Significance The microbiome plays key roles in human health, but little is known about its evolution. We investigate the evolutionary history of the African hominid oral microbiome by analyzing dental biofilms of humans and Neanderthals spanning the past 100,000 years and comparing them with those of chimpanzees, gorillas, and howler monkeys. We identify 10 core bacterial genera that have been maintained within the human lineage and play key biofilm structural roles. However, many remain understudied and unnamed. We find major taxonomic and functional differences between the oral microbiomes of Homo and chimpanzees but a high degree of similarity between Neanderthals and modern humans, including an apparent Homo-specific acquisition of starch digestion capability in oral streptococci, suggesting microbial coadaptation with host diet. The oral microbiome plays key roles in human biology, health, and disease, but little is known about the global diversity, variation, or evolution of this microbial community. To better understand the evolution and changing ecology of the human oral microbiome, we analyzed 124 dental biofilm metagenomes from humans, including Neanderthals and Late Pleistocene to present-day modern humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas, as well as New World howler monkeys for comparison. We find that a core microbiome of primarily biofilm structural taxa has been maintained throughout African hominid evolution, and these microbial groups are also shared with howler monkeys, suggesting that they have been important oral members since before the catarrhine–platyrrhine split ca. 40 Mya. However, community structure and individual microbial phylogenies do not closely reflect host relationships, and the dental biofilms of Homo and chimpanzees are distinguished by major taxonomic and functional differences. Reconstructing oral metagenomes from up to 100 thousand years ago, we show that the microbial profiles of both Neanderthals and modern humans are highly similar, sharing functional adaptations in nutrient metabolism. These include an apparent Homo-specific acquisition of salivary amylase-binding capability by oral streptococci, suggesting microbial coadaptation with host diet. We additionally find evidence of shared genetic diversity in the oral bacteria of Neanderthal and Upper Paleolithic modern humans that is not observed in later modern human populations. Differences in the oral microbiomes of African hominids provide insights into human evolution, the ancestral state of the human microbiome, and a temporal framework for understanding microbial health and disease.


Public displays are often strongly situated signs deeply embedded in their physical, social, and cultural setting. Understanding how the display is coupled with on-going situations, its level of situatedness, provides a key element for the interpretation of the displays themselves but is also an element for the interpretation of place, its situated practices, and its social context. Most digital displays, however, do not achieve the same sense of situatedness that seems so natural in their nondigital counterparts. This paper investigates people's perception of situatedness when considering the connection between public displays and their context. We have collected over 300 photos of displays and conducted a set of analysis tasks involving focus groups and structured interviews with 15 participants. The contribution is a consolidated list of situatedness dimensions that should provide a valuable resource for reasoning about situatedness in digital displays and informing the design and development of display systems.


Many wooden artworks are contaminated by DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) as a result of a surface treatment by means of the liquid preservative Hylotox-59©. It was used until the end of the 1980s. DDT crystal structures are formed on the wood surfaces by the "blooming" of chlorine compounds. In addition to an aesthetic disturbance, it is assumed that DDT represents a health risk. Even decades after applying, the toxins in the wood preservatives are still detectable because they are of low volatility in many wood samples. Contaminated waste wood with natural biocide ageing, gilded and wood carved elements of an old picture frame and wooden samples with paint layers were provided by the Schlossmuseum Sondershausen. Non-contact procedures using laser and plasma appear reasonable to remove the DDT crystals. During the experiments, health and safety issues for the operator have to be taken into account.
The removal of DDT was evaluated employing femtosecond and nanosecond laser radiation and cold atmospheric plasma techniques with different working gases (air, nitrogen, and argon). Before laser application, a chlorine measurement representing the DDT density on the wooden surface is done by X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis as reference. After laser processing, the XRF analysis is used again at the same surface position to determine the depletion rate. Additionally, a documentation and characterization of the sample surface is performed before and after laser and plasma treatment using optical microscopy (OM). For plasma processing with various systems a chlorine measurement is done by gas chromatographic-mass spectrometry (GCMS) analysis.


The following review of program planning and evaluative models seeks to determine relevance within 21 st century Victorian welfare in the context of increasing regulation of service quality and standards of practice. This paper examines three distinct models from the literature: incrementalism, the ethical model, and the effectiveness model as they demonstrate a shift from a simplistic means-focussed approach, to values-based, measurable and outcomes-focussed planning and evaluation methods. These models are critiqued, recognising that complex frameworks can be resource-intensive and ambiguous in their practical application. Thus, common elements are identified to inform a more generic program planning framework. This article asserts that discrete program planning models cannot be universally applied, and that specific models or hybrids should be considered by planners and evaluators within the organisational and broader environmental contexts. The key is to ensure the resultant framework ‐ whether generic or tailored, is meaningful, manageable and of value.


This theoretical paper arises as a purpose of discussing the role play of fans as sport consumers on the marketing strategies, in professional sport clubs. This study is part of a project which will provide some other empirical papers which will use the fan perspective as one axis for analysing sport clubs in the São Paulo city, Brazil. In order to understand the sport fans as consumers, five topics were developed for contextualise them: (i) sport fans overview for explaining what fan means; (ii) loyalty and attendance for sport experiences in which the idea is comprising games as entertainments; (iii) sport fans as consumers in order to discuss what they love to consume; (iv) 'new' interactions between fans and teams, what does have been changed related to promotions? (v) and sport fans as foundations for revenues, what instruments sport clubs have used to get money from their fans? Therefore, this paper aims to highlight the point of view approached by literature to comprise the sport fans as consumers in sport club's business.


SERVICE ORIENTED NETWORKING FOR MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS IN BROADBAND WIRELESS NETWORKS by Ehsan Haghani Dogaheh Extensive efforts have been focused on deploying broadband wireless networks. Providing mobile users with high speed network connectivity will let them run various multimedia applications on their wireless devices. In order to successfully deploy and operate broadband wireless networks, it is crucial to design efficient methods for supporting various services and applications in broadband wireless networks. Moreover, the existing "access-oriented" networking solutions are not able to fully address all the issues of supporting various applications with different quality of service requirements. Thus, "service-oriented" networking has been recently proposed and has gained much attention. This dissertation discusses the challenges and possible solutions for supporting multimedia applications in broadband wireless networks. The service requirements of different multimedia applications such as video streaming and Voice over IP (VoIP) are studied and some novel service-oriented networking solutions for supporting these applications in broadband wireless networks are proposed. The performance of these solutions is examined in WiMAX networks which are the promising technology for broadband wireless access in the near future. WiMAX networks are based on the IEEE 802.16 standards which have defined different Quality of Service (QoS) classes to support a broad range of applications with varying service requirements to mobile and stationary users. The growth of multimedia traffic that requires special quality of service from the network will impose new constraints on network designers who should wisely allocate the limited resources to users based on their required quality of service. An efficient resource management and network design depends upon gaining accurate information about the traffic profile of user applications. In this dissertation, the access level traffic profile of VoIP applications are studied first, and then a realistic distribution model for VoIP traffic is proposed. Based on this model, an algorithm to allocate resources for VoIP applications in WiMAX networks is investigated. Later, the challenges and possible solutions for transmitting MPEG video streams in wireless networks are discussed. The MPEG traffic model adopted by the WiMAX Forum is introduced and different application-oriented solutions for enhancing the performance of wireless networks with respect to MPEG video streaming applications are explained. An analytical framework to verify the performance of the proposed solutions is discoursed, and it is shown that the proposed solutions will improve the efficiency of VoIP applications and the quality of streaming applications over wireless networks. Finally, conclusions are drawn and future works are discussed. SERVICE ORIENTED NETWORKING FOR MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS IN BROADBAND WIRELESS NETWORKS by Ehsan Haghani Dogaheh A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of New Jersey Institute of Technology in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering


After the September 11th attacks in 2001, Congress hastily passed the USA-Patriot Act which made several changes to electronic surveillance law. The Act has sparked a fierce debate. However, the pros and cons of the USA-Patriot Act are only one part of a much larger issue: How effective is the law that regulates electronic surveillance? The USA-Patriot Act made a number of changes in electronic surveillance law, but the most fundamental problems with the law did not begin with the USA-Patriot Act. In this article, Professor Solove argues that electronic surveillance law suffers from significant problems that predate the USA-Patriot Act. The USA-Patriot Act indeed worsened some of these problems, but surveillance law had lost its way long before. Surveillance law is thus in need of a radical reconstruction. After exploring specific difficulties with the scope, standards, and enforcement mechanisms of the statutes, Solove turns to examine the more deeply-rooted and systematic problems. Solove contends that electronic surveillance law is overly intricate and complex, that it has failed to keep pace in adapting to new technologies, and that it provides for insufficient judicial and legislative oversight. He proposes ways in which surveillance law should be reconstructed to address these problems. Solove recommends a rather radical solution: Warrants supported by probable cause should be required for most uses of electronic surveillance. Finally, Solove suggests that Congress draft a charter regulating the FBI.


Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) methods have had recent success in games, planning, and optimization. MCTS uses results from rollouts to guide search; a rollout is a path that descends the tree with a randomized decision at each ply until reaching a leaf. MCTS results can be strongly influenced by the choice of appropriate policy to bias the rollouts. Most previous work on MCTS uses static uniform random or domain-specific policies. We describe a new MCTS method that dynamically adapts the rollout policy during search, in deterministic optimization problems. Our starting point is Cazenave's original Nested Monte Carlo Search (NMCS), but rather than navigating the tree directly we instead use gradient ascent on the rollout policy at each level of the nested search. We benchmark this new Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation (NRPA) algorithm and examine its behavior. Our test problems are instances of Crossword Puzzle Construction and Morpion Solitaire. Over moderate time scales NRPA can substantially improve search efficiency compared to NMCS, and over longer time scales NRPA improves upon all previous published solutions for the test problems. Results include a new Morpion Solitaire solution that improves upon the previous human-generated record that had stood for over 30 years.


We explore a future in which people spend considerably more time in virtual reality, even during moments when they transition between locations in the real world. In this paper, we present DreamWalker, a VR system that enables such real-world walking while users explore and stay fully immersed inside large virtual environments in a headset. Provided with a real-world destination, DreamWalker finds a similar path in a pre-authored VR environment and guides the user while real-walking the virtual world. To keep the user from colliding with objects and people in the real-world, DreamWalker's tracking system fuses GPS locations, inside-out tracking, and RGBD frames to 1) continuously and accurately position the user in the real world, 2) sense walkable paths and obstacles in real time, and 3) represent paths through a dynamically changing scene in VR to redirect the user towards the chosen destination. We demonstrate DreamWalker's versatility by enabling users to walk three paths across the large Microsoft campus while enjoying pre-authored VR worlds, supplemented with a variety of obstacle avoidance and redirection techniques. In our evaluation, 8 participants walked across campus along a 15-minute route, experiencing a lively virtual Manhattan that was full of animated cars, people, and other objects.


This paper considers the problem of evaluating and benchmarking process design configuration in a multi-station assembly process. We focus on the unique challenges brought by the multi-station system, namely, (1) a system level model to characterize the variation propagation in the entire process, and (2) the necessity to describe the system response to variation inputs at both global (system level) and local (station level and single fixture level) scales. State space representation is employed to recursively describe the propagation of variation in such a multi-station process, incorporating process design information such as fixture locating layout at individual stations and station-to-station locating layout change. Following the sensitivity analysis in control theory, a group of hierarchical sensitivity indices is defined and expressed in terms of the system matrices in the state space model, which are determined by the given process design configuration. Implication of these indices with respect to variation control is discussed and a three-step procedure of applying the sensitivity indices for selecting a better design and prioritizing the critical station/fixture is presented. We illustrate the proposed method using the group of sensitivity indices in design evaluation of the assembly process of an SUV (Sport Utility Vehicle) side panel.


It seems unthinkable that citizens of one of the most powerful nations in the world must risk their lives and livelihoods in the search for access to necessary health care. And yet it is no surprise that in many places throughout the United States, getting an abortion can be a monumental challenge. Anti-choice politicians and activists have worked tirelessly to impose needless restrictions on this straightforward medical procedure that, at best, delay it and, at worst, create medical risks and deny women their constitutionally protected right to choose.

This forthcoming book tells the story of abortion in America, capturing a disturbing reality of insurmountable barriers people face when trying to exercise their legal rights to medical services. Authors David S. Cohen and Carole Joffe lay bare the often arduous and unnecessarily burdensome process of terminating a pregnancy: the sabotaged decision-making, clinics in remote locations, insurance bans, harassing protesters, forced ultrasounds and dishonest medical information, arbitrary waiting periods, and unjustified procedure limitations.

Based on patients' stories as well as interviews with abortion providers and allies from every state in the country, Obstacle Course reveals the unstoppable determination required of women in the pursuit of reproductive autonomy as well as the incredible commitment of abortion providers. Without the efforts of an unheralded army of medical professionals, clinic administrators, counselors, activists, and volunteers, what is a legal right would be meaningless for the almost one million people per year who get abortions. There is a better way—treating abortion like any other form of health care—but the United States is a long way from that ideal.


As explained in the paper namely, "Measuring a Societies Knowledge base", it is not difficult to measure the knowledge base of a society, though it would be very laborious and time consuming. Knowledge is simply all the laws of existence a society knows plus all the products that a society creates. Each law that a society knows was given the symbol of point X and each product that a society made was given the symbol point U. Point U being a derivative of the laws of existence that we know. Every product in existence represents a point U, and every product is a derivation of what we understand about the laws of existence. We make spoons out of steel, wood, or plastic rather than cotton, paper, or mercury because of the properties that human beings understand the different materials. From the most simple point U to the most complex, all are derivatives of laws of existence that humans understand. From a simple point U like a tooth pick made of thorns to the most complex such as a nuclear powered submarine, all are derived from what human beings understand about the materials.


This paper investigates the use of thematic progression in scientific articles written by Iraqi EFL learners of English language, in the hope that it would be helpful for teachers of writing non-native speakers students. This study employs the descriptive qualitative method to analyze the collected data. Since thematic progression plays an important role in structuring and organizing discourse and it is considered as a bridge that connects sentence level to the discourse level to produce a cohesive text. So this paper deals with the analysis of professional scientific essays written by Iraqi EFL learners in two different disciplines (Medicine and Engineering). Daneš thematic progression patterns are used as a model of analysis in this study. The findings of the study shows that simple linear is the most used one while derived and split is less used one. This study concludes that the researchers faced a difficulty in presenting a well organized text.


Scientific research provides substantial evidence that there is no genetic or biological basis for our social understanding of race. The confounding social and biological uses of race complicate its use in scientific and biolomedical research; thereby, prompting this discussion of how research informs the concept of race. Recommendations for the use of race in scientific study are provided. Scientists must critically consider when and how to use race in their research so that data are not compromised. Parsing of social, environmental, and biological contributors to health status will contribute to scientific advancement and improved medical care. Clear, consistent, and medically-relevant use of racial concepts in research promotes scientific responsibility, biomedical justice, and an improved social understanding of race. In addition, it is critical to correcting economic, health and other social disparities.


Nanostructured α-MgAgSb has been demonstrated as a good p-type thermoelectric material candidate for low temperature power generation. Nevertheless, the intrinsic defect physics that impedes further enhancement of its thermoelectric performance is still unknown. Here we first unveil that an Ag vacancy is a dominant intrinsic point defect in α-MgAgSb and has a low defect formation energy, shown by first-principles calculations. In addition, the formation of an Ag vacancy could increase the crystal stability. More importantly, intrinsic point defects, namely an Ag vacancy, can be rationally engineered via simply controlling the hot press temperature, due to the recovery effect. Collectively, a high peak ZT of ∼1.3 and average ZT of ∼1.1 are achieved when hot pressed at 533 K. These results elucidate the pivotal role of intrinsic point defects in α-MgAgSb and further highlight that point defect engineering is an effective approach to optimize the thermoelectric properties.


In a multihop wireless network, wireless interference is crucial to the maximum multiflow (MMF) problem, which studies the maximum throughput between multiple pairs of sources and sinks. In this paper, we observe that network coding could help to decrease the impacts of wireless interference, and propose a framework to study the MMF problem for multihop wireless networks with network coding. Firstly, a network model is set up to describe the new conflict relations modified by network coding. Then, we formulate a linear programming problem to compute the maximum throughput and show its superiority over one in networks without coding. Finally, the MMF problem in wireless network coding is shown to be NP-hard and a polynomial approximation algorithm is proposed.


Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order to take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access.


Gradual typing provides a methodology to integrate static and dynamic typing, harmonizing their often conflicting advantages in a single language. When a user wants to enjoy the advantages of static typing, most gradual languages require that they add type annotations. Many nontrivial tasks must be undertaken while adding type annotations, including understanding program behaviors and invariants. Unfortunately, if this is done incorrectly then the added type annotations can be wrong–leading to inconsistencies between the program and the type annotations. Gradual typing implementations detect such inconsistencies at runtime, raise cast errors, and generate messages. However, solely relying on such error messages for understanding and fixing inconsistencies and their resulting cast errors is often insufficient for multiple reasons. One reason is that while such messages cover inconsistencies in one execution path, fixing them often requires reconciling information from multiple paths. Another is that users may add many wrong type annotations that they later find difficult to identify and fix, when considering all added annotations. Recent studies provide evidence that type annotations added during program migration are often wrong and that many programmers prefer compile-time warnings about wrong annotations. Motivated by these results, we develop exploratory typing to help with the static detection, understanding, and fixing of inconsistencies. The key idea of exploratory typing is that it systematically removes dynamic types and explores alternative types for static type annotations that can remedy inconsistencies. To demonstrate the feasibility of exploratory typing, we have implemented it in PyHound, which targets programs written in Reticulated Python, a gradual variant of Python. We have evaluated PyHound on a set of Python programs, and the evaluation results demonstrate that our idea can effectively detect inconsistencies in 98% of the tested programs and fix 93% of inconsistencies, significantly outperforming pytype, a widely used Python tool for enforcing type annotations.


