Summary Bullous pemphigoid (BP) is an autoimmune disease mediated by autoantibodies against hemidesmosome components. This study used PCR–sequence‐specific primers to genotype polymorphisms in HLA‐DR and DQ in 25 BP patients and 57 normal controls from northern China. We found lower frequencies of DRB1*08 (DR8) and DRB1*08/DQB1*06 (DR8/DQ6) haplotypes in BP patients than in controls (4.08% vs. 15.19% and 1.54% vs. 13.82%, respectively; P < 0.05), suggesting a protective role for DR8 and DR8/DQ6 haplotypes in BP patients from northern China; there were no statistical differences among other alleles tested. This result is strikingly different from previous reports that DQB1*0301 is associated with BP in Caucasian patients and DRB1*1101, DQB1*0302, DRB1*04/DQA1*0301/DQB1*0302 and DRB1*1101/ DQA1*0505/DQB1*0302 with Japanese BP patients. Ethnic differences in the polymorphic composition of the HLA‐DR and DQ genes may influence genetic susceptibility to BP.


1. The ability to metabolize lactate at rest and during exercise was studied in six male subjects by using a constant infusion of sodium l(+)-lactate at a rate of 0·05 mmol min −1 kg −1 . Twenty minute periods of rest and exercise at two work rates were used, amounting to 25% and 50% of maximal O 2 uptake (Vo 2 max.) in four subjects and 50% and 66% of Vo 2 max. in two subjects. Control measurements were made with saline infusion. In all studies a steady state in blood lactate was achieved. 2. At rest lactate infusion was associated with an increase of 3·51 mmol/l (± sd 0·70) in plasma lactate. The increase was smaller in exercise and in a given subject was the same at both work rates; plasma lactate was on average 1·21 mmol/l (±sd 1·11) higher during lactate infusion than the control measurement at the same power output. In one subject lactate values in exercise were unchanged by lactate infusion. 3. At rest lactate infusion was associated with an increase in O 2 intake and CO 2 output, the respiratory exchange ratio was unchanged, and plasma HCO − 3 rose by 1·85 mmol/l. 4. During exercise lactate infusion was associated with a smaller and variable increase in O 2 intake. CO 2 output was less, the respiratory exchange ratio fell, and plasma HCO − 3 rose by 6·1 mmol/l. 5. Exercise is accompanied by an increased capacity to metabolize lactate aerobically. Decreasing lactate metabolism appears to play no part in the increase in plasma lactate concentration with increasing exercise, at least to 66% of the maximal O 2 intake.


THE ARMY is going through a period of introspection regarding its counterinsurgency (COIN) practices and their effectiveness in Iraq and Afghanistan. (1) Opinions vary on this topic, but I doubt three years ago anyone could have predicted the current situation in which we find ourselves. Hence, the time is right for a critical conversation. My task force--2d Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82d Airborne Division--recently returned from its second short-notice deployment to Iraq in less than a year and a half. We served in Baghdad and Mosul from December 2004 to April 2005 and in Tal Afar from September 2005 to January 2006. Fate put us at the center of the insurgency in northern Iraq both times. Originally deployed to secure the dangerous Airport Road in Baghdad, we were ordered to Mosul with no notice after the 22 December 2004 Mosul dining-facility bombing. We found ourselves in significant battles with the enemy immediately on arriving in Mosul. Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), chiefly the police force, had collapsed after synchronized insurgent attacks on police stations on 10 November, and the security situation was so serious that several battalions, including my own, were sent to reinforce Multi-National Force, Northwest (MNF-NW). Attached to the 25th Infantry Division's (25th ID's) Stryker Brigade Combat Team (SBCT), we battled our foe throughout the month of January, ultimately prevailing and setting the conditions in our zone for the first-ever free national elections in Iraq, on 30 January 2005. Through aggressive combat operations and with the help of useful information from locals, we defeated insurgent cells and secured the streets, thereby averting a potential strategic defeat. (As late as December 2004, political leaders were seriously contemplating not holding elections in Mosul.) (2) Four and a half months after redeploying from Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF II), we were sent back to Iraq and attached to the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR) to help liberate and stabilize the insurgent safe haven of Tal Afar, in Ninevah province. Tal Afar has been the focus of considerable media coverage over the past year. (3) In early 2005, while coalition forces in the north focused on defeating the insurgency in Mosul, enemy fighters took control of the dense urban terrain of TalAfar, a city just 40 miles from the Syrian border and a staging base for terrorist training and safe passage throughout Iraq. By spring 2005, Islamic extremists led primarily by former regime elements had established a tight grip on the city. They took over schools and mosques and intimidated, kidnapped, or murdered those cooperating with the coalition or Iraqi Government. With unfettered freedom of movement, the insurgents created a sanctuary for the ideological indoctrination of uneducated, unemployed teenage youths and a training base from which to launch attacks on coalition and Iraqi forces. All of this inflamed sectarian tensions, stimulating widespread violence and chaos. Coalition forces sent in the 3d ACR to conduct Operation Restoring Rights (ORR). After shaping operations and a final assault, the city was liberated. Our battalion task force moved into the violent Sarai neighborhood and transitioned to stability operations within 72 hours. What set this operation apart from earlier ones in Tal Afar and other areas across Iraq was the highly developed and well-resourced phase IV (post-assault/stability) dimension of the campaign plan. My paratroopers were committed to living and operating in the same neighborhoods we liberated. As ORR unfolded, U.S. forces worked closely with the ISF throughout the 3d ACR sector obtaining actionable intelligence from the local population to defeat insurgent cells; enabling secure, widely participated-in elections; and in general helping northwestern Iraq enjoy a more stable life. Although by U.S. standards Mosul and Tal Afar remain dangerous places to live, conditions are emerging which favor lasting peace throughout Ninevah province. …


World War II in general and Holocaust in particular are important topics of the debate in the Lithuanian public discourse. Due to that the Lithuanian and Russian press is seen by the author not just as a significant source of information, but also as a peculiar tool for structuring knowledge about Lithuania's historical past. The article reveals that the perception of Holocaust history is changing in the Lithuanian and Russian press in recent years by rethinking of the dominant Lithuanian historical narrative and representing diverse approaches to the role of Lithuanians in collaboration with the Nazi regime. The Holocaust Discourse is constructed as important experience in considering and strengthening the human rights protection discourse in Lithuania as well. The article is based on selected texts published in 2016 by online daily DELFI and printed newspapers in the Lithuanian and Russian languages (150 publications in total).


Predicting future need for water resources has traditionally been, at best, a crude mixture of art and science. This has prevented the evaluation of water need from being carried out in either a consistent or comprehensive manner. This inconsistent and somewhat arbitrary approach to water resources planning led to well publicised premature developments in the 1970's and 1980's but privatisation of the Water Industry, including creation of the Office of Water Services and the National Rivers Authority in 1989, turned the tide of resource planning to the point where funding of schemes and their justification by the Regulators could no longer be assumed. Furthermore, considerable areas of uncertainty were beginning to enter the debate and complicate the assessment It was also no longer appropriate to consider that contingencies would continue to lie solely on the demand side of the equation. An inability to calculate the balance between supply and demand may mean an inability to meet standards of service or, arguably worse, an excessive provision of water resources and excessive costs to customers. United Kingdom Water Industry Research limited (UKWlR) Headroom project in 1998 provided a simple methodology for the calculation of planning margins. This methodology, although well received, was not, however, accepted by the Regulators as a tool sufficient to promote resource development. This thesis begins by considering the history of water resource planning in the UK, moving on to discuss events following privatisation of the water industry post·1985. The mid section of the research forms the bulk of original work and provides a scoping exercise which reveals a catalogue of uncertainties prevalent within the supply-demand balance. Each of these uncertainties is considered in terms of materiality, scope, and whether it can be quantified within a risk analysis package. Many of the areas of uncertainty identified would merit further research. A workable, yet robust, methodology for evaluating the balance between water resources and water demands by using a spreadsheet based risk analysis package is presented. The technique involves statistical sampling and simulation such that samples are taken from input distributions on both the supply and demand side of the equation and the imbalance between supply and demand is calculated in the form of an output distribution. The percentiles of the output distribution represent different standards of service to the customer. The model allows dependencies between distributions to be considered, for improved uncertainties to be assessed and for the impact of uncertain solutions to any imbalance to be calculated directly. The method is considered a Significant leap forward in the field of water resource planning.


The representation of human rights in museums is not simply another new phase of museum practice or policy. This article considers how the space of the museum is, and has always been, an important territory for the exercise of rights, and analyses the museum visit as a journey through which rights are offered to visitors and invested in them. Presenting two cases, Le Memorial de Caen, Normandy, and the National Maritime Museum, London, it pays close attention to how human rights are articulated by museum architecture, gallery installation, collection arrangement and displayed text. Human rights as universal values are being increasingly disseminated across a global museum sector but the understanding of these rights, how they are acquired and who is permitted to exercise them is shaped within each specific museum space.


We describe a new species of glassfrog of the genus Centrolene (Amphibia: Anura: Athesphatanura: Centrolenidae) that inhabits the elfin forests of the Cordillera del Cóndor, an isolated mountain chain separated from the Cordillera Oriental of the Andes by the valley of the River Zamora. This new species is characterized by having vomerine teeth; a subacuminated snout in dorsal view and strongly sloping in profile; a tympanic annulus rather indistinct; shagreened dorsal skin with low warts and abundant spicules; a subcloacal area granular with several enameled warts; humeral spines in adult males; enameled ulnar folds; enameled metatarsal folds; a row of distinct enameled tubercles along the outer tarsal edges; and a green dorsum in life with abundant light and dark flecks. This taxon is the most distinct of a phenetic-set of species that includes Centrolene altitudinale, C. buckleyi, C. heloderma, C. hesperium, C. lemniscatum, and C. venezuelense.


