Each year, the National Basketball Association (NBA) conducts its annual entry draft (NBA Draft), which is the exclusive process by which premiere amateur players gain entrance into the NBA. To the dismay of many commentators, a number of drafted players will have just completed their senior year of high school. Routinely, these players are dismissed as immature, unprepared, and ill-advised, even though most will sign guaranteed, multi-million dollar contracts before their college educations would have begun. In stark contrast to popular myth, this Article finds that players drafted straight out of high school are not only likely to do well in the NBA, but are likely to become better players than any other age group entering the league. In fact, on average, these players perform better in every major statistical category than does the average NBA player or the average NBA player of any age cohort. Beyond excellence in performance, high school players can also earn substantially more over the course of their NBA careers, largely due to the brief, but steep career earnings-curve of professional basketball players, as well as collectively-bargained labor conditions concerning free agency. Strikingly, players who bypass college may earn as much as $100 million more over the course of their careers than had they earned a college diploma. These results may appear surprising and even unpopular, but they only represent predictable outcomes of the NBA's economic system, which, perhaps unintentionally, provides unambiguous incentives for premiere high school players to seek entrance into the NBA as soon as possible. In turn, since those players are often the most talented, they tend to develop at a uniquely accelerated rate, and thus their earlier arrival and longer stay ultimately benefits the NBA. At the same time, those high school players better off attending college tend to do so because of contrasting incentives generated by this same economic system. In short, high school players have proven to be the best group of players entering the NBA because the NBA's economic system dictates that very outcome. Despite the systematically-predictable success of high school players in the NBA, league executives and myriad social commentators desire to ban them. As a result, this Article explores whether federal labor law and antitrust law might preclude the NBA from imposing such a ban. Related discussion analyzes the two most likely forms of employment preclusion: a collectively bargained ban or a unilaterally imposed ban First, should the NBA and the National Basketball Players' Association (NBPA) agree to a provision banning high school players from the NBA Draft, a court may defer to their collective bargaining, even though high school players would not have had a seat at the negotiating table when such a rule was created. Although the NBA and the NBPA have flirted with such negotiations in the past, this scenario seems unlikely, in part due to the specter of litigation, and in part due to likely allegations of hypocrisy levied against the NBPA, which, historically, has unequivocally opposed such a rule. Moreover, pending the final outcome of former Ohio State football player Maurice Clarett's lawsuit against the National Football League (NFL) and its age prohibition, the mere ability of the NBA and NBPA - and any professional sports league and players' association - to construct such a rule would be cast in doubt. Even if the NFL defeats Clarett in court, and the NBPA were to accept a ban on high school players during the next collective bargaining negotiation, a group of sympathetic and, more importantly, influential NBPA members could seek to decertify the union. Decertification would require a majority vote of NBPA members. Provided a majority of NBPA members agree to decertify, the NBPA would lose its collective bargaining power, thus rendering the ban ineffectual. Should the NBA unilaterally impose the ban, however, the analysis turns to antitrust law. Despite recent judicial trends to apply the flexible rule of reason analysis to group boycotts, courts have remained generally consistent in applying the more stringent per se analysis to boycotts where the boycotting group serves as the only option for potential buyers or sellers. In the context of the NBA, high school players, like all potential draft picks, are the sellers since they are selling their talents to NBA teams, the buyers. Because there is no substitute equivalence to the NBA, boycotted players would not be able to secure comparable employment. In this scenario, therefore, high school players would have an excellent opportunity to characterize the ban as a group boycott. A less predictable scenario would occur if a court employs rule of reason analysis or quasi-rule of reason analysis. In those instances, a judicial balancing of procompetitive and anticompetitive effects would weigh a number of factors, including how a ban fails to provide procedural safeguards, how the NBA dominates global basketball, and how high school players comprise only 4 percent of all NBA players. Because antitrust law has generally been confined to instances where large segments of buyers or sellers have been boycotted, the dearth of high school players may prove significant. On the other hand, a blanket prohibition on high school players would fail to provide procedural safeguards, thus potentially animating a court to find it in violation of antitrust law.


PURPOSE
Epidemiologic studies show an association between hepatitis C virus (HCV) and B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). Treatment and outcome of patients with diffuse large-cell lymphoma (DLCL) and HCV infection are still a matter of debate.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
We studied the HCV-positive patients with B-cell DLCL included in the Groupe d'Etude des Lymphomes de l'Adulte (GELA) programs LNH 93 and LNH 98. They were compared with the other patients with DLCL included in these programs. HCV infection prevalence was 0.5% (26 of 5,586 patients).

RESULTS
Histologic types of HCV-positive DLCL were more frequently transformed from low-grade lymphoma than DLCL in HCV-negative patients (32% v 6%, P = .02). This is also supported by more frequent spleen involvement in HCV-positive patients (46% v 17%, P < .001). HCV-positive patients had more frequently elevated lactate dehydrogenase levels than other patients (77% v 55%, P = .02). Outcome of HCV-positive patients was poorer for overall survival (P = .02) but not for event-free survival (P = .13). After matching on age and prognosis factors, at 2 years of follow-up, the overall survival was 56% (95% CI, 33% to 76%) among HCV-positive patients, versus 80% (70% to 89%), and the event-free survival was 53% (33% to 72%) versus 74% (64% to 84%). The short-term hepatic toxicity of chemotherapy was strongly increased among HCV-positive patients. After exclusion of the two subjects with chronic hepatitis B virus infection, the overall proportion of subjects undergoing hepatic toxicity was 65% (15 of 23 patients).

CONCLUSION
HCV-positive patients with DLCL differ from other patients both at presentation and during chemotherapy. Specific protocols evaluating antiviral therapy should be designed for these patients.


Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) by using devices such as mobile phones is an ideal learning platform for learners to acquire language and share knowledge beyond the confines of a fixed location. By utilising the mobile applications available via smartphone, learners can engage in collaborative networks and find information that they need in a variety of diverse environments. This paper shares the findings of a research at UiTM to determine the technological readiness of the students by measuring their digital skills using the Digital Competence Framework (EU). 50 students from the English language proficiency course were purposively sampled because they have been exposed to MALL by their lecturer participated in this research. Their responses were collected through an online questionnaire. The findings showed that all 50 of the students owned a smartphone. 82.6% of the students did not attend any training on how to use the smartphones. 80.4% of the students have their own storing strategies and nearly 90% of the students reported having the following technological skills in operating their smartphone such as accessing applications, ability to record, share and produce technological resources. The findings reiterate that to ensure successful MALL, educators need to be aware of the background and technological skills of the learners before embedding m-learning into the English Language lessons.


Most of the modern gas turbine engine designs requiring super critical operations will often have squeeze film dampers (SFDs) on the high pressure spool bearing as an inevitable feature. However, Squeeze Film Dampers are not very common for inter-shaft bearing applications and are still in the research and development stage. The current effort concentrates on static stiffness parametric studies based on newly conceptualized intershaft squeeze film damper (ISSFD) ring design suitable for space constrained intershaft bearing application of a typical two spool configured system. The work involves static stiffness evaluation of three and four grooves ISSFD rings by varying the groove angle/groove length/subtended angle of groove & hence the overlapping angle of grooves by conducting static tests on a dedicated static stiffness evaluation test rig designed and fabricated for the purpose. The pattern of circumferential variation of stiffness of each ring is studied and the results revealed a typical trend of decreasing stiffness in ISSFD ring with the increase in groove angle and hence the overlapping angle of grooves. The static stiffness parametric studies has resulted in developing an ideal profile of ISSFD ring having six grooves that exhibited axisymmetric pattern of circumferential variation of stiffness. When used in a space constrained intershaft bearing plane of a typical two spool gas turbine engine, the ideal ISSFD ring profile would exhibit the best damping performance.
 Keywords: Inter Shaft Squeeze Film Damper (ISSFD), Gas Turbine Engine, Static stiffness, two spools, grooves.


The novel SiO2 net-like nanobelts have been successfully fabricated on Au-coated Si substrates by a simple thermal evaporation of CdS powder. The as-synthesized SiO2 nanostructures were characterized by using scanning elec- tron microscope (SEM), transmission electron microscope (TEM) and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), respec- tively. The as-grown SiO2 net-like nanobelts are rather uniformly and each nanobelt is about hundreds of micrometers in length and about 1-2 micrometers in width. The important role of CdS in the formation of the SiO2 net-like nanobelts and the possible growth mechanism of the as-grown nanobelts from the thermodynamic aspect are discussed.


This research investigated two aspects of intuition: preference and process. The
underlying basis of preference for intuition defined by Jung in his theory of
psychological types and measured by the sensing-intuition (SN) scale of the Myers-
Briggs Type Indicator was explored in two areas: performance on ability tests and
individual differences in use of intuition. Process of intuition is defined as the use of
unconscious associations to guide decision making.
A thinking aloud protocol technique was used to investigate differences in strategy
between sensing and intuitive types on two ability tests. Test instructions and
conditions were varied to investigate whether preference or ability underlies this
difference. Results indicated that the SN difference is best characterised as a focus on
different types of information - concrete reality vs. looking beyond reality to patterns,
connections and possibilities. The finding that sensing types could modify their style
suggested that this is due to a personality preference that can be overridden rather than
an underlying ability difference.
The nature of the SN difference was further explored by examining the differences
predicted by type theory between the types in the use of intuition. This prediction
contrasts with some process theories of intuition which expect few or no individual
differences. Results indicated that intuitive types were more accurate and more likely to
choose to use intuition than sensing types. Results suggested that preference for
different types of information led to use of different strategies on the tasks. Intuitive
types tended to focus on feelings of familiarity, which resulted in their accessing
intuition in the form of unconsciously learnt associations. Sensing types preferred to
focus on concrete information such as conscious memory of prior experience.
The research has made contributions by evaluating the theory of psychological types,
validating the sensing-intuition scale, and also by demonstrating the existence of
individual differences in certain measures of intuition.