ABSTRACT This paper examines what CPAs do and what accounting educators teach in the US and China. The comparison reveals that while practicing CPAs provide many finance and finance related services, accounting educators offer only limited exposure of finance to accounting students. The finding shows that there is a knowledge gap in finance among accounting students. To provide quality finance and finance related service, additional finance training is necessary for the future CPAs. The paper further discusses the difficulties of making curricular changes, and needs and benefits of integrating finance in accounting education. It also makes preliminary recommendations on what and how to integrate finance in accounting curricula. INTRODUCTION Profound changes in accounting practice have made it necessary to revise the accounting curricula. The calls for changes in accounting education in US are well documented. In its 1986 report titled "Future Accounting Education: Preparing for the Expanding Profession," the American Accounting Association indicates that a growing gap exists between what accountants do and what accounting educators teach (AAA, 1986). The AICPA's CPA Vision Project: Focus on the Horizon calls for modified education programs to meet the future needs of CPAs (AICPA, 1998). In three separate studies published in 1994, 1996, and 1999, the IMA warns accounting education needs to change if it is to meet the future needs of accountants in industry (IMA, 1994, 1996, 1999). Evidence shows that the previous warnings for changes in accounting education have for the most part been ignored and accounting education is being delivered the same way today as it was 20 or 30 years ago (Albrecht & Sack, 2000). Albrecht and Sack warn that because practice has changed so dramatically and because accounting education has not kept up, accounting programs have lost ground to other business majors, to corporate competitors, and to other types of educational programs. Chinese accounting profession has undergone significant changes since China adopted the policy of economic reform and opening up to the world. The broad transformation in many aspects in China has completely altered the landscape of the accounting profession. The certified public accountant profession was established in the early 1980's. There were only 500 CPAs in China in 1986. They mainly provided service to clients in foreign invested enterprises. The numbers grew to 3,000 in 1988, more than 10,000 in 1993, and more than 50,000 in 2000 (CICPA, 2001; Li, 2001). Currently, CPAs provide services to a broad range of customers including government agencies, state owned enterprises, foreign invested enterprises, privately owned enterprises, and publicly traded companies. The sweeping changes have a significant impact on accounting education. The CPA major has been established at major Chinese universities. Accounting curricula at higher education institutions were completely revised in the past 20 years (Cooper et al., 1994; Tang, 1997; Smith et al., 1999; Chan & Rotenberg, 1999). Although the Chinese accounting programs have made progress in preparing future CPAs, there are still many areas that need to be improved. For example, content covered in the existing accounting textbooks do not meet the needs of CPA education, and there is a gap between what employers want from new accounting graduates and what is taught in universities' CPA programs (Xun, 2002). Chinese accounting programs should further revise their curricula, update faculty knowledge, and improve pedagogy to better help students acquire knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to advance in their careers. This paper examines the differences between what CPAs do and what accounting educators teach in undergraduate accounting programs in the US and China. The US is the largest developed country and China is the largest developing country. Professional services such as accounting play an important role in the American economy. …


ABSTRACT The type species of the goblin spider genus Triaeris Simon, T. stenaspis Simon, was originally described from Saint Vincent in the Lesser Antilles, but has attained a pantropical distribution and even has introduced populations living in European greenhouses. At least one of those European populations is parthenogenetic, and no males of the species have ever been found. Simon later assigned one additional species to the genus, T. equestris, from Principe; that species is also known only from females, but resembles T. stenaspis in having an unusually elongated, ventrally spinose patella on leg I. Numerous other species, from both the Old and New worlds, have subsequently been assigned to Triaeris; all those taxa seem to be either synonyms (including T. berlandi Lawrence from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, T. lepus Suman from Hawaii, and T. lacandonus Brignoli from Guatemala, which are newly synonymized with T. stenaspis) or misplaced in the genus. The modified patella I occurs in four new West African species (T. moca from Bioko and T. fako, T. oku, and T. menchum from Cameroon); unfortunately, those species are also represented only by females. Few other gamasomorphines have patellar spines, and most of those that do have such spines belong to a group of genera in which the males have heavily sclerotized endites, suggesting that Triaeris might belong to that group. Searching West African collections of such taxa revealed two additional new species, T. togo and T. ibadan, that are each represented by both sexes. Female genitalic structure suggests that T. togo is the closest relative of T. stenaspis.


Although discernment is not the primary focus of the Letter to the Galatians, a few references to this issue are found in the letter. These references are the focus of this study. After a brief overview of some approaches to discernment, three core elements of discernment are identified, namely reflection, choice and one's relationship to God. Taking these elements as a point of departure, references to discernment in the following passages in the letter are investigated: 2:1-10; 2:11-21; 3:1-5 and 5:12-6:10.


The present paper contains the chief particulars of a specimen in the collection of the United States National Museum, differing from the hitherto described species of Sacculina in its anatomical characters and in those of the cuticle of the mantle. Sacculina punctata nov. spec. Kaseda, Satuma, Japan, T. Urita coll. et don., 1 specimen on Plagusia dentipes de Haan, U. S. N. M. N°. 48337. Diagnosis. Testes almost entirely in the posterior part of the body, outside the visceral mass, vasa deferentia partially in the visceral mass. The two testes well developed, completely separated, forming more or less globular or somewhat compressed, wide sacs, which are connected with the wide vasa deferentia by a short, narrow tube. Colleteric glands with numerous branched tubes, approximately in the central part of the lateral surfaces of the visceral mass. External cuticle of the mantle without excrescences, or covered with small roundish papillae, or provided with irregular outgrowths which give it a more or less ragged appearance. Surface of the external cuticle with distinct little areas which have a diameter varying from 7 to 18 µ. Usually in these areas there is a central column consisting of chitin which differs in structure from that of its surroundings. Internal cuticle with numerous retinacula, arranged in rows on its surface. Each retinaculum consists of a single spindle which has a length of 7 to 12 µ. The specimen is comparatively large, its breadth (greater diameter) is 23 mm, its height (the distance from the stalk to the mantle opening) is 16 mm, and its thickness 6 mm. The animal is more or less kidney-


Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most frequent cancers and leading cause of cancer mortality in the developed world. Twin study has attributed about 35% of the etiology of sporadic CRC to genes. Hitherto, more than 20 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) loci from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) were associated with CRC risk. Most of these index SNPs however have small effect sizes and often located in gene deserts. Thus they are unlikely to be causal. Haplotype-based methods may offer a more powerful approach to disease gene mapping. We previously performed a GWAS on 2,000 ethnicity-, age-, and gender-matched Singapore Chinese CRC patients and healthy controls using the Affymetrix SNP 6 platform. Sporadic patients were defined as aged 50 or more at the time of surgery and with no dominant family history of CRC. Haplotype block detection was performed in Golden Helix SVS after this SNP6 dataset was filtered for genotype call rate (>95%), Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium in the controls and principal component analysis. Block detection was performed requiring strong linkage disequilibrium between block pairs, minor allelic frequencies (MAF) of SNPs more than 0.01, the maximum number of markers and length of the block at 30 and 160kb respectively. Genome-wide, 73,333 blocks were computed using 336, 466 markers on 22 autosomes. Haplotype frequencies were estimated using the EM algorithm. Chi-Squared and logistic regression with odds ratio tests of haplotype association were performed using these pre-computed blocks on a per-haplotype basis. Three candidate loci at chromosomes 3, 15 and 20, each with 6 to 9 SNPs and sizes ranging from 4 to 15 kb achieved genome-wide significance and encompass potential novel disease genes. These loci are currently being validated in an independent replication panel using the Fluidgm SNPtype assays and pooled analyses will be performed. Citation Format: Peh Yean Cheah, Lai Fun Thean, Yik Ying Teo, Woon-Puay Koh, Jian-Min Yuan, Min Hoe Chew, Choong Leong Tang. Genome-wide haplotype association tests identified three candidate loci associated with sporadic colorectal cancer risk in Singapore Chinese. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 107th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2016 Apr 16-20; New Orleans, LA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2016;76(14 Suppl):Abstract nr 2559.


BACKGROUND & AIMS
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has familial aggregation in African Americans (AAs), but little is known about the molecular genetic susceptibility. Mapping studies using the Immunochip genotyping array expand the number of susceptibility loci for IBD in Caucasians to 163, but the contribution of the 163 loci and European admixture to IBD risk in AAs is unclear. We performed a genetic mapping study using the Immunochip to determine whether IBD susceptibility loci in Caucasians also affect risk in AAs and identify new associated loci.

METHODS
We recruited AAs with IBD and without IBD (controls) from 34 IBD centers in the United States; additional controls were collected from 4 other Immunochip studies. Association and admixture loci were mapped for 1088 patients with Crohn's disease, 361 with ulcerative colitis, 62 with IBD type unknown, and 1797 controls; 130,241 autosomal single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were analyzed.