: This paper sets to investigate whether and to what extent the development of tourism sector in Togo is associated with and possibly responsible for economic growth, employment creation and generation of wealth in the country. Results from this paper shows that the development of tourism in Togo has created both business and employment opportunities and that the expansion of the workforce in this sector has been associated with, and to some extent it has been responsible for, a decline in the unemployment rate in the country. In light of these findings, we recommend that the Togolese government should ensure that the tourism sector is strategically built in such a way that it forms an integral part of all of its development plans and that more serious efforts are invested in marketing the sector which is currently largely underutilized.


Input congestion occurs at a given input bundle when the assumption of free disposability of inputs does not hold and an increase in input leads to a decline in output. In this paper we employ the nonparametric method of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to examine the question on input congestion with respect to labor, using state level data from the Annual Survey of Industries for the period 1986-87 through 1999-2000. When the standard assumption of strong disposability is relaxed for the labor inputs, the nonparametric analysis of state-level data from Indian manufacturing shows considerable measure of labor input congestion. While in selected states congestion comes from non-production workers as well, the principal source of labor congestion is production labor. There is no evidence that the problem of labor congestion has become less severe during the post-Reform years. It appears that market forces without any major institutional changes in enforcement of labor discipline cannot eliminate congestion.


The study aims at unveiling the potential of smart grids technology deployment in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) Regions. Founding on a general discussion of the smart grids functionalities and on the description of the progressive evolution of an electricity system from the present state towards the full deployment of smart grids concept, the study puts the concept into the LAC context through the preliminary analysis of the present situation in six representative countries. Challenges and opportunities for the evolution of the local systems towards smart grids are pointed out, motivating policy makers to address the subject and understand its potential. Although acknowledging the wide difference between the network situations in the LAC region, the different drivers that may motivate the network development and the consequent variety of targets to be reached, a general Decalogue is proposed highlighting the most important implementation priorities to be considered. The instrumental role of CEPAL in this process is also put in evidence, at the light of the recent developments in the international smart grids community.


In this chapter, the "green" refers to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), mainly the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP), while "blue" refers to International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) uniformed personnel and contract staff. According to The Long War Journal , during the period 1 January 2008 to 30 November 2012, at least 123 ISAF personnel were killed in green-on-blue attacks. A typical green-on-blue attack involves a lone male Afghan in military or police uniform opening fire on unsuspecting ISAF personnel at a base area or checkpoint. Such attacks have occurred mainly in the south and north east of Afghanistan. Following the first Australian green-on-blue incident the process followed by Australia was to establish an Australian Defence Force Investigative Service (ADFIS) investigation immediately after the incident, followed by a broader ranging Inquiry. The ADF Inquiry reports on the first three green-on-blue incidents have been publicly released. Keywords: ADFIS investigation; Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF); Afghanistan; Australian Defence Force (ADF); green-on-blue attack; International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)


The interview was recorded in Windhoek, Namibia,on March 20,1999.The Interviewer was Jean Krasno.

Namibian-born educator, Selma Shejavali contributes her strong sense of community with her childhood, having been taught in Namibian girls' schools and finishing her training in education in 1966 at the Teachers Training College for women in Okahao. A year and a half after her husband had moved to the United States to study, Mrs. Shejavali and their young daughter followed in 1972. During the six years they lived in the United States, the Shejavalis, after hearing of several atrocities, became concerned with the liberation of their home country. In 1978, they returned to Namibia, only to be arrested by South African forces. Fortunately, they were released the following day. In 1986, Mrs. Shejavali joined the community initiatives of Katutura and Khomasdal to establish the People's Primary School. The school helped to educate the children of exiled Namibians during the repatriation of 1989.

During her life, Mrs. Shejavali experienced her home country during apartheid and its independence in 1990. Working on an oral history of her own when this interview was conducted on 20 March 1999, Mrs. Shejavali shares her personal experiences here, from her childhood to after Namibian independence, and touches upon the United Nations role and presence in Namibia.


Recently internalists have mounted a counter-attack on the attempt to redefine the bounds of cognition. The counter-attack is aimed at a radical project which I call "cognitive integration," which is the view that internal and external vehicles and processes are integrated into a whole. Cognitive integration can be defended against the internalist counter arguments of Adams and Aizawa (A&A) and Rupert. The disagreement between internalists and integrationists is whether the manipulation of external vehicles constitutes a cognitive process. Integrationists think that they do, typically for reasons to do with the close coordination and causal interplay between internal and external processes. The internalist criticisms of the manipulation thesis fail because they misconstrue the nature of manipulation, ignore the hybrid nature of cognition, and take the manipulation thesis to be dependent upon a weak parity principle.


Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s. Ed. by Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012. Pp. 231, notes on contributors, index. Cloth, $49.95.) This is the third book in the series "Perspectives on the History of Congress, 1801-1877," edited by Donald R. Kennon, although the essays in this volume are only loosely tied to the history of Congress. Paul Finkelman does not even try to suggest common themes among the essays in his wonderfully written introduction. His own implicit theme is that national leaders failed to provide leadership during the decade, and he indicts the presidents after Polk for being particularly inept ("Fillmore's utter incompetence," for instance), (p. 3) Congress, he concludes, "only made the crisis worse" with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. (p. 2) He also maintains that there was just one issue - slavery, of course - that drove the crisis of the 1850s. These arguments actually contradict several essays that explicitly de-emphasize slavery or do not really engage the history of Congress. The first two chapters, by Michael Holt and Finkelman, address the Compromise of 1850. Holt summarizes his previously published work on the topic (he does not include notes), and his emphasis on the party politics and patronage battles that shaped the legislation will be familiar to many readers. Finkelman's essay is an extended critique of the Compromise (he calls it the "Great Failure") and congressional leaders who supported it. He is especially critical of Robert Remini (At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union [2010]) and other authors of what he terms the "heroic analysis" of the Compromise. For Finkelman, instead, the Compromise was so one-sided that it "left southerners arrogant [but] then angry when their legislative victory turned out to be a mirage." (p. 79) As in some of his previous work, Finkelman highlights the Fugitive Slave Act as the most important - and flawed - part of the Compromise. Anyone looking for a summary of the Compromise and its impact on antebellum politics would be hard-pressed to do better than these two chapters from two of its best and most celebrated historians. Each of the subsequent chapters addresses some aspect of the 1850s and sectionalism. Matthew Glassman's analysis of the Oregon admission and the statehood process - particularly the "balance rule" - most directly considers Congress and its role in sectionalism. He argues that the statehood process itself was "inherently controversial" (p. 83) with or without slavery, and that historians should examine more completely the other factors that influenced admission of new states. …


Absfruct- This paper addresses the coverage breach problem in wireless sensor networks with limited bandwidths. In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes are powered by batteries. To make efficient use of battery energy is critical to Sensor network lifetimes. When targets are redundantly covered by multiple sensors, especially in stochastically deployed sensor networks, it is possible to save battev energy by organizing 'sensors into mutually exclusive subsets and alternatively activating only one subset at any time. Active nodes are responsible for sensing, computing and communicating, While the coverage of each subset is an important metric for sensor organization, the size of each subset aIsa plays an important role in sensor network performance because when active sensors periodically send data to base stations, contention for channel access must be considered. The number of available channels imposes a limit on the cardinality of each subset. Coverage breach happens when a subset of sensors cannot completely cover all the targets. To make efficient use of both energy and bandwidth with a minimum coverage breach is the goal of sensor network design. This paper presents the minimum breach problem using a mathematical model, studies the computational complexity of the problem, and provides two approximate heuristics. Effects of increasing the number of channels and increasing the number of sensors on sensor network coverage are studied through numerical simulations. Overall, the simulation results reveal that when the number of sensors increases, network lifetimes can be improved without loss of network coverage if there is no bandwidth constraint; with bandwidth constraints, network lifetimes may be improved further at the cost of coverage breach.


Articial spin ice structures are two-dimensional systems of lithographically fabricated lattices ofelongated ferromagnetic islands, which interact via dipolar interaction. These systems have beenshown to be a suitable playground to study the magnetic, monopole-like, excitations, similar tothose in three-dimensional rare-earth pyrochlores. Therefore, such articial structures can be potentialmaterials for investigations of magnetricity [1]. The investigations of these articial spin icestructures stretches from the direct imaging of the magnetic congurations among the islands to indirectinvestigation methods allowing to determine the phase transitions occurring in such systems. Inthis project, square articial spin ice arrays were investigated employing magneto-optical Kerr eectfor the measurement of the magnetic susceptibility. The susceptibility dependence on temperaturewas measured at dierent frequencies of the applied AC magnetic eld for arrays of the dierentisland spacing and at two dierent incident light directions with the respect to the direction of theislands. A peak shift of the real part of susceptibility, χ', with increasing frequency towards thehigher temperatures was observed. Furthermore, a rough estimation of the relaxation times of themagnetic moments in the islands is given by the analysis of the susceptibility data.


