive enough for detection of a Leishmania infection in a single sand fly. The potential for further development of these strips are discussed.


C-peptide is known for several decades. It is released in equimolar amounts together with insulin from the pancreatic beta cells. Still there has been quite remarkable lack of interest in C-peptide. C-peptide is rarely used to classify type of diabetes although it seems self-evident that it is important to estimate the function of those cells which do not function good enough and therefore causes a syndrome which requires life-long treatment and leads to serious complications. Not until recent years C-peptide is accepted as a relevant outcome in trials aiming at preservation of beta cell function, although it is known for decades that some C-peptide is associated with less complications in type 1 diabetes (T1D). Preservation of beta cell function is important to make diabetes milder, and when beta cell function can be preserved before clinical manifestation of T1D, we are on our way to prevent that disease. Residual C-peptide/insulin secretion can be of value in classification of diabetes in different types. C-peptide may give valuable clinical information on why patients are more or less stable/labile in their blood glucose and more or less easy to treat. It explains why patients with T1D have different tendency to develop severe acute complications, both severe hypoglycaemia and diabetic keto-acidosis (DKA). Longstanding C-peptide may decrease risk of developing severe late complications. Finally, although still under debate, C-peptide seems to have several effects on different organs suggesting that it is an important hormone, interesting per se, and not only as a reflection of insulin secretion.


Considering science as the main contributor to contemporary developments has encouraged us to raise a scientific discussion regarding the role of statistics in business decision-making and economic development. Statistics, as an applicative science, is growing and being widely applied in different fields and professions. Statistical thinking is becoming a daily necessity in enterprises. The main purpose of this survey was to ascertain in what levels main enterprise managers in Kosovo are using statistical methods in their business decision-making. For this purpose 85 managers of the main companies in Kosovo have been interviewed. The analysis of the gathered data was performed by Chi-Square Test, Asymp.Sig(2 sided) and Cramer's V. These analyses comprise the central focus of this survey. The data was processed by Statistical Program for Social Sciences (SPSS). Statistical approach and methodology used in this research has made it easier for us to draw conclusions and recommendations.


ABSTRACT This article investigates multidisciplinary teaching practices through models of General Didactics. Multidisciplinary education is gaining interest on international and national levels through policy reforms. Research on multidisciplinary teaching practices is often descriptive and there is a lack of theories to support teachers. General Didactics on the other hand builds on a long tradition of models and concepts (e.g., content, aims, and methods) relevant for the autonomous teacher who reflects on how to structure and execute the teaching practice. The didactic models of Wolfgang Klafki and Wolfgang Schulz were used when analysing two cases of multidisciplinary teaching in two Finnish primary schools. The question addressed is in what ways General Didactic principles, as defined by Klafki and Schulz, can be identified in the multidisciplinary teaching practices. The method of study is comparative, thematic analysis. The article suggests a theoretically and empirically informed didactic model for multidisciplinary teaching. Identified framing factors (school culture, collaboration, curricula) and shaping factors (subjects, competences, values and aims of education, student needs and interests, contemporary issues, methods) are included in the model for multidisciplinary teaching. The model may support teachers in planning and reflecting on multidisciplinary teaching. To strenghten its validity, the model needs to be empirically tested in different educational contexts.


Abstract Early pregnancy occurs frequently in Zambia and is considered a public health issue. The aim of this study was to improve understanding of how gendered sexual norms make young unmarried girls vulnerable to unintended pregnancies in a specific context. It combined individual interviews and focus group discussions with girls and boys aged 13–18 years and the parents of other young people of this same age, with peer interviews with girls aged 13–20 years at four sites in the southern province of Zambia. For girls, sexual relationships and early pregnancies were at odds with dominant norms and were consistently met with disapproval because they led to economic difficulties for young women and their parents, school dropouts and health problems for the young woman and her baby. Lack of resources and insufficient knowledge about sexuality and reproduction, together with gender norms governing sexual behaviour and contraceptive use, combine to place adolescent girls in a vulnerable position with respect to unintended pregnancy.


This paper presents an athermal package to compensate for temperature deviation of a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) with a metal coating. The metal coating is electroless plated onto the optical fiber to function as a thermal compensator. From the cross section of a thermal compensator used for FBG athermal package, an optical fiber and a metal coating appear. Therefore, in theory, the two-phase constant model is applied in designing the metal coating thickness associated with the effective thermal expansion coefficient and the effective Young's modulus in the composite thermal compensator. As a result, the total variation of Bragg wavelength over the temperature ranging from 30 to 80/spl deg/C is around 0.05 nm in a new package based upon the concept of a bimaterial device. To the authors' knowledge, the configuration proposed in this paper is probably the simplest bimaterial package design there is.


Teesid: Kaesolev uurimus pohineb Juri Talveti juubeliuritusel peetud ettekandel ning keskendub professori Liivi-alase tegevuse kasitlemisele. Artiklis tutvustan Talveti Liivi-tolgenduse uudseid ja vahemargatud detaile, mis kajastuvad tema koostatud Liivi luule valjaannetes ja nendega uhenduses olevates kriitilistes kasitlustes. Siinjuures tahan naidata, et Talvet avaldab Liivi luulet teistsuguses votmes ja teisendab oluliselt seda normi, mille vahendusel Liivi luulet tanapaeval tuntakse. The article addresses Juri Talvet's interpretation of poetry by Juhan Liiv (1864–1913). Its focus lies on a collection of Liiv's poetry Snow Drifts, I Sing: Selected Poems (Lumi tuiskab, mina laulan: Valik luulet, 2013) compiled by Talvet. I shall compare this book with the most extensive volume of Liiv's poetry of the previous century With and Without You (Sinuga ja sinuta, 1989) edited by Aarne Vinkel, which has had a major role in the shaping of the norms that serve as a basis for understanding Liiv's work in recent times. The article observes how these volumes mediate Liiv's poetry and the way Talvet transposes its earlier publishing standards. More particularly, I will analyse the poetry collection edited by Talvet from five perspectives: I will map the new texts and text fragments included in the work, discuss Talvet's corrections and highlight the omitted fragments and full texts. Such specific treatment can be narrowed down to three broader topics: what new additions Talvet makes to the known textual body of Liiv's poems (new texts); what changes he makes to previously published poems (textual additions, corrections and omissions); what he has left out (omitted texts). Talvet adds a great number of texts to the known body of Liiv's poems. The poetry book Snow Drifts, I Sing contains over 20 poems that are not included in With and Without You; furthermore, Talvet publishes a number of new pieces of poetry. These texts have been extracted from Estonian print media at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, early publications of Liiv's poetry compiled by Friedebert Tuglas and Liiv's written legacy. Of the more obscure or unpublished finds I will pay most attention to the poem I Found (Leidsin). The analysis of this poem shows that even though Talvet's contributions to the body of Liiv's published poetry may seem insignificant at first, the texts bear a certain aesthetic significance or value of thought that definitely sharpens and expands the view on Juhan Liiv's poetry. Besides new texts, the volume compiled by Talvet also introduces a number of new versions of well-known poems. This includes text additions, corrections as well as omissions. Such changes have been applied to more than 20 poems. The most fascinating modifications occur in the poems "I Walked toward the Forest" ("Ma kondisin metsa poole"), "Autumn" ("Sugise") (i.e. the poem beginning with the verse "Drab sand and empty field" ("Igav liiv ja tuhi vali")) and "Infidelity" ("Truudusetus"). Compared to Vinkel, Talvet has managed to find better publication solutions for several of Liiv's poems and his reasoning has dispelled a certain ambiguity that has long reigned over the publication of some of Liiv's texts. And even though some of Talvet's selective choices for Snow Drifts, I Sing have raised questions, the collection and his accompanying monograph allow readers to discover the reasoning behind his decisions and general problems concerning the publication of Juhan Liiv's poetry. The poetry book Snow Drifts, I Sing excludes a great number of texts—more than 30—that were previously included in With and Without You. The omission of a rather well-known poem Future (Tulevik) raised the most questions and Talvet has not provided any reasons for that. Nevertheless, the general tightening of the circle of Liiv's poetic works is understandable because most of the poems excluded from Snow Drifts, I Sing are generally lacking and fail to convey Liiv's magnitude as a poet to the reader. The abundance of such texts may draw attention away from the intensity of Liiv's poetry. Talvet's selection has a clearer focus than Vinkel's, emphasizing the unusual and unique quality of Liiv's poetry. My research demonstrates that Talvet's innovations have external scope and inherent gravitas—they concern a considerable number of Liiv's poems and are expressed in substantial modifications. Despite the long and exhaustive publication practice of Liiv's poems, Talvet has managed to present Liiv to the reader in a considerably different manner.


