Introduction Since there is no cure for HD all treatment is directed to improve quality of life. One barely recognised non-drug therapy is music therapy. A focus group was installed with the purpose to generate research questions, topics and hypotheses and, most important, to discuss the research design concerning an upcoming trial exploring the effects of music therapy on improving the quality of life of patients suffering from Huntington's Disease. A Focus groups is a qualitative research method using guided group discussion to generate a rich understanding of participants' experiences and beliefs. Quality of Life, disturbing factors, study design and best practice interventions were the most important topics the participants discussed about. Method The focus group consisted of a neurologist, a neuropsychologist, an elderly care physician, a physiotherapist and two music therapists. All members are well experienced and practicing in different specialised Huntington Care Units throughout The Netherlands. In total three meetings of 2-h were held. Questions like what is quality of life, what factor matter most, which role could music therapy play to improve the QoL, were discussed. After getting these answers clear, next the disturbing factors, measurement tools and research design were discussed. Preliminary results and Conclusion The preliminary findings indicate that psychosocial well-being matters most. Also, not only the patient, but also the person closest to him or her should benefit from the music therapy sessions, and share the experience. Members of the focus group recognise a potential role for the music therapist to improve QoL, well worth researching. All the advices and thoughts will be reflected in the definite research design. The most appropriate design seems to be a multicenter randomised or clinical controlled trial. Three nursing home facilities, all specialised in HD, have already been contacted to participate. The measurement-tool most likely to be used in this study will be the recently published "Huntington's Disease Quality of Life" Questionnaire (Ho et al, 2009).


In todays world, Android has revolutionized every facet of our lives. Almost all the important services such as banking, transportation, stock trade, medicine, education, etc. are extended to Android these days. Everything is available in the application market of android. Unfortunately, at the same time, the prosperity of these applications also attracts abusers and malicious attackers to perform different types of attacks. An appropriate action needs to be taken to protect Android device from these attacks. Android applications privacy analysis is an extension to the android privacy model, which traditionally emphasizes on prevention, and detection of attacks. It also deals with capturing, recording and analysis of Android applications to detect and investigate Android device intrusions. In this paper, we explore the comprehensive study about different techniques proposed to perform Android applications analytics. In addition to this, various aspects of android applications analytics have been reviewed along with related technologies and their limitations. This gives enhanced recognition of the problem, existing explanation space, and potential research scope to analyze and investigate various Android device intrusions against such attacks efficiently.


Today, GPUs are widely used as coprocessors/accelerators in High-Performance Heterogeneous Computing due to their many advantages. However, many researches emphasize that GPUs are not as reliable as desired yet. Despite the fact that GPUs are more vulnerable to hardware errors than CPUs, the use of GPUs in HPCs is increasing more and more. Moreover, due to native reliability problems of GPUs, combining a great number of GPUs with CPUs can significantly increase HPCs' failure rates. For this reason, analyzing the reliability characteristics of GPU-based HPCs has become a very important issue. Therefore, in this study we evaluate the reliability of GPU-based HPCs. For this purpose, we first examined field data analysis studies for GPU-based and CPU-based HPCs and identified factors that could increase systems failure/error rates. We then compared GPU-based HPCs with CPU-based HPCs in terms of reliability with the help of these factors in order to point out reliability challenges of GPU-based HPCs. Our primary goal is to present a study that can guide the researchers in this field by indicating the current state of GPU-based heterogeneous HPCs and requirements for the future, in terms of reliability. Our second goal is to offer a methodology to compare the reliability of GPU-based HPCs and CPU-based HPCs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey study to compare the reliability of GPU-based and CPU-based HPCs in a systematic manner.


The magnetic and magnetoresonance properties of a new single-crystal compound Ni-5(TeO3)(4)Cl-2 are studied. Measurements of the magnetization and magnetic susceptibility of the crystal in a wide temperature range (5-300 K) make it possible to conclude that Ni-5(TeO3)(4)Cl-2 is a quasi-two-dimensional antiferromagnet with the easy magnetization axis a* directed perpendicular to the crystallographic plane bc and a magnetic ordering temperature T-N approximate to 21 K. Resonance measurements at 4.2 K in wide range of frequencies (25-105 GHz) and magnetic field (up to 200 kOe) permit us to obtain the frequency-field dependence of the AFMR spectrum for a field applied along the easy magnetization axis a*. It is shown that a magnetic field directed along the anti ferromagnetic axis (H parallel to a*) induces a magnetic phase transition of the spin-flop type, which is found to occur at H-sf approximate to 120 kOe. The magnetic resonance experimental data are described qualitatively in the model of a biaxial anti ferro magnet. (c) 2008 American Institute of Physics.


Passive Force on Skewed Bridge Abutments with Reinforced Concrete Wingwalls Based on Large-Scale Tests Kyle Mark Smith Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, BYU Master of Science Skewed bridges have exhibited poorer performance during lateral earthquake loading when compared to non-skewed bridges (Apirakvorapinit et al. 2012; Elnashai et al. 2010). Results from small-scale laboratory tests by Rollins and Jessee (2012) and numerical modeling by Shamsabadi et al. (2006) suggest that skewed bridge abutments may provide only 35% of the non-skewed peak passive resistance when a bridge is skewed 45°. This reduction in peak passive force is of particular importance as 40% of the 600,000 bridges in the United States are skewed (Nichols 2012). Passive force-deflection results based on large-scale testing for this study largely confirm the significant reduction in peak passive resistance for abutments with longitudinal reinforced concrete wingwalls. Large-scale lateral load tests were performed on a non-skewed and 45° skewed abutment with densely compacted sand backfill. The 45° skewed abutment experienced a 54% reduction in peak passive resistance compared to the non-skewed abutment. The peak passive force for the 45° skewed abutment was estimated to occur at 5.0% of the backwall height compared to 2.2% of the backwall height for the non-skewed abutment. The 45° skewed abutment displayed evidence of rotation, primarily pushing the obtuse side of the abutment into the backfill, significantly more than the non-skewed abutment as it was loaded into the backfill. The structural and geotechnical response of the wingwalls was also monitored during large-scale testing. The wingwall on the obtuse side of the 45° skewed abutment experienced nearly 6 times the amount of horizontal soil pressure and 7 times the amount of bending moment compared to the non-skewed abutment. Pressure and bending moment distributions are provided along the height of the wingwall and indicate that the maximum moment occurs approximately 20 in (50.8 cm) below the top of the wingwall. A comparison of passive force per unit width suggests that MSE wall abutments provide 60% more passive resistance per unit width compared to reinforced concrete wingwall and unconfined abutment geometries at zero skew. These findings suggest that changes should be made to current codes and practices to properly account for skew angle in bridge design.


International trade is a key driver of development. This thesis contains three chapters concerned with the challenges of, and opportunities for, expanding international trade in developing countries.
The first chapter, "Growth Spillovers and Market Access in Africa", shows that because of increased trade, African countries benefit from the growth of their neighbours. In particular, growth in neighbouring countries increases the size of accessible markets, boosting export demand for local goods. Over the period 1992-2012, this expansion of markets increased domestic growth rates by over 2 percent per year on average. By reducing trade costs, countries can further increase these positive growth spillovers.
The second chapter, "Bad Neighbours as Obstacles to Trade: Evidence from African Civil Wars", considers how the trade of landlocked African countries is affected by neighbouring civil wars. The paper shows that such civil wars increase transport costs and subsequently reduce the international trade of landlocked countries. Calibrating the regression results, I estimate that landlocked trade could have been around 12 percent
higher over the period 1975-2005 in the absence of neighbouring civil wars.
The final chapter, "Regulation, Renegotiation and Capital Structure: Theory and Evidence from Latin American Transport Concessions", is joint work with Stephane Straub and Jean-Jacques Dethier. Large transport projects in developing countries are now often delivered through private concessions, and we analyse the financing of such projects. A common argument is that firms use leverage in order to influence regulatory outcomes. Intuitively, firms can extract higher prices by increasing leverage if regulators fear
project collapse. We show that under price cap regulation, this mechanism is weakened because prices are less responsive to costs. Consistent with the theory, we find evidence that infrastructure firms in Latin America use less debt when regulated through price cap.


The inverse heat conduction problem also frequently referred as the sideways heat equation, in short SHE, is considered as a mathematical model for a real application, where it is desirable for someone to determine the temperature on the surface of a body. Since the surface itself is inaccessible for measurements, one is restricted to use temperature data from the interior measurements. From a mathematical point of view, the entire situation leads to a non-characteristic Cauchy problem, where by using recorded temperature one can solve a well-posed nonlinear problem in the finite region for computing heat flux, and consequently obtain the Cauchy data [u, ux]. Further by using these data and by performing an appropriate method, e.g. a space marching method, one can eventually achieve the desired temperature at x = 0. The problem is severely ill-posed in the sense that the solution does not depend continuously on the data. The problem solved by two different methods, and for both cases we stabilize the computations by replacing the derivative ∂ ∂t in the heat equation by a bounded operator. The first one, a spectral method based on finite Fourier space is illustrated to supply an analytical approach for approximating the time derivative. In order to get a better accuracy in the numerical computation, we use cubic spline function for approximating ∂ ∂t in the least squares sense. The inverse problem we want to solve, by using Cauchy data, is a nonlinear heat conduction problem in one space dimension. Since the temperature data u = g(t) is recorded, e.g. by a thermocouple, it usually contains some perturbation in the data. Thus the solution can be severely ill-posed if the Cauchy data become very noisy. Two experiments are presented to test the proposed approach.