Objectives: To determine the seroprevalence rate of immunoglobulin G (IgG) and immunoglobulin M (IgM) to parvovirus B19 in pregnant Saudi women in Makkah. Subjects and Methods: Using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), a total of 1200 serum samples were tested for antibodies to parvovirus B19 known to cause a variety of clinical syndromes in women and newborn infants. Results: Parvovirus B19 IgG antibodies detected in 46.6% and IgM antibodies were found in 2.25% of different age groups. Conclusion: The previous exposure to parvovirus B19 was determined, and 560 (46.6%) of 1200 pregnant Saudi women tested at their first antenatal visit were seropositive for specific IgG. The rate of maternal infection in susceptible pregnancies was 2.25%. These results were in accordance with previous studies performed in other countries.


The strut-and-tie method (STM) is a powerful tool used for
the design of D-regions (disturbed regions) of reinforced concrete structures.
Many typical bridge substructure components consist of D-regions and require
the use of the STM for design. Implementation of the STM is more complex than
typical design methods, and engineers are often unfamiliar with the design
process. As a result, designing using the STM is more time consuming than
traditional design methods. The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT)
identified a need for a tool that assists with the design of typical bridge
substructure components using the STM. STEP (Strut-and-Tie Evaluation Program)
is a computer program created to fulfill this role. To use the computer
program, engineers input geometric conditions, material properties, and
reinforcement information for a structural component. STEP uses this
information to develop a strut-and-tie model and perform STM design procedures.
A graphical representation of the model and a summary of the design results are
provided as program outputs for the user.

STEP, created using Excel VBA, is intended to aid in the
design of multi-column bent caps and integral and semi-integral end bent caps.
Within this thesis, an overview of the STM is provided, including the basic
procedures for designing using the STM. An introduction to Excel VBA is also
presented. The document describes the layout and formatting of the computer
program, required user inputs, and program outputs. Furthermore, limitations
and assumptions within the computer program for the substructure components are
also included. Finally, design examples focused on the use of STEP for the
design of a five-column bent cap and an integral end bent cap are
presented. This document can be used as
a resource for engineers when designing bridge substructure components using
STEP.


A method for the flow hydrogenation of olefins and nitrobenzenes in a continuous-flow reactor containing platinum nanoparticles dispersed on an amphiphilic polystyrene–poly(ethylene glycol) resin (ARP-Pt) was developed. The hydrogenation of olefins and nitrobenzenes was completed within 31 seconds in the continuous-flow system containing ARP-Pt, giving the corresponding hydrogenated products in up to 99% yield with good chemoselectivity. Moreover, long-term (63–70 h) continuous-flow hydrogenation of styrene and nitrobenzene produced more than ten grams of ethylbenzene and aniline, respectively, without significant loss of catalytic activity. The flow hydrogenation system provides an efficient and practical method for the chemoselective reduction of olefins and nitrobenzenes.


The preoccupation with modelling credit scoring systems including their relevance to forecasting and decision making in the financial sector has been with developed countries whilst developing countries have been largely neglected. The focus of our investigation is the Cameroonian commercial banking sector with implications for fellow members of the Banque des Etats de L'Afrique Centrale (BEAC) family which apply the same system. We investigate their currently used approaches to assessing personal loans and we construct appropriate scoring models. Three statistical modelling scoring techniques are applied, namely Logistic Regression (LR), Classification and Regression Tree (CART) and Cascade Correlation Neural Network (CCNN). To compare various scoring models' performances we use Average Correct Classification (ACC) rates, error rates, ROC curve and GINI coefficient as evaluation criteria. The results demonstrate that a reduction in terms of forecasting power from 15.69% default cases under the current system, to 3.34% based on the best scoring model, namely CART can be achieved. The predictive capabilities of all three models are rated as at least very good using GINI coefficient; and rated excellent using the ROC curve for both CART and CCNN. It should be emphasised that in terms of prediction rate, CCNN is superior to the other techniques investigated in this paper. Also, a sensitivity analysis of the variables identifies borrower's account functioning, previous occupation, guarantees, car ownership, and loan purpose as key variables in the forecasting and decision making process which are at the heart of overall credit policy.


Five of the 10 known Indo-Pacific giant anemone species were recorded on subtidal reefs within the eastern Australian subtropics (26°37′S to 30°56′S) during surveys between 1993 and 1995. Giant anemones had a patchy distribution among the 30 localities sampled, and species richness did not display any latitudinal trends within this province. Spatial distribution patterns and abundance of anemones were assessed from total counts and from line-intercept and belt transects. Anemone abundance was significantly higher on reefs to the leeward of the prevailing swell than on more exposed sites, at Julian Rocks and North Solitary Island, northern NSW. Significant reductions in anemone cover were detected among years within shallow reefal sites at North Solitary Island, coinciding with two major storm events. The abundance of the widespread Entacmaea quadricolor at North Solitary Island was the highest reported worldwide. Significant differences were detected between two morphological types of E. quadricolor in terms of microhabitat type, oral disk size and spatial distribution patterns. Important factors influencing the distribution, abundance and spatial patterns of giant anemones over both large and localized spatial scales appear to be water temperature, wave disturbance and water depth.


The Third WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle in November 1999 is expected to pave the way to the ninth multilateral round of trade negotiations, labelled Millennium Round (MR). Like the preceding Uruguay Round (UR), it will have the twin targets of preventing domestic measures from discriminating against foreign supply and of dismantling border measures such as tariffs and non-tariff barriers. The core challenge of the MR will be to defend the WTO framework against efforts to sacrifice its genuine target of guaranteeing and enforcing access to markets by compromising this target with other targets such as protecting the environment, workers' rights, foreign investors' rights and competition. The GATT experience with a contradictory and inefficient mixture of aid targets (special treatment for developing countries and least-developed countries) and trade principles (non-discrimination between all WTO member states) underlines the importance of clearly separating targets, instruments and responsibilities of actors through different institutional set-ups instead of forcing them into a single framework. This holds especially for the protection of the environment and of workers' rights, where existing frameworks should be used and/or new frameworks be founded. For competition and investment, existing elements of the WTO can be used to keep markets open and to level the playing field between foreign and domestic investors. Liberalising trade in services and enforcing free access to service markets through the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) will be the most important concrete liberalisation objective in the MR. As the GATS principle is bottom-up (service-industry-specific liberalisation with many loopholes) while the GATT principle for goods is topdown (across-the-board cut of border measures), the best liberalisation results would be achieved if the top-down principle could be applied to services as much as possible. Linking services to goods as joint products bound to GATT rules and/or defining services as goods wherever possible (for instance, in e-commerce) could be instrumental to anchor the top-down principle in services. In traditionally highly protected sectors with special entitlements like agriculture and textiles (including clothing), the MR must counter efforts of big players like the EU and partly the US to play for time by postponing UR commitments to the latest possible date. In doing so, they will deliberately create an adjustment jam, which would trigger requests for further safeguards. Should the WTO fail to discipline the players in these sectors, frustration in developing countries can weld the vast majority of WTO members into a stumbling block against the MR. Further needs to reform the current WTO framework can be identified in disciplining mushrooming regional integration schemes, which undermine the most-favoured nation treatment principle, in dismantling still existing tariff escalation, which discriminates against manufactured goods exporters, in fundamentally redressing the abuse of contingent protection measures such as anti-dumping and safeguards and, finally, in solving the still pending issue of China's accession to the WTO. The MR without China refutes the WTO's claim to be a universal institution. In a mercantilist world, negotiation strategies matter. Notwithstanding the lack of a fast-track mandate for the US administration, it seems that the US together with Asian countries prefer sector-specific negotiations with a focus on agriculture, services, and government procurement. In contrast, the EU prefers negotiations on all issues in a socalled comprehensive round. Developing countries still hesitate to participate at all but their hesitancy can prove to be a promising strategy to push the EU and the US toward accelerating the implementation of UR commitments. All participants will experience that there are first-mover advantages and that leapfrogging technological progress in the cross-border movement of persons, goods and services will impose high costs on those who get stuck in old-style nitty-gritty trade diplomacy.


Several studies have shown that integrating reading into writing instruction improves writing skills (e.g., Alqadi & Alqadi, 2013; Almansour & Alshorman, 2014; Elley & Mangubhai 1983; Hafiz & Tudor, 1989; Iwahori, 2008; Janopoulos, 1986, 2009; Saleem, 2010; Tsang, 1996). Some researchers suggested that reading is the basis for writing (Carson & Leki, 1993) and consider it as an important resource for writing instruction (Hirvela, 2004; Watson, 1982). Theoretically, the reading-writing connection can be viewed throughout three hypotheses, or models: (1) directional hypothesis, (2) non-directional hypothesis, and (3) bidirectional hypothesis. Since reading-writing relationship is mostly discussed in terms of the impact of reading on writing (directional model), this paper attempts to discuss the relationship from 'reading-towrite' perspective and addresses the issue of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reading-writing connection at the college level in Saudi Arabia. It argues that reading and writing must be taught together and calls for integrating reading into writing instruction as a solution for the problem of the lack of emphasis on reading-writing connection. It also suggests that extensive reading and using models in a second language (L2) enhances L2 writing. Lastly, the paper discusses some pedagogical concerns associated with reading-writing connection and provides some recommendations for successful reading-writing instruction. (Note: in this paper, when I refer to EFL programs at the Saudi universities I mean the EFL programs that are designed for the EFL Saudi college students majoring in English).