This dissertation offers a phenomenological approach to the comprehension of Information Technology (IT) and Strategy, and of the relationships between these two phenomena. We argue that in order thoughtfully to understand the manifold connections between IT and Strategy, their contradictions, shortcomings, and possibilities, one has to rely on the essence of each of these phenomena.

The rationale of this approach implied the need to make explicit the ontological assumptions on which the investigation relies. An essential uncovering of that which IT and Strategy are can only take place as long as we lay bare a primary position on the nature of that which is. Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and, to a lesser extent, the theory of autopoiesis are the foundations of this investigation. We claim that these theories are paradigmatically consistent and show relevant complementarities, namely in what concerns the issues of action information, and knowledge. The matching of these two theories provides the ontological and epistemological grounds of the investigation. Within this fundamental setting we argue that IT and Strategy will only essentially show up as long as they are accessed in-the-world in which they are.

The research applies the phenomenological method of investigation in its original form as developed by Edmund Husserl. However we extend the Husserlian formulation in a last phase by using the arguments of Heidegger on the opening up of possible concealed meanings of phenomena. The method sets the boundaries of the research. IT and strategy are phenomenological analysed not as empirical objects, event, or states of affairs, but as intentional objects of consciousness. These are formally indicated from the outset of the investigation as the ITness of IT and the Strategyness of Strategy.

The central conclusions of the investigation are that (1) IT is an ontological phenomenon substantively penetrating the being-in-the-world we, ourselves, are; and, (2) Strategy, essentially choosing to choose, has been unfolding throughout History guided by the concealed meaning of a striving for an authentic identity. These essential notions uncover a complex set of relationships between the phenomena. Those relationships are thus described and characterised. We also show that although phenomenology is not empirical its results have many important implications for the empirical world.


Several real-time PCR assays are currently used for detection of pathogenic Leptospira spp.; however, few methods have been described for the successful evaluation of clinical urine samples. This study reports a rapid assay for the detection of pathogenic Leptospira spp. in California sea lions Zalophus californianus using real-time PCR with primers and a probe targeting the lipL32 gene. The PCR assay had high analytic sensitivity-the limit of detection was 3 genome copies per PCR volume using L. interrogans serovar Pomona DNA and 100% analytic specificity; it detected all pathogenic leptospiral serovars tested and none of the non-pathogenic Leptospira species (L. biflexa and L. meyeri serovar Semaranga), the intermediate species L. inadai, or the non-Leptospira pathogens tested. Our assay had an amplification efficiency of 1.00. Comparisons between the real-time PCR assay and culture isolation for detection of pathogenic Leptospira spp. in urine and kidney tissue samples from California sea lions showed that samples were more often positive by real-time PCR than by culture methods. Inclusion of an internal amplification control in the real-time PCR assay showed no inhibitory effects in PCR negative samples. These studies indicated that our real-time PCR assay has high analytic sensitivity and specificity for the rapid detection of pathogenic Leptospira species in urine and kidney tissue samples.


We address the problem of named speaker identification in TV broadcast which consists in answering the question "who speaks when?" with the real identity of speakers, using person names automatically obtained from speech transcripts. While existing approaches rely on a first speaker diarization step followed by a local name propagation step to speaker clusters, we propose a unified framework called person instance graph where both steps are jointly modeled as a global optimization problem, then solved using integer linear programming. Moreover, when available, acoustic speaker models can be added seamlessly to the graph structure for joint named and acoustic speaker identification ‐ leading to a 10% error decrease (from 45% down to 35%) over a state-of-the-art i-vector speaker identification system on the REPERE TV broadcast corpus.


Background: Cosmetic surgery among male patients has become increasingly popular. The face-lift technique is different in male patients, specifically regarding preservation of hair follicles, restoration of a youthful and well appearance, and reduction of the risk of hematoma. Methods: A retrospective review of a single surgeon's past 20 years of consecutive male rhytidectomies revealed a cohort of 83 patients. A control group was created by random selection of 83 age-matched female rhytidectomy patients during the same period. Data were collected and analyzed critically for factors contributing to complications, including hematoma, seroma, skin sloughing, alopecia, infection, and nerve injury. The evolution in the senior author's technique in male rhytidectomy is described. Results: Differences in facial analysis and rhytidectomy technique in male patients and female patients are highlighted. Five male patients (6.0 percent) and no female patients in the control group developed postoperative hematoma (p = 0.0587). No other complications occurred. Conclusion: Respecting the patterns of hair growth in incision design, avoiding damage to follicles during dissection, and exercising standard of care (especially avoidance of hypotensive anesthesia) in prevention of postoperative hematoma have delivered safe and consistently reproducible aesthetic outcomes and acceptable complication rates. CLINICAL QUESTION/LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Therapeutic, IV.


Efficient implementations of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) for GPUs provide good performance with large data sizes, but are not competitive with CPU code for small data sizes. On the other hand, several applications perform multiple DFTs on small data sizes. In fact, even algorithms for large data sizes use a divide-and-conquer approach, where eventually small DFTs need to be performed. We discuss our DFT implementation, which is efficient for multiple small DFTs. One feature of our implementation is the use of the asymptotically slow matrix multiplication approach for small data sizes, which improves performance on the GPU due to its regular memory access and computational patterns. We combine this algorithm with the mixed radix algorithm for 1-D, 2-D, and 3-D complex DFTs. We also demonstrate the effect of different optimization techniques. When GPUs are used to accelerate a component of an application running on the host, it is important that decisions taken to optimize the GPU performance not affect the performance of the rest of the application on the host. One feature of our implementation is that we use a data layout that is not optimal for the GPU so that the overall effect on the application is better. Our implementation performs up to two orders of magnitude faster than cuFFT on an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX GPU and up to one to two orders of magnitude faster than FFTW on a CPU for multiple small DFTs. Furthermore, we show that our implementation can accelerate the performance of a Quantum Monte Carlo application for which cuFFT is not effective. The primary contributions of this work lie in demonstrating the utility of the matrix multiplication approach and also in providing an implementation that is efficient for small DFTs when a GPU is used to accelerate an application running on the host.


Over the past year and a half, the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada have been developing a framework for the resolution of international financial crises that aligns incentives for all parties to deal with a crisis and preserve the integrity of the international financial system. The framework is built on principles, not rules. It attempts to be clear about the respective roles and responsibilities of the public and private sectors. A central element in shaping private sector expectations is knowledge that the official sector will behave predictably. Constraints on lending by the International Monetary Fund are a key step in that direction. They ensure that private sector involvement is a crucial part of crisis resolution, and they help encourage debtors and creditors to seek co-operative solutions to a crisis. Characterized by constraints, clarity, and orderliness, the framework has the potential to reduce the incidence and cost of financial crises.


In the session of the kitchen Earth Science last year, we presented an analog experiment on "Pele's hair" which could be observed in the volcanic products in Hawaii Islands. We'd succeeded in producing similar texture of "Pele's hair" by using a cotton candy machine we had invented, and showed that the texture of the sugar fibers (e.g. their thickness and length) depends on several important parameters such as rheological properties of the melted sugar, initial temperature at the outlet of the melted sugar jet, and its ejection speed. Recently we have conducted flow visualization regarding this analog experiment to understand the flow behavior around the melted sugar jet. The experimental setup for flow visualization consists of the cotton candy machine, commercial humidifiers for the flow tracers, and a LCD projector to generate multi-color light sheets. The flow behavior was recorded by a high-speed video camera; the eddies and vortices were clearly observed around the rotating dishes, which affect the formation process of the analog "Pele's hair". We also examined effect of the following parameters such as the rotating speed, heating temperature, diameter of the outlets, which cause a variation in the texture of the cotton candy as reported the last presentation.


