Protein threading, which is also referred to as fold recognition, aligns a probe amino acid sequence onto a library of representative folds of known structure to identify a structural similarity. Following the threading technique of the structural profile approach, this research focused on developing and evaluating a new framework - Mixed Environment Specific Substitution Mapping (MESSM) - for protein threading by artificial neural networks (ANNs) and support vector machines (SVMs). The MESSM presents a new process to develop an efficient tool for protein fold recognition. It achieved better efficiency while retained the effectiveness on protein prediction. The MESSM has three key components, each of which is a step in the protein threading framework. First, building the fold profile library-given a protein structure with a residue level environmental description, Neural Networks are used to generate an environment-specific amino acid substitution (3D-1D) mapping. Second, mixed substitution mapping--a mixed environment-specific substitution mapping is developed by combing the structural-derived substitution score with sequence profile from well-developed amino acid substitution matrices. Third, confidence evaluation--a support vector machine is employed to measure the significance of the sequence-structure alignment. Four computational experiments are carried out to verify the performance of the MESSM. They are Fischer, ProSup, Lindahl and Wallner benchmarks. Tested on Fischer, Lindahl and Wallner benchmarks, MESSM achieved a comparable performance on fold recognition to those energy potential based threading models. For Fischer benchmark, MESSM correctly recognise 56 out of 68 pairs, which has the same performance as that of COBLATH and SPARKS. The computational experiments show that MESSM is a fast program. It could make an alignment between probe sequence (150 amino acids) and a profile of 4775 template proteins in 30 seconds on a PC with IG memory Pentium IV. Also, tested on ProSup benchmark, the MESSM achieved alignment accuracy of 59.7%, which is better than current models. The research work was extended to develop a threading score following the threading technique of the contact potential approach. A TES (Threading with Environment-specific Score) model is constructed by neural networks.


Go to eu2do.bruegel.org to read all the Memos, download the individual Memos and send the Memos to your Kindle. 'There is now a distinct possibility that this crisis will be remembered as the occasion when Europe irretrievably lost ground, both economically and politically'. This was the starting sentence of our memos to the new EU leadership five years ago. Five years later, it is fair to say that this possibility has become a reality. Unemployment has reached record levels and growth has disappointed. Meanwhile, the world outside the EU has continued to change rapidly. Emerging markets in particular have increased their weight in the global economy and in decision making. The new EU leadership – the president of the European Commission and his team of commissioners, and the presidents of the European Council and of the European Parliament – will have to address pressing challenges. Despite the significant steps taken by Europe – among them the creation of a European Stability Mechanism, the start of a banking union, the strengthening of fiscal rules and substantial structural reforms in crisis countries – results for citizens are still unsatisfactory. It is impossible to summarise all the memos in this volume but a common theme is the need to focus on pro-growth policies, on a deepening of the single market, on better and more global trade integration. Reverting to national protectionism, more state aid for national or European champions – as frequently argued for by national politicians – will not be the right way out of the crisis. On the contrary, more Europe and deeper economic integration in some crucial areas, such as energy, capital markets and the digital economy, would greatly support the feeble recovery. But in other areas, less Europe would also be a highly welcome signal that the new European leadership is serious about subsidiarity. Internal re-organisation of the European Commission to ensure that it better delivers would also be welcome. Beyond the pressing challenges – above all crisis resolution, jobs and growth – the memo to the presidents recommends that the new EU leadership should make sure that Europe makes the necessary treaty changes to strengthen Economic and Monetary Union and to permit the coexistence within the EU of countries belonging to the euro area and those that have no intention to join it. Working towards a consensus on this within the European Council and with European citizens is crucial for Europe's future and to enable bold decisions on pressing issues. Our focus in these memos is on economics. But clearly, political and other challenges have multiplied in the last five years. We therefore offer strategic policy advice that we deem both sensible given the problem at hand and politically achievable. Regrettably, we have unexpectedly not been able to include in this volume a memo to the new Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs. Yet, we believe that this Commissioner will have the major task of setting out how to improve Europe's employment and social performance. In many countries, labour market institutions need to be modernised, for instance by making unemployment insurance systems more efficient. Benchmarking could be a way of converging on more sustainable and equitable social models. But reducing unemployment rates will also require better macroeconomic policies, on which the new Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs will have an important role to play. The memos have all been written by Bruegel scholars and their preparation has been coordinated by Senior Fellow Andre Sapir. Like all Bruegel publications, the content reflects the views of the author(s), and there has been no intention to write a 'Bruegel programme'. But the memos have been discussed extensively within the team to improve quality and ensure coherence. Throughout the preparation of this volume, Bruegel's editor Stephen Gardner has contributed considerably to improving the formal and substantive quality of the individual memos. Our gratitude goes to him as well as to all of those who have given feedback on drafts of specific memos. Andre Sapir and Guntram Wolff September 2014


OBJECTIVE
To clarify the relationship between malnutrition and dysphagia following stroke.

DESIGN
Systematic review.

METHODS
All published trials that had examined both the swallowing ability and nutritional status of subjects following stroke were identified. Pooled analyses were performed to establish whether the odds of being malnourished were increased given the presence of dysphagia.

RESULTS
Eight studies were identified. The presence of malnutrition and dysphagia ranged from 8.2% to 49.0% and 24.3% to 52.6%, respectively. Five of the included trials were conducted within the first 7 days following stroke, while 3 were conducted during the rehabilitation phase. The overall odds of being malnourished were higher among subjects who were dysphagic compared with subjects with intact swallowing (odds ratio: 2.425; 95% confidence interval: 1.264-4.649, p < 0.008). In subgroup analysis, the odds of malnutrition were significantly increased during the rehabilitation stage (odds ratio: 2.445; 95% confidence interval: 1.009-5.925, p < 0.048), but not during the first 7 days of hospital admission (odds ratio: 2.401; 95% confidence interval: 0.918-6.277, p < 0.074).

CONCLUSION
In a systematic review including the results from 8 studies, the odds of being malnourished were increased given the presence of dysphagia following stroke.


ABSTRACT Great sums of marketing dollars are spent on television advertising time in the absence of precise audience-size information for individual advertising units. This paper uses granular data from a large system of set-top boxes to observe how television audiences decline and rebuild during expensive commercial time. the data reveal greater set delivery declines from programs to commercial units than has often been anticipated. Moreover, variation in set delivery was seen within particular shows. the results suggest that advertisers should use detailed commercial audience information to choose shows and negotiate media prices.


Identification and analysis of phytoplankton is important for understanding the environmental parameters that are influenced by the oceans, including pollution and climate change. Phytoplanktons are studied at the single cell level using conventional light-field and fluorescence microscopy, but the technique is labour intensive. Flow cytometry enables rapid and quantitative measurements of single cells and is now used as an analytical tool in phytoplankton analysis. However, it has a number of drawbacks, including high cost and portability. We describe the fabrication of a microfluidic (lab-on-a-chip) device for high-speed analysis of single phytoplankton. The device measures fluorescence (at three wavelength ranges) and the electrical impedance of single particles. The system was tested using a mixture of three algae (Isochrysis Galbana, Rhodosorus m., Synechococcus sp.) and the results compared with predictions from theory and measurements using a commercial flow cytometer (BD FACSAria). It is shown that the microfluidic flow cytometer is able to distinguish and characterise these different taxa and that impedance spectroscopy enables measurement of phytoplankton biophysical properties.


Button bars are a relatively new interaction method intended to speed up application use as compared to pull-down menus. This exploratory study compares three command selection methods: pull-down menus, button bars, and user choice of pull-down menus or button bars. Effectiveness was measured in two ways: speed of selection and error rate. 15 participants performed 15 word processor related tasks. Results show that in frequently used functions, such as character attribute selection (bold, italic, underline, etc.), button bars are faster. There were no statistically significant differences in error rates between the three interaction methods


Weighted undirected graphs are a simple, yet powerful way to encode structure in data. A first question we need to address regarding such graphs is how to use them effectively to enhance machine learning problems. A second but more important question is how to obtain such a graph directly from the data. These two questions lead the direction of this thesis. We first explore the use of graphs in matrix completion, with direct implications in recommendation systems. In such systems side information graphs arise naturally, by comparing user behavior and interactions, and by product profiling. Given incomplete object ratings by users, and known graphs for user and object similarities, we propose a new matrix completion model that exploits the graphs to achieve better recommendations. Our model is convex and is solved efficiently with an Alternating Direction Multipliers method (ADMM). It achieves better recommendations than standard convex matrix completion, especially when very few ratings are known a priori, while it is robust to the graph quality. Continuing with the second question, we are interested in learning a graph from data. Data is usually assumed to be smooth on a graph, an assumption associated with graph sparsity and connectivity. Using this assumption, we provide a general graph learning framework that is convex and easy to optimize. We classify graph learning according to the prior structure information in edge-local, node-local or global. Edge-local models are the cheapest computationally, learning each edge independently. Exponential decay graphs and $\epsilon$-neighborhood graphs, the most prevalent weighting schemes in the literature, are such models of our framework. We provide a new model that interpolates between these two, and achieves better performance in many settings. Node-local models take into account the neighborhood of each edge. While they require iterative algorithms, they are stronger models achieving better results. We provide a new node-local model for general graph learning under smoothness assumptions, that redefines the state of the art. We discuss the previous state of the art, two global models of our framework. We provide efficient primal-dual based algorithms for efficiently solving our model and the most prevalent of the previous ones. Our model performs best in many settings. Large scale applications require graphs that are easy to compute, with cost that scales gracefully with respect to the number of nodes, and do not need parameter tuning. We provide the first large scale graph learning solution, based on approximate nearest neighbors with cost of $\mathcal{O}(m\log(m))$ for $m$ nodes. Our solution automatically finds the needed parameters given the sparsity level needed. We finally explore learning graphs that change in time. In many applications graphs are not static, and data comes from different versions of them. In such cases there is no one graph that correctly summarizes connectivity, and we need to learn several graphs, one for each selected time window. Assuming that graphs change slowly, we provide two new models based on a known global and our own node-local one. Our convex time-varying-graph models can use any convex differentiable loss function for time-change penalization, have a cost linear to the number of time windows, and are easy to parallelize. The obtained graphs fit the data better and provide a good compromise between detail in time and computational cost.