Introduction: Coagulation assessment is often missing in microvascular surgery. We aimed at evaluating the predictive value of thromboelastometry for free flap thrombosis in microvascular surgery patients. Materials and Methods: We enrolled 103 adult patients with traumatic injuries scheduled for microvascular free flap surgery into a prospective observational study. Thirty-six patients with recent trauma underwent surgery within 30 days (ES group), and were compared with 67 trauma patients who underwent surgery later than 30 days (late surgery, LS group) after the injury. Rotational thromboelastometry (RTE) was performed before surgery. Functional fibrinogen to platelet ratio (FPR) ≥ 42 was selected as the main hypercoagulability index. Free flap thrombosis was set as primary outcome. Thrombotic risk factors and duration of surgery related to free flap thrombosis were secondary outcomes. Statistical significance p < 0.05; not significant NS. Results: Six patients (16.7%) in the ES group and 10 (14.9%) in the LS group had free flap thrombosis (NS). In the entire cohort, free flap thrombosis rate increased in the presence of thrombogenic comorbidities (OR 4.059, CI 1.33–12.37; p = 0.014) and prolonged surgery times (OR 1.007, CI 1 – 1.012; p = 0.05). Although hypercoagulability occurred more frequently in the ES group (44.4%) than in the LS group (11.9%; p < 0.001), it was not associated with higher free flap thrombosis rate. In ES group patients with surgery times > 240 min, the risk of free flap thrombosis increased (OR 3.5, CI 1.16-10.6; p = 0.026) with 93.3% sensitivity and 86.7% specificity (AUC 0.85; p = 0.007). In contrast, in LS patients hypercoagulability increased the odds of free flap thrombosis (OR 8.83, CI 1.74–44.76; p = 0.009). Moreover, a positive correlation was found between FPR ≥ 42 and free flap thrombosis rate (r = 0.362; p = 0.003). In the LS group, the presence of thrombogenic comorbidities correlated with free flap thrombosis rate (OR 7, CI 1.591–30.8; p = 0.01). Conclusions: In LS patients with thrombogenic comorbidities, thromboelastometry supports the detection of hypercoagulability and predicts free flap thrombosis risk. In ES patients, postoperative hypercoagulability did not predict free flap thrombosis. Prolonged surgery time should be considered as a risk factor.


A single pulse time of flight technique has been used to determine the drift velocity F of the negative ions injected into liquid 4He from a field emission source. Measurements of v as a function of temperature T, pressure P and electric field E are presented within the range: 0.29 ≤ T ≤ 0.5 K; 21 x 105 ≤ P ≤ 25 x 105 Pa; 1 ≤ E ≤ 300kV m-1. The experimental results are in good agreement with Landau's theory of superfluidity. The data are used to demonstrate the inapplicability of two theories of supercritical dissipation: by Takken, based on an assumption of coherent roton emission; and by Bowley & Sheard, based on the assumption of incoherent single-roton emission. The results are, however, shown to be in excellent agreement with Bowley & Sheard's incoherent two-roton theory, and the data are used to derive a numerical value of the matrix element characterizing two-roton emission. The surprising absence of the single-roton emission process is discussed, and an upper bound is placed on the relevant matrix element.


Although Scandinavian Arctic polychaete fauna has been extensively investigated, new species are still being found in the Barents Sea. Polychaetes of the family Serpulidae are calcareous tubeworms that are most abundant at low latitudes and less common in Arctic and Antarctic waters. Because recent phylogenetic data indicate that the family Spirorbidae is a clade nested inside Serpulidae, spirorbins are treated here as subfamily Spirorbinae and their traditionally recognized subfamilies are thus lowered to the tribes Paralaeospirini, Spirorbini, Circeini, Romanchellini, Pileolariini and Januini. Here we report two new serpulid species, a filogranin Protis akvaplani sp. n. and a spirorbin Bushiella ( Bushiella ) barentsii sp. n. collected from off the northern Norwegian coast. Protis akvaplani differs from other species of within the genus by its tube with a high longitudinal keel, six thoracic chaetigerous segments, and short thoracic membranes ending after the 3rd segment. Generic diagnosis of the genus Protis has been emended. Bushiella ( B. ) barentsii differs from other species of the subgenus Bushiella by morphology of the opercular talon of operculum, incomplete fusing of primary operculum with brood chamber, and large tubes (up to 5 mm in coil diameter) with 1-2 distinct longitudinal ridges.


This paper defines chemical and physical characteristics of Vranec wine, grown in region of Povardarie, particular Tikvesh wine region. Vranec is a Montenegrin autochthonous grape variety and also it is one of most widespread red wine varieties in Macedonian vineyard regions. Due to grape localized geography it produces a dry red wine of unique taste that is synonymous with Balkans. The samples differ between each other by year of harvest: 2009, 2010 and 2011. All samples have finished fermentation in a bundle and then were stored in a storage tank for finished wine. The physical–chemical properties of tested wines (total acid, pH, lactic acid, acetic acid, malic acid, citric acid, reducing sugars, total sugars, volatile acids, alcohol, total and free SO2, polyphenols, anthocyanins, colour intensity and shade) were determinated by using traditional and advanced analytical techniques. Also, correlation of variation of climatic parameters during different harvest years with characteristics of produced wines was assessed.


Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UWASNs) have the wide of applications with the proliferation of the increasing underwater activities recently. Most of current studies are focused on designing protocols to improve the network performance of WASNs. However, the security of UWASNs is also an important concern since malicious nodes can easily wiretap the information transmitted in UWASNs due to the vulnerability of UWASNs. In this paper, we investigate one of security problems in UWASNs - eavesdropping behaviours. In particular, we propose a general model to quantitatively evaluate the probability of eavesdropping behaviour in UWASNs. Simulation results also validate the accuracy of our proposed model.


We present a method based on Tikhonov regularization for solving one-dimensional inverse tomography problems that arise in combustion applications. In this technique, Tikhonov regularization transforms the ill-conditioned set of equations generated by onion-peeling deconvolution into a well-conditioned set that is less susceptible to measurement errors that arise in experimental settings. The performance of this method is compared to that of onion-peeling and Abel three-point deconvolution by solving for a known field variable distribution from projected data contaminated with an artificially generated error. The results show that Tikhonov deconvolution provides a more accurate field distribution than onion-peeling and Abel three-point deconvolution and is more stable than the other two methods as the distance between projected data points decreases.


Background: Hemodialysis patients are at an increased risk of polypharmacy as they have the highest pill burden of all chronically ill patient populations, with an estimated average of 12 medications per day. Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate prescribing patterns of outpatient medications in patients receiving in-center hemodialysis. This was done to identify potential candidate medications for future quality improvement initiations to optimize prescribing. Design: We conducted a descriptive retrospective cross-sectional study in the province of Ontario, Canada, using several linked health care databases housed at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). Setting: We considered outpatient medications dispensed to patients eligible for the Ontario Drug Benefit program. Patients: Patients were receiving chronic in-center hemodialysis at one of the 69 facilities in the province of Ontario, Canada as of October 1, 2013. Measurements: We assessed whether any of our 28 study medications of interest were recently dispensed (within the prior 120 days), the type of prescribing physician, and the associated medication costs. The 28 included medications of interest (ie, proton pump inhibitors, benzodiazepines) were selected because they may not have a true indication for dialysis patients and/or there are safety concerns with their use in this population. Results are presented as median (25th, 75th percentile). Methods: We conducted this study at ICES according to a prespecified protocol approved by the Research Ethics Board at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (Toronto, Ontario). Results: A total of 3094 patients on chronic in-center hemodialysis received a study drug of interest (age: 76.5 years [SD: 7.3]), 44% women). Patients were dispensed 11 (8, 14) unique medication products with more than two-thirds of patients dispensed 9 or more different medications. The median number of annual health care visits was 7 (3-15) with more than half the cohort receiving prescriptions from 3 or more specialists. The 10 most commonly dispensed study medications cost more than 3 million dollars in direct costs in 1 year. Limitations: Our study was also subjected to some limitations of health care databases. Conclusions: Polypharmacy is frequent in in-center hemodialysis patients. To decrease polypharmacy and its associated negative outcomes, health care providers need to implement tools to optimize medication use and deprescribe medications that lack evidence for efficacy and safety in hemodialysis patients. Therefore, strategies to improve prescribing and discontinue ineffective medications warrant testing for better patient outcomes and reduced health care costs.


This article deals with the linearization problem (Levelt, 1989). Alore specifically, it focuses on the position of temporal and causal expressions in Dutch complex sentences. As these expressions may occupy several positions in the independent clause, the question is: what position do they have in texts? Is there a dominant order, and if there is, how can we explain it? In the literature, three possible ordering constraints can be identified: frame structuring, isochrony, and thematic coherence. It is unclear how these principles interact. The present study will show that the interaction of the constraints can be explained partially by cognitive economy, which states that a language user prefers to minimalize his cognitive costs during language production. This can be seen both from the point of view of the producer and from the point of view of the interpreter.


Based on the metamaterial cloaking technique, we propose the use of a new photon funnel to compress a plane electromagnetic (EM) wave. The theoretical analysis and numerical simulations indicate that the compression ratio can be designed optionally and the compressed wave beam remains the original wave shape without any distortions. Here we apply the method to EM waves but it can be applied to acoustic waves and other fields as well.