In this paper, we attempt to provide theoretical investigation to debt roll-over crisis in government bond market. By using the global game techniques, we analyse coordination problem in debt auction. The approach in this paper allows us to have insight on the relation between occurence of soverign debt roll-over crisis and the fundamentals of economy which is not clearly explained in preceding works. This paper also makes it clear how the amount of debt for refinancing affects occurrence of soverign debt roll-over crisis. Inplications to policymakers are that they should pay attention to possible serious consequence of debt-bunching which usually grows gradually over time. In public debt management, the government decisions today affect the situation facing the government in the future via change in redemption schedules. Although the cost of debt roll-over crisis is not easy to gauge beforehand, its possibility should be noted by policymakers.


The Internet Open Trading Protocol (IOTP) provides a data exchange
format for trading purposes while integrating existing pure payment
protocols seamlessly. This motivates the multiple layered system
architecture which consists of at least some generic IOTP application
core and multiple specific payment modules. This document addresses a
common interface between the IOTP application core and the payment
modules, enabling the interoperability between these kinds of modules.
Furthermore, such an interface provides the foundations for a plug-in-
mechanism in actual implementations of IOTP application cores. Such
interfaces exist at the Consumers', the Merchants' and the
Payment Handlers' installations connecting the IOTP application
core and the payment software components/legacy systems. This memo
provides information for the Internet community.


In this paper, using the ARDL bounds approach and augmented Solow framework, we explore the impacts of capital inflows (remittances, foreign direct investment and overseas development assistance) and financial-technology inclusion viz. remittance on per worker income in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) for the periods 1970-2010. The results show that growth in the region is lead by capital productivity. Although information and communications technology (ICT) per se has a negative effect on income, when ICT is associated with financial development and remittances, the effects are positive in both short run and long run. Thus, there is a need for greater financial and technology inclusion - linking remittance industry with financial and ICT services. Overseas development assistance (ODA) shows a negative elasticity while FDI and remittances per se is negative and not statistically significant. SSA's predominantly ruralised economic structure further calls for greater accessibility, affordability and inclusivity of financial and ICT services linked to remittances market, development of critical, infrastructures, key sector reforms, and well managed and assessed ODA and FDI inflows for sustainable pro-growth development.


This volume takes the positive view that conversation between persons with dementia and their interlocutors is a privileged site for ongoing cognitive engagement. The book aims to identify and describe specific linguistic devices or strategies at the level of turn-by-turn talk that promote and extend conversation, and to explore real-world engagements that reflect these strategies.Final reflections tie these linguistic strategies and practices to wider issues of the "self" and "agency" in persons with dementia. Thematically, the volume fosters an integrated perspective on communication and cognition in terms of which communicative resources are recognized as cognitive resources, and communicative interaction is treated as reflecting cognitive engagement. This reflects perspectives in cognitive anthropology and cognitive science that regard human cognitive activity as distributed and culturally rooted.This volume is intended for academic researchers and advanced students in applied linguistics, linguistic and medical anthropology, nursing, and social gerontology; and practice professionals in speech-language pathology and geropsychology.


This article discusses the problems inherent in the dual condition of the South African legal system in terms of which the dominant Western oriented common law applies to everyone, while the servient African law applies to Africans only. Consequently, a dichotomy between 'official' African law which seeks to rid itself of those cultural notions that are repugnant to Western civilisation and 'living' African law which retains its indigenous moral values has developed within the servient African system. The latter version applies in actual social practice and is part of the lives of its adherents. My approach rejects the 'official' version because the removal of African moral values by the application of the repugnancy clause has left African law distorted beyond recognition. This version is part of the colonial project which sought to dehumanise Africans and should not be one of the sources of our postapartheid African law. On the contrary, 'living' African law is the version that the adherents of the system continued to apply as part of their resistance to colonial dehumanisation and should be judicially and legislatively affirmed. Unfortunately, our courts continue to regard the distorted version as a legitimate precedent and rely on the instruments, policies and judgments that were used in the past in pursuit of the infamous colonial 'native' administration project. I submit that our legal practice is required to embark on the daunting task of developing the 'living' version that affirms the aspirations of its adherents as required by the constitution.


BACKGROUND
A cross-cultural, randomized study was proposed to observe the effects of a school-based intervention designed to promote physical activity and healthy eating among high school students in 2 cities from different regions in Brazil: Recife and Florianopolis. The objective of this article is to describe the methodology and subjects enrolled in the project.

METHODS
Ten schools from each region were matched and randomized into intervention and control conditions. A questionnaire and anthropometry were used to collect data in the first and last month of the 2006 school year. The sample (n=2155 at baseline; 55.7% females; 49.1% in the experimental group) included students 15 to 24 years, attending nighttime classes. The intervention focused on simple environmental/organizational changes, diet and physical activity education, and personnel training.

RESULTS
The central aspects of the intervention have been implemented in all 10 intervention schools. Problems during the intervention included teachers' strikes in both sites and lack of involvement of the canteen owners in schools.

CONCLUSIONS
The Saude na Boa study provides evidence that public high schools in Brazil represent an important environment for health promotion. Its design and simple measurements increase the chances of it being sustained and disseminated to similar schools in Brazil.


This article examines the transfer of creative industries as a policy idea to Lithuania. Tracing the stages of the transfer and analysing its consequences in the local cultural policy field, this paper argues for the importance of studying cultural policy process. The findings reveal that the process of the international transfer of creative industries mattered, because it generated wider transformations in cultural policy field by having ambiguous effects on local power relations. The policy idea of creative industries opened the cultural policy field to new actors. As a result, competition for scarce state funding increased, but cultural organisations gained access to the European Union structural funds. In all, creative industries as a policy idea significantly transformed Lithuanian state cultural policy, in that it led to a reassessment of both the practices and identities of cultural organisations.


This paper analyzes the dynamics of vetoes and veto overrides in the context of a multiparty legislature using an original dataset from the period 1983–2007 in Argentina. We argue that the President can use an "item" or "partial" veto to selectively delete articles, while keeping enough distributive goods in the bill to break up the coalition responsible for its passage, thereby eliminating support for an override. Our research reveals that total vetoes – which affect all legislators equally – are more likely to be overridden than partial vetoes. Contradicting the received wisdom that in multiparty legislatures override attempts are more likely under a divided government, we find that override attempts are more likely in plurality governments. We use case analyses to illustrate the main arguments developed in this paper.


The Xade Mafic Complex, situated in central Botswana, was identified during the first regional aeromagnetic survey of the country in 1975–77. It is covered by sedimentary rocks of the Kalahari Group and Karoo Supergroup, including Karoo lavas, with a combined thickness varying from 220 m to 1000 m, extending to greater depths in the north beneath the Meso-proterozoic Passarge Basin. What has generally been viewed as the Xade Complex is evidenced by a high amplitude kidney-shaped zoned magnetic anomaly with two semi-linear anomalies extending to the northwest and northeast in a Y-shaped form. The complex is also marked by a coincident Bouguer gravity anomaly. Historical work has been limited, with only three diamond drill holes having been drilled, separately intersecting gabbroic rocks, weathered basalt grading into dolerite, and amygdaloidal lavas followed by Waterberg Group shales. An U-Pb zircon age of 1109.0 ± 1.3 Ma, which is coeval with the Umkondo Igneous episode, has been published for the gabbroic unit. This study has shown, for the first time, that the Xade Complex comprises two lobes of potentially different magmatic character, i.e. a Southern Lobe, which is the historically identified kidney-shaped zoned magnetic anomaly, as well as a hitherto unrecognized large Northern Lobe. The latter is mostly deeply buried in the north and northwest beneath the Passarge Basin, as evidenced by deep magnetic and gravity sources, but its southern and eastern margins partially suboutcrop beneath Karoo sediments, forming the Y-shaped anomalies north of the Southern Lobe. Forward modelling, of both magnetic and gravity data, indicates that the Southern Lobe is a lopolith with a depth extent of approximately 4 km, whereas the southeastern margin of the Northern Lobe has westerly dips consistent with deepening to the northwest. In addition to the historic boreholes, a recent borehole drilled into the Southern Lobe shows that it comprises a mafic volcanic sequence with subordinate gabbro. A further two boreholes drilled into the Northern Lobe margins indicate that it comprises a texturally heterogeneous and magmatically differentiated sequence of gabbroic rocks, with minor dioritic and monzonitic rocks. The present interpretation has also identified a dyke system associated with the Northern Lobe, which may represent either feeder or exit magmatic conduits. The interpretation further shows that the complex is located in a craton margin setting. The combined extent of both lobes is approximately one-third the size of the Bushveld Complex, making the Xade Mafic Complex the largest Meso-Proterozoic magmatic system in southern Africa. The craton margin setting, size, Meso-Proterozoic age and variability of plutonic and volcanic rocks hallmark the Xade Mafic Complex as being a very large dynamic magmatic system, with potential for Ni-Cu-PGE mineralization.