Basaltic micrometeorites (MMs) derived from HED‐like parent bodies have been found among particles collected from the Antarctic and from Arctic glaciers and are to date the only achondritic particles reported among cosmic dust. The majority of Antarctic basaltic particles are completely melted cosmic spherules with only one unmelted particle recognized from the region. This paper investigates the entry heating of basaltic MMs in order to predict the relative abundances of unmelted to melted basaltic particles and to evaluate how mineralogical differences in precursor materials influence the final products of atmospheric entry collected on the Earth's surface. Thermodynamic modeling is used to simulate the melting behavior of particles with compositions corresponding to eucrites, diogenites, and ordinary chondrites in order to evaluate degree of partial melting and to make a comparison between the behavior of chondritic particles that dominate the terrestrial dust flux and basaltic micrometeroids. The results of 120,000 simulations were compiled to predict relative abundances and indicate that the phase relations of precursor materials are crucial in determining the relative abundances of particle types. Diogenite and ordinary chondrite materials exhibit similar behavior, although diogenite precursors are more likely to form cosmic spherules under similar entry parameters. Eucrite particles, however, are much more likely to melt due to their lower liquidus temperatures and small temperature interval of partial melting. Eucrite MMs, therefore, usually form completely molten cosmic spherules except at particle diameters <100 μm. The low abundance of unmelted basaltic MMs compared with spherules, if statistically valid, is also shown to be inconsistent with a low velocity population (12 km s−1) and is more compatible with higher velocities which may suggest a near‐Earth asteroid source dominates the current dust production of basaltic MMs.


The Soccer Goalkeeping Handbook is the authoritative and comprehensive coaching guide to the most important position on the soccer field. It identifies the components that form the essential skills of any goalkeeper, and how these work within the five goalkeeping roles: shot stopping, dealing with crosses and with through balls, distribution and organisation. How the goalkeeper influences play with his presence is also vital. The handbook takes any keeper or coach through the physical, mental, technical and tactical attributes required. A full set of training drills and exercises are provided, focusing on game-specific behaviour to reinforce good habits. All are fully illustrated with a list of essential coaching points. As the modern game has evolved, so has the role of the goalie. This new edition addresses the need for the goalkeeper to be an effective reader of the game and an intelligent distributor of the ball, both as a means of retaining possession and initiating counter-attacks. It also covers how the player can reinforce self-belief for good performance, and how versions of the small-sided game (five-a-side, futsal) can develop technique. Whether experienced or aspiring, this is essential reading for all goalkeepers and coaches.


Iso-bacteriochlorins known as siroheme in some reductases, featured with two adjacent reduced pyrrole rings, have distinctive electronic structures from porphyrin, chlorin and bacteriochlorin analogues. However, the synthesis of such cofactor mimics from hydrogenation of chlorin or porphyrin is associated with drawbacks of uncertain regioselectivity and stability. In this work, we present the first example of selective hydrogenation of the adjacent pyrroles in porphyrin or porpholactone free bases assisted by the Woollins reagent (WR). More importantly, adjacent-dihydroporpholactone (1a) displays iso-bacteriochlorin type spectral features and much higher stability under oxidative conditions, compared to the tetrahydroporphyrin analogue (2a). Analysis of magnetic circular dichroism (MCD) spectra and DFT calculations for the frontier π-molecular orbitals for 1a and 2a reveals the significant effect of a β-oxazolone moiety replacement on lowering the HOMO energy level and enhancing the stability resistant to oxidative conditions.


Several studies have focused on the effect of military trade and defence spending on human rights, particularly the effect of US military aid in Latin America. Little is known, however, about the human rights effects of the proliferation of small arms and light weapons (SALW). Human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, are adamant that any future Arms Trade treaty ban small arms to risky environments. Using a unique dataset on small arms trade, we find that higher imports of small arms associates with lower respect for physical integrity rights and higher levels of state terror against citizens. This study establishes a direct empirical link between small arms imports and the violation of human rights, but this effect is substantively quite small. Since civil wars lead to very high levels of human rights violations and require large amounts of SALW, the overall impact of small arms on human rights is potentially quite large, vindicating demands of the NGO community for greater scrutiny of small arms trade. Moreover, we demonstrate that the effect of small arms among autocracies has a much higher risk of repression than among democracies, which is a salient entry point for global policy.


Organisms in fluctuating environments must constantly adapt their behavior to survive. In clonal populations, this may be achieved through sensing followed by response or through the generation of diversity by stochastic phenotype switching. Here we show that stochastic switching can be favored over sensing when the environment changes infrequently. The optimal switching rates then mimic the statistics of environmental changes. We derive a relation between the long-term growth rate of the organism and the information available about its fluctuating environment.


Estimates of past climate and future forest biomass dynamics are constrained by uncertainties in the relationships between growth and climatic variability and uncertainties in the instrumental data themselves. Of particular interest in this regard is the boreal‐forest zone, where radial growth has historically been closely connected with temperature variability, but various lines of evidence have indicated a decoupling since about the 1960s. We here address this growth‐vs.‐temperature divergence by analyzing tree‐ring width and density data from across Siberia, and comparing 20th century proxy trends with those derived from instrumental stations. We test the influence of approaches considered in the recent literature on the divergence phenomenon (DP), including effects of tree‐ring standardization and calibration period, and explore instrumental uncertainties by employing both adjusted and nonadjusted temperature data to assess growth‐climate agreement. Results indicate that common methodological and data usage decisions alter 20th century growth and temperature trends in a way that can easily explain the post‐1960 DP. We show that (i) Siberian station temperature adjustments were up to 1.3 °C for decadal means before 1940, (ii) tree‐ring detrending effects in the order of 0.6–0.8 °C, and (iii) calibration uncertainties up to about 0.4 °C over the past 110 years. Despite these large uncertainties, instrumental and tree growth estimates for the entire 20th century warming interval match each other, to a degree previously not recognized, when care is taken to preserve long‐term trends in the tree‐ring data. We further show that careful examination of early temperature data and calibration of proxy timeseries over the full period of overlap with instrumental data are both necessary to properly estimate 20th century long‐term changes and to avoid erroneous detection of post‐1960 divergence.


This chapter discusses the treatment that Professor Ruggie's Guiding Principles offer for the responsibility to respect human rights (RtR) as applied to core companies whose affiliates' operations infringe human rights. The issue is about a core company's responsibility to act to address abuses that occur towards the periphery of its group or network. The fairness of globalisation is often questioned with examples from industries where business enterprises are structured along buyer-supplier, parent-subsidiary and joint venture arrangements. The concern here is that the RtR raises difficult issues when applied to a business group or network as opposed to a single business entity. The Guiding Principles are critically reviewed in section 2 for how they deal with the issue of a core company's responsibility to act. Section 3 seeks inspiration in tort jurisprudence in an attempt to justify a responsibility to act and thus reinforce Ruggie's foundational work on the RtR. Section 4 identifies some outstanding issues related to the RtR that could benefit from further research and attention in the post-Ruggie period.


In this paper, resistance spot welding process of AISI 201 stainless steel is studied experimentally. For this purpose, effect of welding current on quality of weld is investigated and relationships between welding current and fusion zone characteristics are examined. For determining mechanical properties such as maximum load and fracture mode, tensile shear test of spot welds is performed. Hardness and microstructural examinations are performed for study the influence of welding current on characteristics of welded joints. The results show that strength of resistance spot welds of AISI 201 stainless steel is increased with increase in welding current. Transition of fracture mode from interfacial to pullout and then pullout with tearing of sheet mode during tensile-shear tests of AISI 201 spot welds is investigated through experimental and theoretical approaches. It is concluded from results that increasing in welding current leads to change in fracture mode from interfacial to pullout mode due to increase in fusion zone size (weld nugget size). Also, it is observed that increasing in fusion zone size is accompanied by an increase in load carrying capacity of resistance spot welds. The minimum required fusion zone size to ensure pullout fracture mode is estimated using an analytical model.


Design and control co-optimization studies for hybrid vehicles have been proposed in the past. However, such works suffer from difficulties arising due to (a) diverse real- and integer-valued variables, (b) complex nonlinear powertrain dynamics and design interconnections, (c) conflicting objective functions with path constraints, and (d) high computational resources requirements. To meet these challenges, this study presents an efficient co-optimization framework for hybrid electric vehicles which is built using existing algorithms and coordination schemes. Particular emphasis is given to the simultaneous scheme and the decomposition-based scheme. The decomposition-based scheme with the problem decomposition proposed in this work can efficiently handle multi-time scale state variables and both integer- and real valued design and control optimization variables. This is demonstrated by solving the mixed-integer optimal design and control problem of a series hybrid vehicle over a one-hour long drive cycle with time discretization of one second. The problem complexity is elevated by using an increasing number of state variables (including battery state of charge, battery energy, and after-treatment system temperature), control variables (such as the engine power and engine on/off), and design parameters (such as the number of battery cells and the type and size of the engine). In addition, a multi-objective cost function is used to find a tradeoff solution between fuel consumption and emissions minimization. The results show that in terms of optimality of the solution, the decomposition based scheme is comparable with the simultaneous, but can give a 14% improvement in computational performance. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated by comparing the co-optimization results against a baseline case in which only the optimal control problem is solved. The co-optimized solution yields up to 3.7% average genset efficiency improvement and a fuel consumption reduction to 1.6 kg from 2.5 kg, which is further reduced to 1.5 kg by adding the engine on-off control. Finally, a decision matrix is developed to provide guidance on the selection of the optimization algorithm and coordination scheme for any problem at hand.