Creating datacenter federations allows balancing workloads accommodating spikes in cloud demand while reducing the extensive energy consumption of datacenters. This allows datacenter operators to reduce cost and increase their revenue from using under-utilized resources. To implement those elastic operations, datacenters need to be connected through a network providing huge capacity and guaranteeing adequate resource availability when it is required. Those features can be covered by the flexgrid optical technology provided with an intelligent control plane. For the latter, in this paper we rely on the application-based network operations (ABNO) architecture currently under standardization in the IETF. To increase the availability of the desired capacity, a carrier software defined network (SDN) is placed on top of ABNO. On this architecture, cloud resource managers request data transferences using an application-oriented semantic, which includes data volume and required completion time. Those requests are transformed into connection requests by the carrier SDN. To increase resource availability for incoming requests, the carrier SDN can perform elastic operations on already established connections supporting transferences provided that the committed completion time is ensured. Requests are routed and resource allocation is scheduled, which becomes the routing and scheduled spectrum allocation (RSSA) problem. An integer linear programming model is proposed, and an algorithm for solving the RSSA problem in realistic scenarios is designed. Results showing remarkable gains in the amount of data transported motivate its use for inter-datacenter traffic.


24X7ATPHL:Vectoring is an investigation into the novel usage of time-based animation software and procedural modeling as a method for visualizing time-based quantitative data via construction of a qualitative, two-dimensional rendering. Treated as an experiment that follows the most basic rules of time-lapse photography, 24X7ATPHL slows down and composites accumulated data on traffic (customer pickup and drop off) over seven days traffic at an international airport. The result not only notates the generations and changes in patterns, but also shows the beauty that can be found in data while unlocking the emergent potential for design. The second in the 24X7@PHL series, Vectoring is based on extraction of the resultant NURBS geometries as a methodology for understanding the specific conditions of movement created by the interaction of existing architecture and users, the results of which are currently being used to develop a new speculative masterplan for the international airport.


Abstract. In recent years, remote sensing images have been used for many different applications that require visual analysis and interpretation. In this paper, reducing/removing noise is the basic approach, as it causes loss of information and therefore affects the accuracy of the analyses. Within the scope of the study, two different test areas of land cover/use were applied to examine the effects of noise on optical satellite images. In this context, Landsat 8 and Sentinel 2 satellites were used to study the effects of denoising methods on different spatial resolutions. Due to the lack of raw images of the selected satellites, two different types of noise (i.e. Gaussian and Stripe) were added to the images. In this context, four different denoising methods were compared by using conventional filter techniques commonly used in the spatial domain, while also different methods that used different threshold values in the frequency domain. The first approach is Median, Block Matching and 3D Filtering methods in the spatial domain, applications that depend mainly on the neighborhood relationship of pixels in the image. The second approach is wavelet-based Contourlet and Curvelet methods in the frequency domain. The quality analysis of denoised images were evaluated as qualitative (statistical methods Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, Mean Square Error, standard deviation, min/max value), and quantitative. Finally, Curvelet hard thresholding transform was the selected method as the best algorithm after quality analysis additionally, the method also effectively preserves edges in homogeneous test area and other fine details in the heterogeneous test area.


The Gem State Hydroelectric Project, five miles south of Idaho Falls, Idaho on the Snake River, consists of a 900-foot-long, 40-foot-high dam; approximately four miles of earthend dikes; a five-gate spillway; and a concrete powerhouse with a 23.4-megawatt Hitachi Kaplan turbine and generator. General construction on the project began in the fall of 1986, continued for 24 months and was completed October 17, 1988. CH 2 M Hill of Boise, Idaho designed the project; M.A. Mortenson Company of Minneapolis, Minnesota acted as general contractor. During the 24 months of construction, the contractor was faced with several interesting and unusual situations requiring special construction techniques. Several of these are discussed.


Today, we can say that almost everything is having "electronic" prefix and the way to access to information has changed substantially because of the many factors like fast advancements in computer technology and internet which is getting more and more widespread everyday. Although some people stick to printed resources, the fact that electronic resources offer innovation and irresistible options in terms of cost and time is obvious. The aim of this survey study is to detect some data that can be generalized about the graduate students' state of using printed and electronic resources. A questionnaire, developed by Ebrary, one of the largest e-book suppliers of the world, was used as the data gathering tool. After the studies for improving the reliability and validity of the questionnaire, a questionnaire form with 16 items was obtained. 634 questionnaires were sent to graduate students via e-mail, 130 of them were sent back and 125 questionnaires were evaluated for the study. Concerning all the data, it was concluded that majority of the graduate students are aware of the comfort of the e-resources and prefer to use these resources academically.


Coal-fired power plants are considered a major source of criteria air pollutants. The existence of such activities close to densely populated areas has an impact on human health and more generally on the environment. The impact of a pollutant typically depends on its residence time and the existence of background concentration levels. This study evaluates the dispersion of PM2.5, SO2 and NOX emissions from Eskom power plants (Arnot, Hendrina, and Komati) located close to KwaZamokuhle Township. AERMOD was used to assess the contribution of each plant to the air quality of the township. This steady-state dispersion model was used to simulate surface concentrations (1-hour, 24-hour and annual average concentrations) on a 50km domain for 2015-2017. The modelled results together with data obtained from Eskom's KwaZamokuhle monitoring site were used to estimate the extent to which these power plants contribute to the ambient air quality of KwaZamokuhle Township. The results confirm that the power plants do contribute to concentrations of PM2.5, SO2, and NOx in the ambient air of the township. However, based on a comparison between the modelled and monitored data, it was inferred that power plants are not the only significant source of these criteria pollutants. Evidence from temporal variations in the monitored data shows that domestic burning is likely the major contributor since the variability is more closely associated with burning habits. It is therefore likely that existing regulatory strategies that focus mostly on the industrial sector may not be successful in improving ambient air quality in low-income settlements like KwaZamokuhle.


To embrace the imminent transition from traditional low-contrast video (LDR) content to superior high dynamic range (HDR) content, we propose a novel backward compatible HDR video compression (HDR MPEG) method. We introduce a compact reconstruction function that is used to decompose an HDR video stream into a residual stream and a standard LDR stream, which can be played on existing MPEG decoders, such as DVD players. The reconstruction function is finely tuned to the content of each HDR frame to achieve strong decorrelation between the LDR and residual streams, which minimizes the amount of redundant information. The size of the residual stream is further reduced by removing invisible details prior to compression using our HDR-enabled filter, which models luminance adaptation, contrast sensitivity, and visual masking based on the HDR content. Designed especially for DVD movie distribution, our HDR MPEG compression method features low storage requirements for HDR content resulting in a 30% size increase to an LDR video sequence. The proposed compression method does not impose restrictions or modify the appearance of the LDR or HDR video. This is important for backward compatibility of the LDR stream with current DVD appearance, and also enables independent fine tuning, tone mapping, and color grading of both streams.


Donald Ritchie here offers a vibrant chronicle of news coverage in our nation's capital, from the early days of radio and print reporting and the heyday of the wire services to the brave new world of the Internet. Beginning with 1932, when a newly elected FDR energized the sleepy capital, Ritchie highlights the dramatic changes in journalism that have occurred in the last seven decades. We meet legendary columnists-including Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop, and Drew Pearson (voted "the best ratcatching reporter in town")-as well as the great investigative reporters, from Paul Y. Anderson (who broke the Teapot Dome scandal) to the two green Washington Post reporters who launched the political story of the decade-Woodward and Bernstein. We read of the rise of radio news-fought tooth and nail by the print barons-and of such pioneers as Edward R. Murrow, H. V. Kaltenborn, and Elmer Davis. Ritchie also offers a vivid history of TV news, from the early days of Meet the Press, to Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite, to the cable revolution led by C-SPAN and CNN. In addition, he compares political news on the Internet to the alternative press of the '60s and '70s; describes how black reporters slowly broke into the white press corps (helped mightily by FDR's White House); discusses path-breaking woman reporters such as Sarah McClendon and Helen Thomas, and much more. From Walter Winchell to Matt Drudge, the people who cover Washington politics are among the most colorful and influential in American news. Reporting from Washington offers an unforgettable portrait of these figures as well as of the dramatic changes in American journalism in the twentieth century.


