Early in development, cells are multipotent. During development through the action of temporally and spatially controlled signals, cells adopt a specific fate. Umesono et al. studied the role of Notch in regulating neuronal and glial differentiation in Drosophila embryos. In the adult peripheral nervous system, Notch inhibits the expression of glial cells missing (gcm), which inhibits glial cell formation. Umesono et al. showed that in the sensory organ precursors of the dorsal bipolar dendriditic (dbd) and the dorsal dendritic arbor (dda) lineage, Notch was required for gcm expression and glial cell development. Whenever Notch signaling was impaired, fewer glial cells were produced in the dbd and dda, and when Notch signaling was increased, glial cells were produced at the expense of neurons. The expression of the POU-domain-containing transcriptional regulator Nubbin was also temporally regulated in dbd cells. Overexpression of Nubbin and constitutively active Notch resulted in increased glial cells in the dda. These findings suggest that Nubbin may provide contextual information for the effect of Notch--to promote or inhibit gliogenesis. Y. Umesono, Y. Hiromi, Y. Hotta, Context-dependent utilization of Notch activity in Drosophila glial determination. Development 129, 2391-2399 (2002). [Online Journal]


This bestselling classic has been completely updated, modernized and redesigned to be the one-stop kitchen reference for today's cook. New in this edition: -- All new design, including two-color text-- Recipes with numbered steps for easy use-- Preparation and cooking times with each recipe-- Lighter versions of favorite recipes-- Timesaving tips to make recipes even quicker-- 200 all-new color photographs-- All-new line art to make learning techniques easy-- Complete nutrition information with each recipe, including percentage of calories from fat-- Back cover of the book shows sample pages of the interior, so you can see the design even though it is shrink-wrappedPeople really rely on Betty Crocker, and all the information they have come to expect is here, revised to be up-to-the-minute.-- Over 900 recipes, from how to make coffee to rolling a fajita-- Recipes that call for readily available ingredients-- Definitions of cooking terms-- Microwave basics and tips-- The best -- and easiest -- way to cook anything, from oysters to apple pie to spaghetti squash-- Photographs to help identify foods, such as types of mushrooms and pasta-- Step-by-step photographs illustrating cooking techniques-- Complete roasting, broiling and microwaving charts for meat and poultry-- Trouble-shooting guides for successful baking-- Food safety facts-- High altitude cooking informationTrust Betty Crocker to make cooking easy, fun, and up-to-the-minute!


BACKGROUND
The few studies assessing long-term effects of educational interventions on antibiotic prescription have produced conflicting results.

OBJECTIVES
Our aim was to assess the effects after 4.5 years of an interactive educational seminar designed for GPs and focused on antibiotic therapy in respiratory tract infections (RTIs). The seminar was expected to decrease antibiotic prescriptions for any diagnosis.

METHODS
We conducted a randomized controlled parallel-group trial in a Paris suburb (France), with GPs as the randomization unit and prescriptions as the analysis unit. The intervention occurred in September 2004 and the final assessment in March 2009. Among 203 randomized GPs, 168 completed the study, 70 in the intervention group and 98 in the control group. Intervention GPs were randomized to attending only a 2-day interactive educational seminar on evidence-based guidelines about managing RTIs or also 1 day of problem-solving training. The primary outcome was the percentage of change in the proportion of prescriptions containing an antibiotic for any diagnosis in 2009 versus 2004. An intention-to-treat sensitivity analysis was performed using multiple imputation.

RESULTS
After 4.5 years, absolute changes in the primary outcome measure were -1.1% (95% confidence interval: -2.2 to 0.0) in the intervention group and +1.4% (0.3-2.6) in the control group, yielding an adjusted between-group difference of -2.2% (-2.7 to -1.7; P < 0.001). Both intervention modalities had significant effects, and multiple imputation produced similar results.

CONCLUSIONS
A single, standardized and interactive educational seminar targeting GPs significantly decreased antibiotic use for RTIs after 4.5 years.


Multi-tapped lines are common in integrated power systems and microgrids which supply variable loads between the main source and the main load Adopting a cost effective and efficient method for fault location is important for fast power recovery and improving system reliability. A method requiring measurements only at the ends of the main distribution line is proposed in this paper to solve the issue of locating faults on the tapped lines as well as on the main line without any measurement required from the taps. A combination of single-ended and double-ended algorithms based on higher frequency impedance estimation are utilized to locate the faults within the tapped line. The study considers different fault types in different locations as well as various fault inception angles. The presented results shows the efficiency and the accuracy of the suggested technique with maximum error less than 3% of the total line length.


Modern Supreme Court opinions are too long. They are too fractured. And they often lack clarity. Separate opinions, particularly concurring opinions, are largely to blame. Today's justices are more inclined to publish separate opinions than their predecessors. The justices do not want to read lengthy briefs but appear willing to publish lengthy opinions. Yet the justices owe us clarity. They should want the law to be understandable—and understood. In hopes of achieving greater legal clarity, this article calls for an end to concurring opinions.

The modern Court writes more separate opinions than past courts. It is becoming far too common that in a given term there will be more separate opinions than majority opinions. This is causing problems for judges, lawyers, law students, and ordinary Americans. Surely most cases do not necessitate separate writing. Whether these separate opinions are driven by ego, politics, law clerks, celebrity, a desire to be a part of the legal "conversation," or the refusal to accept that a particular justice's approach failed to garner sufficient votes to serve as the majority opinion, they should stop. A return to seriatim opinions poses institutional risks. Rarely do concurring opinions become future law.

Little is gained through concurring opinions. It is time to discard the myth that an add-on opinion will one day become binding precedent. It rarely happens. And the regular costs are not worth the rare advantages.

This article seeks Supreme Court reform. The justices should voluntarily agree to stop writing concurring opinions. My thesis is simple: it is time to say goodbye to concurring opinions.


We present a technique for efficiently synthesizing animations for characters traversing complex dynamic environments. Our method uses parameterized locomotion controllers that correspond to specific motion skills, such as jumping or obstacle avoidance. The controllers are created from motion capture data with reinforcement learning. A space-time planner determines the sequence in which controllers must be executed to reach a goal location, and admits a variety of cost functions to produce paths that exhibit different behaviors. By planning in space and time, the planner can discover paths through dynamically changing environments, even if no path exists in any static snapshot. By using parameterized controllers able to handle navigational tasks, the planner can operate efficiently at a high level, leading to interactive replanning rates.


This is the introduction to PLCs for which baffled students, technicians and managers have been waiting. In this straightforward, easy-to-read guide, Bill Bolton has kept the jargon to a minimum, considered all the programming methods in the standard IEC 1131-3 - in particular ladder programming, and presented the subject in a way that is not device specific to ensure maximum applicability to courses in electronics and control systems.Now in its fourth edition, this best-selling text has been expanded with increased coverage of industrial systems and PLCs and more consideration has been given to IEC 1131-3 and all the programming methods in the standard. The new edition brings the book fully up to date with the current developments in PLCs, describing new and important applications such as PLC use in communications (e.g. Ethernet – an extremely popular system), and safety – in particular proprietary emergency stop relays (now appearing in practically every PLC based system).The coverage of commonly used PLCs has been increased, including the ever popular Allen Bradley PLCs, making this book an essential source of information both for professionals wishing to update their knowledge, as well as students who require a straight forward introduction to this area of control engineering.Having read this book, readers will be able to:

 Identify the main design characteristics and internal architecture of PLCs
 Describe and identify the characteristics of commonly used input and output devices
 Explain the processing of inputs and outputs of PLCs
 Describe communication links involved with control systems
 Develop ladder programs for the logic functions AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOT and XOR
 Develop functional block, instruction list, structured text and sequential function chart programs
 Develop programs using internal relays, timers, counters, shift registers, sequencers and data handling
 Identify safety issues with PLC systems
 Identify methods used for fault diagnosis, testing and debugging programs

Fully matched to the requirements of BTEC Higher Nationals, students are able to check their learning and understanding as they work through the text using the Problems section at the end of each chapter. Complete answers are provided in the back of the book.


The purpose of this study is to use the mechanisms of deformation band formation to help with interpreting the timing of phases of deformation in an area with a complex geological history. Deformation bands and zones of deformation bands are described from the quartzites of the Lower Devonian Muth Formation in the Pin Valley, NW Himalayas. Thin-section analyses show that the deformation bands in the Muth Formation formed early in the diagenetic history before porosity was lost. Deformation mechanisms involved cataclasis, translation, rotation of quartz grains and effective porosity reduction. The orientations of the deformation bands cannot be reasonably grouped with the orientations of faults related to Himalayan deformation in the Pin Valley. Additionally, the deformation bands are deformed by Eo-Himalayan (Eocene) folds, which in turn are cut by later faults. The later faults that cross-cut the Eo-Himalayan folds developed in the already-cemented Muth Formation at much higher temperature and pressure conditions by crystal plastic deformation mechanisms, indicated by quartz crystals with undulatory extinction, abundant kink bands, dislocation glide, elongated subgrains, slightly curved deformation lamellae and pronounced shape-preferred orientation. These two completely contrasting deformation mechanisms on the microstructural scale characterize two distinct fault sets that formed at different depths in the crust. Based on these differences, a pre-Himalayan origin of the deformation bands is concluded, thus representing a set of rare pre-Himalayan deformation structures. After unfolding to remove Eo-Himalayan crustal shortening, the orientation of the deformation bands and restored relative offsets of sedimentary bedding are most compatible with ∼ E–W-oriented shortening associated with N–S extension. The age of the deformation bands in the Muth Formation is bracketed by an early Devonian sedimentation age of the Muth Formation and a middle Cretaceous age of considerable cementation as deduced from compiled burial histories. Accepting a pre-middle Cretaceous age of the deformation bands, maximum conditions of about 80°C and 60 MPa lithostatic pressure during their formation are estimated from the amount of overburden during the middle Cretaceous. We suggest the deformation bands are a result of either the Neo-Tethys rifting event beginning in the early Carboniferous or the extension related to late Carnian/early Norian rapid subsidence, although a hitherto unknown deformation event cannot be excluded.