RESULTS
The strongest associations were observed between ulcerative colitis and HLA rs9271366 (P = 7.5 × 10(-6)), Crohn's disease and 5p13.1 rs4286721 (P = 3.5 × 10(-6)), and IBD and KAT2A rs730086 (P = 2.3 × 10(-6)). Additional suggestive associations (P < 4.2 × 10(-5)) were observed between Crohn's disease and IBD and African-specific SNPs in STAT5A and STAT3; between IBD and SNPs in IL23R, IL12B, and C2orf43; and between ulcerative colitis and SNPs near HDAC11 and near LINC00994. The latter 3 loci have not been previously associated with IBD, but require replication. Established Caucasian associations were replicated in AAs (P < 3.1 × 10(-4)) at NOD2, IL23R, 5p15.3, and IKZF3. Significant admixture (P < 3.9 × 10(-4)) was observed for 17q12-17q21.31 (IZKF3 through STAT3), 10q11.23-10q21.2, 15q22.2-15q23, and 16p12.2-16p12.1. Network analyses showed significant enrichment (false discovery rate <1 × 10(-5)) in genes that encode members of the JAK-STAT, cytokine, and chemokine signaling pathways, as well those involved in pathogenesis of measles.

CONCLUSIONS
In a genetic analysis of 3308 AA IBD cases and controls, we found that many variants associated with IBD in Caucasians also showed association evidence with these diseases in AAs; we also found evidence for variants and loci not previously associated with IBD. The complex genetic factors that determine risk for or protection against IBD in different populations require further study.


Multimessenger observations of the neutron star merger GW170817 and its kilonova proved that neutron star mergers can synthesize large quantities of r-process elements. If neutron star mergers in fact dominate all r-process element production, then the distribution of kilonova ejecta compositions should match the distribution of r-process abundance patterns observed in stars. The lanthanide fraction (XLa) is a measurable quantity in both kilonovae and metal-poor stars, but it has not previously been explicitly calculated for stars. Here we compute the lanthanide fraction distribution of metal-poor stars ([Fe/H] < − 2.5) to enable comparison to current and future kilonovae. The full distribution peaks at log XLa ∼ −1.8, but r-process-enhanced stars ([Eu/Fe] > 0.7) have distinctly higher lanthanide fractions: . We review observations of GW170817 and find general consensus that the total , somewhat lower than the typical metal-poor star and inconsistent with the most highly r-enhanced stars. For neutron star mergers to remain viable as the dominant r-process site, future kilonova observations should be preferentially lanthanide-rich (including a population of ∼10% with ). These high-XLa kilonovae may be fainter and more rapidly evolving than GW170817, posing a challenge for discovery and follow-up observations. Both optical and (mid-)infrared observations will be required to robustly constrain kilonova lanthanide fractions. If such high-XLa kilonovae are not found in the next few years, that likely implies that the stars with the highest r-process enhancements have a different origin for their r-process elements.


After more than two decades of policy inertia, since the late 1990s a new interest in labour migration arose across Europe and at the EU level. This translated into a new season of policy experimentation which expressed itself in very different forms across the continent. Such an uneven wave of policy change has not been interrupted by the crisis, which however has deeply altered its dynamics, propelling innovation in some countries and blocking it elsewhere. Based on in-depth fieldwork carried out in the framework of a comparative research project (www.labmiggov.eu) in six European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom) and at EU level, this special issue aims at generating fresh empirical knowledge and new theoretical insights into the complexities of labour migration governance in Europe. In an attempt to go beyond a limited understanding of labour migration policies as admission of foreigners for working purposes, all the articles share a common theoretical framework based on the concept of 'migrant labour supply (MLS) policies'. Under this conceptual umbrella, different functional equivalents of (and alternatives to) direct labour migration policies are considered.Besides setting the broad empirical scene, illustrating the common conceptual foundations of the special issue and providing an overview of the articles' main findings, this Introduction formulates some core arguments. It is argued that determining and constantly adjusting the composition of MLS policy mixes is a fundamental expression of states' agency in the field of labour migration, especially in times of major economic fluctuations. I also contend that such national MLS policy mixes can be explained as country-specific attempts to find and constantly adapt 'paths of least resistance' meant to maximise fulfilment of labour immigration demands while minimising resistances to it.


The emerging nature of climate change and events associated with climate change raises the question of to what extent and how the changing climate will affect the well-established property valuation processes and procedures. Events like the one in March 2007, when the KwaZulu-Natal coast was hit by storm swells which severely damaged coastal properties, is a typical example. The economic loss was estimated to be more than one billion rand. Risk associated with the changing climate is on the increase and if the number of studies (nationally and globally) regarding this phenomenon is taken into account, then there is a need to quantify this risk. In these national and global studies, a variety of concepts, unrelated to market value or a manipulated form of market value, are used to quantify economic loss. However, financial decisions regarding property, plant and equipment are made based on the concept of market value (market value = fair value). This raises the question that this study will attempt to answer: How should property valuers change their current practice of investigating past market behaviour to arrive at an opinion of market value to also include climate change risk? This study aims to identify the knowledge, perceptions and practices of property valuers in a particular property market, on the Southern Cape coast, South Africa regarding the predicted rise in sea level. The paper will attempt to construct an instrument property that valuers can use to determine the market value of coastal residential properties. The Southern Cape coast was chosen because it was identified in two separate studies conducted in 1993 and 2010 as the stretch of coastline along the South African coast most vulnerable to a rise in sea level.


This article provides an introduction to theoretical ideas and practices from the so-called "philosophers of difference" — Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari — as an invitation to think differently about the construction of learning disability and to envision new forms of learning. Two key concepts, Foucault's transgression and Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, are presented, and examples from research on learning disability and other dimensions of disability are given to illustrate their potential. The theoretical practices of deconstruction, developed by Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic analysis are also presented and exemplified. The article argues that these theoretical concepts and practices, if taken up, shift the researcher towards an ethics of research and toward greater responsibility. Implications are discussed in the final part of the paper.


The systems development life cycle (SDLC), while undergoing numerous changes to its name and related components over the years, has remained a steadfast and reliable approach to software development. Although there is some debate as to the appropriate number of steps, and the naming conventions thereof, nonetheless it is a tried-and-true methodology that has withstood the test of time. This paper discusses the application of the SDLC in a 21st century health care environment. Specifically, it was utilized for the procurement of a software package designed particularly for the Home Health component of a regional hospital care facility. We found that the methodology is still as useful today as it ever was. By following the stages of the SDLC, an effective software product was identified, selected, and implemented in a real-world environment. Lessons learned from the project, and implications for practice, research, and pedagogy, are offered. Insights from this study can be applied as a pedagogical tool in a variety of classroom environments and curricula including, but not limited to, the systems analysis and design course as well as the core information systems (IS) class. It can also be used as a case study in an upperdivision or graduate course describing the implementation of the SDLC in practice.


Seizure control using deep brain stimulation (DBS) provides an alternative therapy to patients with intractable and drug resistant epilepsy. This paper presents novel DBS stimulus protocols to disrupt seizures. Two protocols are presented: open-loop stimulation and a closed-loop feedback system utilizing measured firing rates to adjust stimulus frequency. Stimulation suppression is demonstrated in a computational model using 3000 excitatory Morris–Lecar (M–L) model neurons connected with depressing synapses. Cells are connected using second order network topology (SONET) to simulate network topologies measured in cortical networks. The network spontaneously switches from tonic to clonic as synaptic strengths and tonic input to the neurons decreases. To this model we add periodic stimulation pulses to simulate DBS. Periodic forcing can synchronize or desynchronize an oscillating population of neurons, depending on the stimulus frequency and amplitude. Therefore, it is possible to either extend or truncate the tonic or clonic phases of the seizure. Stimuli applied at the firing rate of the neuron generally synchronize the population while stimuli slightly slower than the firing rate prevent synchronization. We present an adaptive stimulation algorithm that measures the firing rate of a neuron and adjusts the stimulus to maintain a relative stimulus frequency to firing frequency and demonstrate it in a computational model of a tonic-clonic seizure. This adaptive algorithm can affect the duration of the tonic phase using much smaller stimulus amplitudes than the open-loop control.


Eastern Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) and mean equatorial Pacific thermocline depth are key variables in El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). A linear fit to observations leads to a remarkably simple picture: ENSO can be represented by a classical damped oscillator, with SST and thermocline depth playing the roles of momentum and position, respectively. An independent fit of observed relationships between western and eastern thermocline depth, central wind stress and eastern Pacific SST yields the same picture and supports a recharge oscillator interpretation. The oscillation arises from the interaction between the recharge time of the Warm Pool and the time delay between east and west Pacific. Both finite Kelvin wave speed and SST dynamics contribute to the time delay. Including seasonality in the description, we find two periods of relative instability: boreal spring, with a large phase progression, and autumn, with nearly stationary phase.