MS (mass spectrometry) has been developed as an important analytical tool to study large molecules including polymer macromolecules and proteins. Its instrumentation technique including ionization methods, mass analyzer and detector systems has been greatly improved from last century to present. Bio-molecules and organic macromolecules tend to be fragile and fragment when they are ionized by conventional ionization methods. ESI (electrospray ionization) and MALDI (matrix assisted laser desorption/ionization) are two relatively tender ionization methods and suitable for the ionization of big molecules. The study on mechanism surround these two ionization methods is a hot issue. For MALDI, one wants to figure out what exactly happens when the laser irradiates the analyte, where in-plume reaction occurs. As an example, the photo-triggered reaction can induce the fragmentation of peptides or proteins. Proteolysis is a key step for proteomic study especially bottom-up proteomic strategy. Porous materials have been developed in last decades. The catalysis of porous materials to enzymatic reaction is a hot issue, and has been demonstrated in much published works. But the mechanism of how different porous materials affect the reaction is not completely clear yet. We compared several different porous material influences for the reaction efficiencies. A kinetic model was proposed to explain and foresee the proteolysis. The model was verified by integrated CE (capillary electrophoresis)/MS detection system, where a custom-designed CE-MS interface was utilized to collect the fraction of digests for off-line MALDI TOF (time-of-flight) MS analysis. From an instrumental point, we then introduce Al-foil as disposable and once-used MALDI-target substitute, by which the sample preparation for MALDI TOF MS analysis is greatly simplified. The regeneration procedure of typical target in each run and attrition of target-plate can be neglected after holding this Al-foil on a commercially available target plate. This substrate provides comparable detection limits (LOD) of protein and digests (peptides) as the typical stainless steel MALDI target plate. The pliability of Al-foil makes it easy to be printed. While nano-scale semiconductor materials such as TiO2 have been widely used for dye-sensitized solar cell study. Following the MALDI target holder study, TiO2 nanoparticles were prepared as optimized ink and fabricated on the Al-foil via screen- and rotogravure- printing procedures. The woven mesh and engraved image carrier can be designed and controlled for different print pattern. The given apparatus here can provide two different TiO2 functionalized Al-foil. The functionalized foil then was then taken for the analysis of matrix free LDI (laser desorption ionization) and the study of protein phosphorylation, which is one of the most common and important protein post-translational modifications that occur in animal cells. Since the typical organic matrix interference always makes noise signals in low mass/charge on a mass spectrum, especially below 1000 or 700 Th, matrix free LDI is introduced to study the low mass molecules or small molecules. In this context, besides TiO2 nanoparticles, we also investigate CdSe semiconductor quantum dots, and electrochemically polymerized film of an aromatic diamine for the LDI analysis. A standard peptide was applied for the feasibility study of LDI based on these substrates. Semiconductor quantum dots are also hot target molecules for the dye-sensitized solar cell. By comparing the photocurrents on different quantum dots fabricated electrodes, the electron transfer process inside was simulated to understand the kinetics, which is also expected to guide the LDI study including the mechanism involved.


This article will describe the implementation of International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) in UN System Organizations and consider technically controversial issues such as revenue recognition in more detail. Based on the IPSAS financial statements of 24 UN System Organizations, the article provides an overview about current funding schemes and key issues related to conditional contributions. Results show a heterogeneous funding mix for UN System Organizations while, overall, voluntary contributions remain the most important revenue source. The main accounting implication arises from conditional voluntary contributions with specified performance obligations, requiring an entity to defer revenue and recognize a liability. Although all analysed UN System Organizations report under the same accounting principles, there exist differences in the level of information concerning conditional contributions and outstanding performance obligations. The article concludes that IPSAS bears the capacity to increase overall financial accountability and to trigger management debates about issues such as resource dependency, topics being discussed by other contributions in this special issue. Overall it is argued that IPSAS shall not be seen as a mere technical exercise, but as a management tool to ensure a flexible funding scheme to successfully achieve an entity's long-term objectives.


Background: Procalcitonin (PCT) is a marker for bacterial infection that can be used as a diagnostic tool to help distinguish viral from bacterial lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI). LRTI is a leading cause of illness in pediatrics worldwide. Most LRTIs in pediatrics are due to viral causes, yet conservative clinical guidelines advise empiric antibiotic therapy because there is no reliable method to determine the etiology of the illness. With the increasing threat of antibiotic resistance, efforts are underway to decrease the use of antibiotics. PCT-guided antibiotic therapy has shown a reduction in the use of antibiotics for adult LRTI. Can PCT-guided antibiotic treatment of LRTIs in a pediatric population reduce the antibiotic therapy duration rate or prescription rate with comparable outcomes to current therapy guidelines? Method: An exhaustive search was conducted using Medline-OVID, CINAHL, and Web of Science using the keywords: procalcitonin, antibiotic, pediatrics, and lower respiratory tract infection. A search on the NIH clinical trials site revealed that there are no trials currently registered relating to the use of PCT-guided antibiotic therapy in pediatrics with lower respiratory tract infections. GRADE was used to assess the quality of relevant articles. Results: Included in this systematic review were two studies that met inclusion criteria. A randomized, multi-center clinical trial with 337 participants demonstrated a statistically significant reduction in the duration of antibiotic therapy, but an increase in the antibiotic prescription rate overall when applying PCT-guided antibiotic therapy. A randomized, single-center clinical trial with 310 participants demonstrated a statistically significant reduction in the duration of antibiotic therapy and antibiotic prescription rate when PCT-guided antibiotic therapy was applied. Conclusion: PCT-guided antibiotic therapy has been shown to reduce the duration of antibiotic therapy. Furthermore, it is suggested that in less severe LRTI PCT-guided antibiotic therapy can reduce antibiotic prescription rates in a pediatric population. More randomized control trials are needed to increase the statistical power behind these findings. There was no evidence of increased risk of disease-specific adverse events. At this time PCT-guided therapy is recommended to reduce the duration of antibiotic therapy. Degree Type Capstone Project Degree Name Master of Science in Physician Assistant Studies First Advisor David Keene, MPAS, PA-C


95 Iuliana-Maria Nicorescu 40 Ficusului Blvd, 1st District, 013975, Bucharest, Romania e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com Abstract. Myelodysplastic syndromes represent clonal diseases of hematopoietic stem cells that occur predominantly in elderly people, but myelodysplastic syndromes can affect younger patients as well. Myelodysplastic syndromes are characterized by ineffective hematopoiesis, causing different forms of cytopenia in peripheral blood, contrasting normal or hypercellular bone marrow. Although less known, due to its absence from current clinical practice or in the prognostic score, molecular analysis could bring a significant contribution in the early diagnosis of disease. In this respect, the latest studies (2011) show that this type of analysis is of great importance in terms of input added to the pathogenic mechanisms of the Myelodysplastic syndromes subtypes establishment, with high conversion. Furthermore, the analysis serves elect the optimal timing for the initiation of specific therapy.


This document specifies the Forwarding and Control Element Separation (ForCES) protocol. ForCES protocol is used for communications between Control Elements(CEs) and Forwarding Elements (FEs) in a ForCES Network Element (ForCES NE). This specification is intended to meet the ForCES protocol requirements defined in RFC3654. Besides the ForCES protocol messages, the specification also defines the framework, the mechanisms, and the Transport Mapping Layer (TML) requirements for ForCES protocol.


Mycobacterium tuberculosis has the remarkable capacity to survive within the hostile environment of the macrophage, and to resist potent antibacterial molecules such as reactive oxygen species (ROS). Thus, understanding mycobacterial resistance mechanisms against ROS may contribute to the development of new anti-tuberculosis therapies. Here we identified genes involved in such mechanisms by screening a high-density transposon mutant library, and we show that several of them are involved in the intracellular lifestyle of the pathogen. Many of these genes were found to play a part in cell envelope functions, further strengthening the important role of the mycobacterial cell envelope in protection against aggressions such as the ones caused by ROS inside host cells.


The expression of sexually dimorphic phenotypes from a shared genome between males and females is a longstanding puzzle in evolutionary biology. Increasingly, research has made use of transcriptomic technology to examine the molecular basis of sexual dimorphism through gene expression studies, but even this level of detail misses the metabolic processes that ultimately link gene expression with the whole organism phenotype. We use metabolic profiling in Drosophila melanogaster to complete this missing step, with a view to examining variation in male and female metabolic profiles, or metabolomes, throughout development. We show that the metabolome varies considerably throughout larval, pupal and adult stages. We also find significant sexual dimorphism in the metabolome, although only in pupae and adults, and the extent of dimorphism tends to increase throughout development. We compare this to transcriptomic data from the same population and find that the general pattern of increasing sex differences throughout development is mirrored in RNA expression. We discuss our results in terms of the usefulness of metabolic profiling in linking genotype and phenotype to more fully understand the basis of sexually dimorphic phenotypes.