CdTe nanorods have been prepared with the different reaction time period from 1hour to 3 hours. CdTe nanorods visible photoconductive detector films have been prepared on porous silicon layer with etching time 10 min. The CdTe nanorods crystallization has been studied, the crystalline structure appears hexagonal when the samples dried under vacuum at 400C° for 1h. The Hall measurements show that all samples were p – type semiconductor. The response time of the fabricated CdTe detector with different reaction time was measured by illuminating the samples visible light (Halogen lamp) and its values were decreased from 0.411ms for 1hour to 0.364 ms for 3 hours, the photoresponsivity of the detector for reaction time 3hours was to be 3.25×10 -6 A/W and specific detectivity is found to be 1.05×10 6 W -1 Hz 1/2 cm.


This paper presents a precise semantics for incomplete predicates such as "ready". Incomplete predicates have distinctive logical properties that a semantic theory needs to accommodate. For instance, "Tipper is ready" logically implies "Tipper is ready for something", but "Tipper is ready for something" does not imply "Tipper is ready". It is shown that several approaches to the semantics of incomplete predicates fail to accommodate these logical properties. The account offered here defines contexts as structures containing an element called a proposition set, which contains atomic propositions and negations of atomic propositions. The condition under which "Tipper is ready" is true in a context is defined in terms of the contents of the proposition set for the context. On this account, the content of the context pertinent to a conversation must be determined not by what speakers have in mind but by relations of objective relevance.


Crimes of the Holocaust: The Law Confronts Hard Cases. By Stephan Landsman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Pp. 320. $49.95 cloth. Crimes of the Holocaust recounts the histories of four of the best-known trials against perpetrators of the Holocaust. The first four chapters are devoted, respectively, to the Nuremberg trial in Germany, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the deportation case and trial against John Demjanjuk in the United States and Israel respectively, and the trial against Imre Finta in Canada. A fifth and final chapter briefly reviews French and German court responses to the Holocaust, criminal prosecutions of previous Latin American regimes by their democratic successor governments, and current international tribunals (International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, International Criminal Court). The final pages provide suggestions for the coordination of truth commissions with criminal court proceedings and for improving future prosecutions. Landsman writes his book as "an American trial lawyer, legal academic, and Jew" (p. xi). He is equally concerned with effective prosecution and punishment and with fairness of criminal proceedings. Both concerns are, as his arguments suggest, closely intertwined, and one of the book's central concerns is expressed in an introductory quotation by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Great cases like hard cases make bad law." The horrors of genocide are one theme of the book. Evidence in the four trials attests to hundreds of prisoners being burnt to death in locked barracks, human skin lampshades, shrunken skulls, gassing trucks, removal of gold teeth from the corpses, forced castration of one inmate by another, drilling into another inmate's anus with an auger, slicing off of ears before entry into the gas chambers, suffering and death in the gas chambers, the smashing of baby skulls to save ammunition, mountains of corpses pushed by bulldozers, and the severely injured crying from within piles of corpses in the mass graves. Conducting trials in face of such monstrous organized and individual crimes is not just painful because of the unbearable accounts participants have to endure and witnesses have to report and relive. It is also challenging because such trials serve diverse and partly contradictory purposes. They are first and foremost criminal trials. Yet they also serve political purposes, and they simultaneously seek to provide a historical and public documentation of hate and cruelty. Landsman's account is full of examples attesting to these agendas (e.g., pp. 6ff, 13ff, 56ff, 60, 93f, 96, 111ff, 123, 169). Successes and weaknesses of the trials are evident in their outcomes and in their proceedings. The Nuremberg trial resulted in the conviction of almost all charged and in most cases in severe penalties, primarily death, and the Eichmann trial in a guilty verdict and in the perpetrator's execution. In contrast, the trials against Demjanjuk and Finta eventually resulted in the release of the accused (and in Demjanjuk's renaturalization in the United States). The latter cases were hampered by "delay, the sprawling and diffuse character of the prosecution case, the substantial risk of misidentification of perpetrators, the harassment of traumatized victim witnesses, [and] the vituperative accusations of defense counsel" (p. …


It's on the tip of my tongue, but I can't remember her name." Lots of people have difficulty remembering people's names, even though they can easily recall other information about the person. As memory and retrieval processes are central to cognitive psychology and neuropsychology the study of proper names makes a fascinating and practical focus of study. Using an information processing approach, Valentine, Brennen and Bredart consider evidence from speech production, face recognition and word recognition to develop a new functional model of the production and recognition of people's names. This book will be valuable to all those studying cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology and linguistics. It makes a suitalbe text for higher level undergraduates and postgraduates and those engaged in research.


The Cases of Iceland, Faroe Islands and Aland Islands. This report is a comparative study of the leadership responses to the structural challenges facing the municipalities of one small Nordic country, Iceland, and two small self-governing areas, the Faroe Islands and the Aland Islands, as they are perceived by a representative number of political and administrative leaders in each. The conclusions arrived at will be relevant to anyone preoccupied with the future of small and peripheral communities across Norden.


Probabilistic sentential decision diagrams (PSDDs) are a tractable representation of structured probability spaces, which are characterized by complex logical constraints on what constitutes a possible world. We develop general-purpose techniques for probabilistic reasoning and learning with PSDDs, allowing one to compute the probabilities of arbitrary logical formulas and to learn PSDDs from incomplete data. We illustrate the effectiveness of these techniques in the context of learning preference distributions, to which considerable work has been devoted in the past. We show, analytically and empirically, that our proposed framework is general enough to support diverse and complex data and query types. In particular, we show that it can learn maximum-likelihood models from partial rankings, pairwise preferences, and arbitrary preference constraints. Moreover, we show that it can efficiently answer many queries exactly, from expected and most likely rankings, to the probability of pairwise preferences, and diversified recommendations. This case study illustrates the effectiveness and flexibility of the developed PSDD framework as a domain-independent tool for learning and reasoning with structured probability spaces.


The advent of social media has provided data and insights about how people relate to information and culture. While information is composed by bits and its fundamental building bricks are relatively well understood, the same cannot be said for culture. The fundamental cultural unit has been defined as a ``meme''. Memes are defined in literature as specific fundamental cultural traits, that are floating in their environment together. Just like genes carried by bodies, memes are carried by cultural manifestations like songs, buildings or pictures. Memes are studied in their competition for being successfully passed from one generation of minds to another, in different ways. In this paper we choose an empirical approach to the study of memes. We downloaded data about memes from a well-known website hosting hundreds of different memes and thousands of their implementations. From this data, we empirically describe the behavior of these memes. We statistically describe meme occurrences in our dataset and we delineate their fundamental traits, along with those traits that make them more or less apt to be successful.


Oral care is essential in maintaining oral hygiene and oral health. When oral care is neglected individuals are at risk of oral and systemic complications affecting general health. Stroke patients are one group who are at risk of poor oral health due to their physical and cognitive dependency. Providing oral care is normally the responsibility of the nurses, and currently there is little evidence to support oral care provided. Through a series of studies this thesis aims to explore oral care in hospitalised stroke patients with the aim of developing an oral assessment to inform oral care.
An integrative literature review examining oral assessments developed for use in a dependent population, identified that an oral assessment for use in stroke patients did not exist. The majority of oral assessments had been developed using the empirical literature and/or expert opinion, with a focus to assess oral health and cleanliness. Those assessments that were selected for review were found to be of a poor quality both in development and testing of psychometric properties. Where agreement had been tested, both within and between raters, agreement was variable across all items. The information gathered from the review was used to aid the design of a qualitative study to explore stakeholder's views of oral care in stroke patients, and the development of a new oral assessment for use in stroke patients.
An interpretive approach was utilised to explore the views and experiences of experts in oral health and stroke; health professionals'; patients' and carers'. Two different methods were used to capture this data: one to one interviews for the experts in oral health and stroke, patients and carers; and focus groups for the health professionals. Eight experts were interviewed, five patients, five carers and the two focus groups with six/seven health professionals. The findings illustrated that oral care is complex, and assessment is only one component of this process. Five concepts relating to oral assessment were identified by all the groups: ability to attend to oral care; oral health and cleanliness of the oral cavity; comfort of the oral cavity; contributing factors; assessment format and layout.
The findings from the qualitative interviews, focus groups, and the literature review, were presented to an expert panel that contained a representative from the oral health experts, stroke experts, health professionals, patients and carers. This group reviewed the data and, using a systematic approach, developed the new oral assessment; the Comprehensive Oral Assessment Tool for Stroke (COATS). Following development, the COATS was tested for within and between rater agreement, and diagnostic accuracy, in 82 stroke patients on an acute stroke unit. Agreement was tested, in registered and unregistered nurses, and ranged from fair to very good. The registered nurse showed better agreement than the unregistered nurse. The COATS also demonstrated in this initial testing that it could correctly identify a high proportion of patients either with or without a problem.
This thesis has provided some novel findings that will contribute to the existing knowledge of oral care in a stroke and dependent population. It has provided an overview of the quality of oral assessments available to nurses looking after acutely ill patients as well as highlighting all the potential issues that need to be considered when implementing a new oral assessment into clinical practice.