Over the last two decades, gaseous and particle mass emissions of new diesel engines have been reduced effectively and progressively in response to the emissions legislation and due to the applied new technologies. There is, however, increasing concern about whether the engine modifications, while improving combustion and reducing emissions, have increased the number emissions of ultrafine and nanoparticles. So far, emissions regulations have solely been based on particulate matter (PM) mass measurements, not on particle number. Nanoparticles, however, form a major part of the PM emissions, but they do not considerably contribute to the PM mass and cannot be seen as a problem, if only PM mass is determined. Therefore, there is increasing interest in expanding the scope of the regulations to also include particle number emissions, e.g., Euro VI for on-road engines. The PM number limit will also be enforced for nonroad engines slightly later. Thus, more information is required about the particle number emissions themselves, but also about the effects of the engine technology on them. Wall-flow diesel particulate filters reduce the particle number very effectively within the entire particle size range. Nevertheless, in order to keep the filter as small as possible and to lessen the need for regeneration, the engine-out PM number should also be minimized. If the diesel particulate filters (DPFs) could be left out or replaced by a simpler filter, there would be greater freedom of space utilization or cost savings in many nonroad applications. This might be realized in installations where the engine is tuned at high raw NOx and a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system is adopted for NOx reduction. However, it is not self-evident that new engine technologies would reduce the PM number emissions sufficiently. In this study, particle number emissions were analyzed in several nonroad diesel engines, representing different engine generations and exploiting different emissions reduction technologies: four- or two-valve heads, exhaust gas recirculation, different injection pressures and strategies, etc. All engines were turbocharged, intercooled, direct-injection nonroad diesel engines. Most engines used common-rail fuel injection technology. Comparisons were, however, also performed with engines utilizing either a distributor-type or an in-line fuel injection pump to see the long-term development of the particle number emissions. In this paper, the PM number emissions of nine nonroad diesel engines are presented and compared. Gaseous exhaust emissions and fuel consumption figures are also provided.


The "Atlantic and its Enemies" is Norman Stone's personal, uncompromising and provocative history of how the West 'won' the Cold War. For decades after the end of the Second World War, most of the globe either laboured under Communist rule or else was lost in a violent stagnancy that seemed doomed to permanence. For every Atlantic success there seemed to be a dozen Communist or Third World successes, as the USSR and its proxies, whether in Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam or China, crushed dissent and humiliated the United States on both military and cultural grounds. Then, suddenly, the Atlantic won - economically, ideologically, militarily - with astonishing speed and comprehensiveness. With wit and brio, Norman Stone's "The Atlantic and its Enemies" offers a unique perspective on events, from Vietnam to glasnost, and draws on his own experiences - such as his time in a Slovak prison - to show both the tragedy and the absurdity of the struggle that divided the world for over forty years. "Opinionated, mischievous, enthralling...an exhilarating read". (Boyd Tonkin, "Independent"). "Lively, idiosyncratic, rollicking". (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "Observer"). "Masterly...the one book that anyone who wants to understand the Cold War must read". (John Gray, "New Statesman"). "A swashbuckling survey of the cold war". (Mark Mazower, "Financial Times"). "[Stone] has a terrific eye for detail, bringing to life everything from the ruins of Germany to Ronald Reagan's White House with a wonderfully waspish turn of phrase". ("Economist"). Norman Stone is one of Britain's most celebrated historians. He is the author of "The Eastern Front, 1914-1917", "Hitler: An Introduction", "Europe Transformed" and "World War One: A Short History".


Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy provides an introduction to the theory, history, research, and practice of this influential approach. Created in the 1950s by the coauthor, Albert Ellis, rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) was the pioneering cognitive-behavioral therapy. In essence, REBT helps clients learn to challenge their own irrational thinking and develop the habit of thinking in beneficial and rational ways. This shift enables clients to behave more effectively and, ultimately, experience healthy emotions. REBT is based on the simple idea that it is not external circumstances that make a person happy or unhappy, but rather internal thoughts about events or self. Thinking, feeling, and behavior are seen as linked and influencing one another. Because changing one's thinking is usually the simplest tactic in a given situation, it tends to be the focus of therapy, along with the encouragement to adopt the humanistic core REBT philosophies of unconditional self-acceptance, unconditional other-acceptance, and unconditional life-acceptance. Ellis and Joffe Ellis present and explore this influential, practical, and compassionate approach, its theory, history, therapy process, primary change mechanisms, and the empirical basis for its effectiveness. They also examine developments that have refined the theory and expanded how it may be practiced. This essential primer, amply illustrated with case examples featuring diverse clients, is perfect for graduate students studying theories of therapy and counseling, as well as for seasoned practitioners interested in understanding how this approach has evolved and how it might be used in their practice.


The case of Emerson's reception--or the points of resistance it reveals--in the intellectual culture he helped found reminds readers in any discipline that criteria frame an interpretation even while it is being made. The diversity of opinion about the nature of Emerson's writing prompts a reader's wider concern about the intelligibility and identity of the text under examination. Do I understand it? And what is it, anyway? As shown Laura Otis's anthology of works in literature and science pressed up beside one another, there are times when the negotiated boundaries of thought are meaningfully apparent. Emerson's nineteenth century, was such a time, and Emerson's writing was such a space for exploring those boundaries and definitions. When those liminal spaces are filled and sometimes ossify, possibilities for reading are narrowed or confounded. If the ongoing dominance of natural science, mostly by reason of its empirical success, has eclipsed innovations in the literary, historical, and philosophical arts, the varied reading of Emerson's work by critics--even up to the present day--suggests that we still inhabit an age of negotiation and discovery. ********** IN THE INTRODUCTION to her masterfully curated anthology, Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century, Laura Otis usefully describes how the nineteenth century was a time when the disciplinary boundaries between literature and science were still permeable, still under negotiation. She emphasizes that "the notion of a 'split' between literature and science, of a 'gap' to be 'bridged' between the two, was never a nineteenth-century phenomenon" (xvii). It was a period, as she notes, when "the two commingled and were accessible to all readers." "Science," says Otis, "was not perceived as being written in a 'foreign language'--a common complaint of twenty-first century readers. As a growing system of knowledge expressed in familiar words, science was in effect a variety of literature.'" If only this were still the case! In the contemporary scene, the methodologies and modes of expression in natural science are largely assumed to be remote from--and often at odds with--poetry, literary art, history, politics, and philosophy. In short, science has been "professionalized" in ways that have alienated both its practice and its comprehension by a lay public. And in recent decades, the contours of literary criticism--for example, in deconstruction--have left otherwise committed and competent readers feeling abandoned and excluded. For this reason, it is worthwhile to look back for a moment, perhaps as a way of finding a way forward. There are few figures in the nineteenth century whose work better reflects the evolution of literature and science as disciplinary activities--and their attendant impact on philosophy, religion, history, and politics--than Ralph Waldo Emerson. Because his work forms such a useful and rare specimen of written material in which to explore and understand what Otis emphasizes--the negotiated borders of disciplinary definition, practice, and crucially, demarcated fields of investigation--I spend some time in what follows trying to assess how this nineteenth-century development in literature and science informed the inheritance of Emerson's writing. Part of what the inheritance of Emerson's work highlights for us that is, for everyone thinking about or contributing to the range of humanistic and scientific endeavors; for poets and physicists, literary critics and philosophers, technology theorists, historians, artists, and educators--is how discerning radical variability is not necessarily at odds with the continuity of inquiry. Giving lectures with titles like "Natural Method of Mental Philosophy," "The Powers and Laws of Thought," and "The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science," Emerson was registering the effects of his reading in works by scientists such as John E W. Herschel (e.g., in his A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy [1831]) and philosophers of mind like Sampson Reed, in his Observations on the Growth of the Mind (1826). …


Neuronal communication relies on chemical synaptic transmission for information transfer and processing. Chemical neurotransmission is initiated by synaptic vesicle fusion with the presynaptic active zone resulting in release of neurotransmitters. Classical models have assumed that all synaptic vesicles within a synapse have the same potential to fuse under different functional contexts. In this model, functional differences among synaptic vesicle populations are ascribed to their spatial distribution in the synapse with respect to the active zone. Emerging evidence suggests, however, that synaptic vesicles are not a homogenous population of organelles, and they possess intrinsic molecular differences and differential interaction partners. Recent studies have reported a diverse array of synaptic molecules that selectively regulate synaptic vesicles' ability to fuse synchronously and asynchronously in response to action potentials or spontaneously irrespective of action potentials. Here we discuss these molecular mediators of vesicle pool heterogeneity that are found on the synaptic vesicle membrane, on the presynaptic plasma membrane, or within the cytosol and consider some of the functional consequences of this diversity. This emerging molecular framework presents novel avenues to probe synaptic function and uncover how synaptic vesicle pools impact neuronal signaling.


Graph Signal Processing (GSP) is a promising framework to analyze multi-dimensional neuroimaging datasets, while taking into account both the spatial and functional dependencies between brain signals. In the present work, we apply dimensionality reduction techniques based on graph representations of the brain to decode brain activity from real and simulated fMRI datasets. We introduce seven graphs obtained from a) geometric structure and/or b) functional connectivity between brain areas at rest, and compare them when performing dimension reduction for classification. We show that mixed graphs using both a) and b) offer the best performance. We also show that graph sampling methods perform better than classical dimension reduction including Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Independent Component Analysis (ICA).


This contribution presents an assessment of the modern and historic fluxes of sediments exiting the Mississippi, St. Croix, and Minnesota watersheds and entering Lake Pepin, a natural riverine lake on the Upper Mississippi River. A Chemical Mass Balance receptor model and elemental signatures for sediments in Lake Pepin and the rivers draining its three principal catchment areas were used to apportion sediments in the lake to their source watersheds. The apportionment data, estimated trapping efficiency of the lake, and watershed basin areas were used to calculate sediment fluxes and erosion rates for each basin on a decadal basis. The relative apportionment of sediments from the Minnesota River watershed increased since European settlement of the region circa 1830 from 83 to 87% for the upper, 83 to 90% for the middle, and 78 to 87% for the lower reaches of the lake. Sediment loading to the whole lake shows a 12-fold increase from historic levels in the mass of Minnesota River-derived sediments. The amount of sediment currently supplied by this river is more than seven times the amount supplied by the headwater-Mississippi and St. Croix Rivers combined. Sediment contributions from these two combined watersheds have risen sevenfold since settlement. The causes of these increases are attributable to intensive agricultural production, especially within the Minnesota River basin. Watershed alterations have resulted in a decrease in wetlands, riparian zones, and native prairie and an increase in acreage artificially drained by sub-surface tile lines and surface ditching.