This thesis investigates, both theoretically and experimentally, the phenomenon of ingress through gas turbine rim seals. The work presented focuses on modelling and measuring the required sealing flow levels to purge the wheelspace against combined ingress and the effect of externally-induced ingress on the surface temperature and heat transfer to the rotor. Combined ingress is driven by a pressure difference between the mainstream annulus and wheelspace cavity resulting from the combination of the asymmetric external pressure profile in the annulus and the rotation of fluid in the rotor-stator wheelspace cavity. Ingress can be prevented by pressurising the wheelspace through the supply of sealant flow. The Owen (2011b) combined ingress orifice model was solved to predict the required levels of sealant flow to prevent ingress into the wheelspace. The model was validated using prepublished data and data collected experimentally over the course of this research. Gas concentration measurements were made on the stator of the Bath single-stage gas turbine test rig to determine the variation of sealing effectiveness with sealant flow rate for an axial clearance seal geometry at design and off-design operational conditions. The measured variation of the required sealant flow rate with the ratio of the external and rotational Reynolds numbers, ReW / Reϕ, was consistent with the findings of other workers: at low values of ReW / Reϕ, ingress levels were influenced by the combined effects of the disc rotation and the annulus pressure profile and were therefore considered to fall into the combined ingress region; the influence of rotation diminished as ReW / Reϕ increased and the ingress levels were dominated by the annulus pressure field (externally-induced ingress). The orifice model was in good agreement with the experimental measurements and the prepublished experimental data. Thermochromic liquid crystal (TLC) was used to determine effect of ingress on the heat transfer coefficient, h, and adiabatic wall temperature, Tad, on the rotor of the Bath gas turbine rig. Concurrent gas concentration measurements were made on the stator to compare the effects of ingress on the two discs. Data was collected at the design condition, where ReW / Reϕ = 0.538 and at an overspeed off-design condition, where ReW / Reϕ = 0.326. The comparison between a newly defined adiabatic effectiveness, ead, on the rotor and the concentration effectiveness, ec, on the stator, showed that the rotor was protected against the effects of ingress relative to the stator. The sealing air, which is drawn into the rotor boundary layer from the source region, thermally buffers the rotor against the ingested fluid in the core. A thermal buffer ratio, η, was defined as the ratio of the minimum sealant flow required to purge the stator against ingress to the minimum sealant flow required to purge the rotor against ingress. The thermal buffer is dependent upon the flow structure in the wheelspace, which itself is governed the turbulent flow parameter, λT. A hypothesis relating η to λT was developed and shown to be in good agreement with the experimental data. The local Nusselt numbers, Nur, on the rotor were shown to be fairly constant with radius and increased as λT was increased. The latter finding can be explained by the flow structure in the wheelspace: as λT is raised, the swirl in the fluid core reduces, which results in an increase in the moment coefficient and Nur on the rotor. Difficulties in measuring Tad during the experiments suggested a new technique from which to solve for h and Tad using TLC surface temperature measurements. The solution Fourier's equation for a step-change in the temperature of a fluid flowing over a solid of semi-infinite thickness (the 'semi-infinite solution') is limited to relatively low Fourier numbers if Tad is to be calculated accurately. A two-layer composite substrate made from, for example, polycarbonate and Rohacell, could be used to achieve accurate estimates of h and Tad over a larger range of Biot numbers than for a single material substrate. TLC could be used to measure the surface temperature history of the composite substrate during an experiment; this would allow h and Tad to be solved from the numerical solution of Fourier's equation or from a combination of the semi-infinite and steady-state solutions. The work presented in this thesis has uncovered some interesting findings in areas where research was limited. The measurements of the minimum sealant flow required to purge the wheelspace at off-design operation for a rotor-stator system with blades and vanes and the measurements of the adiabatic effectiveness on a rotating disc affected by ingress are unique and provide a platform for further experimental studies and validation of CFD models.


Molecular devices made of nucleic acids can perform complex information processing tasks at the nanoscale, with potential applications in biofabrication and smart therapeutics. However, limitations in the speed and scalability of such devices in a well-mixed setting can significantly affect their performance. In this article, we propose designs for localized circuits involving DNA molecules that are arranged on addressable substrates and interact via hybridization reactions. We propose designs for localized elementary logic circuits, which we compose to produce more complex devices, including a circuit for computing the square root of a four bit number. We develop an efficient method for probabilistic model checking of localized circuits, which we implement within the Visual DSD design tool. We use this method to prove the correctness of our circuits with respect to their functional specifications and to analyze their performance over a broad range of local rate parameters. Specifically, we analyze the extent to which our localized designs can overcome the limitations of well-mixed circuits, with respect to speed and scalability. To provide an estimate of local rate parameters, we propose a biophysical model of localized hybridization. Finally, we use our analysis to identify constraints in the rate parameters that enable localized circuits to retain their advantages in the presence of unintended interferences between strands.


We report a new algorithm and measurement system that permits simultaneous monitoring of the hematocrit and plasma volume fraction of blood within the intravascular space of an optically probed volume of skin. The system involves probing with a near infrared laser and simultaneously collecting the Rayleigh and Mie scattered light as one raw signal and the undifferentiated Raman and fluorescence emission as the second raw signal. Those two physically independent raw signals and six parameters that can be obtained by either direct calculation or empirical calibration permit monitoring of the blood in rat paws. We tested a device based on the algorithm in the context of improving detection of blood loss for people with an early undiagnosed internal hemorrhage via real-time monitoring of signal changes with direct correlation to hematocrit. We performed experiments monitoring rat paw skin in vivo while removing blood, centrally or peripherally, and then adding replacement fluids such as Normocarb and blood. Blood removal itself elicits a predictable and consistent response, decreasing hematocrit and increasing relative plasma volume, that depends on the rate and location of removal, the total amount of blood removed, the location of monitoring, and possibly other factors as yet unknown. Similarly, replacing the blood with whole blood vs. saline consistently produces a rational range of responses. Calibration across subjects and the measurement of absolute hematocrit will also be discussed.


Fossil fuels are used widely for energy production and are likely to continue to play a major role world wide for many years to come. Much work has been done on the technology for capturing CO₂ from gaseous industrial e ffluent. For large-scale applications like coal or natural gas-fired power plants, using amine solvents to capture post-combustion CO₂ is the most mature CO₂ capture technology. This technique can be used to retro fit existing plants by treating the flue gas after combustion. This thesis contains a dynamic mathematical model for the absorber column that can be used to include more detailed reaction chemistry for the absorption of CO₂ into an amine in the presence of O₂ as it becomes available. The dynamic model is constructed from first principles and, while it is built using MEA as the absorbent to remove CO₂, it can be adjusted to cater for the removal of different industrial gases with various absorbents. The model is solved using a commercial solver, MATLAB Ode15s when reduced to a system of ODE's by finite difference in the spatial dimension. The flux of MEA, CO₂, O₂ and H₂O across the phase interface in either direction has been included and more components can be added as required. The loss of MEA through oxidative degradation has been quantified which is currently not available using commercial packages. Reaction rate kinetics have been employed to predict the accumulation of oxidation products which is limited by the incomplete knowledge of the dominant reactions between O₂ and MEA. When research has produced more detailed information about the products formed during this oxidation, it can be inserted easily into the model. Validation has been performed using data from the CSIRO PCC pilot plant at AGL Loy Yang. A limited parametric study of the impact of operating conditions on oxidation was performed.


As apprentices in the software, hardware and embedded systems industries, we wondered whether the type of product had an impact on documentation. After collecting the existing literature on the subject, we sent a questionnaire to technical writers with hands-on experience in order to learn more about their methods and skills. Their answers on the subject underlined that having direct access to the product is essential, but that the methods and skills are different depending on the type of product documented. Indeed, for security reasons, hardware industry documents contain more legal requirements than software documents and have a different documentation structure. The type of deliverables and whether the product is published online or in hardcopy depend on how the product is used on site. Terminology and syntax, the illustration workload, and project management methods are also discussed in this article.


This study examines the effect of parents' aspirations on children's educational outcomes using data from the Young Lives study in Andhra Pradesh in India. It contributes to the sparse literature on this topic by first testing the overall impact of aspirations, and second, by uncovering any non-linearities of this effect. Through the channel of children's aspirationsfor-self, parental aspirations affect future-oriented behaviour and outcomes. This study estimates these impacts by exploring the effect of deviations from the average aspirations within the parents' "aspiration window" (Ray 2006) on the outcome variables at three time periods. The results provide support for the idea of an aspirations gap where both the extent and the direction of the deviation are likely to have differing effects on outcomes. Findings imply that higher aspirations are beneficial for both outcomes, although outcomes are potentially impacted in a non-linear fashion.


Metabolism of inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate (I(1,4,5)P3) results in the production of diverse arrays of inositol polyphosphates (IPs), such as IP4, IP5, IP6, and PP-IP5. Insights into their synthesis in metazoans are reported here through molecular studies in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Two I(1,4,5)P3 kinase gene products are implicated in initiating catabolism of these important IP regulators. We find dmIpk2 is a nucleocytoplasmic 6-/3-kinase that converts I(1,4,5)P3 to I(1,3,4,5,6)P5, and harbors 5-kinase activity toward I(1,3,4,6)P4, and dmIP3K is a 3-kinase that converts I(1,4,5)P3 to I(1,3,4,5)P4. To assess their relative roles in the cellular production of IPs we utilized complementation analysis, RNA interference, and overexpression studies. Heterologous expression of dmIpk2, but not dmIP3K, in ipk2 mutant yeast recapitulates phospholipase C-dependent cellular synthesis of IP6. Knockdown of dmIpk2 in Drosophila S2 cells and transgenic flies results in a significant reduction of IP6 levels; whereas depletion of dmIP3K, either α or β isoforms or both, does not decrease IP6 synthesis but instead increases its production, possibly by expanding I(1,4,5)P3 pools. Similarly, knockdown of an I(1,4,5)P3 5-phosphatase results in significant increase in dmIpk2/dmIpk1-dependent IP6 synthesis. IP6 production depends on the I(1,3,4,5,6)P5 2-kinase activity of dmIpk1 and is increased in transgenic flies overexpressing dmIpk2. Our studies reveal that phosphatase and kinase regulation of I(1,4,5)P3 metabolic pools directly impinge on higher IP synthesis, and that the major route of IP6 synthesis depends on the activities of dmIpk2 and dmIpk1, but not dmIP3K, thereby challenging the role of IP3K in the genesis of higher IP messengers.