Using an ultrathin (2 nm) evaporated Ti film to replace the native SiOX of the nSi photoanode and then coating it by thin (2 and 5 nm) Ni layers, the resulting 2 nm Ni/2 nm Ti coated nSi photoanodes (without the native SiOX) reach a photocurrent onset potential of −42 mV relative to the SCE reference electrode in 1 M KOH under 1 simulated sun illumination (−202 mV relative to the potential for the oxygen evolution reaction). With increasing the thickness of the Ni layer to 5 nm, the 5 nm Ni/2 nm Ti/nSi photoanodes show 50 mV lower onset potential than 5 nm Ni directly coated on native SiOX/nSi photoanodes and exhibit a very stable photoelectrochemical performance, which keep 100% activity (10 mA cm−2 at 0.8 V vs. SCE) for ∼6.5 days. These results can be comparable to those of the typical NiOX coated nSi photoanodes with n–p+ buried homojunctions. Using a Ti layer to replace the native SiOX of the nSi photoanodes increases the conductivity of the sample and helps the charge transfer process. In addition, the interlayer Ti film absorbs the oxygen from nearby layers or from the atmosphere, making the Ti layer partially oxidized. The in situ TiOX layer formed from evaporated Ti has more electron defects than the ALD deposited TiO2, and could be responsible for the improved hole conduction process.


Author(s): Peine, John D.; Farmer, Jane Allen | Abstract: Over the last 30 years the wild hog population control program at Great Smokey Mountains National Park has experienced steady growth. The evolution has been relatively slow, and it was not until the latter part of the 1980s that sufficient funds were available to make a serious attempt at control measures. Over the years, the research program has focused on the biology of the wild hog; its reproductive rate; feeding and movement patterns; and its impact on the fauna, flora, and soils of the park. In addition, a major project was conducted to evaluate attractants and baits to increase the trapping success rate in the park. Finally, a population model has been developed to guide management as to the resources necessary to control the population at a satisfactory level. Based on lessons learned, the overall program is reviewed and recommendations are made for a more efficient and effective control program for the 1990s.


Abstract. The overarching goal of this study is to simulate subsurface N* (sensu, Gruber and Sarmiento, 1997; GS97) anomaly patterns in the North Atlantic Ocean and determine the basin wide rates of N2-fixation that are required to do so. We present results from a new Atlantic implementation of a coupled physical-biogeochemical model that includes an explicit, dynamic representation of N2-fixation with light, nitrogen, phosphorus and iron limitations, and variable stoichiometric ratios. The model is able to reproduce nitrogen, phosphorus and iron concentration variability to first order. The latter is achieved by incorporating iron deposition directly into the model's detrital iron compartment which allows the model to reproduce sharp near surface gradients in dissolved iron concentration off the west coast of Africa and deep dissolved iron concentrations that have been observed in recent observational studies. The model can reproduce the large scale N* anomaly patterns but requires relatively high rates of surface nitrogen fixation to do so (1.8×1012 moles N yr−1 from 10° N–30° N, 3.4×1012 moles N yr−1 from 25° S–65° N). In the model the surface nitrogen fixation rate patterns are not co-located with subsurface gradients in N*. Rather, the fixed nitrogen is advected away from its source prior to generating a subsurface N* anomaly. Changes in the phosphorus remineralization rate (relative to nitrogen) linearly determine the surface nitrogen fixation rate because they change the degree of phosphorus limitation, which is the dominant limitation in the Atlantic in the model. Phosphorus remineralization rate must be increased by about a factor of 2 (relative to nitrogen) in order to generate subsurface N* anomalies that are comparable to the observations. We conclude that N2-fixation rate estimates for the Atlantic (and globally) may need to be revised upward, which will help resolve imbalances in the global nitrogen budget suggested by Codispoti et al. (2001) and Codispoti (2007).


In asteroid exploring missions like HAYABUSA 2, it is often needed to compute the shape of the target asteroid using its images taken after the space craft arrives at the asteroid. In this computation process, correspondences between points on two images taken from different view direction have to be established. In order to accomplish this task automatically, image features computed by image processing techniques are used. Among many image features, it is reported that SIFT (Lowe 2004) has good performance for the current purpose (Takeishi et al. 2015). However, SIFT is protected by patent and this can be an obstacle for some situations. On the other hand, AKAZE (Alcantarilla et al. 2013), which was proposed after SIFT, has no limitation in its usage. So, we have compared the performances of SIFT and AKAZE when using them to asteroid images. In the experiments, images of an asteroid model made in JAXA were used. The number of feature points detected by SIFT (e.g. around 6000) is greater than that by AKAZE (e.g. around 3000), but even the number of points by AKAZE is enough amount for the current purpose. The error rates by SIFT and AKAZE for the correspondence computation between two images taken from different view angles are almost the same (e.g. 30 to 40 percents), and sometime the error rate by AKAZE becomes smaller the rate by SIFT (e.g. 32 vs. 36 persents). From these experimental results, we conclude AKAZE has enough performance for correspondence computation for asteroid images.


Awareness of others' interests can lead to fruitful collaborations, friendships and positive social change. Interviews of groups involved in both research and corporate work revealed a lack of awareness of shared interests among workers sharing an organizational affiliation and collocated in the same building or complex but still physically separated (e.g., by walls or floors). Our study showed that loosely coupled, co-located groups were less likely to discover shared interests in the way that many tightly collocated groups do, such as by overhearing conversations or noticing paraphernalia. Based on these findings we iteratively developed a system to capture and display shared interests. Our platform includes an e-mail sensor to discover personal interests, a search algorithm to determine shared interests, a public peripheral display and lightweight location-tracking system to convey those interests. We deployed the system to two groups for two months and found that the system did lead to increased awareness of shared interestes.


Primary hyperparathyroidism revealed by thoracic spine brown tumor and peptic ulcer bleeding is rare. We presented a case of 33-year-old male patient who was admitted with paraplegia. Thoracic spine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed extradural lesion at T4 level. He underwent surgical decompression in T4. According to histopathologic finding and elevated serum parathormone (PTH) and hypercalcemia (total serum calcium 12.1 mg/dL), the diagnosis of brown tumor was down. Ultrasonography of his neck showed a well-defined lesion of 26 × 14 × 6 mm. The day after surgery, he experienced 2 episodes of melena. Bedside upper gastrointestinal endoscopy showed gastric peptic ulcer with visible vessel. Treatment with intragastric local instillation of epinephrine and argon plasma coagulation was done to stop bleeding. After stabilization of the patient, parathyroidectomy was performed. Histologic study showed the parathyroid adenoma without any manifestation of malignancy. At discharge, serum calcium was normal (8.6 mg/dL). On 40th day of discharge, standing and walking status was normal. Learning points: Thoracic spine involvement is a very rare presentation of primary hyperparathyroidism. The issue of whether primary hyperparathyroidism increases the risk of peptic ulcer disease remains controversial. However, gastrointestinal involvement has been reported in association with classic severe primary hyperparathyroidism. The treatment of brown tumor varies from case to case.


This paper presents a new strategy to control the generated power from energy sources existing in autonomous and isolated microgrids. In this particular study, the power system consists of a power electronic converter supplied by a battery bank, which is used to form the ac grid (grid former converter), an energy source based on a wind turbine with its respective power electronic converter (grid supplier converter), and the power consumers (loads). The main objective of this proposed strategy is to control the state of charge of the battery bank limiting the voltage on its terminals by controlling the power generated by the energy sources. This is done without using dump loads or any physical communication among the power electronic converters or the individual energy source controllers. The electrical frequency of the microgrid is used to inform the power sources and their respective converters about the amount of power that they need to generate in order to maintain the battery-bank charging voltage below or equal its maximum allowable limit. Experimental results are presented to show the feasibility of the proposed control strategy.


Objectives: To analyse the policy process that led to changes to the Finance Acts in 2001 and 2002 that gave tax-reliefs to build private hospitals in Ireland. Methods: Qualitative research methods of documentary analysis and in-depth semi-structured interviews with elites involved in the policy processes, were used and examined through a conceptual framework devised for this research. Results: This research found a highly politicised and personalised policy making process where policy entrepreneurs, namely private sector interests, had significant impact on the policy process. Effective private sector lobbying encouraged the Minister of Finance to introduce the tax-reliefs for building private hospitals despite advice against this policy measure from his own officials, officials in the Department of Health and the health minister. The Finance Acts in 2001 and 2002 introduced tax-reliefs for building private hospitals, without any public or political scrutiny or consensus. Conclusion: The changes to the Finance Acts to give tax-reliefs to build private hospitals in 2001 and private for-profit hospitals 2002 is an example of a closed, personalised policy making process. It is an example of a politically imposed policy by the finance minister, where economic policy goals overrode health policy goals. The documentary analysis and elite interviews examined through a conceptual framework enabled an in-depth analysis of this specific policy making process. These methods and the framework may be useful to other policy making analyses.


Application of artificial neural network (ANN) for predicting industrial process behavior has been increasingly popular in the power sector industry. In this paper, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) based ANN model has been developed to predict the deposition rate of oxide scale on waterwall tubes of a coal fired boiler. The input parameters in the ANN model are boiler water chemistry and relevant operating parameters, namely, pH, alkalinity, total dissolved solids, specific conductivity, iron and dissolved oxygen concentration of the feed water and heat flux of a typical 250 MW coal fired boiler. The neural network architecture has been optimized using an efficient gradient based network optimization algorithm to minimize the training and testing errors rapidly during simulation runs. The parametric sensitivity of heat flux, iron content, pH and the concentrations of total dissolved solids in feed water and other operating variables on the scale deposition behavior has also been investigated. It has been observed that heat flux, iron content and pH of the feed water have a relatively predominant influence on the oxide scale deposition phenomenon. There has been very good agreement between ANN model predictions and the measured values of oxide scale deposition rate substantiated by the regression fit between these values.