Formation of the prestalk-prespore pattern in Dictyostelium was investigated in slugs and submerged clumps of cells. Prestalk and prespore cells were identified by staining with vital dyes, which are shown to be stable cell markers. Dissociated slug cells reaggregate and form slugs that contain a prestalk-prespore pattern indistinguishable from the original pattern. The pattern forms by sorting out of stained prestalk cells from unstained prespore cells. Sorting also occurs in clumps of dissociated slug cells submerged in liquid or agar. A pattern arises in 2 h in which a central core of stained cells is surrounded by a periphery of unstained cells. Sorting appears to be due to differential chemotaxis of stained and unstained cells to cAMP since exogenous cAMP (>10 −7 M) reverses the normal direction of sorting-out such that stained cells sort to the periphery of the clumps. Isolated portions of slugs regenerate a new prestalk-prespore pattern. Posterior isolates regenerate a pattern within 2 h due to sorting of a population of vitally stained 'anterior-like' cells present in posteriors. Anterior-like cells do not sort in intact slugs due to the influence of a diffusible inhibitor secreted by the anterior region. During posterior regeneration this signal is absent and anterior-like cells rapidly acquire the ability to sort. Anterior isolates regenerate a staining pattern more slowly than posterior isolates by a process that requires conversion of stained prestalk cells to unstained prespore cells. The results suggest that pattern formation in Dictyostelium consists of two processes: establishment of appropriate proportions of two cell types and establishment of the pattern itself by a mechanism of sorting-out.


ABSTRACT Purpose: Music has been linked with well-being across clinical and community settings. Yet, research has focused on assessment of single dimensions of well-being and on the typical receiver of support services. Acknowledging the burden that a caring role encompasses and integrating recent proposals for a multifaceted definition of well-being, we explore the extent to which group drumming interventions translate into multidimensional well-being change for both mental health service users and carers. Method: Thirty-nine participants engaged in one of a series of community drumming programmes were assessed via semi-structured interviews (n = 11) and focus groups (n = 28) at the end of each programme. Data were analysed using IPA. Results and Conclusion: Emotional, psychological and social dimensions of well-being emerged for both patients and carers, accounted for through six themes: (1) hedonia: positive affect and pleasant physical effects of drumming; (2) agency: initiative and sense of control; (3) accomplishment: non-specific and in relation to musical goals; (4) engagement, through focus and flow; (5) a redefinition of self, through self-awareness, construction of a positive identity, self-prospection and incorporation of a musical identity; and (6) social well-being, through connectedness and positive relationships. The potential of such interventions for clinical contexts is discussed.


Human population growth and habitat loss have exacerbated human–wildlife conflicts worldwide. We explored trends in human–wildlife conflicts (HWCs) in Chile using scientific and official reports to identify areas and species with higher risk of conflicts and tools available for their prevention and mitigation. The puma (Puma concolor) was considered the most frequent predator; however, fox (Lycalopex spp.) and free-ranging or feral dog (Canis lupus familiaris) attacks were also common. Our results suggest that the magnitude of puma conflicts may be overestimated. Domestic sheep (Ovis spp.) and poultry (Galliformes) were the most common species predated. Livestock losses were widespread across Chile but were highest in San Jose de Maipo, located in central Chile, and Cochrane, La Unión, and Lago Verde in south Chile municipalities. Livestock guardian dogs and the livestock insurance, as a part of the Agriculture Insurance of Chile, were identified as the most promising tools to mitigate HWCs, shortand mid-term, respectively. However, longer-term strategies should focus on improving livestock management through extension (i.e., farmer education) programs for local communities. In Chile, HWCs negatively impact small farmers and wild carnivore populations. An interinstitutional and interdisciplinary strategy integrating input from government and nongovernmental organizations, farmers, and academia is needed to achieve effective carnivore conservation in the long-term.


This paper focuses on hydrodynamic research aiming at the short-circuit evaluation of five different outlet configurations through the compartments of a mechanical flocculation unit of vertical shaft with mixing paddles at pilot scale. The tests were carried out with two, three and four compartments, variable and constant velocity gradients, including alternating senses of paddle rotation (clockwise in the first compartment, anticlockwise in the following one and so on). The research pointed out that the relevance of outlet configuration increases with the reduction of the number of compartments. In opposite, the velocity gradient and the sense of the paddle rotation seem less significant features. These results suggest the possibility of a viable increasing of performance, with low financial investments, mainly for flocculation units with three or two compartments installed in overloaded water treatment plants.


A core indicator of success at University is the grade a student achieves following a period of study. A student's ability to achieve expected grades is often understood in terms of learning and study processes that the student is capable of, chooses to adopt, or masters. However, psychology tells us that our selfefficacy is a major determinant of how we select activities, how much effort we expend on them, and how long we sustain effort. The importance of self-efficacy in supporting a student's study choices, effort and sustainability – and hence in the student's capacity for success – is clear. Providing students with an understanding of the role of self-efficacy provides a transformative moment in the student's growth as a university student. This paper examines the effectiveness of a specific method, point-of-contact feedback, in lifting students' awareness of self-efficacy. The ability of the survey to support student metacognition through a social persuasion design, particularly for students originally targeting lower grades, demonstrates that point-of-contact feedback can assist students to improve their awareness and understanding of a learning concept. The outcome of this one-off survey is a demonstrated transformation of student expectations regarding their grades and the way they intend to engage their studies.


The alignment of the components in sensor systems based on external optical feedback is a critical factor due to the small size of laser aperture into which the returned light must be coupled. This paper presents experimental results and a theoretical explanation which show that the fringe frequency of a self-mixing interferometric sensor system can be doubled due to misalignment of the external reflector. The double frequency fringes are less sensitive to the alignment of the reflector than the normal fringes and offer a potential increase in the resolution of a sensing system of a factor of two.


Abstract An attempt has been made to show that basic magma is associated with vertical and not with folding movement, that basic intrusions take the form of those characteristic of unfolded regions and of relatively high levels and that differentiation in situ is common. It is argued that basic magma is emplaced in the orogenic belts as flows and typically non-orogenic intrusions during the geosynclinal or sinking phase of the orogenic cycle, that rocks of the appinitic suite, which commonly occur as stocks associated with granodiorites, are formed from these non-orogenic basic rocks by a process of hybridization during a subsequent folding phase, but that no further basic magma is introduced during this phase. It is suggested that the terms Non-orogenic Association and Orogenic Association might replace Volcanic Association and Plutonic Association to indicate the relation of basic and acid magmas to their tectonic environment.


The rivers are considered as the life line of any country since they make water available for our domestic, industrial and recreational functions. The quality of river water signifies the health status and hygienic aspects of a particular region, but the quality of these life lines is continuously deteriorating due to discharge of sewage, garbage and industrial effluents into them. Thrust on  water  demand has increased manifolds due to the  increased population, therefore tangible efforts to make the water sources free from pollution is catching attention all across the globe. This paper attempts to highlight the trends in water quality change of River Beas, right from Manali to Larji in India. This is an important river in the state of Himachal Pradesh and caters to the need of water for Manali and Kullu townships, besides other surrounding rural areas. The Manali-Larji Beas river stretch is exposed to the flow of sewage, garbage and muck resulting from various project activities, thereby making it vulnerable to pollution. In addition, the influx of thousands of tourists to these towns also contributes to the pollution load by their recreational and other tourist related activities.  Pollution of this river has ultimately affected the livelihood of local population in this region. Hence, water quality monitoring was carried out for the said stretch between January, 2010 and January, 2012 at 15 various locations on quarterly basis, right from the upstream of Manali town and up to downstream of Larji dam.  Temperature, color, odor, D.O.  , pH, BOD, TSS, TC and FC has been the parameters that were studied. This study gives the broad idea about the characteristics of water at locations in the said river stretch, and suggestions for improving water quality and livelihood of local population in this particular domain . Keywords : Competitiveness, Ecological, hygienic, vulnerable, anthropogenic. Submitted 19 February 2014; Revised 27 May 2014; Accepted 8 June 2014; Publihsed 10 June 2014 urn:nbn:de:hebis:34-2014062645581


When cooperating with others carries a direct fitness cost for the individual, natural selection should act against such behavior. However, cooperation is widespread across natural systems. Here we summarize and expand on a recently published work that highlights the importance a previously overlooked factor, the population shape. We used a combination of three in silico systems, Aevol (complex genomes, cooperation based on public good secretion), Aevol-lite (one-locus two-alleles, cooperation based on public good secretion) and CAevol (Prisoners dilemma with two pure strategies, cooperate and defect). In all three systems, higher level of cooperation evolved when populations lived in bulky worlds, a torus created by folding 100x100 quadrilateral grid, rather than slender ones, based on a 4x2500 grid. The result was not intuitive, and we able to discern the population dynamics only upon close examination of the full populations over time, in Aevol-lite. Populations are in dynamic equilibrium, constant emergence and extinction of cooperator patches. We show that slim populations effectively constrained the expansion and thus decreased the size these patches, leading to less cooperation on average. In the extended abstract we further discuss the implications of this work for natural systems, with populations embedded in different dimensions, populations as graphs, and also it with the work on infectious cooperation.