The focus of this paper is the role played in rural contexts by contract farming agreements between smallholders and private investors. These contracts can take different forms, but in general are agreements under which producers commit to supply produce to a buyer firm. They are—at least on paper—at the centre of agrarian policies in Mozambique, through the Strategic Plan for the Development of the Agricultural Sector 2011-2020. Studies on the effect of these contracts on producers usually find out an increase in income, but the effect is still unclear with respect to other variables. The focus of this paper is on contracts' effects—in the Mozambican case—on food security. We may expect contrasting effects to be at work: on the one hand, the effects of increased income, while, on the other, the effects of giving up food production and of monopsonistic market relations. This paper exploits a panel dataset (2002-2005) collected by the Mozambican Ministry of Agriculture among a nationally representative sample of rural households. Overall, the main findings of the paper indicate that selection in contracts is the main driver of the observed differences.


There is a fast growing market for friction stir welding applications in many industrial areas of transportation where the focus is on light weight. Along with the aviation, railway vehicle and shipbuilding industries, the automotive industry is expecting a high growth rate over the coming years. Based on the advantages of the friction stir welding technology, such as excellent weld quality, high potential for saving and eco-friendly process, the market share for friction stir welding of automotive parts will also greatly increase. Following a general introduction to the friction stir welding process, a presentation of the tooling and expected quality of various types of joints will be given. Using examples from automotive manufacture, the requirements for component design for a variety of friction stir applications will be highlighted. Our process control and documentation system is the basis for the implementation of Industry 4.0 and ensures the required traceability, quality and data transparency. KUKA Industries has the experience and expertise to develop and implement cost-effective complete solutions with high process reliability. The benefits and special features of robot-based friction stir welding will be demonstrated with the aid of design concepts for production systems.


We consider existence and uniqueness of two kinds of coisotropic embeddings and deduce the existence of deformation quantizations of certain Poisson algebras of basic functions. First we show that any submanifold of a Poisson manifold satisfying a certain constant rank condition, already considered by Calvo and Falceto (2004), sits coisotropically inside some larger cosymplectic submanifold, which is naturally endowed with a Poisson structure. Then we give conditions under which a Dirac manifold can be embedded coisotropically in a Poisson manifold, extending a classical theorem of Gotay.


New York's northern and western borders with Canada have long served as important commercial and tourist gateways for the entire United States. With recent and projected growth in cross-border travel, and heightened security concerns arising from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the transportation infrastructure in the border regions is being pushed to its limits. In response, agencies responsible for the crossings have developed a wide range of proposals, including physical expansion projects, new border crossing protocols, and technological solutions, all aimed at improving the flow of traffic, upgrading security, and accommodating projected growth. New York has in recent years received little Federal funding for such projects. As Congress debates reauthorization of federal transportation funding laws, it is considering proposals to expand and reform border infrastructure funding programs. Within this context, this report explores New York's border needs. It discusses the relative importance of the border as a national and regional resource and the challenges posed by growth and security. It then provides an overview of the proposals at each of New York's major crossings, and concludes with an evaluation of funding prospects.


This paper explains the modelling of emission in real world onboard measurement under local driving condition for engine size 1000cc and 600cc for motorcycles in Edinburgh. Impact of instantaneous speed, acceleration on emission have been investigated on the air quality management area (AQMA) in Edinburgh. Emission directly observed from the analyser have been converted from ppm and % unit into gm/sec by using the fuel consumption estimates and carbon mass balance equation Finally average emission factors for CO, HC, and NOX along the corridor have been estimated on time based (gm per second) and distance based (gm/km). Since emissions are primarily affected by speed, therefore a correlation between emission factors and speed have been developed. Onboard emission measurements have advantages to collect the emission data into different driving cycle i.e. vehicle operating modes (idling cruise, acceleration, and deceleration). This has been further investigated by developing the relationship between time spent in these modes and emission. These types of models are suitable, in sustainable development of transportation system, traffic demand management, signal coordination, and environment friendly application for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS).


Our purpose was to explore a relatively new sexual behavior—heterosexual women kissing one another publicly at college parties. Popular press articles suggest this is a common occurrence among college women, but no known psychological research has been conducted on its prevalence or meaning. In Study 1, we conducted an online survey of students at a private, residential college to ascertain the prevalence of this behavior. Results indicated that a substantial minority of women (33%) had engaged in this behavior, and the majority of participants (69%), both male and female, had observed this behavior. In Study 2, we recruited heterosexual women who reported having kissed another woman at a college party. We collected open-ended responses from 77 women via a questionnaire and 27 of these women also completed a semistructured interview. Thematic analyses revealed characteristics of the social context that encouraged this behavior, including pressure to so engage, high levels of alcohol consumption, heterosexist attitudes, and the belief that college is a time for experimentation. A total of seven different motivations for engaging in this behavior were described by participants, reflecting both extrinsic motivations (e.g., to gain male attention) and intrinsic motivations (e.g., to bond with female friends). Results are discussed in terms of sociocultural influences (women's sexual objectification and sexualized college parties) and individual factors (women's sexual fluidity and heterosexual identity development) related to this behavior, highlighting issues of empowerment versus objectification.


Beginning with the fact that performant strategies of the financial institutions have programmes and management Eco-cultural tourism is usually defined as a concept in which ecological and cultural aspects of a landscape are combined to create a site for tourists. It is proposed as a way for communities with rather low economic resources to develop. Sustainability and participation are both crucial for the long-term future of this form of tourism. A key element to the success of eco-cultural tourism is local control in the planning, development and maintenance of these sites. Eco-cultural tourism also provides ways for the practice of archaeology and anthropology to mix and to articulate with wider society, although it may also put the two disciplines against each other. Eco-cultural tourism reflects present-day practice, but also acts as a model for how cultural and eco-tourism could be employed by local people to build an empowered, sustainable future in similar settings elsewhere.


The discrimination powers of multilayer perceptron (MLP) and learning vector quantization (LVQ) networks are compared for overlapping gaussian distributions. It is shown, both analytically and with Monte Carlo studies, that the MLP network handles high-dimensional problems in a more efficient way than LVQ. This is mainly due to the sigmoidal form of the MLP transfer function, but also to the fact that the MLP uses hyperplanes more efficiently. Both algorithms are equally robust to limited training sets and the learning curves fall off like 1/M, where M is the training set size, which is compared to theoretical predictions from statistical estimates and Vapnik-Chervonenkis bounds.


Due to ubiquitous sensors (GPS, Accelerometer), easy of use apps (Facebook, Twitter etc), presence of audio & video recording devices and higher internet connectivity, the key characteristics of raw data is changing. This new data can be characterized by 4Vs Volume, Velocity, Variety and Veracity. Moreover, due to popular trend of crowd sourcing or citizen sensors, it is reasonable to assume that people will provide multiple evidence of same event using different data types. For example during a Football match, some people will Tweet about Goals, Penalties etc while others will take a picture and upload it. Although the underlying modalities are different (text and image), the data describes the same event. Such multi modal evidences should be used to strengthen the belief in underlying physical event. Finally, each of the data point will have inherent uncertainty. The uncertainty can arise from inconsistent, incomplete, and ambiguous data as well as the trust worthiness of the user. Similarly, some sources are more reliable than others which will also play a part in overall reliability. The volume, velocity and variety are measurable/observable, however, there is no measure of truthfulness.


We study the influence of laser exposure on transient absorption in a commercial Schott color glass filter doped by CdSxSe1−x microcrystals. With laser exposure the magnitude of the transient absorption at wavelengths above the band gap (negative, with the fast decay rate ≥1011 s−1), decreases, whereas that at wavelengths below the band gap (positive, decay time of 500 ps) increases (in the spectral interval 600–850 nm) or does not change (at 900–1060 nm). At wavelengths near the band gap the differential absorbance changes in both magnitude and sign. A broad maximum between 700–800 nm, which increases with photodarkening, has been found in the spectrum of transient absorption. We interpret this maximum as arising from an increase in the number of energy states in the gap. The compatibility of our results with the results published previously is discussed, and a modification of recently proposed models of photodarkening is suggested.


The surprising success of cryptocurrencies has led to a surge of interest in deploying large scale, highly robust, Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) protocols for mission-critical applications, such as financial transactions. Although the conventional wisdom is to build atop a (weakly) synchronous protocol such as PBFT (or a variation thereof), such protocols rely critically on network timing assumptions, and only guarantee liveness when the network behaves as expected. We argue these protocols are ill-suited for this deployment scenario. We present an alternative, HoneyBadgerBFT, the first practical asynchronous BFT protocol, which guarantees liveness without making any timing assumptions. We base our solution on a novel atomic broadcast protocol that achieves optimal asymptotic efficiency. We present an implementation and experimental results to show our system can achieve throughput of tens of thousands of transactions per second, and scales to over a hundred nodes on a wide area network. We even conduct BFT experiments over Tor, without needing to tune any parameters. Unlike the alternatives, HoneyBadgerBFT simply does not care about the underlying network.