Plague is an infectious disease transmitted from rodents to humans. This disease is considered an endemic disease in western Iran. The last officially reported case of human plague in Iran was in 1965. In the last few decades, human plague has been reported in Iran' neighboring countries. Also, according to some recent evidence witnessing infected rodents in western Iran, it is probable to have new outbreaks of the disease in the near future in Iran. Thus, it is very important for the physicians and health care personnel to know how the disease can transmit. . This study is a report of the outbreak of the disease in Gavmichan village in northern Kermanshah province in 1952, based on the available historical reports. In this outbreak, the diagnoses were confirmed by getting biopsies of parotid, auxiliary and groin glands, running bacteriology tests, smears and cultures and injecting guinea pigs. During this 20-day outbreak, 14 people were infected, of whom eight died. In 11 cases (78.57% of the patients), a close association with an infected patient was reported. Fever and swollen lymph nodes was the frequent clinical symptoms in the patients. The mean (SD) duration of the infection until death was 4.26 (0.42) days. Apparently the source of this outbreak was the wild animals in the fields around the village. It is recommended to do a comprehensive study in the western region of the country to determine the status of the plague and to monitor the disease in this region. Health care workers should be alerted to the current status of the disease in order to be able to respond appropriately to potential outbreaks.


Simple spatial interaction models of human mobility based on physical laws have been used extensively in the social, biological, and physical sciences, and in the study of the human dynamics underlying the spread of disease. Recent analyses of commuting patterns and travel behavior in high-income countries have led to the suggestion that these models are highly generalizable, and as a result, gravity and radiation models have become standard tools for describing population mobility dynamics for infectious disease epidemiology. Communities in Sub-Saharan Africa may not conform to these models, however; physical accessibility, availability of transport, and cost of travel between locations may be variable and severely constrained compared to high-income settings, informal labor movements rather than regular commuting patterns are often the norm, and the rise of mega-cities across the continent has important implications for travel between rural and urban areas. Here, we first review how infectious disease frameworks incorporate human mobility on different spatial scales and use anonymous mobile phone data from nearly 15 million individuals to analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics of the Kenyan population. We find that gravity and radiation models fail in systematic ways to capture human mobility measured by mobile phones; both severely overestimate the spatial spread of travel and perform poorly in rural areas, but each exhibits different characteristic patterns of failure with respect to routes and volumes of travel. Thus, infectious disease frameworks that rely on spatial interaction models are likely to misrepresent population dynamics important for the spread of disease in many African populations.


This paper examines spatial variations in exposure to toxic air pollution from industrial facilities in urban areas of the United States, using geographic microdata from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators project. We find that average exposure in an urban area is positively correlated with the extent of racial and ethnic disparity in the distribution of the exposure burden. This correlation could arise from causal linkages in either or both directions: the ability to displace pollution onto minorities may lower the effective cost of pollution for industrial firms; and higher average pollution burdens may induce whites to invest more political capital in efforts to influence firms' siting decisions. Furthermore, we find that in urban areas with higher minority pollution-exposure discrepancies, average exposures tend to be higher for all population subgroups, including whites. In other words, improvements in environmental justice in the United States could benefit not only minorities but also whites. JEL Categories: P16, Q53, Q56, R3.


We examine the effect of a change in the director election system—the switch from a plurality voting standard to a more stringent standard known as majority voting (MV). Using a regression discontinuity design, we document abnormal returns of 1.43–1.60 % around annual meeting dates where shareholder proposals to adopt MV are voted upon, suggesting that shareholders perceive the adoption of MV as value-enhancing. We document an increase in boards' responsiveness to shareholders at MV firms. In particular, relative to a propensity score-matched control sample, firms adopting MV exhibit an increase in the rate of implementation of shareholder proposals supported by a majority vote and in the responsiveness to votes withheld from directors up for election. We do not find a relation between votes withheld and subsequent director turnover, regardless of the election standard. Overall, it appears that, rather than a channel to remove specific directors, director elections are viewed by shareholders as a means to obtain specific governance changes and that, in this respect, their ability to obtain such changes is stronger under a MV standard.


The asymptotic behavior of the number of set partitions of an $n$-element set into blocks of distinct sizes is determined. This behavior is more complicated than is typical for set partition problems. Although there is a simple generating function, the usual analytic methods for estimating coefficients fail in the direct approach, and elementary approaches combined with some analytic methods are used to obtain most of the results. Simultaneously, we obtain results on the shape of a random partition of an $n$-element set into blocks of distinct sizes.


Multimode interferometer bistable laser diodes (MMI-BLDs) appeared recently as a potential candidate for implementing all-optical flip-flops. It was reported that in such MMI-BLDs, cross-gain saturation effect and saturable absorber together can control the hysteresis window characteristics; however, there was no clear description on how to analyze and estimate the effect of cross-gain saturation on hysteresis characteristics. In this paper, we present a model that can explain the experimental results reported for MMI-BLDs and predict the hysteresis behavior for such devices. The proposed simulation model can work for both symmetric and asymmetric configurations of MMI-BLDs as it considers the spatial gain overlap between the co-propagating modes inside the MMI-BLDs. This spatial overlap accounts for the discrepancies in hysteresis characteristics, i.e., hysteresis width and threshold currents, between both configurations. With the proposed model, as the asymmetric configuration provides variable spatial cross-gain overlap between the fundamental and first-order modes depending on device dimensions, hysteresis window characteristics vary accordingly. To confirm the spatial gain overlap role, we present the simulation results obtained by the proposed model for several asymmetric MMI-BLDs of different spatial gain overlap with fixed saturable absorber effect. The results obtained show that the higher the spatial gain overlap is, the lower the threshold currents of the hysteresis window are for the same hysteresis window width, which is determined mainly by the saturable absorption effect. The obtained simulation results match with the experimental results reported for the asymmetric MMI-BLD configuration.


In this paper, we model and analyze a cellular network that operates in the licensed band of the 3.5-GHz spectrum and consists of a licensed and an unlicensed operator. Using tools from stochastic geometry, we concretely characterize the performance of this spectrum sharing system. We model the locations of the licensed base stations (BSs) as a homogeneous Poisson point process with protection zones (PZs) around each BS. Since the unlicensed BSs cannot operate within the PZs, their locations are modeled as a Poisson hole process. In addition, we consider carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance-type contention-based channel access mechanism for the unlicensed BSs. For this setup, we first derive an approximate expression and useful lower bounds for the medium access probability of the serving unlicensed operator BS. Furthermore, by efficiently handling the correlation in the interference powers induced due to correlation in the locations of the licensed and unlicensed BSs, we provide approximate expressions for the coverage probability of a typical user of each operator. Subsequently, we study the effect of different system parameters on area spectral efficiency of the network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt toward accurate modeling and analysis of a citizens broadband radio service system using tools from stochastic geometry.


ABSTRACT This paper examines the corollaries of the exceptional treatment of Palestinian children under the Israeli military rule. It is shown how the widespread and systematic ill treatment of Palestinian children accrues from exceptional provisions and lack of legal cover of the Israeli military law. Such lack constitutes a precarious condition under which Palestinian children are not treated as children but as a security threat legally accountable for their acts, in many respects with ways similar to adults. Precarity, the paper argues, is produced through three conditions. First, the lack of protection is institutionalised through the legal, territorial and population-regulating techniques internal to state channels. Second, the lack of protection delegates significant power to the discretion of what Judith Butler calls the 'petty sovereigns' – to the soldiers, interrogators, police officers, etc., who are asked to rely on their own judgment when making decisions on the fundamental matters regarding the order and justice, even life and death of children. Third, the use of discretionary power is not only encouraged by the legal system and its exceptions; it also works in tandem with the institutional culture of impunity that accepts the violent disciplining, even torture, of Palestinian children.


We developed several type superconducting bulk magnets with the goal of their industrial application, and study to improve a magnetic field by pulsed field magnetization. It is important to select a suitable refrigerator to cool a bulk superconductor. This paper investigates magnetizing characteristics when using different refrigerators. One is a Stirling refrigerator, in which an ultimate temperature was up to 50 K and cooling capacity was 11 W at 77 K. Another is a dual-stage GM refrigerator with an air-cooled compressor, in which an ultimate temperature was 13 K and cooling capacity was 5 W at 20 K. The other is a dual-stage GM refrigerator with a water-cooled compressor, in which an ultimate temperature was 12 K and cooling capacity was 12 W at 20 K. When a GdBCO bulk with dimensions of 60 mm in diameter and 20 mm thick was cooled by the Stirling refrigerator, the lowest temperature was approximately 55 K. Then, in the other refrigerators, the temperature was adjusted to the same value by a temperature regulator. The bulk was cooled by each refrigerator and a single pulsed field was applied while varying the amplitude of 3.1 to 7.0 T. During magnetization, time variations of magnetic flux density on the bulk surface were monitored. After magnetization, the trapped field distributions were measured on the magnetic pole surface. These data show that even the bulk magnet using the Stirling refrigerator with relatively low cooling ability could trap a high magnetic field. Consequently, the bulk magnet with high cooling capacity could not necessarily generate a high magnetic field.


