Morphologically speaking, there are five kinds of cone cells in the retina of the rudd (Scardinius erythrophthalmus). But two of them, the principal elements of the double cones and the free principal cones, are probably functionally equivalent, while another, sparse, population of small (oblique) cones (which disappear in older fish), is unlikely to make a significant contribution to visual spectral sensitivity. Thus, principal and accessory cones (usually paired with one another), and single cones seem to be the three receptors which underlie the fish's trichromacy. Photographic densitometry of individual cone cells was used to provide evidence that accessory cones contain a green-absorbing photopigment and the single cones a blue one. Other arguments are given in support of those identifications, and they also strongly suggest that principal cones contain the red-absorbing pigment. Golgi-impregnated bipolar cells were examined electron-microscopically to determine the specific patterns of synaptic connexion they make with these different, anatomically identifiable, colour cones and with the retinal rods. Three principal arrangements were distinguished (see figure 69, page 100). (1) Rod bipolar cells comprise two distinct morphological types, both of which connect exclusively to principal (red) cones as well as to the rods within the outlines of their dendritic fields. (2) Selective cone bipolar cells, more delicate neurons with considerably wider dendritic fields, connect (according to type) to one or other of the different colour cone populations. Examples analysed were specific for the accessory (green) or for the single (blue) cones; no bipolar cells were found connected only to red cones. (3) Mixed cone bipolars have the smallest dendritic fields, and connect to combinations of cones (for example, red and green, or green and blue, but not red and blue). They also have synaptic input (usually relatively sparse) from the rods. Cells were encountered connecting to all three cone types, but they were only partially analysed, and are not described at length. The light microscopic morphology of these bipolar cell types consistently reflects the detailed pattern of connexion each makes with the different receptor populations (just as the morphology of the cones reflects the spectral properties of their photopigment). But while their synaptic connectivity is generally highly specific for cone type, they do occasionally make anomalous connexions with the 'wrong' receptors. There is a high degree of divergence (page 85) at the receptor-bipolar synapses, and the different kinds of cones each characteristically connect to different numbers of bipolar cells. Principal (red) cones, which are the most numerous, individually connect to more bipolars than cones of other types, whose characteristic synaptic divergence is likewise related to the frequency with which they occur in the retina. However, rods, which are much more numerous than cones, do not conform with this generalization. The selectivity with which the synaptic terminals of the different cones are connected together by their invaginating basal processes was also examined. These processes link neighbouring synaptic terminals of differently coloured cones: specifically, principal (red) cone basal processes invaginate accessory (green) cone pedicles, and vice versa. Single (blue) cone basal processes connect only to accessory cone pedicles, but that synaptic relation is not reciprocated. These synapses between the cones have important bearing upon interpretation of the bipolar cell connectivity patterns. In their light, the interaction between colour channels which the convergence of different cones onto the mixed cone bipolar dendrites mediates, seems to re-iterate a process already undertaken more peripherally. Likewise, whereas the anatomy of the selective cone bipolars appears designed to convey activity from the individual cone populations, the responses of the receptors they sample must already be influenced by activity in other colour channels.


The challenge of building a security sector effective in terms of protecting the population and the state from challengers, and which at the same time fulfils minimum standards of good governance, was a daunting one in Afghanistan. These difficulties were compounded by what in hindsight seem to be obvious mistakes on the part of the intervention. In our paper, we investigate how security sector building fared under such adverse conditions in north-east Afghanistan. We find that in spite of the formidable challenges and the mistakes made by the international intervention, it did not fail completely. Neither did it succeed. Based on the results of quantitative surveys and qualitative research, we suggest that (a) the international intervention was partly successful in building up Afghan National Security Forces – both as a fighting force and in terms of security sector institutions that are restrained to some extent by the rule of law; (b) the problems caused by setting up informal local militias (violent feuds, criminality, human rights abuses and extortion of the population) could be partly mitigated by transforming them into an official local police programme.