Objectives
We examined the effect of a three year, multi-component, school-based intervention on health behaviors of elementary school students.

Methods
The multi-component, obesity intervention was provided by community partners to 13 schools over three years. Schools were assigned into three varying Levels of Intervention: "Core" Schools (n = 4) received weekly interventions, "Level 1" Schools (n = 5) received monthly interventions, and Control Schools (n = 5) received no intervention. Participants completed self-reported questionnaires assessing several health behaviors, including fruit and vegetable consumption, and physical activity levels. Questionnaires were administered in the Fall and Spring of each year of the intervention. For this study, responses were analyzed from Year 3 and were compared to national recommendations. Descriptive statistics and chi-square tests of independence examined Level of Intervention and questionnaire responses.

Results
No significant chi-square tests of independence were identified for the Level of Intervention and quantity of fruit or vegetable consumption. A significant (P = 0.003) chi-square test of independence assessing physical activity was identified in the Fall of Year 3. Descriptive analyses indicated that higher proportions of students in the Core and Level 1 Schools met national fruit, vegetable, and physical activity recommendations compared to students in Control Schools.

Conclusions
The higher frequency of intervention provided to students in the Core Schools did not influence the dietary behaviors of participants. However, receiving any intervention appeared to affect health behaviors of children receiving the intervention compared to the Control Schools.

Funding Sources
The Independence Blue Cross Foundation.


Abstract Phenotypic, chemotaxonomic and genotypic data from 12 strains of Escherichia coli were collected, including carbon source utilisation profiles, ribotypes, sequencing data of the 16S–23S rRNA internal transcribed region (ITS) and Fourier transform-infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopic profiles. The objectives were to compare several identification systems for E. coli and to develop and test a polyphasic taxonomic approach using the four methodologies combined for the sub-typing of O157 and non-O157 E. coli. The nucleotide sequences of the 16S–23S rRNA ITS regions were amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR), sequenced and compared with reference data available at the GenBank database using the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) . Additional information comprising the utilisation of carbon sources, riboprint profiles and FT-IR spectra was also collected. The capacity of the methods for the identification and typing of E. coli to species and subspecies levels was evaluated. Data were transformed and integrated to present polyphasic hierarchical clusters and relationships. The study reports the use of an integrated scheme comprising phenotypic, chemotaxonomic and genotypic information (carbon source profile, sequencing of the 16S–23S rRNA ITS, ribotyping and FT-IR spectroscopy) for a more precise characterisation and identification of E. coli. The results showed that identification of E. coli strains by each individual method was limited mainly by the extension and quality of reference databases. On the contrary, the polyphasic approach, whereby heterogeneous taxonomic data were combined and weighted, improved the identification results, gave more consistency to the final clustering and provided additional information on the taxonomic structure and phenotypic behaviour of strains, as shown by the close clustering of strains with similar stress resistance patterns.


Facing the systemic crisis which originated in Mexico and in Asia, and spread to all financial centers, the objective of the new international financial architecture is to master the international financial instability; this means improving the transparency and the regulation of markets, as well as arousing a greater responsibility of public and private actors in the prevention and management of crises. But many interrogations subsist concerning the contours of the new architecture. Does it simply mean improving the transparency of information in order to prompt better practices? Or is it desirable to introduce new constraining rules as far as the international mobility of capital is concerned? Does it call for allocating new responsibilities, and therefore new resources, to the International Monetary Fund, or should the Bank for International Settlements, or a central banks club, be entrusted with such a mission? In fact, these questions arise mainly because there is no theoretical consensus among economists and official experts. Paradoxically this leads us to revisit the thought and theoretical inheritance of KEYNES. The growing importance, in current debates, of concepts such as confidence, liquidity, imperfection of financial markets, mimetic contagions, is striking in that respect. Furthermore, discussions about the international financial institutions remind debates that KEYNES started, in his Treatise on Money as well as during the preparation of the conference of Bretton Woods. In a nutshell, cannot one see in this new international financial architecture the revenge of KEYNES? In section 1, one replaces the project of international financial architecture in the context of systemic crisis of the 90's. The basic principles of this architecture, as they appear in reports of the G 22 and the G7, are then reminded, in section 2. In section 3, one sheds a light on the keynesian foundations on which, according to us, this project partially rests, and draws some consequences on the responsibilities assigned to the International Financial Institutions.


Abstract Between 1878 and 1918 the Eastern border (Ostgrenze) of the Habsburg Monarchy, and in particular the mountainous regions between Hercegovina and Montenegro, posed security challenges. The people of the region had strong local traditions and a reputation for resistance to outside authority (having fought against Ottoman power for centuries). In 1878, the village of Klobuk had tried to fight off the Habsburg invader and had only slowly been subdued. Thereafter the new authorities built up a formidable line of defence along their new border with Montenegro including the garrisons at Trebinje, Bileća and Avtovac. After the annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1908, the security situation became tense, a situation exacerbated by fear of South Slav expansion after the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 (which went hand in hand with propaganda that depicted the Serbs and Montenegrins as violent by nature). Orthodox Serbs living along the Montenegrin border were increasingly viewed with suspicion. During the summer of 1914, when anti-Serb feeling reverberated around the Monarchy, men from the villages closest to the border were either hanged or deported. The implementation and interpretation of Habsburg military regulations (Dienstreglement) meant that the Orthodox population in the border areas suffered disproportionately in 1914.


This study will deal with the policies, discourses and actions of the Turkish political parties and their impacts on discources of Turkish nationalism. This study will evaluate the nationalisms of the Republican People's Party (the RPP), the Nationalist Action Party (the NAP), and the Justice and Development Party (the JDP) of Turkey, especially during the first period of the JDP in power. Turkish nationalism has been represented by the RPP and the NAP. Nationalism of the NAP has been conservative, in that sense, the NAP supports traditional and Islamic values. The RPP has been the follower of the Kemalist principles. The Justice and Development Party (the JDP) pursues the necessities of the globalization process. It gives importance to internationalism, accession to the EU, integration with the global markets. Also, the JDP gives importance to Islamism and traditional values. Highlighting on some foreign policy issues as Iraq and Cyprus, changing attitudes of Turkish political parties will be explained. This study investigates different party discourses on those issues and tries to consider and evaluate Turkish nationalism of that era.


As sustainable forest management is threatened by climate change, adaptation measures may be needed to maintain the productive capacity of tropical forests. Yet the extent to which foresters across the tropics implement adaptation actions in anticipation to climate change impacts remains largely unexplored. In this paper, an assessment of the perceptions of climate risks and the implementation of adaptation actions by forest managers and decision makers dealing with natural and planted tropical forests destined for production purposes is presented. An electronic questionnaire was disseminated globally during 2009, and 152 responses were received from Africa, the Americas, and Asia and the Pacific. Respondents perceived that natural and planted forests are at risk from being affected by climate change. However, they seemed ambivalent when asked if investing in adaptation was currently justified. The results of this survey provide initial insights into how climate considerations are being anticipated in tropical forest management and planning yet further examination at the national and local levels is warranted on how foresters, including those from the tropics, perceive climate change risks and handle current uncertainties in order to take action. The fact that climate change ranked below other threats to forests such as commercial agriculture and unplanned logging nevertheless suggests that long-term forest planning and management is not perceived by respondents as viable given other major drivers of forest loss and degradation.


Objective. We aimed to identify the priorities for joint pain research from a large general population survey and identify characteristics associated with these priorities. Methods. A question about research priorities was developed in collaboration with the Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre's Research Users' Group. The question was embedded in a postal survey to an existing cohort of adults with self-reported joint pain, aged ≥56 years, in North Staffordshire. Respondents were asked to rank their top three priorities for research. Factor mixture modelling was used to determine subgroups of priorities. Results. In all, 1756 (88%) people responded to the survey. Of these, 1356 (77%) gave three priorities for research. Keeping active was rated the top priority by 38%, followed by research around joint replacement (9%) and diet/weight loss (9%). Two clusters of people were identified: 62% preferred lifestyle/self-management topics (e.g. keeping active, weight loss) and 38% preferred medical intervention topics (e.g. joint replacement, tablets). Those who preferred the medical options tended to be older and have hip or foot pain. Conclusion. This study has provided population data on priorities for joint pain research expressed by a large cohort of older people who report joint pain. The most popular topics for research were linked to lifestyle and self-management opportunities. Pharmaceutical and invasive interventions, despite being common topics of research, are of less importance to these respondents than non-medical topics. Specific research questions will be generated from this study with collaboration of the patient's group.


There isn't a web site out there-- whether it be WhiteHouse.gov, IBM.com or the site for your local high school-- that isn't written in HTML. If you do any level of web development-- from editing pages on a Wordpress site to designing original pages from scratch, understanding and being able to code in HTML and CSS can give you a level of control, and power over your designs that you've never experienced before. This course helps you learn the HTML and CSS you need to know now (versions 4.01 and XHTML) as well as prepares you for the future with coverage of HTML5. HTML5, increasingly, is the engine behind many mobile applications as well. This important skill set is the baseline for many working in professional web, mobile and application development. In this book authored by master trainer Mark Lassoff, you will learn HTML and CSS, including everything you need to create a creative, quality and sound web site. No experience is required as you start at the very beginning and work your way through more advanced lessons. HTML and CSS for Beginners with HTML5 takes a learn-by-doing approach. Dozens of code examples are presented as you are encouraged to type in the code examples provided and view the result within your web browser. You will not only learn the tags and attributes that comprise HTML code, but also apply them in dynamic lab exercises included with each chapter. This book closely follows the curriculum developed by the author for his popular classroom and online classes on web development. Thousands have learned HTML from Mark Lassoff, and this book provides a great opportunity for you to learn the code behind every web site and many modern mobile applications.