Abstract One of the first post-focus instruments of the new solar telescope GREGOR will be a Fabry-Perot spectrometer, which is an upgrade of the Göttingen Fabry-Perot interferometer at the Vacuum Tower Telescope (VTT) on Tenerife. This spectrometer is equipped with a full-Stokes polarimeter. The modulation is performed with two ferroelectric liquid crystals, one acting nominally as quarter-wave plate, and the other as half-wave plate. A modified Savart plate serves as polarimetric beam splitter. With the present liquid crystals, the optimum wavelength range of this polarimeter is between 580 and 660 nm. The spectro-polarimeter will benefit from the capabilities of the new telescope GREGOR which will provide a spatial resolution of about 0″.1 (75 km on the solar surface). Thus we will be able to investigate small magnetic features, and we will study their development with high cadence.


Phytoestrogens, largely formononetin and genistein, are produced in the leaves of stunted desert annuals in a dry year. When ingested by California quail, these compounds apparently inhibit reproduction and prevent the production of young that will not have adequate food. In a wet year, forbs grow vigorously and phytoestrogenic substances are largely absent. Quail then breed prolifically and the abundant seed crop carries the enlarged population through the winter.


The applications of the Knowledge-Based engineering has emerged as a potential technique for incorporating human expertise and some degree of intelligent judgment into decision-supporting procedures. An Expert Knowledge Base (EKB) methodology to estimate the volume and hydrograph of direct surface runoff from rain events using Soil Conservation Service (SCS) Curve Number method is developed and discussed here. The EKB approach is designed to determine runoff curve numbers even if only limited information on watershed characteristics is available, estimate rainfall intensity of the geographic location for specific duration and return period, and to use the curve number and rainfall intensity estimates for calculating runoff volume, peak runoff and time-to-peak. Rainfall intensity estimation is performed based on four regional rainfall parameters corresponding to a given geographic location. Currently, regional parameters of 1566 towns across twelve Midwestern states including Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin are compiled in the knowledge base.


Composed of a core set of two drums and two gongs, p'ungmul is a South Korean tradition of rural folk percussion. Steeped in music, dance, theater, and pageantry, but centrally focused on rhythm, such ensembles have been an integral part of village life in South Korea for centuries, serving as a musical accompaniment in the often overlapping and shifting contexts of labor, ritual, and entertainment. The first book to introduce Korean drumming and dance to the English-speaking world, Nathan Hesselink's "P'ungmul" offers detailed descriptions of its instrumentation, dance formations, costuming, actors, teaching lineages, and the complexities of training. Hesselink also evaluates how this tradition has taken on new roles and meanings in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, investigating the interrelated, yet contested spheres of history, memory, government policy, grassroots politics, opportunities for musical transmission, and performance practices and aesthetics. "P'ungmul" offers those interested in ethnomusicology, world music, anthropology, sociology, and Asian studies a special glimpse into the inner workings of a historically rich, artistically complex, and aesthetically and aurally beautiful Korean musical and dance tradition.


The endemicity of several parasitic diseases across the globe and recent evidence of distress among COVID-19 patients with preexisting parasitic infections requires strengthening One Health framework and advanced strategies for parasitic detection. Owing to the greater sensitivity and accuracy, molecular technologies such as conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR), reverse transcription (RT)-PCR, nested PCR, loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), and xMAP technology have been extensively studied for parasitic diagnosis. Varieties of genes have been targeted for primer development where 18S rRNA, internal transcribed spacer regions, and mitochondrial DNAs coding for cytochrome, and other enzymes have been widely used. More recent, low-cost sequencing and advances in big data management have resulted in a slow but steady rise of next-generation sequencing-based approaches for parasite diagnosis. However, except for few parasites of global concerns such as Plasmodium and Entamoeba, most of the molecular tools and technologies are yet to witness bench to bedside and field translations. This review looks into some of the advancements in the molecular diagnosis of parasites that have potential relevance to clinical purposes and may pave the way toward disease management in an efficient and timely manner.


In this paper, classification of mammograms for breast cancer detection based on Discrete Curvelet Transform (DCT) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) is proposed. The mammogram patches are first filtered by Column wise neighborhood operations Filter (COLFILT). Enhanced patches are further decomposed into four sub-bands by using DCT. Dense Scale Invariant Feature Transform (DSIFT) method is use to extract the six rotation and scale invariant features for all the sub-bands. By using these sub-bands of all the patches, a feature matrix is created that is further processed by MLP for classification. The proposed method is tested using the Image Retrieval in Medical Application (IRMA) dataset. Numerical validation results and graph shows the significance of proposed scheme as compared to state of art existing schemes.


"Human Anatomy Laboratory Manual" by Christine Eckel is a hands-on learning tool designed to guide students through human anatomy concepts through observation, touch, dissection, and practical activities such as sketching, labeling, and coloring. Exquisite dissection photographs capture anatomical details, and a student-friendly writing style uses relevant examples to engage students in concept application. It focuses on human specimens, and also includes common animal specimens such as cow eye, sheep brain, and sheep heart. This manual was expressly written to supplement and expand upon content covered in the lecture course, not to repeat it. It accompanies McKinley/O'Loughlin "Human Anatomy" 3rd edition, but is also a stand alone product that works well with any 1-semester human anatomy text.


Title of dissertation: ASSESSING FIT OF LATENT CLASS MODELS TO COMPLEX SURVEY DATA: IMPLICATIONS FOR DRUG USE RESEARCH Carrie Elizabeth Markovitz, Doctor of Philosophy, 2003 Dissertation directed by: Professor C. Mitchell Dayton Department of Measurement, Statistics and Evaluation Simple random sampling is an assumption when using fit statistics to fit latent class (LC) models to data. However, LC models are often fit to datasets collected through complex survey sampling methods that may result in inaccurate estimates of standard errors, parameter estimates and fit statistics. This study examined how various comparison tests functioned for latent class models when using complex survey data. The motivation for this research is the issue of reported drug use patterns and whether changes in drug use have occurred over time. This issue was investigated using reported drug use data from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) for 1979 and 1988. Monte Carlo simulations were used to determine how well the various model comparison statistics (chi-square, AIC, BIC, RIC and Wald statistic) functioned for a variety of complex sample designs. In addition, a simulation based on the NHSDA data was used to answer the research question: Do patterns of reported drug use show change over time? The model comparison statistics were most accurate when sample sizes were large and item-specific error rates were low. Intraclass correlation, an indicator of how similar individuals are within the same cluster, appeared to have little effect on the accuracy of the model comparison statistics. Statistics were not as accurate when sampling from unequally weighted groups. The chi-square statistics and AIC were recommended for use with complex survey data based on their high rates of accuracy. More caution was recommended when using BIC and RIC. Results indicated that reported drug use patterns changed between 1979 and 1988. Most patterns of reported drug use increased slightly, with the exception of respondents characterized by alcohol and tobacco use alone that decreased substantially. ASSESSING FIT OF LATENT CLASS MODELS TO COMPLEX SURVEY DATA: IMPLICATIONS FOR DRUG USE RESEARCH


This book provides a comprehensive study of hedging in academic research papers, relating a systematic analysis of forms to a pragmatic explanation for their use. Based on a detailed examination of journal articles and interviews with research scientists, the study shows that the extensive use of possibility and tentativeness in research writing is intimately connected to the social and institutional practices of academic communities and is at the heart of how knowledge comes to be socially accredited through texts. The study identifies the major forms, functions and distribution of hedges and explores the research article genre in detail to present an explanatory framework based on a complex social and ideological interpretive environment. The results show that hedging is central to Scientific argument, individual scientists and, ultimately, to science itself. The importance of hedging to student writers is also recognised and a chapter devoted to teaching implications.