While feminist legal scholarship has thrived within universities and in some sectors of legal practice, it has yet to have much impact within the judiciary or on judicial thinking. Thus, while feminist legal scholarship has generated comprehensive critiques of existing legal doctrine, there has been little opportunity to test or apply feminist knowledge in practice, in decisions in individual cases. In this book, a group of feminist legal scholars put theory into practice in judgment form, by writing the 'missing' feminist judgments in key cases. The cases chosen are significant decisions in English law across a broad range of substantive areas. The cases originate from a variety of levels but are primarily opinions of the Court of Appeal or the House of Lords. In some instances they are written in a fictitious appeal, but in others they are written as an additional concurring or dissenting judgment in the original case, providing a powerful illustration of the way in which the case could have been decided differently, even at the time it was heard. Each case is accompanied by a commentary which renders the judgment accessible to a non-specialist audience. The commentary explains the original decision, its background and doctrinal significance, the issues it raises, and how the feminist judgment deals with them differently.

The books also includes chapters examining the theoretical and conceptual issues raised by the process and practice of feminist judging, and by the judgments themselves, including the possibility of divergent feminist approaches to legal decision-making.

From the foreword by Lady Hale
'Reading this book ought to be a chastening experience for any judge who believes himself or herself to be both true to their judicial oath and a neutral observer of the world… If lawyers and judges like me have so much to learn from reading this book, then surely other, more sceptical, lawyers and judges have even more to learn…other scholars, and not only feminists, must also be fascinated by the window it opens onto the process of judicial reasoning: not the straightforward, predetermined march from A to B of popular belief, but something altogether more complicated and uncertain. And anyone will find it a very good read.'


ABSTRACT
 Social capital predicts many positive health outcomes, including food and water access and sufficiency. Hence, increasing social capital has emerged as one potential strategy to improve food and water security. In this study, we investigate whether social capital generated through participation in a community-based microlending programme based in semi-rural Kenya is associated with water and food insecurity, and explore the interconnectedness of water and food insecurity through mediation analysis. Randomly-selected women participants of the community-based programme (n = 400) were interviewed in June 2018 and again in June 2019. Survey measures included water insecurity, food insecurity and an index of social capital constructs, namely group cohesion, trust, expectations of mutual support, sense of belonging and frequency of attendance in the programme. Random effects linear regression showed that an increase the social capital index was associated with lower water and food insecurity. The mediation analysis indicated that the association between social capital and food insecurity was completely mediated by water insecurity. This study demonstrates the need for further investigation into how social capital-generating programmes can contribute to systems approaches for collaborative food and water security programmes, especially among rural communities in low- and middle-income countries.


Remote ischemic perconditioning (RPEC) is a therapeutic intervention that has been demonstrated to reduce renal ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury. However, the underlying renal protective mechanism remains unclear. The present study hypothesized that RPEC may utilize neural pathways to transfer the protective signal from the perconditioned hindlimb to the kidney. Following a right nephrectomy, rats were randomly allocated into five groups (n=6). The sham group underwent the surgical protocol only. In all other groups, the left renal pedicle was clamped for 45 min and reperfused for 24 h. The I/R control group then underwent 45 min ischemia and 24 h reperfusion (I/R) with no more intervention but the I/R-NR control group underwent the ischemia and reperfusion followed by left femoral nerve (FN) and sciatic nerve (SN) resection. The RPEC group underwent ischemia and reperfusion followed by four cycles of 5 min occlusions of the left femoral artery and 5 min reperfusion. Finally, the RPEC-NR group underwent ischemia and reperfusion followed by left FN and SN resection. Following 24 h, renal functional indices, plasma blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and creatinine (Cr) levels, urinary N-acetyl-β-glucosaminidase (NAG) release and histopathological changes were assessed. Compared with the sham group, ischemia and reperfusion in the sham and I/R control groups resulted in renal dysfunction, indicated by significantly increased levels of BUN and Cr. This was accompanied by increased urinary NAG activity and morphological damage observed in control groups. In the RPEC group, renal histology and function were significantly improved compared with the control groups. However, FN and SN resection eliminated the protection of the kidney, which was induced by RPEC. In conclusion, remote hindlimb ischemic perconditioning reduced renal I/R injury in the rat kidney in a manner that potentially involves a neural pathway.


We investigate the performance of the binary joint transform correlator (JTC) for three types of thresholding used to binarize the joint power spectrum. The first thresholding method uses the median of the joint power spectrum of the reference image, which is independent of the effect of input scene noise. The second thresholding method uses the median of the joint power spectrum of the input scene and the reference image. The third method is the subset median thresholding. The subset median is computed for each segment of the joint power spectrum and is used to threshold the same segment. The threshold computed by the second or third method is dependent on the effect of the input scene noise. The correlation performance of the binary JTC is determined for each thresholding method and is compared with the linear (conventional) JTC. Computer simulation is used to determine the correlation peak intensity, peak-to-sidelobe ratio, and correlation width for various thresholding techniques. The results indicate that the thresholding of the joint power spectrum using the methods that take into account the input scene noise produces a reasonably good correlation performance.


Campaigners for full transparency of all clinical trial data have responded with incredulity to a statement from the drug company Roche saying that it would continue to hold back certain information and results from research into its drugs.

Tracey Brown, director of the charity Sense About Science, said that the company was "on another planet."

In January Brown helped to set up the AllTrials campaign (www.alltrials.net), together with the BMJ and others, for all clinical trials to be registered and reported in full.1

So far the campaign has collected 37 889 signatures for its public petition to put pressure on researchers, funding bodies, and institutions to take action on the issue. And more than 180 organisations have signed up to the initiative, including the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the Wellcome Trust, the UK Medical Research Council and medical royal colleges, the drug company GlaxoSmithKline, and more than 90 patient groups.2

Researchers from the Cochrane Collaboration have been waiting for …


Soe, T. N., Ngampongsai, A. & Sittichaya, W. (2020). Bioactivity of some plant essential oils for seed treatment against pulse beetle, Callosobruchus maculatus (F.) (Coleoptera: Bruchidae) on mung bean. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 26 (1) 141–147 This study was conducted to screen the insecticidal activity of five plant essential oils, subsequently evaluated the seed treatment effect on mung bean seed with the selected plant oil against the pulse beetle, Callosobruchus maculatus, under laboratory conditions. Residual contact was conducted to screen insecticidal activity. Insect mortality and LC50 were performed after 24, 48 and 72 h of treatment. Clove oil was the most toxic to C. maculatus with the lowest LC50 values of 16.09, 12.99 and 7.67 μl/ml and achieved the highest mortality after 24, 48 and 72 h of exposure, respectively. Toxicity of plant oils was categorized in a descending order of clove>cinnamon>lengkuas>citronella>kaffir lime. Clove oil was selected to investigate for seed treatment on mung bean seeds to observe the bioactivity of plant oil. In seed dressing application, bioactivity of clove oil was evaluated with five different concentrations of 0.4, 0.8, 1.2, 1.6 and 2 ml/kg on mung bean seeds. Results show 100% mortality of C. maculatus adults at the concentration of 2 ml/kg seeds after 5 days of exposure, and mortality percentage of 22.50 ± 4.79 at the lowest concentration level of 0.4 ml/kg seeds after the same exposure time. Furthermore, the five concentrations of clove oil significantly reduced F1 progeny, seed damage, weight loss of mung bean, and increased the inhibition rate. Findings of this study suggest that clove oil can be used as an alternative to synthetic insecticides for integrated pest management against insect pests, especially C. maculatus, on mung bean seeds under storage conditions.


A bio-hybrid system integrating photosystem II (PSII) with artificial photocatalysts is considered as a platform to understand the solar-to-chemical energy conversion process. However, the electron transfer from PSII to artificial components remains inefficient, which hinders the favorable conversion performance. Herein, a CdS–PSII hybrid photoelectrochemical (PEC) cell is proposed for overall water splitting, where PSII and the CdS-based PEC cell are connected by an ordered multi-step electron transfer pathway comprising two redox shuttles quinone/hydroquinone and ferricyanide/ferrocyanide coupled by a graphite-based galvanic cell. The hybrid system allows overall water splitting with 8.5 μmol O2 h−1 and 17.7 μmol H2 h−1 under simulated solar light, corresponding to a solar-to-hydrogen efficiency of 0.34%. Moreover, the tandem light absorption from CdS to PSII both improves the light utilization efficiency and prolongs the lifetime of PSII. This work may inspire new approaches to achieve Z-scheme water splitting in the field of artificial photosynthesis.


Any natural team or work group provides an excellent vehicle for learning and cross-training among group members and for development of individual members as well as the organization: Individual development within an organization must be reinforced in a team or group, or new skills will quickly be forgotten from lack of support on the job. For the same reason, group/team development within an organization must be pursued as a group working on skills together. Organization development development of an entire firm, agency, division, or office must be done in small, team-size groups to be effective.


The paper presents the results of survey, dedicated to synthesis of metal oxide coatings on porous materials applied for implant surgery (stainless steel 12X18H9T, titanium alloy and high-purity niobium VT5). This article examines kinetic features of electrochemical formation of anodic oxide coatings on steel, niobium and titanium. It is shown that for steel anodic treatment method does not provide a reliable surface passivation (no current decay, the surface indicates the transition to the passive state). Analysis of polarization dependences obtained on niobium and titanium in electrolytes with an activator (F-), indicates surface passivation (current slump), and at potentials above 2 on the surface of a transition curves in transpassive state (as evidenced by the current increase). Consequently, it can be concluded that presence of F- results surface activation of titanium and niobium electrode (F- oxide reacts to form water-soluble complexes) that promotes nucleation and formation of pores of the porous structure of the oxide coating. SEM results verify the presence of self-organized porous oxide film synthesized on titanium and niobium in solutions containing F-.