Abstract The introduction of virtual learning environments has made new tools available that have the potential to support learner communication and interaction, thus aiding second language acquisition both from a psycholinguistic and a sociocultural point of view. This article focuses on the use of videoconferencing in the context of a larger exploratory study to find out how interaction was influenced by the affordances of the environment. Taking a mainly qualitative approach, the authors analysed the written and spoken interaction in recorded videoconferencing sessions, alongside examining some quantitative data to reveal participation patterns. Exploring language learning interaction in a synchronous online medium allows us to show how this is a process mediated by interaction with experts and peers as well as by the artefacts used (e.g., technology) and how learners use and combine multiple modes to make meaning. Our findings illustrate how an online videoconferencing environment with its multiple modalities can be used in language teaching, how teachers and learners adapt to the multimodal online environment and how new patterns of communication emerge in the process.


The massive scale of current and next-generation massively parallel processing (MPP) systems presents significant challenges related to fault tolerance. For applications that perform periodic checkpoints, the choice of the checkpoint interval, the period between checkpoints, can have a significant impact on the execution time of the application. Finding the optimal checkpoint interval that minimizes the wall clock execution time, has been a subject of research over the last decade. In an environment where there are concurrent applications competing for access to the network and storage resources, in addition to application execution times, contention at these shared resources need to be factored into the process of choosing checkpoint intervals. In this paper, we perform analytical modeling of a complementary performance metric the aggregate number of checkpoint I/O operations. We then show the existence and characterize a range of checkpoint intervals which have a potential of improving application and system performance.


We develop and test a theory to address a puzzling pattern that has been discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election and reproduced here in a post-election survey: how can a constituency of voters find a candidate "authentically appealing" (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a "lying demagogue" (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)? Key to the theory are two points: (1) "common-knowledge" lies may be understood as flagrant violations of the norm of truth-telling; and (2) when a political system is suffering from a "crisis of legitimacy" (Lipset 1959) with respect to at least one political constituency, members of that constituency will be motivated to see a flagrant violator of established norms as an authentic champion of its interests. Two online vignette experiments on a simulated college election support our theory. These results demonstrate that mere partisanship is insufficient to explain sharp differences in how lying demagoguery is perceived, and that several oft-discussed factors—information access, culture, language, and gender—are not necessary for explaining such differences. Rather, for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate.


This thesis looks at three aspects related to the design of E-commerce systems, online auctions and distributed grid computing systems. We show how formal verification techniques from computer science can be applied to ensure the correctness of system design and implementation at the code level. Through an e-ticket sales example, we demonstrate that model checking can locate subtle but critical flaws that traditional control and auditing methods (e.g., penetration testing, analytical procedure) most likely miss. Auditors should understand formal verification methods, enforce engineering to use them to create designs with less of a chance of failure, and even practice formal verification themselves in order to offer credible control and assurance for critical e-systems.
Next, we study why many online auctions offer fixed buy prices to understand why sellers and auctioneers voluntarily limit the surplus they can get from an auction. We show when either the seller or the bidders are risk-averse, a properly chosen fixed permanent buy-price can increase the social surplus and does not decrease the expected utility of the sellers and bidders, and we characterize the unique equilibrium strategies of uniformly risk-averse buyers in a buy-price auction.
In the final chapter we look at the design of a distributed grid-computing system. We show how code-instrumentation can be used to generate a witness of program execution, and show how this witness can be used to audit the work of self-interested grid agents. Using a trusted intermediary between grid providers and customers, the audit allows payment to be contingent on the successful audit results, and it creates a verified reputation history of grid providers. We show that enabling the free trade of reputations provides economic incentives to agents to perform the computations assigned, and it induces increasing effort levels as the agents' reputation increases. We show that in such a reputation market only high-type agents would have incentive to purchase a high reputation, and only low-type agents would use low reputations, thus a market works as a natural signaling mechanism about the agents' type.


This literature review was prepared for a technical consultation on fertility awareness held by IRH in July 2013. Literature on fertility awareness was identified and the findings and trends regarding how fertility awareness knowledge or lack thereof appears to influence sexual and reproductive health attitudes and behaviors across the life course were analyzed. Findings and lessons learned from interventions and programs that have incorporated a fertility awareness component were also documented. By searching the literature for the evidence of fertility awareness knowledge across the life course and its possible influences on attitudes and behaviors this paper aims to document the potential relevance or value-added of fertility awareness as an empowering intervention and foundation for good sexual and reproductive health.


This paper introduces a new international longitudinal database of governmental housing policies. The regulations are measured using binary variables based on a thorough analysis of the real-time country-specific legislation. Three major restrictive policies are considered: rent control, protection from restriction, and housing rationing. The database covers 47 countries and states between 1910 and 2018. This allows comparisons of regulation stringency across both time and space. The analysis reveals a surge of all restrictive policies in the first half of the 20th century. However, following World War II, the evolution of policies diverged: while rent control became more flexible or was phased out, tenure security stabilized at a high level or even increased, while housing rationing became used less frequently. An application of dynamic multivariate longitudinal clustering permits dividing the sample in two groups. One cluster comprises countries with more flexible rent control, stronger tenure security, and more housing rationing. It mostly includes European continental countries. Another cluster unifies countries with a more rigid rent control, weaker tenant protection, and rarely used housing rationing.


INTRODUCTION
Opinion analysis in the big data analysis context has been a hot topic in science and the business world recently. Social media has become a key data source for opinions generating a large amount of data every day providing content for further analysis.
In the Big data age, unstructured data classification is one of the key tools for fast and reliable content analysis. I expect significant growth in the demand for content classification services in the nearest future.
There are many online text classification tools available providing limited functionality -such as automated text classification in predefined categories and sentiment analysis based on a pre-trained machine learning algorithm. The limited functionality does not provide tools such as data mining support and/or a machine learning algorithm training interface.
There are a limited number of tools available providing the whole sets of tools required for text classification, i.e. this includes all the steps starting from data mining till building a machine learning algorithm and applying it to a data stream from a social network source. My goal is to create a tool able to generate a classified text stream directly from social media with a user friendly set-up interface.
METHODS AND MATERIALS
The text classification tool will have a core based modular structure (each module providing certain functionality) so the system can be scaled in terms of technology and functionality.
The tool will be built on open source libraries and programming languages running on a Linux OS based server. The tool will be based on three key components: frontend, backend and data storage as described below:

backend: Python and Nodejs programming language with machine learning and text filtering libraries: TensorFlow, and Keras,
for data storage Mysql 5.7/8 will be used,
frontend will be based on web technologies built using PHP and Javascript.

EXPECTED RESULTS
The expected result of my work is a web-based text classification tool for opinion analysis using data streams from social media. The tool will provide a user friendly interface for data collection, algorithm selection, machine learning algorithm setup and training.
Multiple text classification algorithms will be available as listed below:

Linear SVM
Random Forest
Multinomial Naive Bayes
Bernoulli Naive Bayes
Ridge Regressio
Perceptron
Passive Aggressive Classifier
Deep machine learning algorithm.

System users will be able to identify the most effective algorithm for their text classification task and compare them based on their accuracy.
The architecture of the text classification tool will be based on a frontend interface and backend services. The frontend interface will provide all the tools the system user will be interacting with the system. This includes setting up data collection streams from multiple social networks and allocating them to pre-specified channels based on keywords.
Data from each channel can be classified and assigned to a pre-defined cluster. The tool will provide a training interface for machine learning algorithms.
This text classification tool is currently in active development for a client with planned testing and implementation in April 2019.


Election night broadcasts are instances of a macro-genre which consists of a complex, ordered assembly of interlocking genres. The emergent character of the news, the liveness of the broadcast and its multi-focal character make for a number of typical genres and genre sequences. The chapter provides an overview of the area of research and a framework of analysis, drawing on DA, CA, systemic functional linguistics, pragmatics, semiotics and sociology. The genres studied are reports and comments (soft and hard news, audio-visual presentation of statistics) and Declaration sequences, comprising a running-up sequence (reports, interviews), and the Declaration of results at constituency level. The data are from the BBC election night on the 1997 UK parliamentary elections. The focus is on the discourse of journalists, not of politicians, and on the interplay of the verbal and visual channels.