Cancer Researchers Observe How the Immune System Recognizes and Responds to Cancer Using positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center were able to observe - in real time - how the immune system initially recognizes cancer and mobilizes to fight the disease. The UCLA study is expected to lead to new ways to test immune-based therapies for cancer and other immune system-related diseases and to monitor human response to cancer treatments much more quickly and without the need for invasive biopsies, said Dr. Owen Witte, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher, a professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics and the study's senior author. The study appeared in the Nov. 29, 2005 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and will be published in an early online edition this week. "This study is teaching us about how the immune system recognizes cancer. That's something we couldn't see before," said Witte, who also serves as director of the UCLA Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. "We were able to watch the primary immune response, the very first reaction of the immune system to the presence of cancer in body. This gives us a new tool that will allow us to evaluate novel ways to help the immune system become better at finding and eliminating cancer as well as studying autoimmune and immune deficiency disorders." In the study, Witte and his team removed bone marrow from a laboratory animal and marked all the cells that would be derived from the bone marrow stem cells with two radioactive probes that can be detected by PET scan. Because they use different probes that show cell functions in different ways, the research team is able to see more of what was going on in the immune system as it fought cancer, Witte said. The bone marrow was then put into a different laboratory animal and cancer was introduced so researchers could monitor the immune response - the movement and behavior of lymphocytes and myeloid cells, the cells the immune system uses to fight foreign invaders. "We were able to observe the moment that the immune system sees the foreign antigens of the cancer in the body and its response, which starts in the local draining lymph nodes," Witte said. "We saw an increased number of lymphocytes and myeloid cells in those lymph nodes, then saw them migrating to the tumor in an attempt to kill the cancer." One of the probes used to mark the immune system cells and monitor them under PET scan, the agent FDG, already is approved for use in humans, Witte said. This could prove valuable in monitoring human response to immune-based therapies such as cancer vaccines. Researchers could use FDG and PET scanning, for example, on a patient receiving an experimental cancer vaccine. Researchers could determine much more quickly whether the therapy was working by monitoring immune response in real time. "We could see much sooner if the therapy was effective, without the need for a biopsy," Witte said. "We would also know very rapidly, within a week or two. Prior to this, we had to wait many months to find out if a therapy was working." Jonsson Cancer Center researchers testing a melanoma vaccine will be collaborating with Witte and his team to monitor immune response in those study volunteers, Witte said. If the therapy is not working, the volunteers would not have to undergo months of unsuccessful treatment and could potentially find another therapy to try. PET scanning, developed by UCLA scientist Michael Phelps, is a highly sensitive detection method that provides three-dimensional information within the body. The probes used in this study are labeled with positron-emitting radioisotopes, which allow researchers to measure the rates of biochemical processes in the tissue, processes such as immune response. "Many of the problems in evaluating immunotherapy protocols stem from the lack of effective tools to follow the extent and duration of response to treatment," the study states. "In this study, we have demonstrated a strategy to monitor a specific primary immune response against a tumor challenge." UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center comprises more than 240 researchers and clinicians engaged in research, prevention, detection, control, treatment and education. One of the nation's largest comprehensive cancer centers, the Jonsson center is dedicated to promoting research and translating the results into leading-edge clinical studies. In July 2005, the Jonsson Cancer Center was named the best cancer center in the western United States by U.S. News & World Report, a ranking it has held for six consecutive years.


A sweeping, epic history of the Renaissance artists, seen through the lens of something that perhaps occupied their thoughts and influenced their art the most...sex. Taking Donatello's provocative reinvention of the nude as his starting point, Jonathan shows how the story of the Renaissance is the story of a sexual revolution. The great artists of the 15th and 16th century were not just visionaries, but lovers. Jonathan argues that the famous nudes of Michelangelo and Titian are not abstract images of ideal beauty, but erotic expressions of love and desire; and that in order to understand the Renaissance, we have to understand the sex lives of the men and women who defined it - men like Raphael, who obsessively painted his lover La Fornarina in the nude, Michelangelo, who made beautiful drawings of naked male bodies to present to the young man he adored, and Rembrandt, whose bedroom portraits of Hendrickje Stoffels are the frankest expressions of love anywhere in art.Sweeping from its origins in Florence in the mid-15th century to its culmination in the work of Rubens and Rembrandt in the 17th, The Loves of the Artistsshows that the Renaissance invented eroticism as we know it, and that the new ways of thinking about sex it engendered are crucial to understanding not only art but European culture as a whole.


This work presents blind joint interference suppression and power allocation algorithms for DS-CDMA networks with multiple relays and decode and forward protocols. A scheme for joint allocation of power levels across the relays subject to group-based power constraints and the design of linear receivers for interference suppression is proposed. A code-constrained constant modulus (CCM) design for the receive filters and the power allocation vectors is devised along with a blind channel estimator. In order to solve the proposed optimization efficiently, an alternating optimization strategy is presented with recursive least squares (RLS)-type algorithms for estimating the parameters of the receiver, the power allocation and the channels. Simulations show that the proposed algorithms obtain significant gains in capacity and performance over existing schemes.


This paper describes the organizational processes of knowledge acquisition, sharing, retention and utilisation as it affected the internal and external communication of knowledge about performance in an English police force. The research was gathered in three workshops for internal personnel, external stakeholders and chief officers, using Journey Making, a computer-assisted method of developing shared understanding. The research concluded that there are multiple audiences for the communication of knowledge about police performance, impeded by the requirement to publish performance data. However, the intelligence-led policing model could lead to a more focused means of communication with various stakeholder groups. Although technology investment was a preferred means of communicating knowledge about performance, without addressing cultural barriers, an investment in technology may not yield the appropriate changes in behaviour. Consequently, technology needs to be integrated with working practices in order to reduce organizational reliance on informal methods of communication.


The present study compares (1) monolingual English vs. French adults and children and (2) simultaneous French-English bilingual children who describe caused motion events. The results concerning L1 speakers showed developmental progressions in both languages, e.g., utterance complexity increases with age. However, response patterns differed considerably across languages in that responses were denser and more compact in English than in French. The results concerning bilingual children showed unidirectional crosslinguistic interactions. Responses elicited in English paralleled monolingual developmental patterns, whereas bilinguals' French productions differed from those of monolingual French peers. The findings suggest that bilingual children transfer lexicalisation patterns from one of their languages to the other when the former provides more transparent means of achieving high semantic density.


Differential scanning calorimetry was used to study the phase behavior of binary lipid bilayers consisting of phosphatidylcholine (PC) and phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) of varying acyl chain length. A two-state transition model was used to resolve the individual transition components, and the two-state transition enthalpy, the relative enthalpy, and the transition temperature of each component were plotted as a function of composition. Intriguingly, abrupt changes in these thermodynamic parameters were observed at or close to many "critical" X(PE) values predicted by the superlattice model proposing that phospholipids with different headgroups tend to adopt regular rather than random lateral distributions. Statistical analysis indicated that the agreement between the observed and predicted "critical" compositions is highly significant. Accordingly, these data provide strong evidence that the molecules in PC/PE bilayers tend to adopt regular, superlattice-like lateral arrangements, which could be involved in the regulation of the lipid compositions of biological membranes.


This paper is written in Spanish. The main challenge today's civil society organizations face is adaptation to a rapidly changing task environment. We currently witness a globalization of both problems and solutions. Why? Basically, this is the consequence of the intensification of worldwide social relations, linking distant localities evermore tightly. Much of this interdependence is asymmetric. Among other things, interconnectedness and rapid information flows also lead to the emergence of a global consciousness and new mental models that serve to organize groups of actors through shared concepts such as social entrepreneurship, the bottom-of-the-pyramid or microfinance. This paper analyzes four organizational adaptation strategies to a changing task environment: focus on core competence, single-issue integration, functional integration, and concentration on interface management. The closing section outlines the implications of these trends for donors.


The notion of ``policy regret'' in online learning is supposed to capture the reactions of the adversary to the actions taken by the learner, which more traditional notions such as external regret do not take into account. We revisit this notion of policy regret, and first show that there are online learning settings in which policy regret and external regret are incompatible: any sequence of play which does well with respect to one must do poorly with respect to the other. We then focus on the game theoretic setting, when the adversary is a self-interested agent. In this setting we show that the external regret and policy regret are not in conflict, and in fact that a wide class of algorithms can ensure both as long as the adversary is also using such an algorithm. We also define a new notion of equilibrium which we call a ``policy equilibrium'', and show that no-policy regret algorithms will have play which converges to such an equilibrium. Relating this back to external regret, we show that coarse correlated equilibria (which no-external regret players will converge to) are a strict subset of policy equilibria. So in game-theoretic settings every sequence of play with no external regret also has no policy regret, but the converse is not true.


© 2017 World Obesity Federation Subsequent to the publication, several errors have been found in the paper and can be corrected as follows: The labelling on the studies in Figure 2 is incorrect. The referencing in Table 1 is inconsistent with the manuscript reference list. The correct Figure 2 and Table are shown here. 2 (Figure presented.) Effect on child physical activity from random effects meta-analysis of eligible studies. Overview of characteristics of 47 studies included in systematic review of family-based physical activity promotion (Table presented.) #Corresponds with a significant, positive change in outcome (see Supplementary Table 1 for full details) +Singapore, Mexico, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, Germany *Some studies employed both subjective and objective methods to measure physical activity †Some studies employed more than one intervention strategy.


Excerpt] If you went looking for the "new frontier" of the American labor movement, Alachua, Florida, would hardly be your first stop. To Yankee snowbirds whizzing by on Interstate 75, heading south to Walt Disney World or the Gold Coast's beaches, Alachua is an exit in the middle of nowhere. A true hole-in-theroad. It's located 8 miles northwest of Gainesville, on the southern edge of Florida's panhandle. This is the Bible Belt. Farm country. It's also "Gator Country," as the billboards along U.S. 441 scream out, referring in this case to University of Florida football, although the four-legged kind also inhabit the swamps and marshes. In 1962, when the General Electric Company was looking for a place to build an assembly plant for its new line of rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries, Alachua seemed to be the perfect choice. It had all the right ingredients: cheap land, low taxes, and a struggling farm economy to supply a minimum-wage workforce. Florida's Right-to-Work law and 13% unionization rate would help avoid union problems. Today, GE must be wondering what went wrong. IBEW Local 2156 has 780 members out of 959 hourly employees at the plant—a remarkable 81% in a Right-To-Work state. Wages are comparable to unionized GE plants in other parts of the country. Alachua produced one thing that GE never expected: one hell of a local union. IBEW 2156 has accomplished this feat by pioneering a new and innovative technique — the On-The-Job Canvass (OTJC) — that proponents hope will help revitalize the American labor movement. The combination of new techniques, old-fashioned dedication, and leaders who are not afraid of either one has put this local on the cutting edge of the labor movement in the 1980s.