Abstract. In this paper we describe measurements of volatile organic compounds (VOC) made using a Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometer (PTR-MS) aboard the UK Facility for Atmospheric Airborne Measurements during the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses (AMMA) campaign. Observations were made during approximately 85 h of flying time between 17 July and 17 August 2006, above an area between 4° N and 18° N and 3° W and 4° E, encompassing ocean, mosaic forest, and the Sahel desert. High time resolution observations of counts at mass to charge (m/z) ratios of 42, 59, 69, 71, and 79 were used to calculate mixing ratios of acetonitrile, acetone, isoprene, the sum of methyl vinyl ketone and methacrolein, and benzene respectively using laboratory-derived humidity-dependent calibration factors. Strong spatial associations between vegetation and isoprene and its oxidation products were observed in the boundary layer, consistent with biogenic emissions followed by rapid atmospheric oxidation. Acetonitrile, benzene, and acetone were all enhanced in airmasses which had been heavily influenced by biomass burning. Benzene and acetone were also elevated in airmasses with urban influence from cities such as Lagos, Cotonou, and Niamey. The observations provide evidence that both deep convection and mixing associated with fair-weather cumulus were responsible for vertical redistribution of VOC emitted from the surface. Profiles over the ocean showed a depletion of acetone in the marine boundary layer, but no significant decrease for acetonitrile.


The meanings and practices of space shape how cities are understood and governed. This article argues that space is central to understandings of mobility and practices of regulation in the city. Undertaking an analysis of the regulation of Muslim pilgrims (Hajis) in colonial Bombay (Mumbai) from 1880 to 1914, this article explores urban governance discourses around race, religion and public health at a variety of scales. It investigates the way that Hajis were problematized through these discourses, and targeted as threats to elite power and prosperity in the specific context of Bombay as a global shipping and economic hub. I conclude that elite conceptions of the city shape the governance of problematized bodies in ways which reinforce the meanings and politics of mobility and space. Elite understandings of movement and the city itself shape the practices and targets of urban regulation and control.


Objective Children born very preterm (VP; <32 weeks) are at risk for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders (ADHD). ADHD in VP children have a different clinical presentation to ADHD in the general population, and therefore VP children with difficulties may not come to the teacher's attention in school. We have assessed ADHD symptoms to determine whether VP children's difficulties may go undetected in the classroom. Design Parents and teachers of 117 VP and 77 term-born children completed the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire to assess hyperactivity/inattention, emotional, conduct and peer problems, and the Du Paul ADHD Rating Scale-IV to assess inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity symptoms. Special Educational Needs (SEN) were assessed using teacher report. Group differences in outcomes were adjusted for socio-economic deprivation. Results Parents and teachers rated VP children with significantly higher mean Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire hyperactivity/inattention scores, and parents rated them with more clinically significant hyperactivity/inattention difficulties than term-born controls (Relative Risk (RR) 4.0; 95% CI 1.4 to 11.4). Examining ADHD dimensions, parents and teachers rated VP children with significantly more inattention symptoms than controls, and parents rated them with more clinically significant inattention (RR 4.8; 95% CI 1.4 to 16.0); in contrast, there was no excess of hyperactivity/impulsivity. After excluding children with SEN, VP children still had significantly higher inattention scores than controls but there was no excess of hyperactivity/impulsivity. Conclusions VP children are at greater risk for symptoms of inattention than hyperactivity/impulsivity. Inattention was significantly increased among VP children without identified SEN suggesting that these problems may be difficult to detect in school. Raising teachers' awareness of inattention problems may be advantageous in enabling them to identify VP children who may benefit from intervention.


All conventional aircraft flights start at a point of departure with a take-off and end at the destination with a landing. During this phase, the aircraft is transferred from the airborne state to the ground-borne state and brought to a halt. Although landing an aircraft looks simple but in reality it is difficult to predict the performance during this phase due to its very dynamic nature, a high sensitivity to piloting technique and uncertainties in aerodynamics. As this critical manoeuvre (beside takeoff) takes place in close proximity to the ground, and at a low airspeed ('dirty'), there is a relatively a high risk to the safety of the aircraft and its occupants. A significant number of incidents and accidents occur during this crucial phase in which the aircraft could not be stopped on the runway during landing-known as overruns. Although it has been a problem for quite a long time, unfortunately, not much has been learned. This paper presents some important and interesting facts regarding runway overruns and the crucial aspects during the penultimate stages of the landing process together with the airworthiness and regulatory requirements.


We build upon new developments in the international trade literature to isolate and quantify the long-run economic impacts of tariff changes on the United States and the global economy. In particular, we apply the most recent data and trade elasticity estimates to the Ricardian model of Caliendo and Parro (2015) to quantify the long-run impacts of the recently applied and proposed tariff changes, including the U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and the rounds of additional tariffs between the United States and China. To fit the reality of the current trade policy shift, our analysis also allows for quotas and endogenizes trade balances. Overall, our results suggest that the newly imposed and proposed tariff schemes imply considerable changes in trade flows and sectoral output reallocations, but modest impacts on long-run aggregate prices and output levels.


The origins of modern human behaviour have been construed by some archaeologists as a question of the origins of symbolism. In this thesis I take the position that consciousness is embodied and that body modifications are a key element in generating symbolic behaviour, and I develop criteria by which body modification tools can be recognised archaeologically.  The possibility that body art preceded the first unequivocal archaeological evidence of symbolic behaviour has been long acknowledged but regarded as an intractable problem because of its archaeological invisibility. Archaeological evidence for body modifications shows that they were practiced from the Upper Palaeolithic, but the reliance on preservation of skeletal material and soft tissue, and the difficulty of interpreting ancient art, means that there are limitations to establishing their presence prior to this. The most abundant archaeological remains in the Palaeolithic are stone tools, and I demonstrate that in more recent contexts these are routinely used for head shaving, scarification, and surgery such as finger amputations and genital modifications. The presence of use-wear and human body residues on stone tool edges provides a means of detecting symbolic body practices that is not dependent on stylistic judgements of stone tool form, controversial "non-utilitarian" art objects, burials or changes in brain structure and size, none of which have satisfactorily proved that symbolic behaviour existed before 60,000 BP. To test this I analyse a collection of flaked bottle glass razors used for shaving the head from the Andaman Islands. The results of this analysis are compared to a further series of glass and obsidian razors from Antigua, New Guinea, Mexico and Egypt, and experimental obsidian razors. I conclude that the combination of residues such as blood and hair, and wear traces that indicate a scraping/slicing motion, allow razor use to be identified on stone tools. There is ample archaeological evidence to show that blood residues on stone tools can survive up to 300,000 years, and hair is also extremely well preserved. If body modification tools can be identified prior to 60,000 BP they would provide evidence for the use of complex symbolic constructs and hence an earlier genesis of language than currently accepted.


For many disciplines, students are required to learn to work collaboratively in groups and to perform team-based activities such as brainstorming, collaborative problem solving, and cooperative decision-making. To support the learning of such team-based processes, many university courses require students to engage in short "group challenges." These challenges often comprise in-class experiences in which students form small teams and attempt to solve a simulated problem of practice. Upon completion of the challenge, students are usually asked to reflect upon their experiences and to evaluate their group dynamics, their collective time management, and other factors that might have contributed to the success and/or failure of the team effort. A common problem is students, like most people, are generally poor at selfreflection and have a difficult time objectively assessing their personal behavior as well as the behavior of their group. To address this problem, time-lapse video has been employed as a novel pedagogical intervention for enhancing student reflection in group exercises. Under the protocol, groups were video taped using time-lapse technology that visually compresses time, for example compressing a sixty-minute work session into a sixty-second high-speed video. We postulated that by watching the high-speed video of their own collaborative efforts, the students would more readily recognize patterns of behavior they otherwise would have missed: becoming more insightful when assessing group dynamics, division of labor, time management, and the reasons for the success or failure of their collaborative effort. This paper describes our preliminary efforts to develop and test such a time-lapse video intervention for university-level group projects and describes initial observations regarding the effect of this intervention upon student reflections.


Vehicle theft is a universal problem. The statistic of the vehicle gets stolen or
vandalized increases at an alarming rate every year. For example in Malaysia alone,
for the year 2004, it was reported that about 26,566 cars were stolen which represents
about 33% increases compared to the statistic of the same period of the previous
year. This will lead to an increase in the vehicle insurance premium which has to be
paid by consumers. Therefore, it can be concluded that the security systems installed
by the vehicle manufacturer are not effective enough.
To solve this problem, a wireless vehicle security system which implements mobile
communication protocol is proposed. The control and communication between the
user and the proposed system are achieved through a short message services (SMS)
protocol available in the cellular phone. The proposed system is interfaced with an
immobilizer and a remote keyless entry system.The proposed system is capable of informing the user through the user's cellular
phone if the car is vandalized, tampered or stolen by an intruder. At the same time
the remote keyless entry system and the immobilizer systems will activate the alarm.
The system will produce human voice instead of producing an alarm sound. By using
the proposed system, the user is also capable of controlling the car's door remotely.
The effective communication coverage of this system is based on the user's cellular
phone coverage. The proposed system consists both hardware and software parts.
The hardware components include a microcontroller, an immobilizer, a remote
keyless entry (RKE) system, a GSM modem, a voiced-alarm module, a cellular
phone and a remote control of the RKE system. The software part includes a program
controller interface. The result of simulation and practical tests conducted on the
proposed system, demonstrate that the proposed system is successfully designed and
fabricated.