It is common and advised practice in biomedical research to validate experimental or observational findings in a population different from the one where the findings were initially assessed. This practice increases the generalizability of the results and decreases the likelihood of reporting false-positive findings. Validation becomes critical when dealing with high-throughput experiments, where the large number of tests increases the chance to observe false-positive results. In this article, we review common approaches to determine statistical thresholds for validation and describe the factors influencing the proportion of significant findings from a 'training' sample that are replicated in a 'validation' sample. We refer to this proportion as rediscovery rate (RDR). In high-throughput studies, the RDR is a function of false-positive rate and power in both the training and validation samples. We illustrate the application of the RDR using simulated data and real data examples from metabolomics experiments. We further describe an online tool to calculate the RDR using t-statistics. We foresee two main applications. First, if the validation study has not yet been collected, the RDR can be used to decide the optimal combination between the proportion of findings taken to validation and the size of the validation study. Secondly, if a validation study has already been done, the RDR estimated using the training data can be compared with the observed RDR from the validation data; hence, the success of the validation study can be assessed.


and Implications A potential alternative organic protein source is okara. Okara is the residue left from ground soybeans after extraction of the water portion used to produce soy milk and tofu. Satisfying the high protein requirements of young pigs presents a production challenge to organic pork producers. The effect of dietary supplementation of okara was evaluated on the growth performance of young pigs. In four replicates, weaned pigs (21 ± 2 d of age) were allotted to one of three pens. Each pen received one dietary treatment. Treatments were control diet (composed of corn, soybean meal, oats, and essential vitamins and minerals), 2) okara 25% (25% of total diet), 3) okara 50% (50% of total diet). Pigs and feed were weighed at d 0 and at 7 d intervals until completion of each 18 d trial. Average daily gain (ADG), average daily feed intake (ADFI), and gain:feed ratio (G:F) were calculated. Data were analyzed using fixed effect models with repeated measures. Feeding dietary okara to young pigs had no effect on ADG, ADFI, or G:F ratio when compared to control treatment. Diets supplemented with 25% okara increased ADG 14% when compared to diets supplemented with 50% okara. Okara fed at 25% of the diet increased G:F ratio 17% when compared to okara fed at 50% of the diet. Under the conditions of our study dietary okara is a potential high protein organic feedstuff. Inclusion levels of dietary okara up to 25% of the diet could be used with no reduction in ADG, ADFI, or G:F ratio.


Since the so-called conflicts revolution, choice-of-law theory continues to reject the vested rights approach of the First Restatement of Conflicts without fully criticizing the failures of the governmental interest theory in the Second Restatement of Conflicts. At the same time, neither approach adequately examines the question of what constitutes a legitimate resolution to a conflict between states. This Article suggests that the choice between the rights language of the First Restatement and the governmental interest language of the Second Restatement is actually a debate between legal formalism and legal realism. Both choices lead to a legitimacy deficit for theorists and judges who attempt to resolve conflicts. This Article applies liberal and republican political theory to the debate between vested rights and governmental interest, suggesting an approach to resolving conflicts that is grounded in the legitimate exercise of judicial discretion.


Creating realistic images has been a major focus in the study of computer graphics for much of its history. This effort has led to mathematical models and algorithms that can compute predictive, or physically realistic, images from known camera positions and scene descriptions that include the geometry of objects, the reflectance of surfaces, and the lighting used to illuminate the scene. These images accurately describe the physical quantities that would be measured from a real scene. Because these algorithms can predict real images, they can also be used in inverse problems to work backward from photographs to attributes of the scene.
Work on three such inverse rendering problems is described. The first, inverse lighting, assumes knowledge of geometry, reflectance, and the recorded photograph and solves for the lighting in the scene. A technique using a linear least-squares system is proposed and demonstrated. Also demonstrated is an application of inverse lighting, called re-lighting, which modifies lighting in photographs.
The second two inverse rendering problems solve for unknown reflectance, given images with known geometry, lighting, and camera positions. Photographic texture measurement concentrates on capturing the spatial variation in an object's reflectance. The resulting system begins with scanned 3D models of real objects and uses photographs to construct accurate, high-resolution textures suitable for physically realistic rendering. The system is demonstrated on two complex natural objects with detailed surface textures.
Image-based BRDF measurement takes the opposite approach to reflectance measurement, capturing the directional characteristics of a surface's reflectance by measuring the bidirectional reflectance distribution function, or BRDF. Using photographs of an object with spatially uniform reflectance, the BRDFs of paints and papers are measured with completeness and accuracy that rival that of measurements obtained using specialized devices. The image-based approach and novel light source positioning technique require only general-purpose equipment, so the cost of the apparatus is low compared to conventional approaches. In addition, very densely sampled data can be measured very quickly, when the wavelength spectrum of the BRDF does not need to be measured in detail.


Author(s): Garcia, Jennifer Rosa | Advisor(s): Beckmann, Matthew N | Abstract: On a daily basis, black legislators, like all legislators, are faced with competing demands for their limited time and resources. They must decide which of their priorities are worth fighting for and how best to fight for them. It is through these daily decisions that members provide their constituents with representation. The primary purpose of this dissertation is to understand how black legislators make these choices. More broadly, this dissertation asks why black members of Congress engage in the legislative strategies they do. Are they distinct from the strategies used by non-black members? What influences which activities they engage in and when? And, what does this mean for the substantive representation of blacks in America?Based upon analyses of an original dataset that looks at floor speeches and committee work of all legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives in four issue areas during select congresses over a 50-year span of time, I show that race impacts how members of Congress strategically invest their limited resources in the legislative process. More particularly, I argue that in comparison to their white counterparts, and all else equal, black legislators will exploit strategic opportunities to advocate for the interests of African American communities. How they exploit these opportunities, however, varies in response to the particular conditions they face. I show that shifts in black legislative strategies have occurred on two levels. First, as black legislators have become more institutionally incorporated they have shifted their strategies away from rhetorical floor advocacy (protest) to one focused on committee advocacy (policymaking). On another level, black legislative behavior is much more nuanced, responding to the continually changing congressional circumstances. More particularly, black legislative strategies shift in response to the changing (1) positions of black legislators in Congress, (2) the partisan control of the House and the position of key Congressional players, and (3) the issue being pursued.The project holds major implications for evaluating the substantive benefits of descriptive representation by showing that there are inherent benefits to electing black legislators. However, the benefits they provide are not equally felt among all segments of the black community.


Extended postpartum anovulatory intervals (PPAI) are a major contributor to infertility in seasonal dairy systems constrained to 365-d calving intervals. This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of pasture-based dietary energy intakes during the transitional calving period on PPAI. Sixty-eight multiparous Holstein-Friesian cows were assigned to high [11.9 kg of dry matter (DM)/d] or low (4.8 kg of DM/d) pasture intakes for 29 +/- 7.7 d prepartum. After calving, cows within each prepartum diet were assigned to either a high (13.5 kg of DM/d) or low (8.6 kg of DM/d) pasture intake for 35 d in a 2 x 2 factorial arrangement. Progesterone concentrations were measured in milk samples collected twice weekly to determine PPAI, which was defined as the day on which progesterone level was elevated to > or = 3 ng/mL with subsequent concentrations being consistent with an ovulatory cycle. Blood samples were collected before initiation of treatments, and at d -21, -14, -7, 0 (day of calving), 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 14, 21, 28, and 35 in all cows. The PPAI was associated with body condition score, concentrations of plasma insulin and insulin-like growth factor-I, and growth hormone. Postpartum intake did not affect these metabolic hormones or PPAI, but yield of FCM during the first 35 d was reduced by 23% among cows on a restricted intake. No relationships were found between PPAI and milk production characteristics. These data demonstrate that when pasture is the sole dietary source during the calving transition period, PPAI may be influenced by prepartum intake levels, whereas postpartum intake influences milk yield, but not PPAI. The underlying mechanism(s) that associates the prepartum period to PPAI may involve the sensitivity of the growth hormone-insulin-like growth factor axis to dietary intake levels. Nonetheless, PPAI in grazing multiparous dairy cows appears largely unresponsive to intake levels during the calving transition period.