David H. Perrin, PhD, ATC* • Evan V. Hellwig, PT, ATC* Laurie L. Tis, MEd, ATC* • Byron S. Shenk, EdDt University of Virginia . ------------------This study examined the effect of gravity correction on concentric and eccentric average force of the right and left side shoulder rotator muscles and on the external/internal rotation reciprocal muscle group ratios. Thirty-three males were tested on a Kinetic Communicator dynamometer at 150 deg/sec from a seated position with the shoulder abducted to 90 deg and positioned along the frontal plane. Gravity correction procedures were followed prior to testing, and both the gravity-uncorrected (GU) and gravity-corrected (GC) values were obtained from the dynamometer's software. Paired t-tests indicated the gravity correction procedure increased every value obtained during external rotation and decreased all values obtained during internal rotation. Also, the concentric and eccentric external/internal rotation reciprocal muscle group ratios were all higher as a result of the gravity correction procedure. These findings were consistent with previous reports on the effect of gravity correction on lower extremity muscle groups. In particular, gravity correction significantly added to the muscle group opposed by gravity (external rotators) and detracted from the muscle group assisted by gravity (internal rotators). Therefore correction for the effects of gravity is recommended during isokinetic assessment of the shoulder internal and external rotator muscle groups.


We propose a measure of order in the context of nonequilibrium field theory and argue that this measure, which we call relative configurational entropy (RCE), may be used to quantify the emergence of coherent low-entropy configurations, such as time-dependent or time-independent topological and nontopological spatially-extended structures. As an illustration, we investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of spontaneous symmetry-breaking in three spatial dimensions. In particular, we focus on a model where a real scalar field, prepared initially in a symmetric thermal state, is quenched to a broken-symmetric state. For a certain range of initial temperatures, spatially-localized, long-lived structures known as oscillons emerge in synchrony and remain until the field reaches equilibrium again. We show that the RCE correlates with the number-density of oscillons, thus offering a quantitative measure of the emergence of nonperturbative spatiotemporal patterns that can be generalized to a variety of physical systems.


The creation of open-source terrorist and extremist crime databases has led to a more complete understanding of violence committed by members of the extreme far-right movement in the United States. Yet, important questions remain about how serious forms of extremist violence in the United States compare with far-right violence in other nations, which are also facing this type of threat to homeland security. The current study draws from structured action theory of extremist violence and extends an open-source methodology for the purposes of making cross-national comparisons of incident-, offender-, and victim-level characteristics of extreme far-right homicide in the United States and Germany. Despite some similarities, such as in offender race, legal outcomes, and places where homicides occurred, we find several key differences in the nature of extreme far-right homicide across these two countries. In particular, we find differences in geographic and temporal patterns as well as offender and victim demographic and background characteristics. We conclude our study by considering how the unique social, political, and economic contexts of the United States and Germany over the last 25 years serve to shape our findings.


In this study, we investigate the susceptibility of Candida albicans, Candida glabrata, Candida krusei, Candida parapsilosis, Candida tropicalis, and Aspergillus fumigatus using the EUCAST microdilution minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) method (final tea supernatant concentration range 5.0-0.005 mg/ml) to 23 different teas and tea catechins including epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) isolated from green tea. All teas exhibited potent in vitro antifungal activity against C. glabrata. Six out of nine green teas and three of eight black teas had an MIC of 0.078 mg/ml, one white tea had an MIC of 0.156 mg/ml, and finally three of five oolong teas had an MIC of 0.156 mg/ml. Three teas exhibited activity against C. albicans (MIC 1.25 mg/ml), one green tea was active against C. parapsilosis (MIC 1.25 mg/ml), but none were effective against C. krusei, C. tropicalis or A. fumigatus at the concentrations tested. The MIC of EGCG was 0.3125 μg/ml against C. glabrata and 5.0 μg/ml against C. albicans and C. parapsilosis. The effect was fungicidal against C. glabrata at higher concentrations. In conclusion, EGCG and other yet undefined substances in tea have differential antifungal activity in vitro against C. glabrata, C. albicans and C. parapsilosis. These data indicate that components of tea and EGCG might be useful particularly for the treatment of C. glabrata infections and warrants further investigations.


The motivation for this paper is to predict the flow of water over exterior surfaces of road vehicles. We present simulations of liquid flows on solid surfaces under the influence of gravity with and without the addition of aerodynamic forces on the liquid. This is done using an implementation of a Coupled Level Set Volume of Fluid method (CLSVOF) multiphase approach implemented in the open source OpenFOAM CFD code. This is a high fidelity interface-resolving method that solves for the velocity field in both phases without restrictions on the flow regime. In the current paper the suitability of the approach to Exterior Water Management (EWM) is demonstrated using the representative test cases of a continuous liquid rivulet flowing along an inclined surface with a channel located downstream perpendicular to the oncoming flow. Experimental work has been carried out to record the motion of the rivulet in this case and also to measure the contact angle of the liquid with the solid surface. The measurements of the liquid/solid characteristics such as equilibrium and dynamic contact angles are described along with the analytical expression for contact angle vs. capillary
number used in the CFD code. The results from the simulations are compared to experimental measurements. The simulations are
carried out with air co-flows of 0, 0.5 and 10 m/s. The simulations are seen to reproduce physical phenomena such as the liquid pinning at sharp corners and the longitudinal stretching of the rivulet with higher air velocity.


Indigenous rice is worth conserving as it possesses many important traits such as good table quality for consumers, resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses and, especially, quality of starch. The objectives of this study were to evaluate indigenous rice accessions collected in Northeast Thailand and select the superior accessions for further improvement of indigenous rice. Forty indigenous rice accessions were evaluated in a pot experiment in a split-plot design with completely randomized arrangement of the treatments and four replications for two years in 2014 and 2015. Main plots were two water regimes, including well-irrigated treatment and early season drought treatment; the subplots included 40 indigenous rice accessions. Well-irrigated treatment was higher than early season drought condition in terms of plant height, number of tiller per plants, number of ears per plant, number of unfilled grains per ear, grain weight per plant, straw weight per plant and shoot dry weight per plant; drought treatment was higher than irrigated treatment in terms of the number of filled grains per plant, 1000-grain weight and root dry weight; whereas these two types of treatment showed no differences in terms of the number of tillers/plant at 30 days after emergence and harvest index. The superior genotypes for each trait and the genotypes with better drought tolerance index were


Reinforcement learning is effective in optimizing policies for recommender systems. Current solutions mostly focus on model-free approaches, which require frequent interactions with a real environment, and thus are expensive in model learning. Offline evaluation methods, such as importance sampling, can alleviate such limitations, but usually request a large amount of logged data and do not work well when the action space is large. In this work, we propose a model-based reinforcement learning solution which models the user-agent interaction for offline policy learning via a generative adversarial network. To reduce bias in the learnt policy, we use the discriminator to evaluate the quality of generated sequences and rescale the generated rewards. Our theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution in identifying patterns from given offline data and learning policies based on the offline and generated data.


This paper describes a novel framework to jointly learn data-dependent label and locality-preserving projections. Given a set of data instances from multiple classes, the proposed approach can automatically learn which classes are more similar to each other, and construct discriminative features using both labeled and unlabeled data to map similar classes to similar locations in a lower dimensional space. In contrast to linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and its variants, which can only return c-1 features for a problem with c classes, the proposed approach can generate d features, where d is bounded only by the number of the input features. We describe and evaluate the new approach both theoretically and experimentally, and compare its performance with other state of the art methods.


For autonomous vehicles to be able to operate successfully they need to be aware of other vehicles with sufficient time to make safe, stable plans. Given the possible closing speeds between two vehicles, this necessitates the ability to accurately detect distant vehicles. Many current image-based object detectors using convolutional neural networks exhibit excellent performance on existing datasets such as KITTI. However, the performance of these networks falls when detecting small (distant) objects. We demonstrate that incorporating radar data can boost performance in these difficult situations. We also introduce an efficient automated method for training data generation using cameras of different focal lengths.


This article examines issues of migrancy and socioeconomic disadvantage in present-day China with references to two cases involving the celebritization of migrant beggars and buskers. The first concerns Cheng Guorong, a 34-year-old vagrant beggar with mental health issues who became an international fashion icon known as "Brother Sharp" in 2010 after an amateur photographer posted candid photographs of him walking down a street on an internet forum. The second case involves two migrant buskers in Beijing who performed to an audience of around 1 billion viewers worldwide on China Central Television Station's annual Spring Festival Gala in 2011, after a friend posted a mobile phone video clip of them singing on his microblog. These cases show how the mediated contexts provided by the World Wide Web, combined with the corollary growth of a young digital-technology–savvy population, are generating new entertainment-orientated communities and celeb-rity-making practices in China. It also shows how these seemingly apolitical entertainment practices are refashioning public debates about the politics of prosperity and equality.


In order to test the role of limestone in producing anomalously old radiocarbon ages in land-snail shells, 14 C analyses were performed on shell carbonate of modern land snails from limestone and nonlimestone areas of Jamaica. No anomaly was found in snails from the nonlimestone area, implying that such material is suitable for radiocarbon dating. Snails from limestone areas produced variable anomalies of as much as 3,120 yr due to incorporation of 14 C-free limestone into shell carbonate. All rock-scraping snails and most leaf-litter–feeding snails from limestone areas showed anomalous 14 C contents. Because of the variability in 14 C content even within species, no standard correction factor for limestone anomaly can be applied. However, dating error can be minimized by selecting ecologically appropriate species or by comparison of analyses of several fossil species, within a stratum, to their modern counterparts.