Aerodynamic forces and moments have been obtained in the Langley 9- by 12-inch blowdown tunnel on an external store and on a 45 degree swept-back wing-body combination measured separately at Mach numbers from 0.70 to 1.96. The wing was cantilevered and had an aspect ratio of 4.0; the store was independently sting-mounted and had a Douglas Aircraft Co. (DAC) store shape. The angle of attack range was from -3 degrees to 12 degrees and the Reynolds number (based on wing mean aerodynamic chord) varied from 1.2 x10(6) to 1.7 x 10(6). Wing-body transonic forces and moments have been compared with data of a geometrically similar full-scale model tested in the Langley 16-foot and 8-foot transonic tunnels in order to aid in the evaluation of transonic-tunnel interference. The principal effect of the store, for the position tested, was that of delaying the wing-fuselage pitch-up tendency to higher angles of attack at Mach numbers from 0.70 to 0.90 in a manner similar to that of a wing chord extension. The most critical loading condition on the store was that due to side force, not only because the loads were of large magnitude but also because they were in the direction of least structural strength of the supporting pylon. These side loads were greatest at high angles of attack in the supersonic speed range. Removal of the supporting pylon (or increasing the gap between the store and wing) reduced the values of the variation of side-force coefficientwith angle of attack by about 50 percent at all test Mach numbers, indicating that important reductions in store side force may be realized by proper design or location of the necessary supporting pylon. A change of the store skew angle (nose inboard) was found to relieve the excessive store side loads throughout the Mach number range. It was also determined that the relative position of the fuselage nose to the store can appreciably affect the store side forces at supersonic speeds.


Reconstruction after substantial osseous, cutaneous, and muscular tissue loss following a mandibular resection is a challenge. The use of a fibular free flap is an outstanding, but delicate, treatment option. These grafts, using the double-barrel technique, can achieve an almost complete reconstruction of the mandibular defect. The challenge posed by these treatments is to achieve an end result that is both functional and esthetically pleasing-an endeavor that requires a defined prosthetic plan prior to complete microsurgical reconstruction. Using a detailed clinical case, this article discusses the importance of planning the mandible reconstruction with double-barrel fibular graft in view of an implant-supported fixed partial denture. Immediate implant loading was even possible in this case. This approach allows improvement of the final esthetic and functional result of such a complex rehabilitation. Maxillofacial reconstructive surgery should seek to establish a near-as-normal anatomic situation that will allow a permanent implant rehabilitation that is both esthetic and durable.


Motivated by questions about secure multi-party computation, we introduce and study a new natural representation of functions by polynomials, which we term randomizing polynomials. "Standard" low-degree polynomials over a finite field are easy to compute with a small number of communication rounds in virtually any setting for secure computation. However, most Boolean functions cannot be evaluated by a polynomial whose degree is smaller than their input size. We get around this barrier by relaxing the requirement of evaluating f into a weaker requirement of randomizing f: mapping the inputs of f along with independent random inputs into a vector of outputs, whose distribution depends only on the value of f. We show that degree-3 polynomials are sufficient to randomize any function f, relating the efficiency of such a randomization to the branching program size of f. On the other hand, by characterizing the exact class of Boolean functions which can be randomized by degree-2 polynomials, we show that 3 is the minimal randomization degree of most functions. As an application, randomizing polynomials provide a powerful, general, and conceptually simple tool for the design of round-efficient secure protocols. Specifically, the secure evaluation of any function can be reduced to a secure evaluation of degree-3 polynomials. One corollary of this reduction is that two (respectively, three) communication rounds are sufficient for k parties to compute any Boolean function f of their inputs, with perfect information-theoretic [k-1/3]-privacy (resp., [k-1/2]-privacy), and communication complexity which is at most quadratic in the branching program size of f (with a small probability of one-sided error).


Published: Justin H. Dion and Nicholas M Smith, Consumer Protection—Exploring Private Causes of Action for Victims of Data Breaches, 41 W. NEW ENG. L. REV. 253 (2019).Data breaches are becoming a norm in modern life. Every year it seems that bigger and bigger attacks are launched, and more and more individuals are harmed. The law has responded by increasing states' ability to prosecute cybercriminals. A glaring hole exists in this protection though. The state is largely an unharmed party. The real harm is done to individual citizens affected by the breaches. Their data is compromised, their identities are stolen, and their livelihoods are placed at risk. This Article will analyze the issue and propose a solution for increased consumer protection in addition to the current criminal punishments.


The principal aim of the study has been to examine the effects on travel to and from South America of the introduction of a new direct air link to Argentina. It is proposed that this new air route from Melbourne to Buenos Aires should follow a great circle route across the Antarctic so as to shorten the distance between the two centres from approximately 10,000 miles to approximately 7,200 miles.
In achieving this result the study implicitly has two major sections. The first of these involves the estimation of factors affecting travel to and from Australia. This initially involves recognition of some of tiie main features and problems encountered in demand modelling techniques. Travel is estimated in terms of over- . seas visitors coming to Australia and Australian residents travelling overseas using 1980 cross-section data.
Having estimated the magnitude of various factors affecting travel these results are then applied to the South American countries most affected by the direct air link. Application of the model para-meters enable forecasts to be made of the likely generation of travel both to and from Australia with the shortened, direct air route.
Chapter two undertakes a review of travel demand modelling techniques. As well as providing a discussion of various types of demand studies carried out it emphasises some of the more important issues considered to apply to the new direct air route.
The gravity model approach is introduced and then extended to techniques usedin city-pair demand modelling. The purpose of this discussion is to draw out possible implications for model coefficients . of increased travel distance and also to show the role of various impedance factors to travel. This:serves as a foundation for the discussion of factors affecting international air travel demand.
The area of international air travel demand modelling focuses primarily on cross-section. data models. However, some of the more pertinent time series approaches are discussed to clarify important points. One such issue is the specification of the dependent variable. Another centres around the need to disaggregate travel by journey purpose; a factor often passed over in travel demand modelling.
The dissertation then proceeds in Chapter three to specify a model for explaining travel to Australia from overseas countries. This procedure incorporates established demand model techniques and statistical measures. The results are then applied to the South American air link to determine the likely magnitude of travel generation to Australia. This is carried out in Chapter four.
To complete the estimation process a similar demand model is formulated to explain overseas travel by Australians. This has a two-fold purpose. Firstly it enables a total picture of travel generation between Australia and South America to be given and secondly it permits a comparison of the relative magnitude. of the factors affecting international air travel to and from Australia. General implications from such a comparison are discussed in Chapter seven along with conclusions on the potential or the direct polar air route.


Many problems in machine learning and statistics can be formulated as (generalized) eigenproblems. In terms of the associated optimization problem, computing linear eigenvectors amounts to finding critical points of a quadratic function subject to quadratic constraints. In this paper we show that a certain class of constrained optimization problems with nonquadratic objective and constraints can be understood as nonlinear eigenproblems. We derive a generalization of the inverse power method which is guaranteed to converge to a nonlinear eigenvector. We apply the inverse power method to 1-spectral clustering and sparse PCA which can naturally be formulated as nonlinear eigenproblems. In both applications we achieve state-of-the-art results in terms of solution quality and runtime. Moving beyond the standard eigenproblem should be useful also in many other applications and our inverse power method can be easily adapted to new problems.


Shared mobility—the shared use of a vehicle, bicycle, or other mode—is an innovative transportation strategy that enables users to gain short-term access to transportation modes on an "as-needed" basis. Shared mobility includes various forms of carsharing, bikesharing, ridesharing, on-demand ride services, and microtransit. Additionally, smartphone and mobile "apps" aggregate and optimize these mobility services and are critical to many shared mobility modes. Courier network services connect couriers using their personal vehicles or bicycles with freight and seek to disrupt the existing package and food delivery industry. The emergence of automated vehicles into shared mobility could further transform the passenger and freight transportation system, with greater emphasis on shared mobility. This chapter describes the different models that have emerged in the shared mobility space and reviews research that has quantified the environmental, social, and transportation-related impacts of these services. The authors also project future trends as automated vehicles begin to emerge.


Recent studies of irregular applications such as finite-element mesh generators and data-clustering codes have shown that these applications have a generalized data parallelism arising from the use of iterative algorithms that perform computations on elements of worklists. In some irregular applications, the computations on different elements are independent. In other applications, there may be complex patterns of dependences between these computations.
 The Galois system was designed to exploit this kind of irregular data parallelism on multicore processors. Its main features are (i) two kinds of set iterators for expressing worklist-based data parallelism, and (ii) a runtime system that performs optimistic parallelization of these iterators, detecting conflicts and rolling back computations as needed. Detection of conflicts and rolling back iterations requires information from class implementors.
 In this paper, we introduce mechanisms to improve the execution efficiency of Galois programs: data partitioning, data-centric work assignment, lock coarsening, and over-decomposition. These mechanisms can be used to exploit locality of reference, reduce mis-speculation, and lower synchronization overhead. We also argue that the design of the Galois system permits these mechanisms to be used with relatively little modification to the user code. Finally, we present experimental results that demonstrate the utility of these mechanisms.


The aim of this review is to describe the properties and uses of the more recently available anticonvulsant agents. The goal of epilepsy treatment is to achieve total seizure freedom with no side effects. Despite the appropriate use of anticonvulsants approximately 25% of children will continue to experience seizures. The development of new anticonvulsants is therefore imperative. Since the late 1980s there have been a number of new anticonvulsant agents with various modes of action and differing applications in clinical practice. Although this potentially increases the therapeutic options available to clinicians, the increased choice of drugs may also lead to irrational polypharmacy and some agents are recognised to increase seizures in certain epilepsy syndromes.