Abstract The regeneration-associated gene (RAG) expression program is activated in injured peripheral neurons after axotomy and enables long-distance axon re-growth. Over 1000 genes are regulated, and many transcription factors are upregulated or activated as part of this response. However, a detailed picture of how RAG expression is regulated is lacking. In particular, the transcriptional targets and specific functions of the various transcription factors are unclear. Jun was the first-regeneration-associated transcription factor identified and the first shown to be functionally important. Here we fully define the role of Jun in the RAG expression program in regenerating facial motor neurons. At 1, 4 and 14 days after axotomy, Jun upregulates 11, 23 and 44% of the RAG program, respectively. Jun functions relevant to regeneration include cytoskeleton production, metabolic functions and cell activation, and the downregulation of neurotransmission machinery. In silico analysis of promoter regions of Jun targets identifies stronger over-representation of AP1-like sites than CRE-like sites, although CRE sites were also over-represented in regions flanking AP1 sites. Strikingly, in motor neurons lacking Jun, an alternative SRF-dependent gene expression program is initiated after axotomy. The promoters of these newly expressed genes exhibit over-representation of CRE sites in regions near to SRF target sites. This alternative gene expression program includes plasticity-associated transcription factors and leads to an aberrant early increase in synapse density on motor neurons. Jun thus has the important function in the early phase after axotomy of pushing the injured neuron away from a plasticity response and towards a regenerative phenotype.


An individual tontine account (ITA) is an investment product similar to a conventional brokerage account, but with the added feature of mortality pooling through participation in an open-ended fair tontine. The ITA exploits the property that participants in a fair tontine need not be confined to a common investment portfolio or to a common payout method. Instead, participants are allowed to select and trade investments as they wish and to choose from a variety of payout methods, with each participant's results being largely unaffected by the investment and payout choices of others. We envision the ITA as being complementary to an individual retirement account (IRA), allowing retirees to derive extra income from savings without taking on additional investment risk and to obtain lifetime income at a lower cost than with comparable insurance products. The mortality-pooling features of ITAs compare favorably to those of insurance products. The cost per dollar of income is lower. The opportunity for individual choice is increased. Fees are transparent rather than opaque. Accounting is transparent and conveyed simply on account statements. The downside of ITAs is that income from mortality pooling is not guaranteed, and a participant might experience less income than hoped for if other participants live longer than expected.

ITAs represent a new arrow in the quiver for addressing global retirement needs and may address the "annuity puzzle" by giving retirees a more transparent, lower-cost alternative to insurance-based products.


The field goal is a critical scoring play in the National Football League. Coaches and fans alike are interested in the probability that a field goal attempt will be made or missed. Traditional analyses assume that the attempt distance is the primary factor determining success; however, we believe that other environmental and situational factors cannot be ignored. We constructed a binary logistic regression model based on data from the 2000-2011 NFL seasons to identify factors that have a significant effect on the likelihood of field goal success. Distance and most environmental factors were significant. Altitude and artificial turf improved the likelihood of a make, while cold temperatures, wind, and precipitation reduced it. Contrary to popular belief, not one situational factor (regular season vs. postseason, home vs. away, whether a timeout was called before the attempt, and situational pressure) was significant. We used our comprehensive model to evaluate kicker careers, seasons, and stadiums between 2000-2011. This evaluation is superior to pure make percentage, which is ignorant of the difficult of a kicker's field goal attempts. By more accurately predicting the outcome of field goal attempts, coaches can make better ingame decisions and fans can gain a greater understanding of kicker ability.


The proliferation of knowledge-sharing communities such as Wikipedia and the progress in scalable information extraction from Web and text sources has enabled the automatic construction of very large knowledge bases. Recent endeavors of this kind include academic research projects such as DBpedia, KnowItAll, Probase, ReadTheWeb, and YAGO, as well as industrial ones such as Freebase and Trueknowledge. These projects provide automatically constructed knowledge bases of facts about named entities, their semantic classes, and their mutual relationships. Such world knowledge in turn enables cognitive applications and knowledge-centric services like disambiguating natural-language text, deep question answering, and semantic search for entities and relations in Web and enterprise data. Prominent examples of how knowledge bases can be harnessed include the Google Knowledge Graph and the IBM Watson question answering system. This tutorial presents state-of-the-art methods, recent advances, research opportunities, and open challenges along this avenue of knowledge harvesting and its applications.


Insurance policy document belonging to Mrs. C. C. Jensen of Danevang, Texas. According to the content in the document, she applied for membership with the Danish Mutual Insurance Association for protection against any fire or lightening damage that could affect her home and furnishings. Signatures from the president and secretary of the organization can be seen at the bottom, by P. J. Petersen and Peter Harton, respectively.
When folded, the back of the document acts as a pamphlet that lists the various bylaws and article of the insurance organization.


The extraocular muscles are one of few skeletal muscles that are structurally and functionally intact in Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Little is known about the mechanisms responsible for differential sparing or targeting of muscle groups in neuromuscular disease. One hypothesis is that constitutive or adaptive properties of the unique extraocular muscle phenotype may underlie their protection in dystrophinopathy. We assessed the status of extraocular muscles in the mdx mouse model of muscular dystrophy. Mice showed mild pathology in accessory extraocular muscles, but no signs of pathology were evident in the principal extraocular muscles at any age. By immunoblotting, the extraocular muscles of mdx mice exhibited increased levels of a dystrophin analog, dystrophin-related protein or utrophin. These data suggest, but do not provide mechanistic evidence, that utrophin mediates eye muscle protection. To examine a potential causal relationship, knockout mouse models were used to determine whether eye muscle sparing could be reversed. Mice lacking expression of utrophin alone, like the dystrophin-deficient mdx mouse, showed no pathological alterations in extraocular muscle. However, mice deficient in both utrophin and dystrophin exhibited severe changes in both the accessory and principal extraocular muscles, with the eye muscles affected more adversely than other skeletal muscles. Selected extraocular muscle fiber types still remained spared, suggesting the operation of an alternative mechanism for muscle sparing in these fiber types. We propose that an endogenous upregulation of utrophin is mechanistic in protecting extraocular muscle in dystrophinopathy. Moreover, data lend support to the hypothesis that interventions designed to increase utrophin levels may ameliorate the pathology in other skeletal muscles in Duchenne muscular dystrophy.


The development of offshore oil and gas, the mining of deep sea minerals and the disposal of wastes through ocean dumping have raised important questions about the way we harvest ocean resources and use the marine environment. From an economic perspective all of the above activities involve risk, either to private developers, society at large, or both. This paper presents a simple model of resource development with environmental risk. The model and subsequent modifications are used to characterize the risks inherent in the aforementioned marine activities, and to help define an appropriate role for public policy. The nature of the risks involved, the possibilities for risk spreading, the presence or absence of irreversible consequences, and the expected value of information are shown to be important in determining the rate of development and the way in which net benefits should be evaluated.


Introduction Thalassemia patients are prone to the hepatitis C, B, and HIV virus, due to their constant need to receive blood transfusions. Therefore, this research was aimed to determine the epidemic of the aforementioned diseases in thalassemia patients of Shahid Mohammadi Hospital of Bandar Abbas, Iran. Methods This cross-sectional study was carried out on thalassemia patients visiting the Thalassemia Hospital of Bandar Abbas from March 21, 2014, to March 22, 2015. Checklists were used to collect the data. HBS-Ag, HCV-Ab, and HIV-Ab tests have been registered for hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and HIV virus, respectively. The data were analyzed using SPSS 19 by Mann-Whitney U test, chi-square test, and independent samples t-test. Results Among 587 records administered into the research, 280 individuals (47.7 %) were men and (52.3 %) were female. The average age of participants was 18.01 ± 9.31 years. The youngest was 1 years old, and the oldest was 46 years old. Four patients under the study (0.7 %) were positive for HBV; 60 (10.2 %) were HCV positive. However, no one in the study was diagnosed HIV positive. In the case of spread, there was no significant difference regarding age and sex in HBV patients. However, in HCV patients, significant differences were found (p=0.044 for gender and p=0.001 for age). Conclusion In thalassemia, hepatitis C had the highest rate of spread. According to the screening, it was much anticipated that the trend should be falling, but the results show the contrary. Hence, it is recommended that more precise methods such as PCR be used.


MnCo2O4 architectures assembled from well-aligned nanowire or nanosheet arrays have been vertically grown on Ni foam with robust adhesion by in situ hydrothermal growth. Interestingly, the nanostructures of MnCo2O4 can be easily tailored from nanowires to nanosheets by the addition of NH4F at moderate concentrations in a mixed solvent. Further, unique 3D self-supported hierarchical core/shell MnCo2O4@CoS nanowire or nanosheet (MCO-NW@CS or MCO-NS@CS) arrays have been further engineered and synthesized via a subsequent electrodeposition process, which shows that interconnected CoS ultrathin layers as the shell have been uniformly immobilized on the MnCo2O4 arrays to form a novel core/shell structure. The synergic effect of the unique structure and heterogeneity is advantageous to increase the interfacial area, improve the charge accumulation and storage, accelerate the electron and electrolyte ion transfer, and enhance the electrochemical activity of the two components (MnCo2O4 and CoS) when used as an integrated electrode for (asymmetric) supercapacitors. As a result, the MCO-NW@CS or MCO-NS@CS electrodes display greatly improved electrochemical performance including remarkable specific capacitance, outstanding rate capability and good cycling stability. Moreover, the solid-state asymmetric supercapacitor using MCO-NS@CS as the positive active electrode and activated carbon (AC) as the negative active electrode has also achieved high energy density (55.1 W h kg−1 at 477.3 W kg−1). The hierarchical MCO-NW@CS or MCO-NS@CS electrodes with outstanding structural characteristics hold great promise not only in high capacitance applications but also in high energy and power density fields. In addition, to have a deeper understanding of their electrochemical behavior, a combined experimental and density functional theory (DFT) calculation study is also introduced.