Infective endocarditis still has high mortality and morbidity. Infective endocarditis usually affects the native valve and may lead to non-cardiac complications such as embolism, metastatic infection and septicemia due to the embolus of septic vegetations. Devel-opment of heart failure, systemic embolization, and perivalvular abscess are indications for emergency surgery. Complication rate of vegetations which are greater than 10 mm is more than 90% however, the complication rate of vegetations which are less than 10 mm is 48%. Medical treatment alone may not always be sufficient and may lead to more serious complications such as peripheral embolism. Here, we present a patient diagnosed with acute aortic valve infective endocarditis and left femoral artery embolism in the light of current literature.


This article explores the unstable distinction between "who" and "what" in Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! The story's moral that "a person's a person no matter how small" has often been read as atoning for the racist cartoons that Geisel drew of the Japanese during World War II. Seussian pedagogy teaches us to hear all persons as whos rather than whats or things. Yet this essay argues that all persons are also things. While this thingliness remains unequally distributed thanks to persistent sociopolitical hierarchies, it also calls on us to think about ethics and politics differently. Diverging from the person/who equation, Jacques Derrida conceives the who as an absolute singularity that resists its subjection to the what, and by extension, its reduction to particularity and identity. Expanding beyond Horton's racial context, the final section of the essay considers how the contemporary "Black Lives Matter" movement reckons with the problem of particularity and identity while also gesturing toward an incalculable singularity—infinitely deferred yet always "present."


Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (efMRI) has emerged as a powerful technique for detecting brains' responses to presented stimuli. A primary goal in efMRI data analysis is to estimate the Hemodynamic Response Function (HRF) and to locate activated regions in human brains when specific tasks are performed. This paper develops new methodologies that are important improvements not only to parametric but also to nonparametric estimation and hypothesis testing of the HRF. First, an effective and computationally fast scheme for estimating the error covariance matrix for efMRI is proposed. Second, methodologies for estimation and hypothesis testing of the HRF are developed. Simulations support the effectiveness of our proposed methods. When applied to an efMRI dataset from an emotional control study, our method reveals more meaningful findings than the popular methods offered by AFNI and FSL.


This White Paper is the fourth in a series addressing state efforts to take over federally managed public lands. We argue here that state time and resources would be better spent on collaborative efforts to improve resource management practices. Alternatives to litigation, like that threatened under Utah's Transfer of Public Lands Act, are important because, as our prior work shows, Utah's claims are likely to fail. The federal government is not obligated to dispose of additional public lands, and even if a disposal obligation were found to exist, such an obligation would not necessitate giving the land to the states. Furthermore, a state takeover of public lands would subject states to significant fiscal risk while likely reducing opportunities for public involvement in land management decisions. Faced with the prospect of a long, costly, and likely fruitless legal fight, states should consider other responses to what are, for many, sincerely held frustrations over the condition and management of our public lands. This paper discusses five of the main problems that we believe give rise to the frustration driving the public lands transfer movement. We then present seven possible alternatives to demanding title to federal lands that we believe respond to these problems and that are likely to produce lasting and tangible land management improvements. Neither the list of problems, nor the list of alternatives, is exhaustive. While we identify what we see as key challenges and opportunities, others will undoubtedly add to our list. We hope that a productive dialogue over public land management policies and practices can grow from this effort.


"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants."


The German expressionist, architectural visionary, author, inventor, and artist Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) wrote several fictional utopian narratives related to glass architecture. In The Gray Cloth, the first of his novels to be translated into English, Scheerbart uses subtle irony and the structural simplicity of a fairy tale to present the theories of colored glass outlined in his well-known treatise Glass Architecture.The novel is set forward in time to the mid-twentieth century. The protagonist, a Swiss architect named Edgar Krug, circumnavigates the globe by airship with his wife, constructing wildly varied, colored-glass buildings. His projects include a high-rise and exhibition/concert hall in Chicago, a retirement complex for air pilots on the Fiji Islands, the structure for an elevated train across a zoological park in northern India, and a suspended residential villa on the Kuria Muria Islands off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea. Fearing that his architecture is challenged by the colorfulness of women's clothing, Krug insists that his wife wear all gray clothing with the addition of ten percent white. This odd demand brings him notoriety and sensationalizes his international building campaign. For the reader, it underlines the confluence of architecture with fashion, gender, and global media.In his introduction, John Stuart surveys Scheerbart's career and role in German avant-garde circles, as well as his architectural and social ideas. He shows how Scheerbart strove to integrate his spiritual and romantic leanings with the modern world, often relying on glass architecture to do so. In addition to discussing the novel's reception and its rediscovery by contemporary architects and critics, Stuart shows fiction to be a resource for the study of architecture and places The Gray Cloth in the context of German Expressionism.


A motor programme is described for defensive kicking in the locust which is also probably the programme for jumping. The method of analysis has been to make intracellular recordings from the somata of identified motornuerones which control the metathoracic tibiae while defensive kicks are made in response to tactile stimuli. Three stages are recognized in the programme. (1) Initial flexion of the tibiae results from the low spike threshold of tibial flexor motorneurones to tactile stimulation of the body. (2) Co-contraction of flexor and extensor muscles followa in which flexor and extensor excitor motoneurones spike at high frequency for 300-600 ms. the tibia flexed while the extensor muscle develops tension isometrically to the level required for a kick or jump. (3) Trigger activity terminates the co-contraction by inhibiting the flexor excitor motorneurones and simultaneously exciting the flexor inhibitors. This causes relaxation of the flexor muscle and allows the tibiae to extend. If the trigger activity does not occur, the jump or kick is aborted, and the tibiae remain flexed.


Title of Document: ON THE WAY TO LINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION: NEUROMAGNETIC EVIDENCE OF EARLY AUDITORY ABSTRACTION IN THE PERCEPTION OF SPEECH AND PITCH Philip J. Monahan, Ph.D., 2009 Directed By: Assoc. Prof. William J. Idsardi, Linguistics Prof. David Poeppel, Linguistics & Biology The goal of this dissertation is to show that even at the earliest (non-invasive) recordable stages of auditory cortical processing, we find evidence that cortex is calculating abstract representations from the acoustic signal. Looking across two distinct domains (inferential pitch perception and vowel normalization), I present evidence demonstrating that the M100, an automatic evoked neuromagnetic component that localizes to primary auditory cortex is sensitive to abstract computations. The M100 typically responds to physical properties of the stimulus in auditory and speech perception and integrates only over the first 25 to 40 ms of stimulus onset, providing a reliable dependent measure that allows us to tap into early stages of auditory cortical processing. In Chapter 2, I briefly present the episodicist position on speech perception and discuss research indicating that the strongest episodicist position is untenable. I then review findings from the mismatch negativity literature, where proposals have been made that the MMN allows access into linguistic representations supported by auditory cortex. Finally, I conclude the Chapter with a discussion of the previous findings on the M100/N1. In Chapter 3, I present neuromagnetic data showing that the response properties of the M100 are sensitive to the missing fundamental component using well-controlled stimuli. These findings suggest that listeners are reconstructing the inferred pitch by 100 ms after stimulus onset. In Chapter 4, I propose a novel formant ratio algorithm in which the third formant (F3) is the normalizing factor. The goal of formant ratio proposals is to provide an explicit algorithm that successfully "eliminates" speaker-dependent acoustic variation of auditory vowel tokens. Results from two MEG experiments suggest that auditory cortex is sensitive to formant ratios and that the perceptual system shows heightened sensitivity to tokens located in more densely populated regions of the vowel space. In Chapter 5, I report MEG results that suggest early auditory cortical processing is sensitive to violations of a phonological constraint on sound sequencing, suggesting that listeners make highly specific, knowledge-based predictions about rather abstract anticipated properties of the upcoming speech signal and violations of these predictions are evident in early cortical processing. ON THE WAY TO LINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION: NEUROMAGNETIC EVIDENCE OF EARLY AUDITORY ABSTRACTION IN THE PERCEPTION OF SPEECH AND PITCH


Tissue culture has been used for over 100 years to study cells and responses ex vivo. The convention of this technique is the growth of anchorage dependent cells on the 2-dimensional surface of tissue culture plastic. More recently, there is a growing body of data demonstrating more in vivo-like behaviors of cells grown in 3-dimensional culture systems. This manuscript describes in detail the set-up and operation of a hollow fiber bioreactor system for the in vivo-like culture of mammalian cells. The hollow fiber bioreactor system delivers media to the cells in a manner akin to the delivery of blood through the capillary networks in vivo. The system is designed to fit onto the shelf of a standard CO2 incubator and is simple enough to be set-up by any competent cell biologist with a good understanding of aseptic technique. The systems utility is demonstrated by culturing the hepatocarcinoma cell line HepG2/C3A for 7 days. Further to this and in line with other published reports on the functionality of cells grown in 3-dimensional culture systems the cells are shown to possess increased albumin production (an important hepatic function) when compared to standard 2-dimensional tissue culture.