Projecting the response of forests to changing climate requires understanding how biotic and abiotic con trols on tree growth will change over time. As temperature and interannual precipitation variability increase, the overall forest response is likely to be influenced by species-specific responses to changing climate. Management actions that alter composition and density may help buffer forests against the effects of changing climate, but may require tradeoffs in ecosystem services. We sought to quantify how projected changes in climate and different management regimes would alter the composition and productivity of Puget Lowland forests in Washington State, USA. We modeled forest responses to four treatments (control, burn-only, thin-only, thin-and-burn) under five different climate scenarios: baseline climate (historical) and projections from two climate models (CCSM4 and CNRM-CM5), driven by mod erate (RCP 4.5) and high (RCP 8.5) emission scenarios. We also simulated the effects of intensive manage ment to restore Oregon white oak woodlands ( Quercus garryana ) for the western gray squirrel ( Sciurus griseus ) and quantified the effects of these treatments on the probability of oak occurrence and carbon sequestration. At the landscape scale we found little difference in carbon dynamics between baseline and moderate emission scenarios. However, by late-century under the high emission scenario, climate change reduced forest productivity and decreased species richness across a large proportion of the study area. Regardless of the climate scenario, we found that thinning and burning treatments increased the carbon sequestration rate because of decreased resource competition. However, increased productivity with management was not sufficient to prevent an overall decline in productivity under the high emis sion scenario. We also found that intensive oak restoration treatments were effective at increasing the probability of oak presence and that the limited extent of the treatments resulted in small declines in total ecosystem carbon across the landscape as compared to the thin-and-burn treatment. Our research suggests that carbon dynamics in this system under the moderate emission scenario may be fairly con sistent with the carbon dynamics under historical climate, but that the high emission scenario may alter the successional trajectory of these forests.


This qualitative study explored a multisensory (including olfactory) intervention for people with dementia. Six themed boxes (e.g. Childhood) containing items chosen from the Boots archive designed to encourage conversation were used in weekly group sessions. Session participants were people with dementia and care staff from a local care home, a trained facilitator and archivists from Boots UK. Semi-structured interviews explored participants' experiences of the sessions. Interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. The three major themes Engagement (subthemes: Inclusiveness; Emotional involvement; Factors that supported engagement), What's in the box (subthemes: Contents stimulate memories; Mystery, variety and age of items; Value of olfactory stimuli), and A conversation starter (subtheme: Opportunity for self-expression) reveal the success of the intervention and the value of olfactory stimuli. Multisensory boxes including olfactory stimulation can be an engaging intervention with scope to refine it for people with dementia and their carers in the wider community.


The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) accumulator ring is designed to accumulate, via H/sup -/ injection, protons of 2 MW beam power at 1 GeV kinetic energy at a repetition rate of 60 Hz. At such beam intensity, electron-cloud is expected to be one of the intensity-limiting mechanisms that complicate ring operations. This paper summarizes mitigation strategy adopted in the design, both in suppressing electron-cloud formation and in enhancing Landau damping, including tapered magnetic field and monitoring system for the collection of stripped electrons at injection, TiN coated beam chamber for suppression of the secondary yield, clearing electrodes dedicated for the injection region and parasitic on BPMs around the ring, solenoid windings in the collimation region, and planning of vacuum systems for beam scrubbing upon operation.


Introduction Optical blur is potentially important for visual perception, but how the retina processes blur remains unclear. We know from studies of emmetropization (where a postnatal eye normally adjusts its growth to achieve good focus) that the retina detects both the presence and sign of blur (hyperopic defocus: eye too short, myopic defocus: eye too long), and that it can do this independently of the rest of the central nervous system. What optical cues does it use? The retina could use longitudinal chromatic aberration (LCA), but the sparsity of short wavelength-sensitive ("blue") cones should make it impossible for the retina to use spatial resolution to determine the degree to which blue images are in focus. We propose that the retina uses the temporal flicker in blue as an animal moves itself and its eyes as a proxy for image sharpness. Methods Four groups (n=3 per group) of tree shrews (a diurnal cone dominated mammal closely related to primates) were exposed binocularly to either steady or flickering red (628nm) or blue (464nm) light for 14 hours a day from 11 to 25 days after eye opening. The pattern of flicker approximated the natural temporal pattern on the back of the retina as an animal moves both its eyes and itself. Results Compared with normal eyes, both steady (+3.8D) and flickering red light (+6.4D) powerfully arrested eye growth. Flickering blue light produced significant myopia (-4.5D), but steady blue light was much less myopiagenic (-0.9D). Conclusion These results are consistent with the neural retina using LCA to regulate eye growth during development, and with temporal flicker being used as a proxy for spatial image focus for blue light. Does the retina shares this information with the brain via retinal ganglion cells? Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


Atomic-scale computer simulations have emerged as a powerful tool to probe at a very high resolution the structural and dynamical properties of amorphous and crystalline biomaterials with a direct impact on their biological activity. In particular, bioactive glasses (BGs) represent a target of high strategic importance for the simulations, due to the central role that they play in the broad arena of materials for repairing and regenerating tissues. Simulations aimed at understanding the properties of bioactive glasses thus reveal the potential, and also the limitations, of computational approaches to support the rational development of biomaterials. This perspective article examines several key challenges that computer simulations of BGs are currently dealing with and that will need to be effectively tackled in order to achieve further substantial progress in this field. Relevant examples are the identification of new structural descriptors, the modelling of ion migration, and the simulation of nanosized samples, which are discussed in relation to the underlying issues, such as the limited space and time scales that can be probed in atomic-scale simulations.


Each of the past six U.S. presidents has become deeply involved in the diplomacy surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict. The same has certainly been true for President Bill Clinton. In this book, William Quandt offers the hopeful message that the United States, if it plays its role of mediator skillfully, can contribute to a resolution of the dispute between Israel and its Arab neighbors. He cautions, however, that presidents and their advisers have often misread the realities of the Middle East and pursued flawed policiesespecially during the years when the Middle East was viewed through a cold war lens. The result was, at times, a worsening of the conflict. Quandt provides a detailed account of American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict since the June 1967 war. He assesses each administration's initial approach to the problem of peacemaking, along with the evolution of policy as it confronted the stubborn realities of the region and the minefields of domestic political controversy. Given the complexity of the challenge, American policy has shown remarkable consistency and surprising successes, not least that Egypt and Israel are at peace with one another and are both friendly to the United States. More recently, other Arab parties have begun to negotiate with Israel under American auspices. One of the points on which presidents of both political parties have agreed is that an American role in support of Arab-Israeli peace is consistent with American national interests. A participant in the policymaking process on two occasions as a member of the National Security Council staff in the Nixon and Carter administrations, Quandt brings his experience to bear on this analysis of how decisions are made on a particularly sensitive foreign policy issue. The book concludes with lessons derived from a quarter century of American involvement with the Arab-Israeli peace process."


In this paper we develop a criterion of the applicability for the trajectory-based semiclassical propagation methods that are exact for Gaussian wavepackets in locally quadratic potentials. The error estimate takes into account a deviation of the wavefunction from the Gaussian form due to the anharmonicity of a potential. The derivation is based on the time-dependent noncoherent solutions of the Schrodinger equation for a general quadratic potential that form a complete orthonormal time-dependent basis. The anharmonicity is treated as a time-dependent cubic perturbation, which is further related to the nonlinearity of a force acting on trajectories. The criterion is expressed in terms of scalar products of the average force, its first moments, and dispersion of the wavefunction and is efficient in the context of dynamics with the Bohmian trajectories. We give an application for the Bohmian dynamics with the approximate quantum potential, for the Gaussian wavepacket dynamics and for the semiclassical initial value representation propagator. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Quantum Chem, 2004


Understanding how amyloid-β peptide interacts with living cells on a molecular level is critical to development of targeted treatments for Alzheimer's disease. Evidence that oligomeric Aβ interacts with neuronal cell membranes has been provided, but the mechanism by which membrane binding occurs and the exact stoichiometry of the neurotoxic aggregates remain elusive. Physiologically relevant experimentation is hindered by the high Aβ concentrations required for most biochemical analyses, the metastable nature of Aβ aggregates, and the complex variety of Aβ species present under physiological conditions. Here we use single molecule microscopy to overcome these challenges, presenting direct optical evidence that small Aβ(1-40) oligomers bind to living neuroblastoma cells at physiological Aβ concentrations. Single particle fluorescence intensity measurements indicate that cell-bound Aβ species range in size from monomers to hexamers and greater, with the majority of bound oligomers falling in the dimer-to-tetramer range. Furthermore, while low-molecular weight oligomeric species do form in solution, the membrane-bound oligomer size distribution is shifted towards larger aggregates, indicating either that bound Aβ oligomers can rapidly increase in size or that these oligomers cluster at specific sites on the membrane. Calcium indicator studies demonstrate that small oligomer binding at physiological concentrations induces only mild, sporadic calcium leakage. These findings support the hypothesis that small oligomers are the primary Aβ species that interact with neurons at physiological concentrations.


Ideally, public health debates are conducted civilly and focus on the evidence and the public good. In practice, many debates deviate markedly from this approach, for example with personal denigration of opponents. To help assess methods used in public health debates, a classificatory system of ideal types is introduced, with the categories of deliberative democracy, marketplace of ideas, marketplace of abusive comment, dominant orthodoxy, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. To illustrate how methods can be fitted into these ideal types, instances of opposition to the Australian Vaccination Network are examined. Being able to identify the types of methods used in particular debates provides public health advocates with opportunities to reflect on the impact of different methods deployed and how they relate to public participation and free speech.