All 212 neonates undergoing cardiac surgery at this hospital during the 5-year period from 1976 to 1980 inclusive were reviewed. Forty required open heart surgery with 23 (57%) deaths. One hundred and seventy-four neonates underwent non-bypass procedures and could be divided into three groups: group 1 (82 patients) had inadequate pulmonary blood flow, group 2 (33 patients) had increased pulmonary blood flow or inadequate mixing, and group 3 (59 patients) had coarctation of the aorta, alone or with associated lesions. Forty-four (25%) of the neonates undergoing non-bypass procedures died. Two required bypass surgery later in the first month of life. Metabolic acidosis and the need for preoperative respiratory support were appreciably greater in non-surviving patients. The spectrum of diagnoses encountered and types of operative procedures performed are analysed.


The promoter of the human C3 gene has been shown to be responsive to stimulation by both estrogen and tamoxifen-activated estrogen receptor (ER) in transcriptional assays reconstituted in mammalian cells. Using a series of deletions and point mutations, we have determined that the agonist activity of these two compounds was dependent upon the direct interaction of ER with each of three estrogen response elements (EREs) contained within this promoter. One of these sequences, ERE1 resembles the canonical vitellogenin A2-ERE whereas the other two, ERE2 and ERE3, do not display significant homology to known EREs. Using gene transfer studies it was shown that these sequences are necessary and sufficient for ER-mediated transcription. Interestingly, using in vitro receptor/DNA-binding assays we demonstrated that neither ERE1, ERE2, or ERE3 alone formed high-affinity complexes with purified ER; however when a promoter fragment containing all three sequences was used, specific, high-affinity ER-DNA interactions were observed. It was not surprising, therefore, that, when assayed individually on a heterologous promoter, these sequences function as weak EREs but together they act in a synergistic manner to create a strong ER-dependent enhancer. It has been suggested that tamoxifen mediates its partial agonist activity through AP-1 at target promoters. However, the fact that purified ER can bind directly to the estrogen-responsive sequences within the C3 promoter, and that tamoxifen activity on this promoter is unaffected by AP-1 coexpression, indicates that at least on some promoters tamoxifen can manifest partial agonist activity through a classical ER/ ERE- mediated mechanism.


Recognizing the increasing cancer burden worldwide, Nasca & Pastides provide a basic understanding of cancer epidemiology, with a particular focus on cancer biology, gene–environment associations in the cancer etiology and major risk factors for cancer.

The intended readers are students in public health schools and related medical and para-medical fields as well as those working in cancer control on a regional, national and international level. Since, according to the authors, there is no textbook dealing with cancer epidemiology for first-time students, this book aims to be such a textbook for those with basic knowledge in epidemiology.

Nasca & Pastides begin by emphasizing the importance of describing the cancer burden and trends using appropriate measures. Then they explain what cancer is and how it can be diagnosed and categorized using different cancer classification schemes (e.g staging, coding).

Chapters 3–7 contribute to the methodological and technical knowledge on cell biology and on study types, which are of particular relevance for investigating carcinogenicity, biomarkers and genetic risk factors. Among them are experimental studies, molecular–epidemiological studies, studies on gene–environment interactions and genetic epidemiology studies.

The subsequent chapters (8–16) describe risk factors for cancer in a detailed and comprehensive way. Not only are classic lifestyle and well known risk factors such as tobacco, alcohol, diet and occupational hazards considered but also genetic factors, ionization and radiation, infections, immunological factors and hormones. Possible dose–response relationships are addressed and figures and illustrations help to understand the etiology and terminology.

The chapters on risk factors are internally structured in different ways, some by cancer sites, others by the particular factors associated with the increased risks, taking into account the different study types that address these associations.

One whole chapter is dedicated to the risk factors for and occurrence of childhood cancers and points out the need for the life–course perspective in cancer research. This chapter was newly added into this second edition. The last section gives an introduction to cancer screening as a method for early detection using certain cancers as examples to demonstrate different screening concepts.

Although the chapter on infectious agents and occupational carcinogens addresses the disproportionate geographical burden between high- and low-income countries, not much information in general is provided on geographical differences in cancer burden and survival.

Using "descriptive epidemiology" as a chapter heading, one would expect more technical information on what this is. The book makes us aware of the need to take care in interpreting comparisons, trends and data on cancer occurrence; however, it does not state how to carefully interpret these statistics.

The authors use tables and figures that aid in understanding the burden of cancer and distribution of cancer sites as well as the categorization within different cancer classification schemes. Several illustrations are used to make etiology and biology of cancer understandable also to non-medical professionals.

The appendix provides a detailed glossary with a particular focus on biological and medical terminology, a feature that is usually available in reference books used by medical students. Appendix B lists web sites without indicating the kind of information they could provide to the reader. A more helpful table for major cancer web resources is available on page 3.

Every chapter ends with a summary and discussion questions. However, it would be helpful to provide specific answers to these questions in the appendix, which would make an improvement to the relatively ineffectual appendices.

The book is an important reference book for students, whether beginners or post-graduate students. It is written in a clear language, is well ordered and accurate. Nevertheless, several cancer epidemiology textbooks are already available from IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer). Thus the main strength of this book is its strong biological and medical basis as well as the up-to-date reference to the continuum of genetics and biomarkers in cancer epidemiology.

Although health policy-makers are not the priority audience, and few words are said on cancer control activities, an introduction in this field would significantly add to Fundamentals of cancer epidemiology. ■


Objectives: Therapeutic coma is advocated in guidelines for management of refractory status epilepticus; this is, however, based on weak evidence. We here address the specific impact of therapeutic coma on status epilepticus outcome. Design: Retrospective assessment of a prospectively collected cohort. Setting: Academic hospital. Patients: Consecutive adults with incident status epilepticus lasting greater than or equal to 30 minutes, admitted between 2006 and 2013. Measurements and Main Results: We recorded prospectively demographics, clinical status epilepticus features, treatment, and outcome at discharge and retrospectively medical comorbidities, hospital stay, and infectious complications. Associations between potential predictors and clinical outcome were analyzed using multinomial logistic regressions. Of 467 patients with incident status epilepticus, 238 returned to baseline (51.1%), 162 had new disability (34.6%), and 67 died (14.3%); 50 subjects (10.7%) were managed with therapeutic coma. Therapeutic coma was associated with poorer outcome in the whole cohort (relative risk ratio for new disability, 6.86; 95% CI, 2.84–16.56; for mortality, 9.10; 95% CI, 3.17–26.16); the effect was more important in patients with complex partial compared with generalized convulsive or nonconvulsive status epilepticus in coma. Prevalence of infections was higher (odds ratio, 3.81; 95% CI, 1.66–8.75), and median hospital stay in patients discharged alive was longer (16 d [range, 2–240 d] vs 9 d [range, 1–57 d]; p < 0.001) in subjects managed with therapeutic coma. Conclusions: This study provides class III evidence that therapeutic coma is associated with poorer outcome after status epilepticus; furthermore, it portends higher infection rates and longer hospitalizations. These data suggest caution in the straightforward use of this approach, especially in patients with complex partial status epilepticus.


This paper presents the first computationally-derived scalar measurement of metaphoricity. Each input sentence is given a value between 0 and 1 which represents how metaphoric that sentence is. This measure achieves a correlation of 0.450 (Pearson's R, p < 0.01) with an experimental measure of metaphoricity involving human participants. While far from perfect, this scalar measure of metaphoricity allows different thresholds for metaphoricity so that metaphor identification can be fitted for specific tasks and datasets. When reduced to a binary classification evaluation using the VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus, the system achieves an F-Measure of 0.608, slightly lower than the comparable binary classification system's 0.638 and competitive with existing approaches.


Bulky carcinogen-DNA adducts commonly cause replicative polymerases to stall, leading to a switch to bypass polymerases. We have investigated nucleotide incorporation opposite the major adduct of 2-amino-1-methyl-6-phenylimidazo[4,5-b]pyridine (PhIP) in the DinB family polymerase, Dpo4, using molecular modeling and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. PhIP, the most prevalent heterocyclic aromatic amine formed by cooking of proteinaceous food, is mutagenic in mammalian cells and is implicated in mammary and colon tumors. Our results show that the dG-C8-PhIP adduct can be accommodated in the spacious major groove Dpo4 open pocket, with Dpo4 capable of incorporating dCTP, dTTP or dATP opposite the adduct reasonably well. However, the PhIP ring system on the minor groove side would seriously disturb the active site, regardless of the presence and identity of dNTP. Furthermore, the simulations indicate that dATP and dTTP are better incorporated in the damaged system than in their respective mismatched but unmodified controls, suggesting that the PhIP adduct enhances incorporation of these mismatches. Finally, bulky C8-dG adducts, situated in the major groove, are likely to impede translocation in this polymerase (Rechkoblit et al. (2006), PLoS Biol., 4, e11). However, N2-dG adducts, which can reside on the minor groove side, appear to cause less hindrance when in this position.