Although the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified more than a century and a half ago, courts have yet to delve into its relevance to gender discrimination. This oversight is unfortunate given the extent to which jurisprudence about another Reconstruction Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, has evolved beyond its original racial confines to include gender, disability, sexual orientation, and other forms of group-specific inequalities. A progressive interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment should likewise expand congressional enforcement authority beyond race. As was the case with its Fourteenth Amendment counterpart, the Thirteenth Amendment was initially ratified to prevent racial discrimination, but its antisubordination principles are also relevant to policies for abolishing gender discrimination. This underexplored area of law offers tremendous potential for providing redress against a variety private, state, and institutional forms of gender discrimination that are not actionable under current civil rights statutes.This Essay demonstrates how broad concepts of liberty, which abolitionists, feminists, and Congress developed before and after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, seamlessly lend themselves to the enforcement of gender equality norms. Over the last forty years, the Supreme Court has recognized the existence of federal authority to prevent state gender discrimination. The Thirteenth Amendment is a source of legislative authority that can be used to address private acts of discrimination.


Cancer cell lines are often used in high throughput drug screens (HTS) to explore the relationship between cell line characteristics and responsiveness to different therapies. Many current analysis methods infer relationships by focusing on one aspect of cell line drug-specific dose-response curves (DRCs), the concentration causing 50% inhibition of a phenotypic endpoint (IC50). Such methods may overlook DRC features and do not simultaneously leverage information about drug response patterns across cell lines, potentially increasing false positive and negative rates in drug response associations. We consider the application of two methods, each rooted in nonlinear mixed effects (NLME) models, that test the relationship relationships between estimated cell line DRCs and factors that might mitigate response. Both methods leverage estimation and testing techniques that consider the simultaneous analysis of different cell lines to draw inferences about any one cell line. One of the methods is designed to provide an omnibus test of the differences between cell line DRCs that is not focused on any one aspect of the DRC (such as the IC50 value). We simulated different settings and compared the different methods on the simulated data. We also compared the proposed methods against traditional IC50-based methods using 40 melanoma cell lines whose transcriptomes, proteomes, and, importantly, BRAF and related mutation profiles were available. Ultimately, we find that the NLME-based methods are more robust, powerful and, for the omnibus test, more flexible, than traditional methods. Their application to the melanoma cell lines reveals insights into factors that may be clinically useful.


Water is an essential part of our lives, but many people struggle to obtain enough clean water to meet their basic needs. However, the solution to this problem may be right in their backyard. Moringa Oleifera (M. oleifera) seeds contain a coagulating protein that can coagulate and remove particles in water. The purpose of this study was to analyze the coagulating efficiency of the seed and to test a new and innovative way to utilize the seed. When the part of the seed responsible for the coagulating properties was isolated and combined with sand, a new functionalized-sand (f-sand) was created. This research aimed to determine how effectively the M. oleifera Cationic Protein (MOCP) functionalized-sand reduces the amount of bacteria compared to other filtration techniques. We accomplished this by testing six different types of contaminated solutions before and after four different filtration techniques: plain sand, f-sand, f-sand with cilantro, and the normal moringa technique, which utilizes only moringa seed powder. We concluded that the MOCP f-sand removed the largest percent of bacteria, and when used in combination with cilantro, it was more efficient than the other techniques. This can have a large impact, especially in developing areas, as it provides a way to have clean water while also helping the economy.


Traditional information extraction systems adopt pipeline strategies, which are highly ineffective and suffer from several problems such as error propagation. Typically, pipeline models fail to produce highly-accurate final output. On the other hand, there has been growing interest in integrated or joint models which explore mutual benefits and perform multiple subtasks simultaneously to avoid problems caused by pipeline models. However, building such systems usually increases computational complexity and requires considerable engineering. This paper presents a general, strongly-coupled, and bidirectional architecture based on discriminatively trained factor graphs for information extraction. First we introduce joint factors connecting variables of relevant subtasks to capture dependencies and interactions between them. We then propose a strong bidirectional MCMC sampling inference algorithm which allows information to flow in both directions to find the approximate MAP solution for all subtasks. Extensive experiments on entity identification and relation extraction using real-world data illustrate the promise of our approach.


This dissertation examines the crisis of authenticity in postmodern culture and argues that contemporary science fiction, specifically the subgenre of Movement SF, has evolved a unique answer to this crisis by adopting, perhaps spontaneously, the picaresque narrative structure. Postmodern fiction has a tenuous relationship with the issue of authenticity, such that the average postmodern subject is utterly without true authenticity at all, alternately victim to the socioeconomic conditions of his or her culture and to the elision of the self as a result of the homogenizing effects of advertising, television, etc. Postmodern SF also carries this bleak perception of the possibility of agency; William Gibson's Sprawl and Bridge trilogies are rife with negations of human agency at the metaphorical hands of various aspects and incarnations of what Fredric Jameson terms the "technological sublime." This dissertation puts forth the argument that a group of post-Eighties SF texts all participate in a spontaneous revival of the picaresque mode, using the picaresque journey and related motifs to re-authenticate subjects whose identity and agency are being erased by powerful social and economic forces exterior to and normally imperceptible by the individual. This dissertation is organized around three loosely connected parts. Part 1 attempts to define Movement SF by separating the various, often confusing marketing labels (such as cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, etc.) and extracting a cluster of core characteristics that have shaped the genre since its inception in the early 80s. Part 1 further examines how these core characteristics (or premises) of Movement SF provide fertile ground for picaresque narrative strategies. Part 2 describes in detail the picaresque as it appears in Movement SF, examining worldbuilding strategies, the persistence and evolution of tropes and motifs common to the traditional picaresque, and the generation of new tropes and motifs unique to Movement picaresques. Part 3 examines the spatial tactics used in Movement picaresque narratives to enable picaresque marginality in totalized, globalized environments. Furthermore, Part 3 examines the use of psychological plurality as an internal tactic to escape closed environments.


The effects of dietary Ca-salt of palm fatty acid distillate (CSPFAD) as an energy
supplement on sheep performance, carcass characteristics and meat quality were
examined. Eighteen Santa Ines lambs weighing 16.6&1.4 kg were randomly allocated
to three dietary treatments with six animals for each group. The lambs were fed a
based diet containing palm kernel cake plus oil palm fi-ond (PKC+OPF)
supplemented with either 0% (diet l), 2.5% (diet 2) and 5% (diet 3) calcium salt of
palm fatty acid (CSPFAD). The feed intake, body weight and feed conversion ratio
were recorded every two weeks for a period of 4 months. At the end of the
experiment, 9 lambs (3 lambs from each dietary treatment) were randomly selected
and slaughtered to examine carcass characteristics. Longissirnus dorsi (LD) muscle
were sampled and examined for cooking loss and objective tenderness by Warner-
Bratzler shear force analysis. In the second experiment three adult male sheep (51 *
2.12 kg body weight) fitted with ruminal cannulas were used, 3 x 3 Latin square
design to determine the degradability of dry matter and protein at 6, 12,24,36 and 48
hr incubation time. The pH, ammonia nitrogen (NH3-N) and volatile fatty acid (VFA)
of the rumen fluid were measured at 0, 2 and 4hr post-feeding and stored at -20C0
until analysis.
The result shows there were no significant difference (P>0.05) in feed intake and
body weight changes of the lambs among the dietary treatments. pH, total VFA,
molar proportions of acetic acid, and acetic : propionic ratio of rumen fluid were not
affected by dietary treatment. However, there was significant difference (P<0.05) in
propionic acid molar proportion between the dietary treatment with the highest and
lowest indicated in the 5% (diet 3) and control (diet I), respectively. Further more,
the pH of meat, dressing percentage, and carcasses composition are similar (P>0.05)
among the dietary treatments. However, cooking loss of meat increased (P<0.05) as
the levels of CSPFAD was increased in the diet. Significant different (P<0.05) in
shear force were observed between diets with highest and lowest indicated by the
control and 5% dietary treatment respectively.
It can be concluded that the CSPFAD can be used up to 5% as an energy source in a
diet without any adverse effects on rumen fermentation. It can also enhanced meat
quality such as tenderness.


Degradation of carbon supported platinum catalysts is a major failure mode for the long term durability of high temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cells based on phosphoric acid doped polybenzimidazole membranes. With Vulcan carbon black as a reference, thermally treated carbon black and multi‐walled carbon nanotubes were used as supports for electrode catalysts and evaluated in accelerated durability tests under potential cycling at 150 °C. Measurements of open circuit voltage, area specific resistance and hydrogen permeation through the membrane were carried out, indicating little contribution of the membrane degradation to the performance losses during the potential cycling tests. As the major mechanism of the fuel cell performance degradation, the electrochemical active area of the cathodic catalysts showed a steady decrease in the cyclic voltammetric measurements, which was also confirmed by the post TEM and XRD analysis. A strong dependence of the fuel cell performance degradation on the catalyst supports was observed. Graphitization of the carbon blacks improved the stability and catalyst durability though at the expense of a significant decrease in the specific surface area. Multi‐walled carbon nanotubes as catalyst supports showed further significant improvement in the catalyst and fuel cell durability.