Epilepsy is a common problem in childhood with an annual incidence of 60/100 000 children.1 The goal of epilepsy treatment is to achieve complete seizure freedom without any adverse side effects. When considering all the childhood epilepsies, approximately 25–30% of children will continue to experience seizures that are resistant to all currently available antiepileptic drugs. The term "antiepileptic" is somewhat of a misnomer because all that the current antiepileptic therapies are able to achieve—with the exception of epilepsy surgery—is to prevent seizures in someone who has epilepsy. Most but not all of these drugs are effective against tonic-clonic convulsions, which is why antiepileptic drugs may also be called "anticonvulsants". The antiepileptic drugs that are currently available have no effect on the underlying cause of the seizures. Given the current limitations of therapy, it remains important to try and identify new drugs which are not only effective in preventing seizures and are safe, but which may also be able to act directly on the underlying cause of the epilepsy, or at least modify the pathogenesis of the seizures.

Modern epilepsy treatment began in 1857 with the introduction …


This document describes the use of the Stateless IP/ICMP Translation
Algorithm (SIIT) in an IPv6 Internet Data Center (IDC). In this
deployment model, traffic from legacy IPv4-only clients on the
Internet is translated to IPv6 upon reaching the IDC operator's
network infrastructure. From that point on, it may be treated the same
as traffic from native IPv6 end users. The IPv6 endpoints may be
numbered using arbitrary (non-IPv4-translatable) IPv6 addresses. This
facilitates a single-stack IPv6-only network infrastructure, as well
as efficient utilization of public IPv4 addresses. The primary
audience is IDC operators who are deploying IPv6, running out of
available IPv4 addresses, and/or feeling that dual stack causes
undesirable operational complexity.


Policy evaluation is a critical step in the approximate solution of large Markov decision processes (MDPs), typically requiring O(|S|3) to directly solve the Bellman system of |S| linear equations (where |S| is the state space size in the discrete case, and the sample size in the continuous case). In this paper we apply a recently introduced multiscale framework for analysis on graphs to design a faster algorithm for policy evaluation. For a fixed policy π, this framework efficiently constructs a multiscale decomposition of the random walk Pπ associated with the policy π. This enables efficiently computing medium and long term state distributions, approximation of value functions, and the direct computation of the potential operator (I - γPπ)-1 needed to solve Bellman's equation. We show that even a preliminary non-optimized version of the solver competes with highly optimized iterative techniques, requiring in many cases a complexity of O(|S|).


Purpose – The aim of this paper is to highlight successful strategies leaders can use to sustain and grow business during the economic business cycle variation.

Design/methodology/approach – Opinions were based on 32 interviews conducted during December-2010 to November-2011 with CXO's, Business/Functional Heads from seven leading Indian IT/ITES public listed companies that partnered and delivered solutions to global corporations including Fortune-500 companies. One of the interview queries was to share experience, views and opinions on what works during recession and how should one tackle recovery.

Findings – This paper offers 11 handy strategies for practitioners like executives, leaders and managers to manage the economic cycles better. These common findings from several cases are summarized supported with specific examples. They are: cost management need not go overboard; incessantly monitor, control and sustain; communication, culture and empathy helps; quality bolsters empathy; stay invested to be relevant; innovation needs to be disruptive; diversification leverages law of averages; people are imperative; customers need to be venerated; change and risk management is inevitable; coherence and prudence needed.

Practical implications – The paper provides strategic insights and practical solutions that can protect organizations world-wide from failing during economic recessions.

Social implications – The paper provides strategic insights and practical solutions that can have a broader social impact.

Originality/value – The paper presents the arguments in a condensed and easy-to-digest format supported with live organization examples for easy comprehension.


We present an updated, subjective list of the extant, non-marine ostracod genera and species of the world, with their distributions in the major zoogeographical regions, as well as a list of the genera in their present hierarchical taxonomic positions. The list includes all taxa described and taxonomic alterations made up to 1 July 2018. Taxonomic changes include 17 new combinations, 5 new names, 1 emended specific name and 11 new synonymies (1 tribe, 4 genera, 6 species). Taking into account the recognized synonymies, there are presently 2330 subjective species of non-marine ostracods in 270 genera. The most diverse family in non-marine habitats is the Cyprididae, comprising 43.2% of all species, followed by the Candonidae (29.0%), Entocytheridae (9.1%) and the Limnocytheridae (7.0%). An additional 13 families comprise the remaining 11.8% of described species. The Palaearctic zoogeographical region has the greatest number of described species (799), followed by the Afrotropical region with 453 species and the Nearctic region with 439 species. The Australasian and Neotropical regions each have 328 and 333 recorded species, respectively, while the Oriental region has 271. The vast majority of non-marine ostracods (89.8%) are endemic to one zoogeographical region, while only six species are found in six or more regions. We also present an additional list with 'uncertain species', which have neither been redescribed nor re-assessed since 1912, and which are excluded from the main list; a list of taxonomic changes presented in the present paper; a table with the number of species and % per family; and a table with numbers of new species described in the 20-year period between 1998 and 2017 per zoogeographical region. Two figures visualize the total number of species and endemic species per zoogeographical region, and the numbers of new species descriptions per decade for all families and the three largest families since 1770, respectively.


Globally the field of doctoral education is changing, with a move towards more internationalisation and away from traditional education. More PhD educational programmes use blended and e-learning elements and have an increasing number of working professionals enrolled in a PhD, or PhD students with jobs engaged in writing a dissertation. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the PhD scene reflects this change. Yet, not much is known about PhD capacity in Africa. While in terms of scientific output the continent is left behind, and thus doctoral education is an area to focus on, research on the effectiveness of doctoral education, and how to improve the educational offering is lacking. In this study, we offer an update of the literature related to doctoral education in Africa, an overview of the needs in the field according to both African PhD fellows and their supervisors, and a discussion on the role of e-learning innovations in supporting capacity building.


The macro porous adsorption resin produced in this experiment mainly uses dipole dichloride etc. as the material, a certain proportion of mixed solution composed of pyridine and 1, 4-dioxane as the composite oxidant. Then adding a certain proportion of mixed solution composed of cyclopean and paraffin in the homogeneous solution of cellulose as the photogenic agent. As a result, these materials will polymerize, and generate the resin. Among these materials, the cellulose is polymeric monomer, dipole dichloride is cross linker, and they crosslink and polymerize each other, forming the porous skeletal structure of the macro porous adsorption resin, which is a kind of cross linked polymer consisting of ion exchange group. For the synthetic macro porous resin, using Fourier infrared spectrometer for pressed characterization, and scanning electron microscope (SEM) for resin pore-forming characterization, the result shows that the new macro porous resin has been synthesized. This paper taking ruin as adsorb ate explores the adsorption property of the synthetic macro porous resin to glycoside material, including property of equilibrium adsorption, static adsorption and adsorption. Meanwhile the influence of different solvents on the resin adsorption property is testified. After a general comparison, we have found that the resin has the strongest adsorption property in ethanol solvent, while for adsorption, the best effect is reached when using water as the elegant. What's more, the adsorption data shows that the adsorption of ruin on the very resin conforms to the Freundlich isothermal adsorption equation.


Although differential transform method (DTM) is a highly efficient technique in the approximate analytical solutions of fractional differential equations, applicability of this method to the system of fractional integro-differential equations in higher dimensions has not been studied in detail in the literature. The major goal of this paper is to investigate the applicability of this method to the system of two-dimensional fractional integral equations, in particular to the two-dimensional fractional integro-Volterra equations. We deal with two different types of systems of fractional integral equations having some initial conditions. Computational results indicate that the results obtained by DTM are quite close to the exact solutions, which proves the power of DTM in the solutions of these sorts of systems of fractional integral equations.


Abstract In the studies on selection and population genetics of forest trees that include the analysis of genotype × environment interaction (GE), the use of biplot graphs is relatively rare. This article describes the models and analytic methods useful in the biplot graphs, which enable the analyses of mega-environments, selection of the testing environment, as well as the evaluation of genotype stability. The main method presented in the paper is the GGE biplot method (G - genotype effect, GE -genotype × environment interaction effect). At the same time, other methods have also been referred to, such as, SVD (singular value decomposition), PCA (principal component analysis), linear-bilinear SREG model (sites regression), linear-bilinear GREG model (genotypes regression) and AMMI (additive main effects multiplicative interaction). The potential of biplot method is presented based on the data on growth height of 20 European beech genotypes (Fagus sylvatica L.), generated from real data concerning selection trials and carried out in 5 different environments. The combined ANOVA was performed using fixed- -effects, as well as mixed-effects models, and significant interaction GE was shown. The GGE biplot graphs were constructed using PCA. The first principal component (GGE1) explained 54%, and the second (GGE2) explained more than 23% of the total variation. The similarity between environments was evaluated by means of the AEC method, which allowed us to determine one mega-environment that comprised of 4 environments. None of the tested environments represented the ideal one for trial on genotype selection. The GGE biplot graphs enabled: (a) the detection of a stable genotype in terms of tree height (high and low), (b) the genotype evaluation by ranking with respect to the height and genotype stability, (c) determination of an ideal genotype, (d) the comparison of genotypes in 2 chosen environments.