A number of operational IFS configurations call the radiation scheme only every 3 h, and the cosine of the solar zenith angle (μ0) used in the radiation scheme is computed at the central time of this "radiation timestep". Comparing to model runs in which the radiation scheme is called every model timestep (treated as truth), it is found that calling radiation every 3 h leads to wavenumber-8 fluctuations around the tropics in annual-mean surface and top-of-atmosphere net shortwave fluxes of amplitude 1.6 and 0.9 W m−2, respectively. The total shortwave absorption by the atmosphere is overestimated by around 1.4 W m−2 in the tropics, which is associated with tropical stratospheric temperatures too warm by up to 3.4 K. Calculating μ0 used by the radiation scheme instead as the average value for the radiation timestep removes the wavenumber-8 fluctuations, but the stratosphere is still too warm by up to 2.3 K. This is found to be due to excessive solar absorption at dawn and dusk. By instead computing μ0 used by the radiation scheme as the average of only the sunlit part of the radiation timestep, stratospheric biases are reduced to only of order 0.5 K (compared to running the radiation scheme every timestep). Higher frequency fluctuations are also found in the incoming solar radiation at top-of-atmosphere, and removed by the new scheme, but it is found that both the wavelength and amplitude of these fluctuations decrease rapidly with shorter model timesteps and are negligible for the high-resolution model configurations used at ECMWF.


Developing country efforts to enforce basic public health standards are often hindered by limited agency resources and poorly designed enforcement mechanisms, including excessive reliance on slow and erratic judicial systems. Traditional public health regulation can therefore be difficult to implement. This article examines innovative approaches to the implementation of public health regulations that have emerged in recent years within the OECD countries. These approaches aim to improve compliance with health standards among the different actors while reducing dependence on the legal system and the administrative resources of public health agencies in developing countries. Developing countries may find some useful lessons from these approaches that can be adapted for use in their own institutional settings.


A new dual-channel multifrequency fluorometer is described which employs a mode-locked argon-ion laser as a polarized excitation source. The laser produces high-frequency sinusoidal intensity modulations in the MHz to GHz regime which are used to simultaneously probe the fluorescent molecules. The resulting orthogonally polarized components of the emission are collected by two opposite matched detection channels. Because both the parallel [I∥(ω)] and perpendicular [I⊥(ω)] components of the emission are collected simultaneously and at all modulation frequencies, information about the molecules' rotational rate can be rapidly deduced. With the new instrument, rotational correlation times as short as 15 ps can be routinely determined with data-acquisition times as short as 10 ms. Commonly, however, we employ collection times of several seconds to permit the averaging of between 100 and 500 scans. Examples which demonstrate the utility of the new instrument include the determination of the rotational correlation times for rhodamine 6G, fluorescein, and rubrene as a function of solvent viscosity. In addition, results are presented for the resolution of rhodamine 6G associated with beta-cyclodextrin. In the beta-cyclodextrin studies, little spectral (excitation/emission) or temporal (fluorescence lifetime) change was noted upon association. However, a significant difference exists between rotational correlation times of the free fluorophore and the fluorophore included by beta-cyclodextrin. This difference enables the formation constant for the association to be determined, a measurement which would be impossible with conventional techniques.


This dissertation studies the context-aware application with its proposed algorithms at client side. The required context-aware infrastructure is discussed in depth to illustrate that such an infrastructure collects the mobile user's context information, registers service providers, derives mobile user's current context, distributes user context among context-aware applications, and provides tailored services. The approach proposed tries to strike a balance between the context server and mobile devices. The context acquisition is centralized at the server to ensure the reusability of context information among mobile devices, while context reasoning remains at the application level. Hence, a centralized context acquisition and distributed context reasoning are viewed as a better solution overall.
The context-aware search application is designed and implemented at the server side. A new algorithm is proposed to take into consideration the user context profiles. By promoting feedback on the dynamics of the system, any prior user selection is now saved for further analysis such that it may contribute to help the results of a subsequent search. On the basis of these developments at the server side, various solutions are consequently provided at the client side. A proxy software-based component is set up for the purpose of data collection. This research endorses the belief that the proxy at the client side should contain the context reasoning component. Implementation of such a component provides credence to this belief in that the context applications are able to derive the user context profiles. Furthermore, a context cache scheme is implemented to manage the cache on the client device in order to minimize processing requirements and other resources (bandwidth, CPU cycle, power). Java and MySQL platforms are used to implement the proposed architecture and to test scenarios derived from user's daily activities.
To meet the practical demands required of a testing environment without the impositions of a heavy cost for establishing such a comprehensive infrastructure, a software simulation using a free Yahoo search API is provided as a means to evaluate the effectiveness of the design approach in a most realistic way. The integration of Yahoo search engine into the context-aware architecture design proves how context aware application can meet user demands for tailored services and products in and around the user's environment. The test results show that the overall design is highly effective, providing new features and enriching the mobile user's experience through a broad scope of potential applications.


Using an experimental design in which the addition of hypotaurine or epinephrine was staggered through time, evidence was found that suggests these two compounds are working independently and sequentially to stimulate the fertilizing capacity of hamster spermatozoa in vitro. Prior exposure of spermatozoa to hypotaurine is a prerequisite for the action of epinephrine in causing activation and penetration of hamster ova. A definite role for hypotaurine in inducing capacitation of hamster spermatozoa is also demonstrated. The alpha-adrenergic antagonist, phentolamine, was more effective in blocking fertilization of hamster ova in vitro than was propranolol, a beta-antagonist. This indicates tha catecholamines may be working by way of alpha-adrenergic receptors in causing capacitation of hamster spermatozoa. The failure to block fertilization with phentolamine after epinephrine has exerted its effect implies that epinephrine acts in a hormone-like fashion.


Sudoku puzzles date back to the 1800s in France and were introduced to America in the late 1970s. Since then, the puzzle has become a worldwide phenomenon. This thesis will be of expositional nature including the works of books and mathematical papers such as [2], [14], and [15], among others. The pages ahead will contain answers to some common questions about Sudoku such as, what is the minimum number of starting clues that will produce a unique solution? On the other side of the spectrum, what is the maximum number of starting clues that won't produce a unique solution? Taking Sudoku one step farther, this paper will talk about Magic Squares and the algorithm used in making them. Even more interesting is that the algorithm provides the makings of a multimagic square, where every entry in a magic square is squared, with the rows, columns, and diagonals still adding to the same number [15]. See the Appendix for the computer code in the program MATLAB that creates multimagic squares.


Neuroactive steroids have been postulated to cause anesthesia by binding to unique steroid recognition sites on gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptors and modulating GABA receptor function. Steroids interact with these sites diastereoselectively, but it is unknown whether steroid sites show enantioselectivity. To address this issue, we synthesized enantiomers to (+)-3alpha-hydroxy-5alpha-androstane-17beta-carbonitrile and (+)-3alpha-hydroxy-5alpha-pregnan-20-one. In this study, we show that potentiation of GABA-mediated currents and gating of the GABA(A) channel by steroids, as well as steroid-induced anesthesia in tadpoles and mice, is enantioselective, with the (+)-enantiomers exhibiting significantly greater potency in all assays. The correlation between the effects of steroid enantiomers on channel behavior and their effects as anesthetics provides strong evidence that GABA(A) receptors play a predominant role in steroid-induced anesthesia. The enantiomers also provide a tool to probe the relative contributions of direct chloride channel activation versus potentiation of GABA-elicited currents to the induction of anesthesia. Studies examining the effects of combinations of (+)- and (-)-3alpha-hydroxy-5alpha-androstane-17beta-carbonitrile were consistent with the hypothesis that potentiation of GABA-activated currents contributes to steroid-induced anesthesia but indicated that direct steroid activation of GABA(A) receptors is not mechanistically important in producing anesthesia.


Eric Williams Correctional Officer Protection Act of 2015 Amends the federal criminal code to require the Director of the Bureau of Prisons to issue oleoresin capsicum spray to: (1) any Bureau officer or employee employed in a prison that is not a minimum or low security prison who may respond to an emergency situation in such prison; and (2) such additional prison officers and employees as the Director deems appropriate, subject to specified requirements. Requires any such officer or employee to complete a training course before being issued such spray and annual training on the use of such spray. Authorizes Bureau officers and employees issued such spray to use it to reduce acts of violence committed by prisoners and prison visitors against themselves, other prisoners and visitors, and Bureau officers and employees. Directs the Comptroller General, not later than three years after the date on which the Director begins to issue oleoresin capsicum spray to Bureau officers and employees, to submit to Congress a report that includes: (1) an evaluation of the effectiveness of issuing such spray on reducing crime in such prisons and acts of violence committed by prisoners against themselves and others, (2) an evaluation of the advisability of issuing such spray, and (3) recommendations to improve the safety of Bureau officers and employees in prisons.


We document several new facts regarding urbanization and structural change in developing countries and develop a model that can account for them. Most developing countries follow a standard pattern: urbanization is a by-product of either "push" from agricultural productivity growth or a "pull" from industrial productivity growth. In these countries urbanization occurs with structural transformation and cities are "production cities", with a mix of workers in tradable and non-tradable sectors. For a distinct subset of countries that rely on natural resource exports, however, urbanization has increased at an equally rapid pace, but it is not associated with an increased importance of manufacturing and services in GDP. In these countries urbanization has taken place in "consumption cities" where the mix of workers is heavily skewed towards non-tradable services. We adapt a standard model of structural transformation to explain how natural resources can both drive urbanization as well as shift the composition of the urban labor force. The model may help explain why natural resource exporters - and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular - have experienced urbanization without structural transformation, which has implications for the pace of long-run growth in these areas.