Five new candidate genes for fatness, growth, and feed intake traits were studied. The genes were chosen based on their presumed biological action for a given trait of interest. A molecular genetics polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphisms (PCR-RFLP) approach was used to identify genetic differences (polymorphisms) in the porcine melanocortin-4 receptor (MC4R), melanocortin-5 receptor (MC5R), cocaine and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART), peroxisome proliferator activated receptor _ (PPAR_), and prepro-orexin genes. These genes were genetically mapped using several markers on porcine chromosomes (SSC) 1, 6, 12, 13, and 16, respectively. All five genes also were physically mapped with a pig/rodent somatic cell hybrid panel. The physical locations of all five genes are as follows: MC4R (SSC1q22-27), MC5R (SSC6q24-(1/2)q31), prepro-orexin (SSC12p13- p11), PPAR_ (SSC13q23-q41), and CART (SSC16q21). The localization of these genes is reasonably consistent with previous chromosome painting results, indicating conserved (similar) regions between human and pig chromosomes. We also looked at the effect of these genes on traits of interest. The effect of a MC4R polymorphism was investigated in a large population of pigs from several commercial lines. MC4R genotypes were significantly associated with fatness, growth rate, and feed intake traits. Further studies on the effect of these candidate genes are underway.


Jacques Lacan significantly influenced Althusser's accounts of ideology and the subject. Althusser's belief that science is a discourse without a subject parallels Lacan's belief that in the Symbolic Order the Subject and the Other are alienated. Althusser's account of interpellation, which explains how ideology recognizes individuals as subjects, takes for granted Lacan's notion of the mirror stage. Althusser repudiates the plenitude of the subject, whose interpellation conceals its lack; Lacan shows that the subject's failure to express itself in language makes the subject a void. However, Althusser, whose subject is too much like Lacan's ego, fails to distinguish between the "I" of the split subject and the "ego" of the subject's imaginary self-identity. What is more, Althusser rejects the self-consciousness implied by the subject's lack of plenitude and its suturing interpellation. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol18/iss1/7


I In his book Instinct for Freedom the contemporary dharma activist Alan Clements, a former Buddhist monk in the Burmese tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, presents a dramatic incident from 1990 when he was with prodemocracy resistance fighters in the Burmese jungle following the military's re-assumption of power. (1) This real event has three protagonists: Clements himself, a (non-violent Buddhist) non-combatant observer in solidarity with the fugitive resistance-fighters living rough in the jungle; a Burmese former monk turned combatant resistance fighter called Maung Win (an "old friend" of Clements's from his years in the monastery); and a Burmese military soldier captured in a firefight, whom Clements calls the "enemy soldier" (and will be so designated here), and whom Clements (and the reader) discover to be a former Buddhist monk as well. (2) The captured soldier is also thought to be the one who has fired the bullet that has just killed Maung Win in an ambush moments before. Just moments before that Maung Win and Clements have had a verbal altercation, in which the resistance fighter has challenged Clements's unwillingness to engage in battle. He shouts in Clements's face: "I'm sick of your judgment. We live under dictatorship. Do you know what that means? Haven't you seen enough?" (Clements 23). He has, as he reports, indeed seen "Villages ... smouldering, mortared into charred ruins. And among the ruins, massacres--My Lai-style. Severed heads, still blindfolded. Even the dogs had been killed, blackened to a crisp . wailing mothers running, exhausted and starving, clutching their children. Some of the children were dead, mangled unrecognizably by land mines disguised as toys. I heard tales of brutal gang rapes by soldiers that went on for days and months" (21). Has Clements seen enough? Unquestionably, Maung Win has, even where Aung San Suu Kyi, the national leader for democracy and freedom in Burma, is "advocating non-violence as the best means of political change" (22). Maung Win accuses Clements of "idealism"; he points out that Clements has complete freedom inasmuch as with his U.S. passport "stuffed in his pocket" he can "leave anytime, and go sit in retreat--as if you know what freedom means" (23). Clements is left speechless, aware that despite his Buddhist pre-suppositions he has not thought out the full implications of the situation. Maung Win believes he does not have any other choice: "I couldn't justify sitting in meditation while my brothers and sisters were being killed. Our teachers taught us to love even those who hate us. But try to love with a gun pointed at your head. After they tortured my brother, I disrobed and joined the resistance. My heart is with my people, not with my enlightenment" (23). Clements attempts a riposte ("with a small shred of defiance") by suggesting that "weapons and war" are not the only means to a possible resolution. Indeed, from his perspective as a Buddhist, they are not means at all. But Maung Win responds with what seems a definitive argument from the heart. He aggressively pushes Clements with his AK-47, shouting, "What if it was your girlfriend who was raped? What would you do? Sit back and be mindful? Become a dead Buddhist?" (23). Clements, it appears, has no ready answer to this appeal. Both his aporetic uncertainty, as well as Maung Win's unequivocal commitment to human freedom at any cost, even the death of another by his hand, present difficult and unsettling challenges to Buddhist ethics, and require some elucidation. Clearly Clements and Maung Win stand in opposition despite the powerful justification each finds for their position. That is, despite the 'rightness' of each position, in one sense, they arrive at absolute disagreement, and this is more than a contradiction, it is an existential aporia. This aporia has its perplexing human side, too: they are also good friends, and still more, fellow Buddhists. How does such an ethical paradox occur, particularly in the Buddhist context? …