Value chain interventions are increasingly used by international organizations and national donor agencies in the context of their private sector development strategies. This paper argues that an understanding of Global Value Chains (GVCs), their drivers, and their governance structures is necessary for effective interventions to further enterprise development. The focus of value chain interventions is to improve market access conditions, upgrade opportunities, and change the distribution of risks and benefits in GVCs in favor of developing country firms and producers. The paper offers an overview of relevant interventions by international organizations and donors, and analyzes a sample of IDB value chain projects to develop broad conclusions regarding its value chain approach and logic. However, so far there appears to be limited overview and coordination of and no common understanding or framework for value chain interventions. The paper concludes arguing that a deep and common understanding of core value chain concepts and approaches is needed, and that tailor-made, context-specific upgrading strategies need to be developed and supported. It proposes to consider the potential role of the involvement of lead firms and first-tier suppliers/ intermediaries, and the importance of innovation systems and local learning efforts to enable upgrading processes within GVCs.


This article challenges A.W. Pollard's foundational distinction between good and
bad quartos, which confuses ethical and bibliographical categories. Some quartos
are badly inked, or printed on poor-quality paper. But Q1 Hamlet is a professional,
well-made commodity. Zachary Lesser has conjectured that Q1 sold poorly, and
has claimed that the similarity of the title pages of Q1 and Q2 supports that
hypothesis. But both title pages are typical of Ling's books, and their similarities
are no more remarkable than those in Ling's different quartos of Michael
Drayton's poems. Q1 Hamlet apparently sold more quickly than Q2. Using D.W.
Winnicott's theories about the 'good enough mother' and 'transitional objects',
we can identify Q1 as a 'good enough quarto'.


This work covers the experimental verification of 2 space-time (ST) algorithms on the smart antenna software radio test system (SASRATS) platform . This work also covers the concept and architecture of SASRATS, which was designed and developed to facilitate the field testing of ST processing architectures and algorithms. The paper covers the experimental verification of two robust ST algorithms developed by the authors for signal enumeration and channel order estimation. Simulation results are also presented and compared with the experimental results obtained on the SASRATS platform.


Ken Salazar was elected to the United States Senate in November 2004 as Colorado's thirty-fifth U.S. senator, making history as one of the few Mexican Americans to serve in the United States Senate. Prior to the Senate, Salazar served as the thirty-sixth attorney general of Colorado for six years. He has served as chief legal counsel to the governor, executive director of the Department of Natural Resources, and chairman of the Rio Grande Compact Commission. Salazar is a fifth-generation Coloradoan born on 2 March 1955 and is one of eight brothers and sisters. He and his family have been farmers and ranchers in the San Luis Valley. He attended St. Francis Seminary, graduated from Centauri High School in Conejos County in 1973, and received a political science degree from Colorado College in 1977 and his law degree in 1981 from the University of Michigan. Salazar also received honorary doctorates of law from Colorado College in 1993 and the University of Denver in 1999. Salazar has been a farmer and rancher in the San Luis Valley, natural resources lawyer, and small business owner much of his life. He and his wife have owned radio stations in Pueblo and Denver and own and operate a Dairy Queen in Westminster, Colo. He also practiced water, environmental, and public lands law for eleven years in the private sector. The senator currently serves on the Senate Committees on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry; Energy and Natural Resource; and Veterans Affairs. Senator Salazar and his wife, Hope, have two teenage daughters, Melinda and Andrea. Ken's older brother, John Salazar, was elected to the United States Congress in November 2004 from Colorado's third congressional district. Milagros "Mimi" Aledo and Rafael J. Lopez, senior editors of HJHP, and Liz Montoya interviewed Sen. Ken Salazar on 17 February 2005. Ms. Aledo, a native of Florida, recently spent a year serving as an AmeriCorp volunteer in Lafayette, Colo. She will receive a master in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2006. Mr. Lopez, a native of Watsonville, Calif., most recently served as an elected council member of the Watsonville City Council and was the founding executive director of First 5 Santa Cruz County. Ms. Montoya, a native of Sante Fe, N.M., most recently served as a special assistant to President William Jefferson Clinton in the Office of Presidential Personnel. Mr. Lopez and Ms. Montoya will both receive a master in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2005. HJHP Thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed by the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy. We know how busy you are as a new senator and are honored to include you in this year's Journal. Sen. Salazar, what motivated you to run for the United States Senate, and what are your three top priorities during your first term? Salazar I ran for U.S. Senate because Colorado deserves a U.S. senator who will always fight for all of [its citizens]. My entire life I have had a saying that the joy is in the journey--I truly find joy in working towards solutions that make life better for people. I grew up poor, one of eight siblings, in a rural agricultural community in southern Colorado. My parents worked hard to ensure that all of us received a college education. I understand the hopes, dreams and needs of all the people of Colorado. Being a U.S. senator presents a tremendous opportunity to continue that journey and build upon the progress of past generations. First, above all else, my number one priority is to always put the interests of the people of Colorado first, above partisan or any other interests. As senator, I want to prioritize what I think is our number one domestic issue--homeland security. I want to shine a spotlight on the forgotten America--our rural communities--because for a long time now they have been left to wither on the vine while other, more populous areas get needed attention. …


One of the issues that arise within the community of software developers is the process of estimating costs. Questions such as how and what is proper and correct process has always been a matter of much thought among them. Estimation of the exact things related to system development process taken into account and will produce accurate results. In the success of this research, a survey was conducted among those involved in this process as a project manager and developer of the system. The study shows that method of estimation, experience and some serious matter related to software development process help to obtain accurate results. In conclusion, the consideration of important matters in the software development process helps to produce an accurate budgeting.


This research investigates the 'performativity' of the 'author function' through collaging the audio recordings of American poet Sylvia Plath. The 'author function' is a term by Michel Foucault to describe how readers attribute certain characteristics that they believe belong to the author and ascribe them to the writing. 'Performativity' is a term used by Judith Butler to describe a set of actions that ascribe and predetermine a set of attributes to a subject through his or her gender, age, timeframe, nationality and race. The 'performativity' of the 'author function' appropriates these characteristics and attributes them to the author. How the determination of an authorial identity translates to the interaction of the practice component of the project, which includes several components of digital collage, is through attributions that readers make in the creation of an author. The practice component of the project consists of the collage of audio and video recordings, the programming of video with Max/MSP/Jitter, 'performative' elements and collage poetry on Twitter. The audio component was collaged from two poems entitled 'Lady Lazarus' and 'The Applicant' that Plath read to the British Council in 1962 to form a new poem entitled Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus. The video component consists of collaging recorded video clips of storefront and street signs in Camden, London, where she is associated with living and committing suicide at. A second video collage entitled Shadows/Shadows/Tomb takes place at a cemetery close to my residence in 2011 and documents symbols of death that reference my own authorial identity. The second set of videos run on a Max/MSP/Jitter patch that display four screens of filmed texts inscribed on tombstones that play four streaming poems through a systematic structure of boxes. The screens are displayed in each box and sourced from separate folders to display and play the film clips. The practice of collage and constraint-based poetry complicates the constitution of being the author when the collagist of Plath's poetry is a different gender than hers. This research then expands on how identity radically shifts in the text when the subject and the collagist have very different identities. The radical shift in a collage takes place within a predefined and generalized concept of the reader as determined by Stanley Fish, a prominent writer on the subject of 'reader-response criticism', who believes that one way a reader could be approached is through his or her relationship with the writing.


Effective data mining is going to be important for differentiating and succeeding in the digital economy especially with increased commoditization and reduced barrier to entry for infrastructure devices like servers, storage and networking systems. There is lot of telemetry data from manufacturing facilities and customers that can be used to drive improved supportability experience, unmatched product quality and reliability of infrastructure devices like servers and storage devices. Currently data mining of hardware, firmware and platform logs is a challenging task as the domain knowledge is complex with expertise for large multinational organization distributed across the world. With increasing complexity and data mining continuing to be a very time consuming task that requires math/statistics skills, diverse programming & machine learning skills and cross domain knowledge, it is important to look at next generation analytics solution tailored to infrastructure vendors to improve supportability, quality, reliability, performance and security. In this publication we propose a smart, automated and generic data analytics platform that enables a 24/7 data mining solution using an built in platform domain modeler, an expert system for analyzing hardware and firmware logs and a policy manager that allows user defined hypothesis to be verified round the clock based on policies and configurable triggers. This smart data analytics platform will help democratize data mining of hardware and firmware logs and help improve troubleshooting complex issues, improve supportability experience, reliability and quality and reduce warranty costs.


Enabling a humanoid robot to drive a car requires the development of a set of basic primitive actions. These include walking to the vehicle, manually controlling its commands (e.g., ignition, gas pedal, and steering) and moving with the whole body to ingress/egress the car. We present a sensor‐based reactive framework for realizing the central part of the complete task, consisting of driving the car along unknown roads. The proposed framework provides three driving strategies by which a human supervisor can teleoperate the car or give the robot full or partial control of the car. A visual servoing scheme uses features of the road image to provide the reference angle for the steering wheel to drive the car at the center of the road. Simultaneously, a Kalman filter merges optical flow and accelerometer measurements to estimate the car linear velocity and correspondingly compute the gas pedal command for driving at a desired speed. The steering wheel and gas pedal reference are sent to the robot control to achieve the driving task with the humanoid. We present results from a driving experience with a real car and the humanoid robot HRP‐2Kai. Part of the framework has been used to perform the driving task at the DARPA Robotics Challenge.