© 2014 Future Medicine Ltd. Although one Millennium Development Goal target, to halt and reverse the TB epidemic, has been achieved, there were still 8.7 million new TB cases and 1.4 million deaths from TB in 2011 [1]. The rate of decline needs to increase in order to progress towards eliminating the disease and effective prophylactic vaccination is key to achieving this. The only existing licensed prophylactic TB vaccine is bacillus Calmette-Guerin, an attenuated strain of Mycobacterium bovis, which has been in use since 1920. Over the past decade, a number of novel TB vaccine candidates have been developed and many are now in clinical trials. Validated preclinical animal models of TB and immune biomarkers of protection are required to facilitate selection of which candidate vaccines should enter early-stage clinical trials, and which should progress to large-scale efficacy testing.


In the lesson on which this practical article is based, third grade students constructed a "lift-the-flap" page to explore food webs on the prairie. The moveable papercraft focused student attention on prairie animals' external structures and how the inferred functions of those structures could support further inferences about the animals' diets. In general, most students made simple causal connections between an animal's observable characteristics and the food it would probably eat. Some students were also able to make multi-agent connections to develop a more complex mental model of a food web. Ultimately, the lift-the flap project was engaging to students and motivated them to focus their attention on the characteristics of animals of different ecosystems to infer their probable diets.


BACKGROUND
Toll like receptor 4 (TLR-4) is a protein located in the cell membrane with an important function in the immune response of the organism. Its activation decreases heart contractility and activates nuclear transcription factor kappa B (NF-kB ). This in turn, increases the synthesis of different pro-inflammatory cytokines and the inducible enzyme nitric oxide (iNOS), which plays an important role in the inflammatory processes when nitric oxide production is enhanced.

AIM
To determine if, after one session of acute exercise, expression of TLR-4 and iNOS, and activation of NF-kB are induced in rat cardiac tissue.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
Exercise and control groups of eight male Wistar rats each, were studied. The exercise group was subjected to an acute exercise bout lasting one hour. After the exercise, the heart was excised to measure the expression of iNOS and TLR-4 genes by quantitative polyme-rase chain reaction, NF-kB activation by electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) and p50 by Western blot.

RESULTS
After exercise, there was an increase in TLR-4 and of iNOS mRNA levels (+46.7 and +74.3% respectively). NF-kB activation and the nuclear expression of its p50 subunit also increased significantly (+240 and +306% respectively).

CONCLUSIONS
Increased expression of TLR4 following a session of acute exercise may contribute to the activation of the NF-kB signaling route, promoting the synthesis of nitric oxide, which could influence negatively the cardiac response to high intensity physical exercise.


Sodic soils have immense productivity potential, if managed through
proper technology interventions. Biocompost is prepared by composting pressmud
(a sugar industry byproduct) received from cane juice filtration and spent wash
received from distilleries through microbial aerobic decomposition and can be
used to reclaim sodic soils. Field experiments were conducted during the wet
season of 2011 and 2012 to study the effect of incorporation of biocompost in
sodic soil with four treatments: T1—Control, T2—Biocompost at 2 t ha-1,
T3—Biocompost at 4 t ha-1 and T4—Biocompost at 6 t ha-1.
The two promising salt tolerant rice varieties preferred by farmers, Narendra
usar 3 and NDR 359 were used as test crops, which can produce yields ranging
between 2-4 t ha-1 in soil having a pH range of 9.2 to 10.5. Among the different doses of
biocompost tested, application of biocompost at 6 t ha-1 registered
highest yields, enabled by a higher biomass, ear bearing tiller (EBT), and
grain fertility in both varieties. Narendra usar 3 was more responsive to
treatments even at lower doses of biocompost than NDR 359, but NDR 359 yielded
slightly higher than Narendra usar 3 in all treatments. Soil health was also
improved evidently on better fertility
and low soil pH and EC at harvest. Thus, biocompost can be considered as a commercially
viable, environmentally acceptable and practically enforceable option for
improving the crop productivity and soil fertility status.


We find that there lacks a formal algebraic framework in the research area of P2P information retrieval. Such a formal framework is indispensable and pivotal. On the one hand, no solid theoretical foundation can explain why the results of many ad-hoc commercial ranking algorithms are good or bad; on the other hand, in some cases, it might be preferable in a decentralized search system to use different retrieval models and different ranking algorithms at the same time since each separate document collection and each peer might have different characteristics. Thus it is important to have a common framework, where we can capture the individual models and describe the overall behavior. Such a framework characterizes notions like ranking, relevance feedback, rank aggregation and combination, etc. and necessary operations. In this paper, we define such a foundation model for P2P information retrieval, where data models for rankings from the perspectives of both the end user's search needs and the search member server's contextual rankings are provided, and a new ranking aggregation language is proposed to perform ranking combination operations. A case study is included to demonstrate how the foundation model and the ranking aggregation language could be applied in real ranking problems of P2P Web search systems.


Enlightenment London surgeon. Examining his personal, professional, and genteel achievements enhances our understanding of the boundary between surgeons and physicians in Enlightenment 'marketplace' practice. Turner's pioneering writing on skin disease, De Morbis Cutaneis, emphasizes the skin's role as a physical and professional boundary between university-educated physicians who treated internal disease and apprentice-trained surgeons relegated to the care of external disorders. Turner also argued that a pregnant woman's imagination could be transferred to her unborn child, imprinting its skin with various marks and deformities. This stance sparked a major pamphlet war between Turner and London physician James Blondel, raising this phenomenon from a folk belief to a chief concern of Enlightenment natural philosophy. Turner's career-long crusade against quackery and his voluminous writings on syphilis, a common 'surgical' disorder, provide a refined view into distinctions between orthodox and quack practices in 18th-Century London. Turner, long viewed as a pioneer in British dermatology, also holds the Anglo-American distinction of receiving a medical degree from Yale, the first such degree offered from Colonial America


X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) has been used to investigate the effect of various surface cleaning procedures on Al[x]Ga[1]-[x]N surfaces for x = 0.20 and 0.30. Results show that wet chemical etch in a HF solution followed by a 600°C in-situ annealing under ultra-high vacuum (UHV) is very effective in removing oxygen from the surface. Downward band bending of 0.87 eV and 0.99 eV also occurs between the solvents-treated and the annealed Al[x]Ga[1]-[x]N surfaces for x = 0.20 and 0.30, respectively.Increasing in-situ temperature annealing in increments of 100°C up to 600°C shows a re-ordering at the surface and subsurface with Ga and A1 moving deeper in the surface, whereas N goes to the topsurface. In addition, the Fermi level movement observed when increasing the temperature could be interpreted by the change in surface stoichiometry or by a creation of vacancies due to the ex-situ surface treatment which may, in turn, be activated/deactivated by temperature annealing. Atomic hydrogen clean (AHC) followed by 400°C in-situ UHV annealing is also found effective in removing O and C from Al[x]Ga[1]-[x]N surface (x = 0.20).The formation of Ag/Al[x]Ga[1]-[x]N (x = 0.20) and Ni/Al[x]Ga[1]-[x]N (x = 0.30) interfaces, where the substrate was subjected to HF etch followed by 600°C in-situ UHV anneal, has been studied by a combination of XPS, atomic force microscope (AFM), scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and current-voltage (I-V) measurements.XPS results suggest a layer-by-layer followed by islanding growth mode of Ag and Ni on Al[x]Ga[1]-[x]N. This is confirmed by the presence of metal islands at the metal-covered surfaces using AFM and in-situ STM. XPS investigation shows a more abrupt, well-defined Ag/Al[x]Ga[1]-[x]N interface compared to Ni/Al[x]Ga[1]-[x]N. Ag deposition on Al[x]Ga[1]-[x]N substrates causes upward band bending of 0.30 eV and 0.40 eV between the "clean" surface and the last metal deposition, for x = 0.20 and 0.30, respectively, while Ni induces downward band bending of 0.3 eV for x = 0.20. I-V measurements of Ag/Al[x]Ga[1]-[x]N (x = 0.30), where the substrate was cleaned using N[+] bombardment followed by 600°C annealing, yield a Schottky barrier height of 0.82 eV with ideality factor n = 1.21.XPS and I-V results on Ag/Al[x]Ga[1]-[x]N and Ni/Al[x]Ga[1]-[x]N are compared and discussed in terms of current models of Schottky barrier formation.


BACKGROUND: It has been found that HIV infection predisposes to a hypercoagulable state and that the risk of venous thromboembolism is about 10times that expected among people without HIV. Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) has been reported to be more common among HIV infected people in several parts of the country. No formal research has been published to confirm or refute this observation within the South African context. There has thus been the need to determine the true prevalence of deep vein thrombosis amongst patients with HIV infection in the medical ward of Nelson Mandela Hospital, Mthatha, South Africa.

AIM: To determine the risk profile and prevalence of Deep Venous Thrombosis (DVT) in patients admitted with HIV/AIDS at the Nelson Mandela Hospital.

OBJECTIVES: The main objectives of this study were:
•To determine the proportion of patients admitted with DVT who also had HIV/AIDS.
•To obtain a profile of the risk factors associated with DVT in patients requiring admission for DVT.
•To describe the association of DVT and HIV/AIDS in subgroups of patients with different degrees of immunosuppression.

METHODS: We conducted a study in which we collected data retrospectively on all DVT cases admitted over a year period. Detailed information was collected about HIV status,CD4 count, and other risk factors for DVT.