In a world where, as a result of biological laws, there is a constant confrontation between humans and microorganisms, vaccination remains the most rational method of prevention against infectious diseases. According to the great changes occurring in modern medicine, vaccinology became an innovative science because it saves millions of lives daily. The introduction of new vaccine preparations is a challenge for both research and clinical practice, but also for health policy decidents in countries where the population is at risk for illness and death. Even if a new vaccine is used in the general population after more than 10 years of research and investment in human and financial resources, in recent years there is an increasing tendency to exploit the psychology of parents in assuming the vaccination agreement and thus the compliance to immunization campaigns decreased considerably. In this way, it is not only compromised the beneficial effect of the vaccine on one person, but virtually the benefit of collective immunity, that is provided by the immunization of at least 80% of the eligible population. The desire of controlling and sometimes eliminating and eradicating an infectious disease that can be prevented by protecting individuals becomes increasingly distant and impossible. There are many examples in the recent years, demonstrating the beneficial effects of vaccines compromised for many reasons (religious, psychological, financial) and one of them is related to the "myth" about the causal relationship between hepatitis B vaccination and multiple sclerosis. Pros and cons proved to be controversial, but what brings hope for a positive resolution in this "dilemma" of the modern world is only the scientific argument, according to evidence-based medicine.


Obesity problems are no longer limited to the USA as, in recent years, obesity rates in the EU countries have increased dramatically, leading to serious consequences in terms of direct health care costs and productivity losses, and indicating the existence of a negative externality connected with obesity. Several studies have investigated the private and social costs of obesity, and possible interventions to reduce this pathology. Moreover, a number of economic studies deals with the analysis of variables affecting overweight. Following this last approach and focusing on Italy, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the socio-economic variables affecting obesity, by means of a survey conducted on a sample of 955 consumers resident in Lombardy. The sample was stratified by the variables of gender, age, and residence of the interviewees and was representative of the Lombardy population. We used an ordinal regression model as the dependent variable is expressed in terms of BMI ordinal categories. The independent variables in the model are 14, and are connected to socio-demographic characteristics, nutritional claims, food product attributes, consumer healthy life attitude. The results show that the condition of the seriously overweight, and obese people, increases with age, and this is especially so in people over 65 where the obesity rate is quite high. Also gender is correlated with the pathology, those affected being more likely to be men. Furthermore, there is an inverse relation between obesity and education, obesity decreasing with increasing level of education. Therefore, the analysis underlined that disadvantaged social categories are more susceptible to obesity and overweight. Interestingly, it was found that an inverse relation exists between obesity and quality and marketing attributes of food products.


There is no doubt that making AI mainstream by bringing powerful, yet power hungry deep neural networks (DNNs) to resource-constrained devices would required an efficient co-design of algorithms, hardware and software. The increased popularity of DNN applications deployed on a wide variety of platforms, from tiny microcontrollers to data-centers, have resulted in multiple questions and challenges related to constraints introduced by the hardware. In this survey on hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW-NAS), we present some of the existing answers proposed in the literature for the following questions: "Is it possible to build an efficient DL model that meets the latency and energy constraints of tiny edge devices?", "How can we reduce the trade-off between the accuracy of a DL model and its ability to be deployed in a variety of platforms?". The survey provides a new taxonomy of HW-NAS and assesses the hardware cost estimation strategies. We also highlight the challenges and limitations of existing approaches and potential future directions.

We hope that this survey will help to fuel the research towards efficient deep learning.


One of the main driving force behind the industrial revolution was the invention of the electric motor more than a century ago. Its widespread use for all kinds of mechanical motion has made life simple and has ultimately aided the advancement of human kind. The advent of the inverter that facilitated speed and torque control of AC motors has propelled the use of electric motor to new realms that was inconceivable just a mere 30 years ago. Advances in power semiconductors along with digital controls have enabled realization of motor drives that are robust and can control position and speed to a high degree of precision. Use of AC motor drives has also resulted in energy savings and improved system efficiency. Yaskawa Electric Corporation has been at the forefront of technology, creating reliable drives that consistently push the envelope of engineering achievement. This paper reviews Yaskawa's role in the development and application of the inverter technology to AC motor drives and introduces some futuristic vision for the motor drive technology. The development of more efficient, more powerful electric motor drives to power the demands of the future is important for achieving energy savings, environmentally harmonious drives that do not pollute the electrical power system, and improving productivity. Yaskawa wants to be an integral part of this future and hopes to contribute significantly to achieve this.


Pesticides are used worldwide and exhibit a plethora of different modes of action against a wide
spectrum of organisms. Therefore, before they can be marketed they have to be tested against certain
standardised regulations. These include the Food and Environment Protection Act 1985 (FEPA), the
Control of Pesticides Regulations 1986 (COPR), and more recently the European Council Directive
1991 91/414 and the Plant Protection Products Regulations 1991 (PPPR). However, the current tests
used to determine pesticide impacts on microorganisms as detailed by the OECD focus on only broadscale
analytical methods that may mask more subtle effects that may still be ecologically significant.
Therefore, this project aimed to determine the effects of a widely-used model pesticide, azoxystrobin
on both target and non-target microbial communities across different trophic levels.
The techniques used to perform this included broad- (soil microbial biomass and soil dehydrogenase
activity) and fine-scale (T-RFLP, cloning/sequencing, and qPCR) analytical methods. The results of
these analyses showed that the application of azoxystrobin had a significant, concentration-dependent
impact on soil dehydrogenase activity whilst biomass was unaffected. The molecular analyses showed
that azoxystrobin significantly impacted fungal community structure, diversity and gene copy number.
Additionally, pesticide application significantly altered nematode community structure and general
eukaryotic diversity. Soil and liquid culture enrichments showed that azoxystrobin degradation can be
enhanced following repeated applications and enabled the isolation of two degrader organisms with
sequence homologies to a Cupriavidus sp. and a Rhodanobacter sp. Further work showed that
sequential enrichments with azoxystrobin also conferred cross-enhanced degradative abilities for three
other strobilurin fungicides: pyraclostrobin, kresoxim methyl and trifloxystrobin. The work performed
in this thesis served to illustrate how the current OECD test procedures may benefit from the
incorporation of finer-scale molecular methods into its tests, as well as how difficult the task can be to
produce compounds that persist in the environment long enough to perform their required function,
but do not have significant deleterious impacts on non-target organisms when present.


Recent research and development has been incredibly successful at advancing the capabilities for vacuum electronic device (VED) sources of powerful terahertz (THz) and near-THz coherent radiation, both CW or average and pulsed. Currently, the VED source portfolio covers over 12 orders of magnitude in power (mW-to-GW) and two orders of magnitude in frequency (from <; 0.1 to >; 10 THz). Further advances are still possible and anticipated. They will be enabled by improved understanding of fundamental beam-wave interactions, electromagnetic mode competition and mode control, along with research and development of new materials, fabrication methods, cathodes, electron beam alignment and focusing, magnet technologies, THz metrology and advanced, broadband output radiation coupling techniques.


Carbon nanomaterials are among the best known and most promising products of the nanotechnology movement. Some early studies suggest that fullerenes and nanotubes may pose significant health risks, and this has given rise to an emerging literature on carbon nanotoxicology. This young field has now begun to yield insight into toxicity mechanisms and the specific material features involved in those mechanisms. This paper explores the potential to alter those material features through post-processing or reformulation with the goal of reducing or eliminating carbon nanomaterial health risks. The paper emphasizes the important roles of metal content and bioavailability, carbon surface chemistry, and nanomaterial aggregation state. The nanotechnology movement has been given a unique "window of opportunity" to systematically investigate the toxicity of nanotechnology products and to develop ways to manage health risks before large scale manufacturing becomes widespread.


OBJECTIVE
Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is a systemic disorder occurring in genetically predisposed individuals. The disease course appears to be characterized by bouts of partial remission and flares. However, we have little understanding of what is a flare, why they occur, and what lasting effects they have on the patient. We examine the patient's perception of the factors important in defining flare.

METHODS
Twenty group meetings of 7-12 participants were held over a one year period. A summary statement was written at the end of each discussion and patients were asked to sign the statement if they considered it to be an accurate summary of their answers, or to amend the statement where they disagreed.

RESULTS
There were 214 patients questioned (169 men, 45 women; average disease duration 25 years; age of disease onset 22 years). Data show that the main symptoms of flare are pain (100% of groups), immobility (90%), fatigue (80%), and emotional symptoms (depression, withdrawal, anger) (75%). There are 2 types of flare: (1) localized: during which the symptoms affect one area; and (2) generalized: this is a severe event including all the above symptoms and a flu-like illness (fever, sweating) with hot, burning joints, muscle spasm, and increased sensitivity. All patients experience between one and 5 localized flares per year. Fifty-five percent of groups contained patients (n = 85) who experienced a generalized flare. The main perceived triggers of flare were stress (80%) and "overdoing it" (50%). Patients reported that a flare may last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks and relief from flare can be gained by analgesic injections (including opiates) from a doctor, relaxation, sleep, and cannabis (3 individuals). Three-quarters of the groups agreed that there was no longterm effect on the AS following a flare.