This prospective study investigated many compliance-related aspects involving a population of Type II (non-insulin-dependent) diabetics, who attended the out-patients' clinic of a District General hospital. The investigations were undertaken from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives; activities within the clinic were observed and knowledge levels concerning diabetes mellitus were measured. A teaching programme was constructed, drawing on general educational principles; each stage was subjected to analysis and evaluation. Information, teaching and counselling skills were incorporated and a quality assurance model described. Two groups of subjects - one diagnosed less than one year (n=20), the other diagnosed more than one year (n=18) - were entered into a teaching programme; weight change was chosen as the study variable. Three interventions were planned for each subject. No statistically significant differences were found between the study groups and an historical control group, but clinically significant trends towards the target weight were recorded. Following the intervention study, a clinic-specific video was made, which was positively evaluated by subjects after it was viewed in their own homes. An innovative method of analysis was applied to health belief attributes, including vulnerability and social support-dynamic concept analysis (Kontiainen, 1973) - and models were constructed to determine whether there were common patterns of interview response from which prediction of compliance with clinical advice could be deduced. From the analysis it was concluded that computerised models could be constructed, which would be used in the clinic setting to predict, and subsequently monitor and guide, the behaviour required of individuals with NIDDM. The home viewing of clinic-specific videos would provide an adjunct to effective management through the dissemination of information outside the immediate physician-patient interaction. The main aim of Type II diabetes management is control of body weight. A means of depicting movement out of the obesity grading (Garrow and Webster, 1985) was devised, which could be utilised in a collaborative way by the health care professional and the diabetic person. From this longitudinal study it was concluded that the unique educational needs of individuals must be met by a range of inter-linked skills, methods and materials, if a solution to the non-compliance problem is to be found.


Abstinent drug addicts often relapse following exposure to environmental cues associated with drug taking. The ability of some forms of previously acquired memory to influence future behavior may depend upon reconsolidation of retrieved memories (see Hernandez and Kelley), leading two groups to see if disrupting such reconsolidation also disrupts the association of addictive drugs with contextual cues. The acquisition of cocaine-conditioned place preference (COC-CPP) in rats depends on activation of the extracellular signaling-regulated kinase (ERK) signaling pathway; it is blocked by inhibiting mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase (MEK), which phosphorylates and thereby activates ERK. Miller and Marshall used immunocytochemistry and Western analysis to show increased phosphorylation of ERK and of the downstream transcription factors Elk-1 and CREB in the nucleus accumbens core (AcbC, a midbrain region associated with cue-elicited drug seeking) in rats that had acquired COC-CPP. Infusion of a MEK inhibitor into the AcbC shortly before testing for COC-CCP blocked COC-CCP-related behavior and an associated increase in ERK, CREB, and Elk-1 phosphorylation and Fos abundance in the AcbC of rats that had already undergone pairing of cocaine with a particular environment. When administered independently of behavioral testing, MEK inhibition did not affect COC-CCP tested 24 hours later. However, rats in which exhibition of COC-CPP was blocked by preadministration of a MEK inhibitor, or that received a MEK inhibitor right after testing (who exhibited COC-CCP during the test), failed to show COC-CCP when retested 24 hours or 14 days later. These rats also showed decreased activation of the AcbC ERK pathway. Thus, the authors concluded that disruption of AcbC ERK signaling during memory reconsolidation blocked the subsequent expression of COC-CCP. Expression of the transcription factor Zif268 in the basolateral amygdala increases following reexposure to stimuli associated with self-administration of cocaine. In the second study, by Lee et al., rats learned to nosepoke for a cocaine infusion, which was accompanied by a light. When paired with a memory reactivation session, Zif268 antisense oligodeoxynucleotides (Zif268 ASO) infused into the basolateral amygdala eliminated the ability of light to promote acquisition of a new drug-seeking behavior, whereas missense oligodeoxynucleotides, administered with the reactivation session, or Zif268 ASO, administered without it, did not. C. A. Miller, J. F. Marshall, Molecular substrates for retrieval and reconsolidation of cocaine-associated contextual memory. Neuron 47, 873-884 (2005). [PubMed] J. L. C. Lee, P. Di Ciano, K. L. Thomas, B. J. Everitt, Disrupting reconsolidation of drug memories reduces cocaine-seeking behavior. Neuron 47, 795-801 (2005). [PubMed] P. J. Hernandez, A. E. Kelley, Cracking addiction the second time around: Reconsolidation of drug-related memories. Neuron 47, 772-775 (2005). [PubMed]