RESULTS: A total of 102 DVT cases were admitted over the period of one year and data was extracted from the charts. A total of 81 (79.4%) of the DVT cases were HIV infected (HIV positive) while 21 cases (20.6%) were HIV negative. Among the other risk factors for DVT considered, 42 (41.2%) of the DVT cases were also on treatment for Tuberculosis. Only a small percentage of the DVT cases had co morbidities like obesity, smoking, cancer, diabetes, immobility, kidney disease etc. It was found that 70(68.6%) of DVT cases were < 40yrs of age. Among patients with known CD4 counts, 29 (70.7%) had a CD4 count < 200 while 12 (29.3%) had a CD4 count ≥ 200. In univariate analysis, HIV (OR = 11.571; 95% CI = 4.888 – 27.392) and TB (OR = 1.667.CI = 1.420 – 1.956) had significant association with DVT. When subjected to multiple logistic regression, only HIV (OR = 13.2, 95% CI = 5.3 – 32.3; p = <0.0001) and Age < 40yrs (OR = 2.7, 95% CI = 1.1 – 6.7; p = 0.034) were statistically significantly associated with DVT.A total of 650 HIV related cases were admitted over the same year period which gave a cumulative period prevalence of DVT of 12.5% among the HIV infected population.

CONCLUSION: The prevalence of DVT at the Nelson Mandela hospital Mthatha was 12.5% for the year 2009 and is clearly above the average reported in other studies. HIV infection and age were the risk factors with a statistically significant association with DVT in this study. As this was an observational cross-sectional study, a more definitive prospective longitudinal design would assist in establishing the incidence of DVT in HIV infected patients, as well as the magnitude of the relationship between HIV and DVT.


This paper presents case studies of producing fields where faults heavily influence fluid-flow behaviour. In a first case, faults show no evidence of barrier behaviour prior to production but, nevertheless, demonstrate strongly compartmentalized field behaviour once production starts. Analytical modelling suggests that short-term pressure differences between faulted panels can be predictable owing to the permeability contrast between fault zone and reservoir: fault permeability, however, is not low enough to prevent dissipation on the geological timescale. Faults in a second case acted as baffles during production, supporting significant pressure differences, with salinity data suggesting that, as a network, they channelled sweep through relays and around fault tips. The third case examines a fault acting as a vertical drain, causing early water breakthrough through proven intermediate seals and depleting non-produced aquifers above. The fault permeability required to explain these depletion rates is estimated from an analytical model. Estimates of 0.02 – 0.2 mD compare well with predictions from a new algorithm calibrated using measurements on natural fault rocks from seismic-scale faults. Experience from case studies such as these can improve the way in which we use limited data from exploration wells when considering fault behaviour in development scenarios and in conditioning reservoir models for production forecasting.


Objective: This review summarises the existing evidence on the effects that recreational and medical use of cannabis and cannabinoids have on cognitive performance. Methods: Databases (PubMed, Medline, and Google Scholar) were searched from inception to March 2017 by adopting the following key terms: dronabinol, nabilone, nabiximols, cannabis, marijuana, cognition, neurology, and neuropsychology. A total of 94 documents, including reviews, preclinical and clinical studies, industrial and government agencies reports were included in this review. Results: We found that recreational use of cannabis doubles the risk of a fatal traffic accident by impairing attention and lengthening reaction time. Short-term use lowers performance in working memory, attention, executive functions and visual perception tasks. Chronic recreational use in adolescents also doubles the risk of early school-leaving, cognitive impairment and psychoses in adulthood. Adverse effects of cannabis-based medication – dronabinol, nabiximol and nabilone – and ingestion/inhalation of marijuana allowed for medical use include dizziness, drowsiness and short-term memory impairment. Conclusion: Cannabis consumption is associated with significant impairments in a range of cognitive abilities. Of particular concern, early and chronic exposure to cannabis, especially in the adolescence, seems to be associated with irreversible cognitive impairments. ASEAN Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 18 (2): July – December 2017: XX XX.


Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been extensively and inconclusively debated in the literature. In this essay, we examine the development of CSR by both reviewing the evolution of the conceptual framework and models of CSR and discussing social responsibility accounting and auditing. We conclude that both business and academic communities worldwide should pay closer attention to CSR and its components of economic, social, and environmental performance. Business organizations worldwide are just starting to recognize the importance of quality as it relates to CSR and the link between profitability and social behavior. Justifications for CSR are fulfilling moral obligations, maintaining a good reputation, ensuring sustainability and licensing to operate, and creating shared value for all corporate stakeholders.


The engineers who studied in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and who returned to Greece to work have been seen as bearers of scientific knowledge and the modernising effort. Actually, they were active historical agents contributing with their multiple scientific activities to the process of appropriation of science and technology and industrial modernisation in the specific historical environment. This article aims, through the study of a particular professional group of engineers, the mining engineers, to demonstrate the interaction between scientific and technical professional activities and participation in political and social affairs. For these mining engineers, the technical efficiency and economic growth that industrialisation would bring could not be dissociated from social order and a hierarchical form of social organisation. At the same time, the formation of their professional group, as well as the social organisation that they envisioned, were rooted in gendered and class relations of power.


Summary Discussions between analysts from the Institute for National Strategic Studies of the National Defense University and China's Institute of Strategic Studies of the National Defense University of the Chinese People's Liberation Army convened in Beijing during March, 1997. During discussions PLA analysts: * described a relatively peaceful region; * criticized the U.S./Japan Security Treaty; * showed no flexibility on Taiwan or the South China Sea; * argued against alliances as outmoded and upheld Beijing's ties with Moscow as a model for a different form of regional security architecture; * evidenced a desire for a more multilateral approach to regional security issues; and, * indicated an interest in coordinating policies on North Korea and possibly on South Asia. Introduction PLA analysts are focused on maritime and littoral security issues such as Taiwan, the South China Sea, and relations with Japan. They expressed particular satisfaction with Beijing's ties with Russia and the CIS, and with South and Southeast Asia, suggesting that the consolidation of these sets of relations frees the PLA to look towards the significant challenges located to the east and south. Discussion of South Asia and the Korean peninsula revealed a confluence of U.S. and Chinese interests. Like Washington, Beijing has a strong interest in controlling proliferation in South Asia as well as in avoiding conflict on the Korean peninsula. Military analysts noted the desirability of coordinated policies with respect to these regions and issues. On a different, and at times more contentious note, PLA interlocutors also presented an assessment of the forces and trends that define the region; sketched the broad outlines of what they referred to as a new concept of security better suited to the needs and desires of regional states; and, most notably, delivered an intense critique of the efforts by the United States and Japan to refocus their security alliance away from the defense of Japan and towards maintaining regional security. PLA Views The Regional Security Assessment. Chinese military analysts describe the present regional security environment as more promising than at any time since end of World War II. With the possible exception of North Korea, and unlike Europe or the Third World, failed or failing states do not challenge regional stability. Moreover, they note that the interests of regional states are converging. Focused as they are on economic development, regional actors wish to maintain the political stability necessary for continued economic growth. Indeed, in the PLA view, the desire to avoid conflict and settle disputes peacefully has almost reached the status of a regional norm. As a result, apart from the Taiwan Strait, which remains volatile and on which they indicated no flexibility, PLA analysts think it unlikely that any of the well-known regional hotspots will erupt into conflict. Border disputes, and competing maritime claims are considered to be under control, or nearly so. Regional concerns engendered by conflicting signals of Chinese intentions in the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea are dismissed summarily as the result of misperception and bad faith. Even on the Korean peninsula, PLA analysts believe the parties concerned would rather find political solutions than resort to military force. In sum, China's military analysts describe an environment in which, except for Taiwan, there is little chance of major conflict. More significantly, they hold that the time has come to build a new regional security architecture. They assert that bilateral security alliances such as the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty are rapidly outliving their usefulness. Towards a New Regional Security Architecture: the PLA Vision. PLA interlocutors argue that the future security structure should embrace an entirely new concept of security based on three overlapping principles: * Common Security. …


Mycogone perniciosa, causes wet bubble disease of Agaricus bisporus, is very contagious and results in severe crop losses. The Pathogenesis of wet bubble disease (W.B.D) and structural change occuring during this mycotic infection of A. bisporus are presented from a morphologists point of view. By the use of light and scanning electron microscopy the mode of a parasitic fungus interactions with host tissue were studied. Result of these studies showed that the pathogen adheres to and penetrates the host during any stage of fruit body development. The host hyphae dediffrentiation process and an excessive, nodular, reactive or hyper plastic proliferation usually occur. Exudation of accumulated extracellular fluid results in a tear-drop phenomenon (hence wet bubble). When young primordia are infected, tumorus fungal masses are formed and no sings of cell differentiation and organogenesis can be found. The mycoparasite itself seemed not to be influenced by the change of the host tissue, and caused cytological differences of the host and finally occure lytic phenomenon.


Pyrazolines are important five membered ring structures containing two nitrogen atoms at positions 1 and 2 and are partially reduced form of pyrazoles. Pyrazoline derivatives constitute an important class of compounds in drug research. They are found to possess antiimplantation, antiarrhythmic, anti-inflammatory, antihypertensive, abortifacient, antiarthritic, anthelmintic, antidepressant, fungicidal, antiviral, antitumor, anesthetic, hypoglycemic, antifertility and antioxidant activities. This article attempts to review the importance of medicinal aspect of pyrazolines.


The equilibrium joint state probabilities of interacting Markov processes are obtained in a hierarchical way, by finding the reversed process of the interaction in terms of the reversed processes of the components. From a reversed process, a product-form solution for the joint state probabilities follows directly. The method uses a Markovian process algebra formalism and generalizes the recent Reversed Compound Agent Theorem (RCAT) to solve a diverse class of concurrent systems. This class includes processes with shared, exclusive resources, a customer-oriented specification of a last-come-first-served (LCFS) queue with Coxian service times and an extended PS queue with a non-product form solution. From these results, a new, very short proof of the BCMP theorem ensues. The principal advantage of the methodology is its potential for mechanisation and symbolic implementation. Indeed, many non-standard product-forms have emerged directly from the compositional approach.


Unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE) or spam constitutes a significant fraction of all e-mail connection attempts and routinely frustrates users, consumes resources, and serves as an infection vector for malicious software. In an effort to scalably and effectively reduce the impact of these e-mails, e-mail system designers have increasingly turned to blacklisting. Blacklisting (blackholing, block listing) is a form of course-grained, reputation-based, dynamic policy enforcement in which real-time feeds of spam sending hosts are sent to networks so that the e-mail from these hosts may be rejected. Unfortunately, current spam blacklist services are highly inaccurate and exhibit both false positives and significant false negatives. In this paper, we explore the root causes of blacklist inaccuracy and show that the trend toward stealthier spam exacerbates the existing tension between false positives and false negatives when assigning spamming IP reputation. We argue that to relieve this tension, global aggregation and reputation assignment should be replaced with local aggregation and reputation assignment, utilizing preexisting global spam collection, with the addition of local usage, policy, and reachability information. We propose two specific techniques based on this premise, dynamic thresholding and speculative aggregation, whose goal is to improve the accuracy of blacklist generation. We evaluate the performance and accuracy of these solutions in the context of our own deployment consisting of 2.5 million production e-mails and 14 million e-mails from spamtraps deployed in 11 domains over a month-long period. We show that the proposed approaches significantly improve the false positive and false negative rates when compared to existing approaches.


This article describes and evaluates a co-authored translation of France Preseren's "Sonetni venec [A Wreath of Sonnets]" (1834), which has been translated once before into English, namely by Vivian de Sola Pinto in 1954. Having sketched the background to the undertaking, the author describes the structure of "Wreaths of Sonnets" in general and mentions some examples from English literature. He then places "Sonetni venec" in Preseren's oeuvre. Next, he exemplifies two other translations of "Wreaths" into English (one from Danish, the second from Czech). Most of the article is devoted to the strategy employed in this latest undertaking, a very complex and challenging one. Three particular problems had to be solved, given that the aim was to produce a translation that, formally, would be as close near feasible to the original. The first involved metre: Preseren's original was in iambic pentameters with feminine rhymes in line-finals; the translators chose to reject feminine rhymes, and their reasons are provided. Second, which particular frequently-recurrent rhymes would be chosen, given that one had to occur 24 times and another 18 times? This choice, also, is described. Third, Preseren's original has an acrostic in the Master Theme: we decided to attempt one in our version. The whole evaluation, which is some details compares this translation with the one by Pinto, is limited to an extremely formal framework.


We present a computational technique that aids with the design of structurally‐sound metal frames, tailored for robotic fabrication using an existing process that integrate automated bar bending, welding, and cutting. Aligning frames with structurally‐favorable orientations, and decomposing models into fabricable units, we make the fabrication process scale‐invariant, and frames globally align in an aesthetically‐pleasing and structurally‐informed manner. Relying on standard analysis of frames, we then co‐optimize the shape and topology of bars at the local unit level. At this level, we minimize combinations of functional and aesthetic objectives under strict fabrication constraints that model the assembly of discrete sets of bent bars. We demonstrate the capabilities of our global‐to‐local approach on four robotically‐constructed examples.


This paper describes the practice of students enrolled in an undergraduate Global Leadership course taking a Cultural Intelligence (CQ) assessment. The results of the assessment provided insight into the students' development across various dimensions of CQ, as well as their scores relative to their peers and global averages. This information was incorporated into the course instruction to assist students in developing a more concrete understanding of their own capacities in otherwise ambiguous or abstract behavioral dimensions. Results of the practice indicate that it is beneficial to the students, particularly from a self-efficacy and motivational standpoint. A sample lesson plan and debriefing questions are provided to assist educators desiring to incorporate a CQ assessment into their teaching.


Three CaCO3 dissolution events have been documented in the western equatorial Atlantic, one associated with marine isotope stage 5d, one with stage 5b, and one with early stage 4. The intensity of these events appears to require a greatly expanded invasion of waters with a low carbonate ion concentration akin to that characterizing today's deep Pacific (and also the Antarctic Bottom Water). While evident in a core from a depth of 3.4 km, these three events appear to be much less intense in the western equatorial Pacific than in the western Atlantic. The Atlantic results appear to be telling us that the density difference between Southern Ocean and North Atlantic deep waters has been modulated by insolation changes associated with the 23,000‐year precession cycle.


Governments worldwide face the challenge of financing a growing student population with limited resources, especially in the current context of difficult economic recovery. Student loan schemes, because they appear as cost-efficient and are defendable on the lines of social equity (students invest in their future), are increasingly politically attractive. It was therefore only a matter of time before the European Union considered the feasibility of implementing a similar scheme. Such a lending scheme faces EU-specific limitations. The Union has more limited resources than a fully-grown government. It is also bound by Treaty rules to complementary competencies and has to accommodate various levels of member states' willingness to integrate further. This paper offers a general discussion on the design of an EU-wide lending scheme for students. It argues in favour of a European Credit Union for Students, an EU-wide agency liaising with the European Investment Bank to raise the necessary funds and subcontracting other institutions for the administration of the loans. This agency would start by financing loans for the relatively narrow pool of mobile students under the Erasmus scheme. Doing so, it would lay down the foundation for a further integration of financing capacities as/if the Union becomes ever closer.


This paper details a non-destructive type of tomographic technique to obtain the intensity profile of a carbon steel pipe. This method requires a radioactive source, where a detector-source pair is mounted on a circular gantry located around the periphery of a steel pipe. A radioactive source with an appropriate activity was chosen based on the thickness of the pipe under test. In order to detect gamma rays, photon scintillation detectors are required. A Thallium-activated Sodium Iodide (NaI(Tl)) detector crystal was used. Stability tests were conducted on the detectors before they were ready to be used. A portable hardware to house the detector and source was then designed and built. For testing purposes, objects (polypropylene log, wax log, hollow polypropylene log, concrete log). The system was able to achieve an average accuracy of 96.283% when a comparison was done between actual dimension of the objects under test and the dimension based on the intensity profiles.


The intrinsic gas-phase reactivity of cyclic N-alkyl- and N-acyliminium ions toward addition of allyltrimethylsilane (ATMS) has been compared using MS(2) and MS(3) pentaquadrupole mass spectrometric experiments. An order of electrophilic reactivity has been derived and found to agree with orders of overall reactivity in solution. The prototype five-membered ring N-alkyliminium ion 1a and its N-CH(3) analogue 1b, as well as their six-membered ring analogues 1c and 1d, lack N-acyl activation and they are, accordingly, inert toward ATMS addition. The five- and six-membered ring N-acyliminium ions with N-COCH(3) exocycclic groups, 3a and 3b, respectively, are also not very reactive. The N-acyliminium ions 2a and 2c, with s-trans locked endocyclic N-carbonyl groups, are the most reactive followed closely by 3c and 3d with exocyclic (and unlocked) N-CO(2)CH(3) groups. The five-membered ring N-acyliminium ions are more reactive than their six-membered ring analogues, that is: 2a > 2c and 3c > 3d. In contrast with the high reactivity of 2a, its N-CH(3) analogue 2b is inert toward ATMS addition. For the first time, the transient intermediates of a Mannich-type condensation reaction were isolated-the beta-silyl cations formed by ATMS addition to N-acyliminium ions-and their intrinsic gas-phase behavior toward dissociation and reaction with a nucleophile investigated. When collisionally activated, the beta-silyl cations dissociate preferentially by Grob fragmentation, that is, by retro-addition. With pyridine, they react competitively and to variable extents by proton transfer and by trimethylsilylium ion abstraction-the final and key step postulated for alpha-amidoalkylation. Becke3LYP/6-311G(d,p) reaction energetics, charge densities on the electrophilic C-2 site, and AM1 LUMO energies have been used to rationalize the order of intrinsic gas-phase electrophilic reactivity of cyclic iminium and N-acyliminium ions.


A probabilistic clustering technique is used to describe tropical cyclone tracks in the eastern North Pacific, on the basis of their shape and location. The best track data set is decomposed in terms of three clusters; these clusters are analyzed in terms of genesis location, trajectory, landfall, intensity, seasonality, and their relationships with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Madden‐Julian Oscillation (MJO). Longitudinal track location plays a strong discriminating role in the regression mixture model's solution, with the average track orientation becoming more zonal toward the west. This progression encapsulates well the relationship between tropical cyclones over the eastern tropical Pacific and the MJO or ENSO. Two of the clusters describe tropical cyclones (TCs) with tracks that lie near the coast of Mexico and Central America. The most frequent cluster contains tracks that trend west‐northwestward, while the second most frequent one has genesis locations that lie slightly to the southeast of those in the most frequent cluster and tracks that run typically parallel to the Central American coast. This second cluster is shown to be significantly associated with the westerly phase of the MJO. The third, least frequent cluster contains TCs with westward trajectories over the central and eastern equatorial Pacific; some of these TCs have an impact on Hawaii and other islands, as far as the central and western North Pacific regions. The least frequent cluster is strongly related to ENSO, while the others are not; it occurs significantly more frequently during El Niño conditions. Examination of the large‐scale patterns of atmospheric circulation and sea surface temperature associated with each of our three clusters are consistent with previous studies. Anomalous low‐level westerly zonal winds from the monsoon trough and MJO meet anomalous easterlies near the region of genesis in each cluster.