Background: To study the outcome of endoscopic third ventriculostomy (ETV)Methods: In this observational study an endoscopic third ventriculostomy was applied in patients who suffered from hydrocephaly. The diagnosis of hydrocephalus was determined by  physical, neurological and neuro-radiological criteria. Patients with obstructed hydrocephalus whether congenital or acquired, with a dilated 3rd ventricle were included. Linear incision was given 2cm anterior to the coronal suture in mid pupillary line. Right frontal burr hole is made. For ETV, burr hole is placed on a line joining the foramen of monro and inter-peduncular line. Floor of the thirdventricle was punctured close to or over the dorsum sellae. Membrane was dilated with balloon. Balloon was inflated and subsequently was taken out from puncture site. It ensured easy visibility of basilar artery and its perforators.Result: Age of patients ranged from 06 months to 24 years, with a mean age of 4 years . Fourteen patients had posterior fossa tumour's with dilated third ventricle, sixty four patients had aqua ductal stenosis, two patients with CSF ascites as complication of ventriculo-peritoneal shunt, eleven patients had blocked lower end of ventriculoperitoneal shunt. Seven patients had CSF leak. Time taken to complete endoscopic third ventriculostomy was from 20 to 40 min as compared to 1 hour to 1.30 hours, taken in a VP shunt. Patients who had ETV performed had a mean hospital stay of 3 days, where as patients in whom a VP shunt was performed stayed in the ward for an average of 5 to 10 days, depending on how eventful the post op period was. The cost incurred to the VP shunt patient who remained admitted for an average of 5 days was between Rupees 16,000 to 25,000, ascompared to Rs: 2000 for the patient who underwent endoscopic third ventriculostomy.Conclusion: Patients of ETV, with less per operative time, had decreased length of stay. ETV also was less expensive to the patient and he did not have to buy the shunt apparatus with less rehospitalization rates, compared to patients who had undergone shunt.


Quality control is an important thing that must be done by the company to minimize defective products. The company can analyze product defects by using the Six Sigma method, by formulating Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC) that occurs. PT. XYZ as a large company that prints magazines often faces the problem of quality defects in its printouts, resulting in the cost losses due to production defects every year is not small, as a result of not being sold. The Six Sigma method is an approach method to help control the quality of production. This study conducts to determine the level of sigma from the current production process, the types of defects that are a priority to be addressed, and the causes of disability. From the results of the study, the sigma value of current production is 3.6 or DPMO of 15919.63613. The type of defect that occurs is blurred by 59%, does not register at 29% and paper cut by 12%. To achieve Six Sigma it is necessary to take corrective steps using the results of the analysis.


Building and HVAC system design can significantly improve if numerical optimization is used. However, if a cost function that is smooth in the design parameter is evaluated by a building energy simulation program, it usually becomes replaced with a numerical approximation that is discontinuous in the design parameter. Moreover, many building simulation programs do not allow obtaining an error bound for the numerical approximations to the cost function. Thus, if a cost function is evaluated by such a program, optimization algorithms that depend on smoothness of the cost function can fail far from a minimum. For such problems it is unclear how the HookeJeeves Generalized Pattern Search optimization algorithm and the simple Genetic Algorithm perform. The Hooke-Jeeves algorithm depends on smoothness of the cost function, whereas the simple Genetic Algorithm may not even converge if the cost function is smooth. Therefore, we are interested in how these algorithms perform if used in conjunction with a cost function evaluated by a building energy simulation program. In this paper we show what can be expected from the two algorithms and compare their performance in minimizing the annual primary energy consumption of an office building in three locations. The problem has 13 design parameters and the cost function has large discontinuities. The optimization algorithms reduce the energy consumption by 7% to 32%, depending on the building location. Given the short labor time to set up the optimization problems, such reductions can yield considerable economic gains.


Many papers on the taxonomy of fossil crustaceans are often based upon poorly preserved material and/or specimens that have been insufficiently prepared. The purpose of the present note is to outline some preparation methods that are applied in our (J.S.H. Collins and S.L.J.) ongoing studies of anomuran and brachyuran decapods from the Middle Danian limestones at Fakse quarry (Denmark), which have greatly enhanced the quality of our material. The techniques briefly outlined here involve: 1 - staining method; 2 - water blasting (as a cleaning tool in preparation of fossils); and 3 - negative preparation (with acid). Some of these techniques will have wide applications in other fields of paleontological research.


We consider a general worst-case robust convex optimization problem, with arbitrary dependence on the uncertain parameters, which are assumed to lie in some given set of possible values. We describe a general method for solving such a problem, which alternates between optimization and worst-case analysis. With exact worst-case analysis, the method is shown to converge to a robust optimal point. With approximate worst-case analysis, which is the best we can do in many practical cases, the method seems to work very well in practice, subject to the errors in our worst-case analysis. We give variations on the basic method that can give enhanced convergence, reduce data storage, or improve other algorithm properties. Numerical simulations suggest that the method finds a quite robust solution within a few tens of steps; using warm-start techniques in the optimization steps reduces the overall effort to a modest multiple of solving a nominal problem, ignoring the parameter variation. The method is illustrated with several application examples.


A project aimed at the 3D simulation of textile yarns from technical specifications was begun in 1993 and attracted support from both industry and research councils to enable the formation of a multi-national team of researchers to come together in the UK. Considerable progress has been made particularly in the simulation of knitting yarn and plain knit fabric. In recent times the team has tackled the problem of simulating mixture coloured yarns sometimes called melange. This has necessitated a more complicated model of yarn structure based on queuing theory which is outlined at the end of the paper. References are provided for readers who wish to learn more of the various theories and models that have been used throughout the course of this project.


The class 1 outer membrane protein encoded by the porA gene of Neisseria meningitidis is a candidate for a vaccine against meningococcal infection. The expression of class 1 outer membrane protein displays phase variation between three expression levels. Northern (RNA) blot and primer extension analysis revealed that this phase variation is regulated at the transcriptional level. The start site for transcription is located 59 bp upstream of the translational initiation codon. Sequence analysis of the promoter region of the porA gene of a variant without class 1 protein expression revealed nine contiguous guanidine residues between the -10 and -35 domains. Comparison of promoter sequences of different phase variants indicated that the length of the polyguanidine stretch correlated with the expression level of the class 1 outer membrane protein; the presence of 11, 10, or 9 contiguous guanidine residues results in high levels, medium levels, or no expression of class 1 mRNA, respectively. These results suggest that the variable porA expression levels seen in different isolates are modulated by guanidine residue insertion and/or deletion due to slipped-strand mispairing on the polyguanidine stretch within the intervening sequence of the -35 and -10 regions of the promoter. The phase variation of class 1 outer membrane protein may provide a molecular mechanism to evade the host immune defense. Therefore, the protective efficacy of a vaccine based on class 1 outer membrane protein may be questioned.