CONCLUSION
There are 2 forms of flare: (1) localized to one area or (2) throughout the entire body. Examining the differences between these types of flares may aid our understanding of the biological mechanism of the disease process of AS and allow us to help relieve the symptoms of flare, a highly painful and often depressing phenomenon.


The literature on male imprisonment consistently reveals a particular form of hegemonic masculinity based on competition, dominance and violence, actual or threatened. This article seeks to examine this standard view via the experience of republican politically motivated prisoners in Northern Ireland. It finds evidence of elements of hegemonic masculinity as in other prisons, but alongside this there was an alternative form of hegemonic masculinity, one based on the ability to endure rather than inflict violence. The article also examines the way in which homosociality – male fraternity without homosexual desire – was an integral part of the prison experience and was enhanced by the solidarity among the prisoners; this solidarity was based on both initial political ideology and the collective resistance against the prison system's attempts to break their solidarity. Finally, it also examines the space for emotions and emotional support in the difficult circumstances of violence inflicted by prison officers, an extended "blanket protest" and a harrowing hunger strike.


This study investigated the experience of disengaging and engaging emotions among Black and White South African university students. In total 351 Black and White students attending a large North Western province university in South Africa (45% Black students, 69% female students, Mage = 21.09, SDage = 3.02) reported on their emotions in general, on the last emotional experience they had at home, and on the last emotional experience they had at university. They rated in each context 55 emotion terms that represented the emotion domain. Participants could either respond in English, Setswana, or Afrikaans. A multidimensional scaling revealed a two-dimensional structure across Blacks and Whites, the three languages, and the three contexts. On the first dimension negative emotions (such as sadness) were opposed to positive emotions (such as joy). On the second dimension disengaging emotions (such as anger and pride) were opposed to engaging emotions (such as guilt and compassion). Thus also in South Africa emotions differ with respect to whether they set a person apart from the social context (disengaging), or whether they link a person to the social context (engaging). Contrary to expectation, Blacks did not report more engaging and less disengaging emotions than Whites. In the university context no differences were observed, while in the home and general context Blacks reported more disengaging and less engaging emotions than Whites. Post hoc explanations are proposed in terms of relative differences in social status, acculturative changes, and the specific experiences of Black and White students in the South-African context.


Strong evidence suggests that the gut microbiota is altered in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), indicating its potential role in noninvasive diagnostics. However, no clinical applications are currently used for routine patient care. The main obstacle to implementing a gut microbiota test for IBD is the lack of standardization, which leads to high interlaboratory variation. We studied the between-hospital and between-platform batch effects and their effects on predictive accuracy for IBD. Fecal samples from 91 pediatric IBD patients and 58 healthy children were collected. IS-pro, a standardized technique designed for routine microbiota profiling in clinical settings, was used for microbiota composition characterization. Additionally, a large synthetic data set was used to simulate various perturbations and study their effects on the accuracy of different classifiers. Perturbations were validated in two replicate data sets, one processed in another laboratory and the other with a different analysis platform. The type of perturbation determined its effect on predictive accuracy. Real-life perturbations induced by between-platform variation were significantly greater than those caused by between-laboratory variation. Random forest was found to be robust to both simulated and observed perturbations, even when these perturbations had a dramatic effect on other classifiers. It achieved high accuracy both when cross-validated within the same data set and when using data sets analyzed in different laboratories. Robust clinical predictions based on the gut microbiota can be performed even when samples are processed in different hospitals. This study contributes to the effort to develop a universal IBD test that would enable simple diagnostics and disease activity monitoring. identified of in profile the corresponding profile. on basis of or not replicate profile had cross-validation.


In this work, we describe both benign and malignant asbestos-related diseases and provide an updated review of recent advances in the field. It has long been appreciated that the inhalation of asbestos fibers causes several well-described respiratory diseases including pleural plaques, diffuse pleural thickening, asbestosis, lung cancer, and malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM). However, despite this knowledge and stricter industrial controls, the incidence of these diseases continues to increase in many parts of the world. In fact, despite the introduction of strict limits early in the 20th century, the mortality rate due to MPM is still increasing in industrialized countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia. In this update we provide an overview of each disease entity while concentrating on the role that newer imaging techniques, including high-resolution computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and positron emission tomography /computed tomography, play in the diagnosis of asbestos-related pleural and parenchymal diseases. As the incidence of MPM continues to increase in many parts of the world, this review also focuses on new approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of this devastating condition. A description of the potential use and limitations of biomarkers in the diagnosis and monitoring of the disease is included along with recent trial data examining novel vaccine-based biological therapies.


A study of the certification market in the Northern European service sector. Today, the service sector accounts for more than 2/3 of economic activity in most European countries. However, there is relatively little trade in services across national boundaries. The certification of services has the potential to become an important mechanism for assuring the quality both of the services themselves, and thus also the trade in these services. Studies of the certification schemes within the tangible goods sector conclude that the market for certification and marking in Europe is confused. It is often necessary to repeat certification of the same product in several countries, which involves trade barriers and extra costs for producers (especially SMEs). This also leads to confusion among consumers and less transparency in the markets.


Abstract. Data on irrigation patterns and trends at field-level
detail across broad extents are vital for assessing and managing limited
water resources. Until recently, there has been a scarcity of comprehensive,
consistent, and frequent irrigation maps for the US. Here we present the
new Landsat-based Irrigation Dataset (LANID), which is comprised of 30 m
resolution annual irrigation maps covering the conterminous US (CONUS) for
the period of 1997–2017. The main dataset identifies the annual extent of
irrigated croplands, pastureland, and hay for each year in the study period.
Derivative maps include layers on maximum irrigated extent, irrigation
frequency and trends, and identification of formerly irrigated areas and
intermittently irrigated lands. Temporal analysis reveals that 38.5×106 ha of croplands and pasture–hay has been irrigated, among which the
yearly active area ranged from ∼22.6 to 24.7×106 ha. The LANID products provide several improvements over other
irrigation data including field-level details on irrigation change and
frequency, an annual time step, and a collection of ∼10 000
visually interpreted ground reference locations for the eastern US where
such data have been lacking. Our maps demonstrated overall accuracy above 90 % across all years and regions, including in the more humid and
challenging-to-map eastern US, marking a significant advancement over
other products, whose accuracies ranged from 50 % to 80 %. In terms of
change detection, our maps yield per-pixel transition accuracy of 81 %
and show good agreement with US Department of Agriculture reports at both
county and state levels. The described annual maps, derivative layers, and
ground reference data provide users with unique opportunities to study local
to nationwide trends, driving forces, and consequences of irrigation and
encourage the further development and assessment of new approaches for
improved mapping of irrigation, especially in challenging areas like the
eastern US. The annual LANID maps, derivative products, and ground
reference data are available through https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5548555 (Xie and Lark, 2021a).


Recurrence of Cushing's disease after successful transsphenoidal surgery occurs in some 30% of the patients and the response to desmopressin shortly after surgery has been proposed as a marker for disease recurrence. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the response to desmopressin over time after surgery. We tested 56 patients with Cushing's disease in remission after transsphenoidal surgery with desmopressin for up to 20 years after surgery. The ACTH and cortisol response to desmopressin over time was evaluated in patients on long-term remission or undergoing relapse; an increase by at least 27 pg/mL in ACTH levels identified responders. The vast majority of patients who underwent successful adenomectomy failed to respond to desmopressin after surgery and this response pattern was maintained over time in patients on long-term remission. Conversely, a response to desmopressin reappeared in patients who subsequently developed a recurrence of Cushing's disease, even years prior to frank hypercortisolism. It appears therefore that a change in the response pattern to desmopressin proves predictive of recurrence of Cushing's disease and may indicate which patients require close monitoring.


The marine environment is of special interest for studying hybridization between closely related taxa because of the high dispersal potential of planktonic larvae, such as those of most bivalve species. The oysters Crassostrea angulata and C. gigas are known to be very close genetically and entirely inter-fertile under controlled conditions. However, hybridization in the wild had not been investigated, mainly due to the lack of nuclear diagnostic markers. In the present paper, we first estimated genetic differentiation between these 2 closely related taxa using 8 microsatellite markers. Interestingly, 5 markers displayed significant differences of allele size between taxa. The subsequent sequencing of alleles of one of these microsatellites showed several mutational events, which suggested null alleles and homoplasy. The presence of 1 insertion/deletion event in its 5' flanking sequence enabled us to design a new bi-allelic ('C' and 'NC') nuclear PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism (-RFLP) marker (CG44R). This, together with a mitochondrial DNA marker, was used to analyze populations of C. angulata and C. gigas. The CG44R allele frequencies were very different between C. angulata (f[C] = 0.91) and C. gigas (f[NC] = 0.92) populations. This analysis also provided evidence for hybridization between C. angulata and C. gigas in a wild Portuguese population where the 2 taxa are in contact due to recent transportation of C. gigas stocks for aquacultural production. Our results represent the first indication of hybridization between these 2 taxa in the natural environment, and contribute to knowledge of the evolutionary history of the Crassostrea genus.