Bovine pancreas contains two polypeptide trypsin inhibitors that are not homologous and differ in their inhibitory activity towards chymotrypsin, kallikrein, elastase, and other serine proteinases. The Kunitz inhibitor and the Kazal inhibitor are present in approximately equimolar concentrations in bovine pancreatic tissue, yet only the Kazal inhibitor is detectable in the pancreatic juice. The Kazal inhibitor has been named the pancreatic secretory trypsin inhibitor, PSTI because its concentration in the pancreatic juice parallels that of the exocrine secretory proteins. The Kunitz inhibitor is considered the intracellular inhibitor, however, no direct information is available concerning the intracellular localization of these inhibitors in the pancreas. The preparation of /sup 125/I-labeled derivatives of Kazal and Kunitz inhibitors by the lactoperoxidase method and a radioimmunoassay for each inhibitor are described.


In this paper a method of integrating a model of suprasegmental duration with a HMM-based recogniser at the post-processing level is presented. The N-Best utterance output is rescored using a suitable linear combination of acoustic log-likelihood (provided by a set of tied-state triphone HMMs) and duration log-likelihood (provided by a set of durational models). The durational model used in the post-processing imposes syllable-level elastic constraints on the durational behaviour of speech segments. Results are presented for word accuracy on the Resource Management database after rescoring, using two different syllable-like constraint units, a fixed-size N-phone window and simple (no constraint) phone duration probability scoring.


Background: This study purposed to examine how the incidence of the central line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI) in a operating room (OR) is affected by bundle application on central line insertion (CLI) practice. Methods: The study design was a pretest-posttest experimental trial. The subjects were 83 patients before the bundle application on CLI and 70 patients after. Results: The compliance(%) of bundle on CLI of among those who observed all of the five items increased from 7.2% before the intervention to 72.9% after. By items, compliance with the maximal barrier precaution was 100% for the use of a mask and cap before and after the intervention, but increased from 73.5% before the intervention to 88.6% after for the hand hygiene, from 73.5% to 88.6% for the use of a sterile gown, and from 9.6% to 75.7% for the use of a sterile large drape covering the whole body. CLABSI did not happen on CLI either before or after the application of the bundle intervention. Conclusion: Bundle application increased compliance with the use of a sterile gown and the use of a sterile large drape. However, its effect in the prevention of CLABSI was not clear probably due to the short period of intervention in a single hospital.


Over the last decade, the concept of using sport for regeneration purposes has gained increasing credibility in a number of cities throughout the UK. Despite this, little is known about the economic importance of sport at the local level. Although research has been carried out on the economic activity generated through sport since the mid 1980s (Henley Centre for Forecasting, 1986), the majority of studies have been undertaken at the national and regional level. This thesis investigates the economic importance of sport at the local level, using Sheffield as a case study. It represents the first study of sport-related economic activity to be carried out at the city level, in the UK. Following a critical evaluation of the feasible methodologies for measuring the economic importance of sport at the local level, the National Income Accounting framework was found to be most appropriate for measuring sport-related economic activity in Sheffield. To satisfy the data requirements of this framework, extensive primary data collection was undertaken in the voluntary, consumer and commercial sport sectors using questionnaires and structured interviews. This was used, together with data collected from secondary sources and previous economic impact studies in the UK, to estimate the value-added and employment created from sport-related economic activity in Sheffield. The findings of the research revealed that the economic importance of sport in Sheffield in 1996/97 was approximately twice the level predicted from current national estimates. The value-added by sport-related economic activity was found to be £165.61 million, which was approximately 4.11% of GDP in Sheffield in 1996/97, compared with just 1.61% of GDP at the national level (LIRC, 1997). Whilst a number of explanations for these findings are explored within the thesis, one of the most significant findings of the research is that previous estimates, established in other studies on the economic importance of sport in the UK, have been inaccurate and have essentially underestimated the size of the sport-related economic activity. The research also evaluated the potential role for sport in economic regeneration and provided evidence to suggest that sport can perform as a basic sector activity, a function widely assumed to be fulfilled only by producer services, manufacturing and agricultural activities (Williams, 1997). The study demonstrates that sport is an industrial sector within its own right and that it has considerable potential for generating benefits, including local economic development, job creation and urban renewal. Nevertheless, the thesis suggests that the future development of the sports industry for regeneration purposes should take the form of an integrated approach with other cultural industries and tourism.


Geometric gradient flows for elastic energies of Willmore type play an important role in mathematics and in many applications. The evolution of elastic curves has been studied in detail both for closed as well as for open curves. Although elastic flows for networks also have many interesting features, they have not been studied so far from the point of view of mathematical analysis. So far it was not even clear what are appropriate boundary conditions at junctions. In this paper we give a well-posedness result for Willmore flow of networks in different geometric settings and hence lay a foundation for further mathematical analysis. A main point in the proof is to check whether different proposed boundary conditions lead to a well posed problem. In this context one has to check the Lopatinskii–Shapiro condition in order to apply the Solonnikov theory for linear parabolic systems in Hölder spaces which is needed in a fixed point argument. We also show that the solution we get is unique in a purely geometric sense. Mathematics Subject Classification (2010): 35K52, 53C44 (primary); 35K61, 35K41 (secondary).


TransLighting Group, Inc. consists of two companies all centered around the transportation industry. The original company, TransLighting, was started in 1962 by Henry Phillips. Henry was an engineer with Ford Motor Company specializing in braking wiring systems. Over an eight-year period, he designed and patented several wiring and harness systems that are used in cars as of the 2006 model year. Back in the 1950s Henry had the opportunity to learn about and use LED technology. He even came up with a process using this technology to increase brake light visibility (i.e., the third or middle brake light on most cars). In June 1961 over dinner with another engineering buddy, Bill Acken, Bill figured that they could use this same technology to display roadside messages for motorists. Following license approval from Ford, Bill and Henry started TransLighting in White Lake, Michigan.


Published in 1911, Margaret Deland's The Iron Woman depicts the transformation in the American cultural scene of the second half of the nineteenth century as affected by the powers of industrialization, modernity, and intellectuality. While reflecting on an extensive change in the social landscape, cultural ideology, gender roles, and family relations, the novel presents a unique exploration of the motherhood experience. I argue in this study that Deland reconceptualizes the female maternal experience by defying an already established ambivalent discourse about mothers in the American culture. This ambivalence, as exposed and challenged in The Iron Woman, has confined motherhood within different power relations which seek to codify the lives of mothers religiously, culturally, socially, and psychologically. Although she lived in a pre-feminist era, Deland was able to anticipate a modern feminist argument of motherhood in her characterization of real mothers who struggle in their society and resist conforming to the traditional idealization and essentialist prototypes that accompany mother figures in the American cultural mind. The major concern of this study is to discuss how Deland challenges a number of cultural codes of motherhood; such as, the religiously idealized Virgin Mary, the socially constructed "True Woman," and the newly introduced modernist "New Woman." Stepping beyond a dual, ambivalent discourse that glorifies mothers on one hand, and blames them on the other, Margaret Deland forges a new maternal path in her mother characters who resist inconsistency in culturally embedded notions of motherhood which codify and perpetuate a restrictive mother image while neglecting actual experiences of mothering.


Ex situ collections in genebanks conserve many old cultivars that had disappeared from mainstream agriculture before modern genebanks were established. The collections incorporated cultivars from many sources, such as botanical gardens and working collections, sometimes with little further information on their origin. Many old cultivars with identical or synonymous names are maintained in multiple collections and often more than once within collections. This research investigates the authenticity of old cultivars in genebanks using a large lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) collection as a case study. Accessions presumed to be identical, based on the cultivar names accompanying the accessions, were compared for their DNA marker profiles, based on amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs). Using the genetic similarity of these accessions, the probability of authenticity of the old cultivars maintained in the collection was estimated. Separate analyses were done for different classes of cultivars, on the basis of the year of release or the donor history of the cultivar. The two largest cultivar groups within the collection, Sans Rivale a Graine Blanche and Maikonig, were analyzed in detail. Nonauthenticity of the investigated cultivars appeared to be high. This was especially true for the oldest cultivars, but even for the cultivars released from the 1960s to 1990 it was estimated that approximately 10% was not authentic. Recommendations to improve authenticity of cultivars in ex situ collections were presented


A recent debate about the Bush administration's use of presidential signing statements has raised questions about their function, legality, and value. We argue that presidential signing statements are legal and that they provide a useful way for the president to disclose his views about the meaning and constitutionality of legislation. Although President Bush has challenged more statutory provisions in signing statements than prior administrations have, his signing statements are similar in many respects to the signing statements issued by prior presidents, such as President Clinton. In addition, basic tenets of positive political theory suggest that signing statements do not undermine the separation of powers or the legislative process and that, under certain circumstances, they can provide relevant evidence of statutory meaning.


Modern functional languages offer several attractive features to support development of reliable and secure software. However, in our efforts to use Haskell for systems programming tasks-including device driver and operating system construction-we have also encountered some significant gaps in functionality. As a result, we have been forced, either to code some non-trivial components in more traditional but unsafe languages like C or assembler, or else to adopt aspects of the foreign function interface that compromise on strong typing and type safety.In this paper, we describe how we have filled one of these gaps by extending a Haskell-like language with facilities for working directly with low-level, memory-based data structures. Using this extension, we are able to program a wide range of examples, including hardware interfaces, kernel data structures, and operating system APIs. Our design allows us to address concerns about representation, alignment, and placement (in virtual or physical address spaces) that are critical in some systems applications, but clearly beyond the scope of most existing functional languages.Our approach leverages type system features that are wellknown and widely supported in existing Haskell implementations, including kinds, multiple parameter type classes, functional dependencies, and improvement. One interesting feature is the use of a syntactic abbreviation that makes it easy to define and work with functions at the type level.