Learning a measure of similarity between pairs of objects is a fundamental problem in machine learning. It stands in the core of classification methods like kernel machines, and is particularly useful for applications like searching for images that are similar to a given image or finding videos that are relevant to a given video. In these tasks, users look for objects that are not only visually similar but also semantically related to a given object. Unfortunately, current approaches for learning similarity do not scale to large datasets, especially when imposing metric constraints on the learned similarity. We describe OASIS, a method for learning pairwise similarity that is fast and scales linearly with the number of objects and the number of non-zero features. Scalability is achieved through online learning of a bilinear model over sparse representations using a large margin criterion and an efficient hinge loss cost. OASIS is accurate at a wide range of scales: on a standard benchmark with thousands of images, it is more precise than state-of-the-art methods, and faster by orders of magnitude. On 2.7 million images collected from the web, OASIS can be trained within 3 days on a single CPU. The non-metric similarities learned by OASIS can be transformed into metric similarities, achieving higher precisions than similarities that are learned as metrics in the first place. This suggests an approach for learning a metric from data that is larger by orders of magnitude than was handled before.


Chromophoric (or colored) dissolved organic matter (CDOM) has been identified as a major determinant of the optical properties of oligotrophic oceans. The factors controlling distribution of CDOM far from the direct influence of land are not well known, as CDOM abundance and distri- bution does not directly correlate with phytoplankton productivity or biomass, or with dissolved organic matter (DOM) concentration. As part of a larger study of the dynamics of CDOM in the open ocean, we investigated direct release from plankton as a factor contributing to distribution patterns of CDOM. We measured the production of CDOM by zooplankton (copepods, euphausiids, amphi- pods, salps, polychaetes), protozoans (colonial radiolaria), and by the colonial cyanobacterium Tri- chodesmium spp. in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre. Groups of individual species of plankton were incubated and absorption spectra were obtained for their release products. CDOM was pro- duced by all organisms examined, and absorption spectra varied by taxa, with major taxa exhibiting characteristic absorption peaks. Plankton-produced DOM is a source of labile carbon and thus facil- itates microbial activity, and CDOM may also serve as photoprotection for near-surface-living organ- isms. Zooplankton likely play an important role in the CDOM cycle in the Sargasso Sea, directly through release/excretion of CDOM and indirectly by providing a labile substrate (excretia) for microbial-mediated production of CDOM.


Valeva, N. and Y. Stamenov, 2017. Nitrogen removal assessment in omitted plot trials with wheat and barley. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 23 (3): 449–452 Nutrients removal by crops is one of the key indicators to determine the optimal nutrient status. During the period 2009 – 2012 in the region of Pomorie and village Sadievo (municipality Nova Zagora), a Eutric Vertisol and Chromic Luvisols, it was assessed the infl uence of the nutrition conditions on the nitrogen removal by winter wheat (variety "Aglika") and winter barley (variety "Aheloy"). Eight nutrition treatments were studied during the fi eld experiment, including addition and omission of nutrients – untreated control; N; P; K; NP; NK; PK and NPК. Yield parameters and chemical composition of the main and secondary production were reported every season to determine the effi ciency indicators and nitrogen removal per harvested area and per yield unit (grain). Analysis of the data for both sites of the research, shows that alone phosphorus addition and potassium addition, as well as nitrogen omission (PK) led to lower nitrogen removal per ton of wheat production compared to conditions with balanced nutrition (NPK).The highest nitrogen removal per ton of barley production was reported under conditions of single addition of nitrogen for the region of Pomorie, and the village Sadievo. Nitrogen removal for one tone production of wheat and barley was variable depending on the specifi c conditions of the experimental regions and nutrition conditions. The differences were relatively small and in average nitrogen removal for one tone production wheat was higher in the region of Pomorie – 24.4 kg t-1compare to 22.5 kg t-1 in the region of Sadievo. For barley, nitrogen removal was higher in Sadievo – 22.2 kg t-1 compare to 21.6 kg t-1 for the region of Pomorie. For both crops at the two regions of the study, the highest nitrogen removal for one tone production was reported under conditions of single addition of the nitrogen. The similar results for nitrogen removal for one tone of wheat and barley grain obtained under optimal nutrient conditions NPK showed the possibility of using universal data for the nitrogen removal in different regions.


Dynamical downscaling of Global Climate Models (GCMs) through regional climate models (RCMs) potentially improves the usability of the output for hydrological impact studies. However, a further downscaling or interpolation of precipitation from RCMs is often needed to match the precipitation characteristics at the local scale. This study analysed three Model Output Statistics (MOS) techniques to adjust RCM precipitation; (1) a simple direct method (DM), (2) quantile-quantile mapping (QM) and (3) a distribution-based scaling (DBS) approach. The modelled precipitation was daily means from 16 RCMs driven by ERA40 reanalysis data over the 1961–2000 provided by the ENSEMBLES (ENSEMBLE-based Predictions of Climate Changes and their Impacts) project over a small catchment located in the Midlands, UK. All methods were conditioned on the entire time series, separate months and using an objective classification of Lamb's weather types. The performance of the MOS techniques were assessed regarding temporal and spatial characteristics of the precipitation fields, as well as modelled runoff using the HBV rainfall-runoff model. The results indicate that the DBS conditioned on classification patterns performed better than the other methods, however an ensemble approach in terms of both climate models and downscaling methods is recommended to account for uncertainties in the MOS methods.


This Thesis is concerned with a framework for the research of employee development. To start, the importance of training, development and learning at the societal, organizational, group and individual level is set out. A review of the research on training and development argues that a detailed comparison may further our understanding of the latter, by investigating training effectiveness models (e. g. Colquitt, 2000) in the context of development. Individual difference measures that may affect development are discussed. Different development activities are compared on different dimensions such as the degree of formality and frequency of occurrence, and implications for research are discussed. Three quantitative studies [A, B, C] concentrate on staff appraisals and development centres, investigating how individual differences and demographic characteristics are associated with development outcomes. Results from Study A (N = 126) showed that age was correlated with participation in training and development; tenure was associated with participation in training; appraiser role was associated with participation in training and career movement, and predicted perceived utility and career movement. Study B (n = 63) showed that Learning Climate [LC] increased significantly following participation in appraisal ; changes in need to achieve [nAch] and tenure were associated with participation in development activities. Generally, nAch had stronger associations with development outcomes than development specific self-efficacy [DSE] in both studies. In Study C, nAch and DSE changed significantly following DC participation (n = 87), these gain scores, age and gender predicted DC ratings, but no significant associations with development outcomes were observed (n = 47). Linking in with the observations from the literature review, the potential limitations of quantitative approaches were highlighted. Therefore the final study [D] took a qualitative approach using template analysis to elicit managers' definitions of training and development. The analysis showed that managers (N = 20) are able to differentiate training and development, and that decision-making processes and outcomes appear different for each type of activity. Development is seen as less measurable and quantifiable in terms of organizational benefits, and therefore can take second place to training. The concluding Chapter argues that experimental approaches are perhaps limiting for the investigation of development due to its long-term and on-going nature. Although a whole array of individual differences (such as locus of control, learning styles or attitudinal variables) require further study we first need better methods for defining and measuring development motivation and development outcomes; an initially qualitative approach may be more conducive to further our understanding.


Cambridge Flow Solutions Ltd, Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge, CB4 9AD, UK Real-world simulation challenges are getting bigger: virtual aero-engines with multistage blade rows coupled with their secondary air systems & with fully featured geometry; environmental flows at meta-scales over resolved cities; synthetic battlefields. It is clear that the future of simulation is scalable, end-to-end parallelism. To address these challenges we have reported in a sequence of papers a series of inherently parallel building blocks based on the integration of a Level Set based geometry kernel with an octree-based cut-Cartesian mesh generator, RANS flow solver, post-processing and geometry management & editing. The cut-cells which characterize the approach are eliminated by exporting a body-conformal mesh driven by the underpinning Level Set and managed by mesh quality optimization algorithms; this permits third party flow solvers to be deployed. This paper continues this sequence by reporting & demonstrating two main novelties: variable depth volume mesh refinement enabling variable surface mesh refinement and a radical rework of the mesh generation into a bottom-up system based on Space Filling Curves. Also reported are the associated extensions to body-conformal mesh export. Everything is implemented in a scalable, parallel manner. As a practical demonstration, meshes of guaranteed quality are generated for a fully resolved, generic aircraft carrier geometry, a cooled disc brake assembly and a B747 in landing configuration. Copyright © 2009 by W.N.Dawes.


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