An important element in social interactions is predicting the goals of others, including the goals of others' manual actions. Over a decade ago, Flanagan and Johansson demonstrated that, when observing other people reaching for objects, the observer's gaze arrives at the goal before the action is completed. Moreover, those authors proposed that this behavior was mediated by an embodied process, which takes advantage of the observer's motor knowledge. Here, we scrutinize work that has followed that seminal article. We include studies on adults that have used combined eye tracking and transcranial magnetic stimulation technologies to test causal hypotheses about underlying brain circuits. We also include developmental studies on human infants. We conclude that, although several aspects of the embodied process of predictive eye movements remain to be clarified, current evidence strongly suggests that the motor system plays a causal role in guiding predictive gaze shifts that focus on another person's future goal. The early emergence of the predictive gaze in infant development underlines its importance for social cognition and interaction.


Educational robotics is an innovative approach to teaching and learning a variety of different concepts and skills as well as motivating students in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. This especially applies to educational robotics competitions such as, for example, the FIRST LEGO League, the RoboCup Junior, or the World Robot Olympiad as out-of-school and goal-oriented approach to educational robotics. These competitions have gained greatly in popularity in recent years and thousands of students participate in these competitions worldwide each year. Moreover, the corresponding technology became more accessible for teachers and students to use it in their classrooms and has arguably a high potential to impact the nature of science education at all levels. One skill, which is said to be benefitting from educational robotics, is problem solving. This thesis understands problem solving skills as engineering design skills (in contrast to scientific inquiry). Problem solving skills count as important skills as demanded by industry leaders and policy makers in the context of 21st century skills, which are relevant for students to be well-prepared for their future working life in today's world, shaped by an ongoing process of automation, globalization, and digitalization. The overall aim of this thesis is to try to answer the question if educational robotics competitions such as the World Robot Olympiad (WRO) have a positive impact on students' learning in terms of their problem solving skills (as part of 21st century skills). In detail, this thesis focuses on a) if students can improve their problem solving skills through participation in educational robotics competitions, b) how this skill development is accomplished, and c) the teachers' support of their students during their learning process in the competition. The corresponding empirical studies were conducted throughout the seasons of 2018 and 2019 of the WRO in Germany. The results show overall positive effects of the participation in the WRO on students' learning of problem solving skills. They display an increase of students' problem solving skills, which is not moderated by other variables such as the competition's category or age group, the students' gender or experience, or the success of the teams at the competition. Moreover, the results indicate that students develop their problem solving skills by using a systematic engineering design process and sophisticated problem solving strategies. Lastly, the teacher's role in the educational robotics competitions as manager and guide (in terms of the constructionist learning theory) of the students' learning process (especially regarding the affective level) is underlined by the results of this thesis. All in all, this thesis contributes to the research gap concerning the lack of systematic evaluation of educational robotics to promote students' learning by providing more (methodologically) sophisticated research on this topic. Thereby, this thesis follows the call for more rigorous (quantitative) research by the educational robotics community, which is necessary to validate the impact of educational robotics.


Shell architectures of the larger foraminiferal genera Cuvillierinella , Cyclopseudedomia , and Rhapydionina were studied by comparing topotypes of previously described species with new specimens retrieved from Late Cretaceous shallow-water carbonates of Pylos (Peloponnese, Greece), where the three genera are found in association. The megalospheric generation of each genus exhibits a distinctive shell shape in adult specimens (i.e., fan-shaped in Cyclopseudedomia , conical in Rhapydionina , and cylindrical in Cuvillierinella ). Although their microspheric adults are similarly thin, flat, and discoidal, they can be identified at the genus level by means of a detailed structural analysis. Cuvillierinella shows the septula to be interrupted by a large preseptal space, while Cyclopseudedomia and Rhapydionina exhibit continuous, non-interrupted septula. In addition, Cyclopseudedomia presents only one row of medullar chamberlets, whereas Rhapydionina shows numerous medullar chamberlets distributed in a thick basal layer. Two new species, Cuvillierinella pylosensis and Rhapydionina fleuryi , are described. The former is a more complex taxon than the type species, C. salentina , while the latter corresponds to a more primitive species, R. liburnica . Strontium-isotope stratigraphy indicates an uppermost Campanian–lowermost Maastrichtian age for these new species.


Female executives of large companies are still in short supply in the U.S., but they have made great strides in recent years and their number is growing. Patricia Werhane and four other leadership experts interviewed twenty-two prominent women-including executives at Kraft, Boeing, and Harley Davidson-to uncover their leadership styles, reveal their most effective practices, and find out how they broke through the glass ceiling. This celebration of stellar executives highlights their achievements, the values and visions that guide them, and the contributions they've made to both their companies and industries. Besides enjoying fascinating stories, readers-both men and women-will gain insights that help them manage and lead better. Despite enormous strides in the status of women in business, female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies can be counted on two hands, and less than 15 percent of Fortune 500 board seats are held by women. These daunting statistics, however, belie another phenomenon: The iceberg of male domination in the boardroom is beginning to break up and melt. More and more women are assuming positions of real leadership. And it's none too soon. With the increasing diversity of the workforce, businesses need the wisdom successful female executives can offer. To encourage more women to step up to the plate, this book tells many stories of perseverance and inventiveness. But it digs deeper to reveal common qualities and characteristics that reflect a style of leadership that is in stark contrast-in every major dimension, from communication styles to team building to crisis management-to the traditional, white-male model that has dominated practice, theory, and management education. While men tend to be transactional leaders, the women profiled in this book are nothing less than inspiring, transformational leaders. The result is an incisive, engaging, thought-provoking, and ultimately empowering narrative that will serve as a guide for women now entering, progressing, and leading in the workplace-as well as the men with whom they work.


In order to evaluate the effect of seed moisture content at harvesting time and drying temperature on soybean seed germination characteristics, an experiment was conducted as factorial (2×3×2) based on Randomized Complete Block Design with three replications in Karaj and Moghan areas. The first factor was cultivar with two levels (Williams and L 17 ), the second factor was seed moisture content with three levels (15, 20 and 25%) and the third factor was drying temperature with two levels (30 and 45 °C). Results show that the germination percentage of producing seeds in Karaj (81.3%) were higher than Moghan area (77.4%). The difference between the germination percentage of dried seeds at 30 and 45 P C with initial seed moisture content of 15% was about 5.5%, while this difference for seeds with 25% initial moisture content was about 18.5%. There was no significant difference between seedling vigor index of seeds with 15% moisture content of two cultivars that have been produced in Karaj, but at 20% moisture content, the seedling vigor index in Williams cultivar (139.7) was higher than L 17 cultivar (107.3). The highest (51.42 Q sm cm -1 g -1 ) electrical conductivity of seed leakage soluble was obtained from L 17 cultivar with 25% moisture content and 45 P C and the lowest (28.46 42 Q sm cm -1 g -1 ) rate of it was observed in Williams cultivar with 20% moisture content and 30 P C . According to these results, we must harvest and dry soybean seeds at 30 P C when its moisture content reached under 20%.


The suspect in eyewitness lineups may be guilty or innocent. These possibilities are traditionally simulated in eyewitness identification studies using a dual-lineup paradigm: all witnesses observe the same perpetrator and then receive one of two lineups. In this paradigm, the suspect's guilt is manipulated by including the perpetrator in one lineup and an innocent suspect in the other. The lineup is then filled with people matched to either the suspect (resulting in different fillers in perpetrator-present and perpetrator-absent lineups) or to the perpetrator (resulting in the same fillers in each lineup). An inescapable feature of the dual-lineup paradigm is that the perpetrator-present and perpetrator-absent lineups differ not only in the suspect's guilt, but also in their composition. Here, we describe a single-lineup paradigm: subjects observe one of two perpetrators and then receive the same lineup containing one of the perpetrators. This alternative paradigm allows manipulation of the suspect's guilt without changing the lineup's composition. In three experiments, we applied the single-lineup paradigm to explore suspect-filler similarity and consistently found that increasing similarity reduced perpetrator identifications but did little to prevent innocent suspect misidentifications. Conversely, when fillers were matched to the perpetrator using a dual-lineup paradigm, increasing similarity reduced identification of perpetrators and innocent suspects. This finding suggests that the effect of filler similarity may depend on the person to whom the fillers are matched. We suggest that the single-lineup paradigm is a more ecologically-valid and bettercontrolled approach to creating suspect-matched lineups in laboratory investigations of eyewitness memory than existing procedures.


This document explains the relative ease with which deterministic operation of Teledyne-e2v's giga-sample broadband ADCs can be established to facilitate sample synchronization across multiple ADC channels especially in massively parallel sampling systems. Or more straightforwardly, this is a simple guide to using the SYNC chain functionality. Information provided is pertinent to systems using digital beam-forming or those used in MIMO antenna systems. This information should be read in conjunction with the product data sheet.


Semantic equivalences are used in process algebra to capture the notion of similar behaviour, and this paper proposes a semi-quantitative equivalence for a stochastic process algebra developed for biological modelling. We consider abstracting away from fast reactions as suggested by the Quasi-Steady-State Assumption. We define a fast-slow bisimilarity based on this idea. We also show congruence under an appropriate condition for the cooperation operator of Bio-PEPA. The condition requires that there is no synchronisation over fast actions, and this distinguishes fast-slow bisimilarity from weak bisimilarity. We also show congruence for an operator which extends the reactions available for a species. We characterise models for which it is only necessary to consider the matching of slow transitions and we illustrate the equivalence on two models of competitive inhibition.