Modern scientific discovery depends on collecting large heterogeneous datasets with many sources of variability, and applying domain-specific pipelines from which one can draw insight or clinical utility. For example, macroscale connectomics studies require complex pipelines to process raw functional or diffusion data and estimate connectomes. Individual studies tend to customize pipelines to their needs, raising concerns about their reproducibility, which add to a longer list of factors that may differ across studies and result in failures to replicate (including sampling, experimental design, and data acquisition protocols). Mitigating these issues requires multi-study datasets and the development of pipelines that can be applied across them. We developed NeuroData's MRI to Graphs (NDMG) pipeline using several functional and diffusion studies, including the Consortium for Reliability and Reproducability, to estimate connectomes. Without any manual intervention or parameter tuning, NDMG ran on 25 different studies (≈6,000 scans) from 19 sites, with each scan resulting in a biologically plausible connectome (as assessed by multiple quality assurance metrics at each processing stage). For each study, the connectomes from NDMG are more similar within than across individuals, indicating that NDMG is preserving biological variability. Moreover, the connectomes exhibit near perfect consistency for certain connectional properties across every scan, individual, study, site and modality; these include stronger ipsilateral than contralateral connections and stronger homotopic than heterotopic connections. Yet, the magnitude of the differences varied across individuals and studies—much more so when pooling data across sites, even after controlling for study, site, and basic demographic variables (i.e., age, sex, and ethnicity). This indicates that other experimental variables (possibly those not measured or reported) are contributing to this variability, which if not accounted for can limit the value of aggregate datasets, as well as expectations regarding the accuracy of findings and likelihood of replication. We therefore provide a set of principles to guide the development of pipelines capable of pooling data across studies while maintaining biological variability and minimizing measurement error. This open science approach provides us with an opportunity to understand and eventually mitigate spurious results for both past and future studies.


Even if linguistic research (e.g. Berns 1988; Hilgendorf 2005) has claimed that the status of English in Germany might be changing from foreign language (EFL) to second language (ESL) status, or, for that matter, from an Expanding Circle to an Outer Circle English (e.g. Kachru 1985), empirical evidence is sparse. The present study addresses this gap by presenting different types of empirical data which tackle three issues relevant for describing the status of English: spreading bilingualism, exonormative orientation and the nativization of pronunciation features. In addition it is shown how the categorization of English spoken in non-postcolonial settings can profit from the basic notions of Schneider's Dynamic Model for postcolonial Englishes and thus go beyond the tradition static terms ESL, EFL and the like.


In The Social Life of Forensic Evidence, Corinna Kruse provides a major contribution to understanding forensic evidence and its role in the criminal justice system. Arguing that forensic evidence can be understood as a form of knowledge, she reveals that each piece of evidence has a social life and biography. Kruse shows how the crime scene examination is as crucial to the creation of forensic evidence as laboratory analyses, the plaintiff, witness, and suspect statements elicited by police investigators, and the interpretations that prosecutors and defense lawyers bring to the evidence. Drawing on ethnographic data from Sweden and on theory from both anthropology and science and technology studies, she examines how forensic evidence is produced and how it creates social relationships as cases move from crime scene to courtroom. She demonstrates that forensic evidence is neither a fixed entity nor solely material, but is inseparably part of and made through particular legal, social, and technological practices.


Organic thin film transistor (OTFT) performance is highly materials interface-dependent, and dramatic performance enhancements can be achieved by properly modifying the semiconductor/gate dielectric interface. However, the origin of these effects is not well understood, as this is a classic "buried interface" problem that has traditionally been difficult to address. Here we address the question of how n-octadecylsilane (OTS)-derived self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) on Si/SiO(2) gate dielectrics affect the OTFT performance of the archetypical small-molecule p-type semiconductors P-BTDT (phenylbenzo[d,d]thieno[3,2-b;4,5-b]dithiophene) and pentacene using combined in situ sum frequency generation spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy, and grazing incidence and reflectance X-ray scattering. The molecular order and orientation of the OTFT components at the dielectric/semiconductor interface is probed as a function of SAM growth mode in order to understand how this impacts the overlying semiconductor growth mode, packing, crystallinity, and carrier mobility, and hence, transistor performance. This understanding, using a new, humidity-specific growth procedure, leads to a reproducible, scalable process for highly ordered OTS SAMs, which in turn nucleates highly ordered p-type semiconductor film growth, and optimizes OTFT performance. Surprisingly, the combined data reveal that while SAM molecular order dramatically impacts semiconductor crystalline domain size and carrier mobility, it does not significantly influence the local orientation of the overlying organic semiconductor molecules.


Suppose an agent is in a (possibly unknown) Markov Decision Process in the absence of a reward signal, what might we hope that an agent can efficiently learn to do? This work studies a broad class of objectives that are defined solely as functions of the state-visitation frequencies that are induced by how the agent behaves. For example, one natural, intrinsically defined, objective problem is for the agent to learn a policy which induces a distribution over state space that is as uniform as possible, which can be measured in an entropic sense. We provide an efficient algorithm to optimize such such intrinsically defined objectives, when given access to a black box planning oracle (which is robust to function approximation). Furthermore, when restricted to the tabular setting where we have sample based access to the MDP, our proposed algorithm is provably efficient, both in terms of its sample and computational complexities. Key to our algorithmic methodology is utilizing the conditional gradient method (a.k.a. the Frank-Wolfe algorithm) which utilizes an approximate MDP solver.


Background: 'Condom' is a stigmatized topic in India. Open discussion about its use and promotion are considered inappropriate. This study examines the association between exposure to public service announcements (PSA) around condoms and discussion, attitude and behavioral intentions about condom use among married men by their age and socio-economic status. Methods: A sub-sample of monogamous married men (N=2502) was obtained from 2009 BBC World Service Trust's condom normalization survey among men in four high HIV prevalence states in India. The multiple logistic regression models were used to analyze the association of exposure to PSA around condoms with discussion, attitudes and behavioral intentions about condom and its usage. Result: More than half married men (55%) were younger (<=35 years), having better socio-economic status (educated above secondary levels and employed) (55%) and exposed to condom PSA (64%). Exposure to PSA was associated with greater likelihood to seek condom information (AOR: 1.33; p=0.010), positive attitude (AOR: 1.24; p=0.008), higher self-efficacy (AOR: 1.53; p=0.006) in using and, last time condom use (AOR: 2.15; p=0.023) among better SES group; with positive caring attitude (AOR: 1.27; p=0.010), ease in purchasing condom (AOR: 2.04, p=0.009) among older (35+ years) men, and with last time condom use among younger men (AOR: 1.85; p=0.037). Conclusion: The findings of the study highlight an important contention that linkage between mass-media campaigns and promotion of condom normalization through discussion, seeking information and intention to use and its usage goes beyond as a behavior change strategy to include dimensions of age, educational attainment and economic status. The effectiveness of mass media campaigns for normalizing condom discussion is largely mediated by demographic and socio-economic variables. Future campaigns need to address these variables to be more effective.


In order to remain competitive in an increasingly competitive international context, French companies are forced to follow one or more of various possible routes: relocating some of the activities, optimising the design and/or production process or innovating technologically. When they choose to develop new technologies, it is advisable to seek outside expertise in different areas. Thus, they must exchange and create knowledge in partnership with other companies. But in order to control and integrate this future technology, we acknowledge that the acquisition and capitalisation of technical training during the process of innovation are of primary importance. This article demonstrates that the construction of this knowledge base can be achieved only by formalising a close and rigorous collaboration. To do this, we propose a model of the collaborative process, meant for the leaders of innovative projects to support design.


A methodology based on the use of time-lapse photographs is presented to evaluate the leakages over time of a reservoir (Montejaque dam, Malaga Province, Spain) that feeds a karstic aquifer. In particular, photographic control allows the evolution of water levels in the dam and the river that feeds it to be monitored. Through changes in water volume, which are calculated from the level differences, daily leakages are evaluated, and the relationship between leakages and the water level of the reservoir is established. The proposed method includes adjusting the hydric balance and the use of digital terrain model and climate data. The inputs (river flow and direct precipitation) and other outputs (direct evaporation) are also evaluated. Values between 4 m 3 /s and 0.35 m 3 /s are obtained for the reservoir infiltration, clearly superior to the values obtained at the time of the construction of the dam in the 1920s. Mobilisation of the filling of fractures and conduits in karstic massif and calcite dissolution are processes that can influence this behaviour. When the water level is very low, the obtained values are below the historical leakages due to deposition of clay sediments at the reservoir bottom.