Purpose To examine whether a noncomputerized multitasking compensatory saccadic training program (MCSTP) for patients with hemianopia, based on a reading regimen and eight exercises that recreate everyday visuomotor activities using three-dimensional (3D) real-world objects, improves the visual ability/function, quality of life (QL), and functional independence (FI). Methods The 3D-MCSTP included four in-office visits and two customized home-based daily training sessions over 12 weeks. A quasiexperimental, pretest/posttest study design was carried out with an intervention group (IG) (n = 20) and a no-training group (NTG) (n = 20) matched for age, hemianopia type, and brain injury duration. Results The groups were comparable for the main baseline variables and all participants (n = 40) completed the study. The IG mainly showed significant improvements in visual-processing speed (57.34% ± 19.28%; P < 0.0001) and visual attention/retention ability (26.67% ± 19.21%; P < 0.0001), which also were significantly greater (P < 0.05) than in the NTG. Moreover, the IG showed large effect sizes (Cohen's d) in 75% of the total QL and FI dimensions analyzed; in contrast to the NTG that showed negligible mean effect sizes in 96% of these dimensions. Conclusions The customized 3D-MCSTP was associated with a satisfactory response in the IG for improving complex visual processing, QL, and FI. Translational Relevance Neurovisual rehabilitation of patients with hemianopia seems more efficient when programs combine in-office visits and customized home-based training sessions based on real objects and simulating real-life conditions, than no treatment or previously reported computer-screen approaches, probably because of better stimulation of patients´ motivation and visual-processing speed brain mechanisms.


Many people of Estonian ethnicity have found their way out of poverty by chance. Chance will favour the ambitious and hard-working and give them an opportunity to realise their dreams. Several examples can be found among Estonian scientists and cultural figures as well. One of those was Philipp Jakob Karell. Philipp Jakob Karell, who came from of a family of peasant servants of an estate, graduated from the Medical Faculty of the University of Tartu in 1832 with the doctoral dissertation De rheumatismo uteri , and after graduation from the university, a piece of good luck gave the hard-working young man a chance to go to work in Saint Petersburg where, in 1849, he became the physician in ordinary to the Emperor's family. He was the escort of Emperor Nicholas I on his travels both in Russia and abroad. Empress Alexandra Feodorovna was also Karell's patient, and Alexander II also named him his physician in ordinary. On his first travel abroad, he learned the use of starch casts for the treatment of bone fractures from L. Seutin, chief surgeon of Brussels Saint Peter's Hospital, and in 1837 started to use them himself in the hospital of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment. When the Dutch physician Baron C. Heurteloup visited Russia, Philipp Karell was his companion and operating assistant in both Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Ph. Karell summarized what he had learned during the operations in the article "Vollstandige Beschreibung von Baron Heurteloups Lithotripsie und Lithokenose durch Percussion, nach dessen eigenen mundlichen Mittheilungen und Papieren", noting among other things that non-physicians should also recognize the initial symptoms of stone diseases (nephrolithiasis, cholelithiasis). Karell's method of milk therapy where skimmed milk had to be consumed after fixed time intervals, starting from 0.5–1.0 coffee cups 3–4 times a day and reaching two bottles a day on the second week, brought him international recognition. With the method of milk therapy, he achieved good results primarily in the treatment of diseases, connected with disturbances of water balance (cardiac, renal, gastrointestinal and liver diseases, and overweight). Ph. Karell was also active in the foundation of the Russian Red Cross Society, participated in drafting of its statutes and belonged to its committee. He was also among the founders of the Russian Society of Surgery. On Karell's initiative, sanitary companies were created in the Russian Army. Although he worked in the Emperor's court, Ph. Karell always remained an Estonian and repeatedly helped to acquire money from the Emperor for Estonian undertakings. He helped to publish the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg ( Son of Kalev ) and always valued his friendship with F.R. Kreutzwald and N. Pirogov, which had started during his university days.


An information-theoretic framework is presented for bounding the number of samples needed for supervised learning in a parametric Bayesian setting. This framework is inspired by an analogy with rate-distortion theory, which characterizes tradeoffs in the lossy compression of random sources. In a parametric Bayesian environment, the maximum a posteriori classifier can be viewed as a random function of the model parameters. Labeled training data can be viewed as a finite-rate encoding of that source, and the excess loss due to using the learned classifier instead of the MAP classifier can be viewed as distortion. A strict bound on the loss-measured in terms of the expected total variation-is derived, providing a minimum number of training samples needed to drive the expected total variation to within a specified tolerance. The tightness of this bound is demonstrated on the classification of Gaus-sians, for which one can derive closed-form expressions for the bound.


Hospital information systems (HIS) are a core component of the healthcare system. These systems have been in use for decades worldwide and for many years now in the Middle East. Many hospitals in Saudi Arabia started to adopt HIS, but still faced with many challenges. On top of these come the organizational, financial and regulatory challenges. The main objective of this study is to identify, analyze and evaluate these three categories of challenges perceived by healthcare professionals in order to provide decision makers with suggestions and recommendations on proper actions. The study used survey methods to collect data from healthcare professionals at two main Saudi hospitals known for their experience implementing HIS, and then analyzed the results to describe and evaluate challenges. The study validated 10 organizational, 6 financial and 6 regulatory challenges and explored participants' experiences regarding each. The study sorted challenges importance from the most to the least; financial challenges came first, then organizational challenges while regulatory challenges came last. Government hospital users had more concerns than private, regarding all of the three categories of challenges. Some demographic variables, such as age, gender, experience and profession, had significant influence on the perception of healthcare professionals towards different challenges. The study recommends providing or outsourcing the required experience of hospital management to choose, to implement and to evaluate HIS performance. Redesigning workflows to match HIS is a viable option for successful implementation. Clear time frame for implementation is very essential. Allocating proper and enough investments, especially at the initial phase of implementation, is important. Feasibility studies on benefits versus costs of implementing and using HIS are crucial for decision makers. Much work still to be done on developing regulations, policies and procedures on both hospital and national levels to govern adoption, implementation and utilization of HIS.


Prescribed fire is widely used for ecological restoration and fuel reduction in fire-dependent ecosystems, most of which are also prone to drought. Despite the importance of drought in fire-adapted forests, little is known about the cumulative effects of repeated prescribed burning on tree growth and related response to drought. Using dendrochronological data in red pine (Pinus resinosa Ait.)-dominated forests in northern Minnesota, USA, we examined growth responses before and after understory prescribed fires between 1960 and 1970 to assess whether repeated burning influences growth responses of overstory trees and vulnerability of overstory tree growth to drought. We found no difference in tree-level growth vulnerability to drought, expressed as growth resistance, resilience, and recovery, between areas receiving prescribed fire treatments and untreated forests. Annual mortality rates during the period of active burning were also low (less than 2%) in all treatments. These findings indicate that prescribed fire can be effectively integrated into management plans and climate change adaptation strategies for red pine forest ecosystems without significant short- or long-term negative consequences for growth or mortality rates of overstory trees.


The use of animal models has been crucial for studying the function of genetic elements in the human genome. Embryonic stem (ES) cell-based homologous recombination (HR) has proven a very efficient technique for gene manipulation. However, this technique is not (yet) available for all model organisms due to the inability of maintaining a pluripotent state of ES cells in culture. The laboratory rat Rattus norvegicus is one of the most used model organisms in biomedical research, especially for studying physiology, pharmacology, toxicology and neurobiology. Due to the long lack of pluripotent rat ES cells, alternative methods to manipulate its genome have been developed. The first genetic rat knockout models were developed using chemically-induced mutagenesis, which is based on treating male rats with the mutagen N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea (ENU) that very efficiently introduces point mutations in the spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs). Subsequently, the ENU-treated rats are crossed with untreated rats to generate an F1 population in which each animal contains unique heterozygous mutation throughout its genome. Finally, mutations that affect gene function are identified and crossed to homozygocity in order to study its effect. The technique can be used for both forward (phenotype-driven) and reverse (gene-driven) genetics approaches. In this thesis the optimization and application of the reverse genetics procedure, termed target-selected mutagenesis, in the rat has been described. In this approach the DNA of F1 animals is screened for mutations in pre-selected genes using molecular biological techniques. The efficiency of the approach depends on 1) the mutation frequency and 2) mutation discovery. By taking advantage of DNA mismatch repair (MMR)-deficiency, a system involved in repairing ENU-induced DNA damage, in the MSH6 knockout rat, we demonstrate that the mutation frequency can be significantly increased. After obtaining a F1 library, different techniques have been applied to identify interesting mutations. Here, we combine massive parallel sequence technology with microarray-based enrichment of genomic regions of interest to further improve the mutation discovery efficiency. The increased efficiency of the approach was demonstrated by screening a large set of genes in the rat encoding one-to-one orthologs of human G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). This large family of seven transmembrane receptors play essential roles in physiology and disease; however, genetically altered GPCR animal models are scarce, especially in non-murine species. Using this approach multiple mutant rat lines were isolated, including knockout as well as missense animals. Extensive bioinformatic analyses were applied in order to prioritize the missense mutants. We show loss of function for a knockout allele of the melanocortin 4 receptor (Mc4r) and a missense allele of the lysophosphatidic acid receptor 1 (Lpar1) confirming our analyses. ENU mutagenesis is a non-redundant gene manipulation technique with several unique advantages. It is highly efficient and random in introducing germ line point mutations, which resemble the most common form of human genetic variation. Furthermore, it allows for allelic series production, which can be important for studying specific gene function. In conclusion, using chemically-induced mutagenesis we have significantly contributed to the generation and characterization of genetically manipulated rats that model human disease.