The Diplomacy of Pragmatism sets Britain's role in the formation of NATO, not in the context of orthodox, revisionist or post-revisionist approaches to the Cold War, but in terms of what has become known as "depolarization." This approach emphasizes the distinctive and leading roles of other countries, apart from the Soviet Union and the United States, in the early Cold War period. In focusing on Britain's role there is no attempt to be chauvinistic. The key role of other states in the formation of NATO is acknowledged. Britain certainly did not establish NATO single-handedly. Nor was British diplomacy wholly consistent or completely successful throughout ther period covered. Different strands of policy, focusing on the United States, Europe and a "Third Power" global role, struggled for pre-eminence. Foreign policy and global strategy were not always well-coordinated. Nevertheless, despite the failures, it is argued that Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, made a decisive contribution to postwar diplomacy by his pragmatic and patient attempts to coordinate the policies of Western European states together with the United States and Canada. By 1949, a new system of European security had been developed in the context of rapidly changing domestic and international events. The author argues that, despite the differences, there are important lessons to be learned from postwar diplomacy by today's statesmen as they struggle to build another new European security system in the post-Cold War era.


We model the Penman potential evaporation (PE) over all land areas of the globe for the 25-yr period 1983–2008, relying on radiation transfer models (RTMs) for the shortwave and longwave fluxes. Penman's PE is determined by two factors: available energy for evaporation and ground to atmosphere vapour transfer. Input to the PE model and RTMs comprises satellite cloud and aerosol data, as well as data from reanalyses. PE is closely linked to pan evaporation, whose trends have sparked controversy in the community, since the factors responsible for the observed pan evaporation trends are not determined with consensus. Our particular interest is the temporal evolution of PE, and the provided insight to the observed trends of pan evaporation. We examine the decadal trends of PE and various related physical quantities, such as net solar flux, net longwave flux, water vapour saturation deficit and wind speed. Our findings are the following: Global warming has led to a larger water vapour saturation deficit. The periods 1983–1989, 1990–1999, and 2000–2008 were characterised by decreasing, increasing, and slightly decreasing PE, respectively. In these last 25 yr, global dimming/brightening cycles generally increased the available energy for evaporation. PE trends seem to follow more closely the trends of energy availability than the trends of the atmospheric capability for vapour transfer, at most locations on the globe, with trends in the Northern hemisphere significantly larger than in the Southern. These results support the hypothesis that global potential evaporation trends are attributed primarily to secular changes in the radiation fluxes, and secondarily to vapour transfer considerations.


Abstract. As simply based on fundamental logic and on the concepts of cause and effect, an epistemological examination of the geochemical analyses performed on the Vostok ice cores invalidates the marked greenhouse effect on past climate usually assigned to CO2 and CH4. In agreement with the determining role assigned to Milankovitch cycles, temperature has, instead, constantly remained the long-term controlling parameter during the past 423 kyr, which, in turn, determined both CO2 and CH4 concentrations, whose variations exerted, at most, a minor feedback on temperature itself. If not refuted, the demonstration indicates that the greenhouse effect of CO2 on 20th century and today's climate remains to be documented, as already concluded from other evidence. The epistemological weakness of current simulations originates from the fact that they do not rely on any independent evidence for the influence of greenhouse gases on climate over long enough periods of time. The validity of models will, in particular, not be demonstrated as long as at least the most important features of climate changes, namely the glacial–interglacial transitions and the differing durations of interglacial periods, remain unaccounted for. Similarly, the constant 7 kyr time lag between temperature and CO2 decreases following deglaciation is another important feature that needs to be understood. Considered in this light, the current climate debate should be considered as being the latest of the great controversies that have punctuated the march of the Earth sciences, although its markedly differs from the preceding ones by its most varied social, environmental, economical and political ramifications.


Abstract. Land use is an important variable in remote sensing which describes the functions carried out on a piece of land in order to obtain benefits and is especially useful to the personnel working in the fields of urban management and planning. The land use information is maintained by national mapping agencies in geo-spatial databases. Commonly, land use data is stored in the form of polygon objects; the label of the object indicates land use. The main goal of classification of land use objects is to update an existing database in an automatic process. Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been widely used to tackle this task utilizing high resolution aerial images (and derived data such as digital surface model). One big challenge classifying polygons is to deal with the large variation in their geometrical extent. For this challenge, we adopt the method of Yang et al. (2019) to decompose polygons into regular patches of fixed size. The decomposition leads to two sets of polygons: small and large, where the former suffers from a lower identification rate. In this paper, we propose CNN methods which incorporate dense connectivity and integrate it with intermediate information via global average pooling to improve land use classification, mainly focusing on small polygons. We present different network variants by incorporating intermediate information via global average pooling from different stages of the network. We test our methods on two sites; our experiments show that the dense connectivity and integration of intermediate information has a positive effect not only on the classification accuracy on the whole but also on the identification of small polygons.


Production of and demand for Canadian canola meal have been increased yearly. In order to improve the competitiveness of canola meal domestically and internationally, as well as to develop potential markets for canola meal, it is necessary to develop canola meal-based products that have high feed values and can be easily transported. The objectives of this research were: 1) to investigate the effects of temperature and time of conditioning during pelleting process on the nutritive values of canola meal in terms of chemical profiles, protein and carbohydrate subfractions, and energy values, using the AOAC procedures, CNCPS v6.1 and NRC (2001), respectively; 2) to detect the effects of temperature and time of conditioning during the pelleting process on rumen degradation and intestinal digestion characteristics and predicted protein supply of canola meal, using the in situ procedure, the three-step in vitro procedure, and the NRC 2001 model; and 3) to determine pelletinginduced changes in spectral characteristics of molecular structures of canola meal using Attenuated Total Reflectance Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) with univariate and multivariate analysis, and reveal the relationship between molecular structures of protein and carbohydrate and nutrient values, rumen degradation and intestinal digestion characteristics, and predicted protein supply of canola meal. Three different conditioning temperatures (70, 80 and 90oC) and two different conditioning time (50 and 75 sec) were applied in this research. Two different batches of canola meal from a commercial feed company were selected. A randomized complete block design (RCBD) with 3 × 2 factorial arrangement was employed in this research. Molecular spectral functional groups related to protein, cellulosic compounds, and carbohydrates were used in the spectral study. This research indicated: 1) soluble crude protein (SCP) was decreased and neutral detergent insoluble CP (NDICP) was increased with increasing temperature; 2) the lowest protein rumen degradation of pellets was observed at conditioning temperature of 90 oC and protein rumen degradation was increased by pelleting; 3) the amount of protein digested in the small intestine tended to increase with increasing conditioning temperature; 4) pelleting under different temperatures and time in the current study shifted the protein digestion site to the rumen, rather than to the small intestine; 5) with respect to predicted protein supply, based on the NRC 2001 model, increasing conditioning temperature tended to increase the metabolizable protein supply of canola meal pellets to dairy cattle; 6) changes in the molecular structure of canola meal induced by pelleting can be detected by ATR-FTIR; 7) not only protein molecular structure characteristics but also carbohydrate molecular structure


Thin-film deposition of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) is now possible, but little is known regarding the microscopic nature of hybrid hetero-interfaces. We first assess optimal substrate combinations for coherent epitaxy of MOFs based on a lattice matching procedure. We then perform a detailed quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical investigation of the growth of (011) MOF-5 on (110) rutile TiO2. The lowest energy interface configuration involves a bidentate connection between two TiO6 polyhedra with deprotonation of terephthalic acid to a bridging oxide site. The epitaxy of MOF-5 on the surface of TiO2 was modelled with a forcefield parameterised to quantum chemical binding energies and bond lengths. The microscopic interface structure and chemical bonding characteristics are expected to be relevant to other hybrid framework-oxide combinations.


A birefringent crystal with a surface curvature ρ provides a radial variation of polarization retardation. One or more such radial birefringent elements in combination with a polarizer form a radial intensity filter (RIF). RIF's permit the generation of a variety of radial transmittance and reflectance profiles that are useful in resonator and spatial filter applications.


Many observers in colonial Spanish America—whether clerical, governmental, or foreign—noted the large numbers of forasteros, or Indians who were not seemingly attached to any locality. These migrants, or "wanderers," offended the bureaucratic sensibilities of the Spanish administration, as they also frustrated their tax and revenue efforts. Ann M. Wightman's research on these early "undocumentals" in the Cuzco region of Peru reveals much of importance on Andean society and its adaptation and resistance to Spanish cultural and political hegemony. The book thereby informs our understanding of social change in the colonial period.

Wightman shows that the dismissal of the forasteros as marginalized rural poor is superficial at best, and through laborious and painstaking archival research she presents a clear picture of the transformation of traditional society as the native populations coped with the disruptions of the conquest—and in doing so, reveals the reciprocal adaptations of the colonial power. Her choice of Cuzco is particularly appropriate, as this was a "heartland" region crucial to both the Incan and Spanish empires. The questions addressed by Wightman are of great concern to current Andean ethnohistory, one of the liveliest areas of such research, and are sure to have an important impact.


New clinical indicators. Health-related quality of life. In the last decades the need of better measurements of health outcomes has increased the interest for new clinical indicators. Health- related quality of life (HRQoL) has emerged in this context as a multidimensional model approach where the patient is the exclusive source of information. The main objective of HRQoL measurement is to provide a global evaluation of the impact of diseases and the consequences of treatments over the daily life of the patients. The instruments developed for that purpose are questionnaires; either generic - for the comparison between different diseases-, or specific -aimed to evaluate particular conditions. These questionnaires must demonstrate several psychometric properties, such as reliability, validity, responsiveness, and for some authors also feasibility. In many areas, HRQoL studies have demonstrated to increase the knowledge of the natural history of diseases and its global consequences, beyond the classic health outcomes information based on morbidity and mortality rates. This knowledge may assist in the design of epidemiological studies and improve the comparison of strategies in therapeutic interventions. Nevertheless, some controversial issues remain such as the clinical implications of absolute scores obtained, and the need for updating the content of the instruments in accordance with the changes in natural history of diseases under evaluation.