The updated and much expanded 3e of the Handbook of Radioactivity Analysis is an authoritative reference providing the principles, practical techniques, and procedures for the accurate measurement of radioactivity from the very low levels encountered in the environment to higher levels measured in radioisotope research, clinical laboratories, biological sciences, radionuclide standardization, nuclear medicine, nuclear power, and fuel cycle facilities and in the implementation of nuclear forensic analysis and nuclear safeguards. The book describes the basic principles of radiation detection and measurement and the preparation of samples from a wide variety of matrices, assists the investigator or technician in the selection and use of appropriate radiation detectors, and presents state-of-the-art methods of analysis. Fundamentals of radiation properties, radionuclide decay, the calculations involved, and methods of detection provide the basis for a thorough understanding of the analytical procedures. The Handbook of Radioactivity Analysis, 3e, is suitable as a teaching text for university and professional training courses. * The only comprehensive reference that describes the principles of detection and practical applications of every type of radioactivity detector currently used. The new 3e is broader in scope, with revised and expanded chapters, new authors, and seven new chapters on Alpha Spectrometry, Radionuclide Standardization, Radioactive Aerosol Measurements, Environmental Radioactivity Monitoring, Marine Radioactivity Analysis, Nuclear Forensic Analysis and Analytical Techniques in Nuclear Safeguards* Discusses in detail the principles, theory and practice applied to all types of radiation detection and measurement, making it useful for both teaching and research


In this paper, we propose that in multiagent dynamic worlds, agents which are autonomous, need to be guided by attitudes for effective problem solving. Often agents, existing in dynamic and hostile worlds, are required to exhibit the specified problem solving behaviors for prolonged periods of time either continually or intermittently. In order to be able to perform these types of behaviors, autonomous agents need meta-level controls known as attitudes to guide them towards selecting the proper goals and actions. In this paper, we investigate the role of attitudes in problem solving in dynamic worlds, and suggest several attitudes for the agents in a hostile dynamic world, the fire world. We then evaluate and compare the problem solving behaviors of the agents in a simulated fire world using different types of attitudes. In a dynamic environment, meta-level control is needed not only to improve the efficiency of reasoning, but also the accuracy and utility of the results of reasoning. - Martha Pollack in The uses of plans, AI 57(1992) 43-68.


The paper discusses the adsorption ability of precipitated barium sulphate and dolomite for the ferri/ferrous impurities found in commercial grade sodium sulphide. Due to the presence of iron impurities, later chemical is not suitable for the manufacture of pharmaceutical grade chemicals and dyes chemicals. Author had carried out experiments for the usage of both the adsorbents (separately) in different proportions in aqueous solution of crude sodium sulphide. Results are quite promising and can be reasonably valuable for barium industries.


We report on an unexpected suppression of the magnetocrystalline anisotropy contribution in epitaxial fcc Co(110) films on Cu(110) below a thickness of dc=(50 +/- 10) A. For film thicknesses larger than dc the measured anisotropy value agrees with published data. Measurements on films with reduced strain indicate a large strain dependence of dc . A model calculation based on a crystal-field formalism and discussed within the context of band theory, which explicitly takes tetragonal misfit strains into account, reproduces the experimen-tally observed anomalies. Our results indicate that the usually applied phenomenological description of anisotropies, assuming additive free energy terms for each anisotropy contribution, fails in this case.


Scolecodonts provide fossil evidence of the evolution and diversification of jaw‐bearing polychaetes from the latest Cambrian onwards. However, their record before the Darriwilian (Middle Ordovician) is scarce worldwide, which limits our understanding of key evolutionary events. One such event is the emergence of taxa possessing the asymmetrical labidognath‐type jaw apparatus architecture, which became common in the Middle Ordovician and is often dominant throughout the Palaeozoic. Here, we document a small collection of Dapingian scolecodonts from the Capillas section, Sierras Subandinas, north‐western Argentina. The isolated elements recovered allowed us to reconstruct the distinctive jaw apparatus, and to introduce a new taxon, Andiprion paxtonae gen. et sp. nov. The maxillary apparatus of Andiprion is intermediate between the symmetrognath type of the Early Ordovician Kadriorgaspis and the labidognath type that is present in polychaetaspids and related taxa. The apparatus architecture of Andiprion corresponds best to the labidognath type, but the morphology of the individual jaws suggests that it may be the most primitive representative of this lineage currently known. We propose that Andiprion‐like forms were ancestral to polychaetaspids, polychaeturids and ramphoprionids. The Capillas collection provides supporting evidence for the evolutionary homology of the 'basal plate' and the left first maxilla. Thus the labidognath‐type asymmetry, with an unpaired left maxilla III, developed as a result of gradual reduction in size of the first right jaw ('basal plate') in front of the carriers, instead of loss or fusion of anterior maxillae.


Students operate within a bounded social context and often face decisions regarding whether to pursue selfish or group-level benefit. Yet little work has examined what predicts their behaviour towards fellow students. This work addresses this gap by investigating what factors may predict students' performance of pro-social actions at university, and how an institution may maximise such behaviour. Study 1 created the student pro-sociality scale, used tomeasure these tendencies in students. In study 2, 428 students from 25UK universities took part an online survey study using this scale, and several other pre-existing measures of possible predictors. Analysis suggested that of those factors examined, role clarity, affective commitment, empathy, and perspective-taking emerged as the most influential. This first foray into this area can now inspire further research in finding the effective ways of fostering pro-social behaviour in students.


Rats are always bigger than you expect...' Marcus Didius Falco, ancient Rome's hangdog investigator, hates sharing a cell with a rodent - though being bailed by his old mother is almost as embarassing. His highborn girlfriend can't decide if she wants him and Titus Caesar's reward for past services is a wet fish. Hoping for a better life, or at least a better apartment, he takes on new clients. On the elegant slopes of the Pincian Hill, three nouveaux riches freedmen with two flashy wives are under siege by a clever redhead. Severina Zotica has a foul-mouthed parrot, an odd connection with a snake dancer - and averysuspicious past. As he pursues this flame-haired fortune-hunter, Falco finds himself beset by violent rent-racketeers, poisoners, and women without consciences who have dangerous designs on him...


Counter-rotating turbomachines have the potential to be high efficiency, high power density devices. Comparisons between conventional and counter-rotating turbomachines in the literature make multiple and often contradicting conclusions about their relative performance. By adopting appropriate non-dimensional parameters, based on relative blade speed, the design space of conventional machines can be extended to include those with counter-rotation. This allows engineers familiar with conventional turbomachinery to transfer their experience to counter-rotating machines. By matching appropriate non-dimensional parameters, the loss mechanisms directly affected by counter-rotation can be determined. A series of computational studies are performed to investigate the relative performance of conventional and counter-rotating turbines (CRTs) with the same non-dimensional design parameters. Each study targets a specific loss source, highlighting which phenomena are directly due to counter-rotation and which are solely due to blade design. The studies range from two-dimensional blade sections to three-dimensional finite radius stages. It is shown that, at hub-to-tip ratios (HTRs) approaching unity, with matched non-dimensional design parameters, the stage efficiency and work output are identical for both types of machines. However, a CRT in the study is shown to have an efficiency advantage over a conventional machine of up to 0.35 percentage points for a HTR of 0.65. This is due to differences in absolute velocity producing different spanwise blade designs.


The trace gas emissions from six biomass fires, including three grass fires, were measured using a Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer coupled to an open-path, multipass cell (OP-FTIR). The quantified emissions consisted of carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, water vapor, carbon monoxide, methane, ammonia, ethylene, acetylene, isobutene, methanol, acetic acid, formic acid, formaldehyde, and hydroxyacetaldehyde. By including grass fires in this study we have now measured smoke composition from fires in each major vegetation class. The emission ratios of the oxygenated compounds, formaldehyde, methanol, and acetic acid, were 1–2% of CO in the grass fires, similar to our other laboratory and field measurements but significantly higher than in some other studies. These oxygenated compounds are important, as they affect O3 and HOx chemistry in both biomass fire plumes and the free troposphere. The OP-FTIR data and the simultaneously collected canister data indicated that the dominant C4 emission was isobutene (C4H8) and not 1-butene. The rate constant for the reaction of isobutene with the OH radical is 60% larger than that of 1-butene. We estimate that 67±9% of the fuel nitrogen was volatilized with the major nitrogen emissions, ammonia, and nitric oxide, accounting for 22±8%.


Sufficient evidence points to interleukin 13 (IL-13) as an important pathological factor in UC and raises hopes to a promising new treatment strategy.1–3 However, the outcomes of two recent clinical trials, both published in Gut 2015, suggest otherwise.4 ,5 A commentary published in the same issue described these results as crushing the enthusiasm for anti-IL-13 treatment in UC.6 In this letter, we show evidence that the disease outcome is determined by the type of signalling pathway used by IL-13 in mice. Therefore, we suggest that directly blocking IL-13 remains a potential treatment strategy for a subset of patients with UC that have elevated tissue IL-13 production.

In the first clinical study using anrukinzumab treatment, which targets the IL-4 receptor-alpha (IL-4Rα) and not IL-13 directly, had no effect on improving the clinical response or remission rates of patients with UC.4 In contrast, although patients treated with tralokinumab, which blocks IL-13 directly, showed no improved clinical response rate, there was …


The immigrant population in Denmark is one of the smallest in Western Europe but is made up of highly diverse groups coming from about 200 different countries. Compared to their native Danish peers, immigrant students, on average, leave compulsory education with significantly weaker performance levels in reading, mathematics and science. Immigrant students are more likely to go to the vocational education and training (VET) sector, which qualifies primarily for access to the labour market. There is scope to develop the capacities of leaders and teachers in schools and VET colleges; build on the existing framework for teaching Danish as a Second Language by standardising structure and mainstreaming the language support offered across all municipalities and school types; involve immigrants' parents and communities as partners in children's education; and strengthen monitoring and evaluation at all levels of the system to ensure migrant education policies are implemented and effective.


Accurate electromagnetic modeling of complicated optical structures poses several challenges. Optical metamaterial and plasmonic structures are composed of multiple coexisting dielectric and/or conducting parts. Such composite structures may possess diverse values of conductivities and dielectric constants, including negative permittivity and permeability. Further challenges are the large sizes of the structures with respect to wavelength and the complexities of the geometries. In order to overcome these challenges and to achieve rigorous and efficient electromagnetic modeling of three-dimensional optical composite structures, we have developed a parallel implementation of the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA). Precise formulation of composite structures is achieved with the so-called "electric and magnetic current combined-field integral equation." Surface integral equations are carefully discretized with piecewise linear basis functions, and the ensuing dense matrix equations are solved iteratively with parallel MLFMA. The hierarchical strategy is used for the efficient parallelization of MLFMA on distributed-memory architectures. In this paper, fast and accurate solutions of large-scale canonical and complicated real-life problems, such as optical metamaterials, discretized with tens of millions of unknowns are presented in order to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed electromagnetic solver.


Perceptions and experiences of war, violence and migration and related sexual and reproductive health among Somali refugee women in Sweden.Background and objectives: Sweden has during the latest six years experienced a twofold increase of Somali born refugees. Elevated levels of pregnancy related morbidity and perinatal complications are seen among Somali born refugee women. Research has shown links between a mother´s prenatal stress and anxiety and the health of the child the first year. Furthermore, violence towards a mother-to-be has negative health effects and increases the neonatal mortality The specific aim in the current study was to explore perceptions and experiences of war, violence and migration among Somali refugee women in Sweden. This in order to find strategies in caring for birth giving Somali refugee women, with possible experiences of violence, which would benefit the woman and society at large.Material and methods: Qualitative individual audio-recorded interviews were conducted with Somali born refugee women in fertile ages. Interviews were held in three steps: 1) personal narratives by newly arrived Somali born women, 2) perceptions and views out of a depersonalized case and 3) reflections upon emerging themes by female key persons of Somali origin. Thematic analysis according to Clarke and Braun was applied.Preliminary results: The analysis resulted in two main themes: Lives controlled by the presence of violence and Sacrificing for the sake of a future. Access to education, livelihood opportunities and health facilities has been strictly limited by the long-lasting civil war. Escalated violations of sexual and reproductive health and rights were a common triggering factor for finalizing escape. Lives have been extensively marked by family separations. Patience created by war and a pragmatic orientation in life have made survival possible.Conclusions: To be presented at the congressImplications for practice: The results will provide increased evidence based knowledge useful to midwives when caring and supporting birth giving refugee women.


This dissertation examines the birth of a Buddhist
intellectual movement in twelfth century Tibet, known by its
Sanskrit name, Prasangika ("Middle Way Consequentialism"), and
founded on the writings of the seventh century Indian, Candrakirti.
From its inception, Prasangika philosophy - ranging from logic to
soteriology - quickly came to dominate Tibetan intellectual life,
and continues to do so down to the present day. This project traces
the movement's inauguration in the writings of eleventh century
Indian Buddhists and its twelfth century institutional birth in
Central Tibet, examining the philosophical issues that were its
raison d'etre and tracing the manner in which these issues and the
texts embodying them were utilized to construct a religious
community. Through analyzing the interplay of translation, canon
formation, and doctrinal innovation and relating this analysis to
the sociopolitical rivalries of this fractious and formative period
of Tibetan Buddhism, this dissertation offers a new approach to
interpreting Buddhist doctrinal and historical genres. The first
chapter introduces the Indian Buddhists who popularized
Candrakirti's writings and examines the issues around which they
valorized them. These issues center on their interpretation of
ultimate truth (paramarthasatya), the relationship of the ultimate
to epistemological (pramana) concerns and to tantric practice, and
a unique view of Buddhahood. The second chapter traces the
controversies precipitated by the introduction to Central Tibet of
Candrakirti's main writings just after the onset of the twelfth
century. Philosophical issues and the social milieu contributed to
the formation, for the first time, of Prasangika and Svatantrika
schools, which can best be understood as Tibetan "textual
communities." The final three chapters explore these two schools'
debates, examining the writings of Prajnakaramati (950-1030), Atisa
(c. 982-1054), Jayananda (c. 1100), Abhayakaragupta (c. 1025-1125),
Chaba Chokyi Senge (Phya pa Chos kyi rang ge, 1109- 1169), Mabja
Jangchub Tsondru (rMa bya Byamg chub brtson grus, d. 1185), Sonam
Tsemo (bSod nams rtse mo, 1142-1182), and Drakpa Gyeltsen (Grags pa
rgyal mtshan, 1147-1216).


Postnatal cerebral development is a complicated biological process precisely controlled by multiple genes. To understand the molecular mechanism of cerebral development, we compared dynamics of mouse cerebrum transcriptome through three developmental stages using high-throughput RNA-seq technique. Three libraries were generated from the mouse cerebrum at infancy, adolescence and adulthood, respectively. Consequently, 44,557,729(infancy), 59,257,530(adolescence) and 72,729,636(adulthood) reads were produced, which were assembled into15,344, 16,048 and 15,775 genes, respectively. We found that the overall gene expression level increased from infancy to adolescence and decreased later on upon reaching adulthood. The adolescence cerebrum has the most active gene expression, with expression of a large number of regulatory genes up-regulated and some crucial pathways activated. Transcription factor(TF) analysis suggested the similar dynamics as expression pro?ling, especially those TFs functioning in neurogenesis differentiation, oligodendrocyte lineage determination and circadian rhythm regulation. Moreover, our data revealed a drastic increase in myelin basic protein(MBP)-coding gene expression in adolescence and adulthood, suggesting that the brain myelin may be generated sincemouse adolescence. In addition, differential gene expression analysis indicated the activation of rhythmic pathway, suggesting the function of rhythmic movement since adolescence; Furthermore,during infancy and adolescence periods, gene expression related to axon repulsion and attraction showed the opposite trends, indicating that axon repulsion was activated after birth, while axon attraction might be activated at the embryonic stage and declined during the postnatal development. Our results from the present study may shed light on the molecular mechanism underlying the postnatal development of the mammalian cerebrum.