Introduction: The aim of this study was to investigate the incidence and risk factors for the development of nosocomial infections (NI) in elderly patients who were treated in the medical intensive care units (ICU). Factors affecting mortality were also evaluated. Materials and Method: A total of 433 patients who were treated in the ICU for over 48 hours were included in the study. 228 of the patients were over 65 years of age (elderly group), and 205 were between 18 to 65 years of age (adult group). The elderly and adult groups were compared taking into consideration the risk factors for NI development, causative organisms and mortality rates. Patients in the elderly group with or without NI were also compared. Results: There was no significant difference between the elderly and adult groups regarding the development of NI (p>0.05). In the elderly group with NI, duration of hospitalization and mortality rate were found to be significantly higher (p<0.001). In both groups the most frequently encountered NI was pneumonia, and the utilization of mechanical ventilation (MV) was high. In a multivariate analysis, 65 or higher age, prolonged hospitalization, application of central venous catheters and MV, altered consciousness, presence of chronic systemic diseases, NI and malignancy were independent risk factors contributing to the mortality. Conclusion: Although increased age is not the only factor for development of NI in patients admitted to ICUs, the development of NI, especially pneumonia, is a major cause of mortality in elderly patients.


If privatisation ever had a significant impact on health, it would show up in the former Soviet Union. Compare Margaret Thatcher the "Great Privatiser", who privatized roughly 30 state-owned companies during her 11-year tenure, to Boris Yeltsin's regime, which under the guidance of Jeffrey Sachs and World Bank economists,1–3 privatised over 15 000 large state-owned companies in less than 2 years. Such an episode of privatisation as that seen in Russia during the early- to mid-90s remains unparalleled in both its scale and its scope.4

Not all former Soviet countries took such a radical approach to privatisation. Many opted for a more gradual …


[1] We produced gridded monthly sea-surface boundary conditions for the Atlantic Ocean at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) based on the sea-surface temperature reconstruction of the GLAMAP project. We used an ocean general circulation model (OGCM), subject to these sea-surface boundary conditions and a corresponding wind stress field from an atmospheric general circulation model, to study the differences in the distribution of the main water masses between the LGM and the present. Our global OGCM is characterized by high vertical resolution, low vertical diffusion, and isopycnal mixing and hence allows for a realistic representation of the hydrology and circulation of the modern Atlantic Ocean. According to a series of LGM experiments with an increasing sea-surface salinity anomaly in the Weddell Sea, the ventilated thermocline was colder than today by 2–3°C in the North Atlantic Ocean and, in the experiment with the largest anomaly (1.0 beyond the global anomaly), by 4–5°C in the South Atlantic Ocean. Its depth was reduced by 50 m on average, most notably in the tropics. In the North Atlantic Ocean the outcrop locations of the thermocline isopycnal surfaces migrated southward by 5°–10°, and the ventilation increased. In the South Atlantic Ocean the mixed layer and thermocline water masses were dominated by cold water originating from Drake Passage, and the import of warm water from the Indian Ocean was reduced to about 4 Sv or 40% of its modern value. Antarctic Intermediate Water was colder by 3–4°C and could be traced as far as 10°N. The meridional overturning rates of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) and Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) in the Atlantic Ocean were similar to those of the present-day experiment (9–10 Sv and 4 Sv, respectively). However, NADW cooled by 2.5°C and AABW by 1°C. AABW was near the freezing point of seawater at the surface and the saltiest water mass in the Atlantic Ocean, even saltier than NADW. We show that the differences between the LGM and the present-day experiments can be traced back to the changes in the subpolar and interhemispheric sea-surface density gradients.


The Design of Rectangular Microstrip Patch Antenna using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been presented. This paper used Feed Forward Back Propagation Algorithm (FFBPN), Resilient Back-propagation (RPROP), Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) and Radial Basis functions (RBF) of ANN to obtain the resonant frequency of rectangular microstrip patch antenna. The model of ANN algorithm was developed and implemented in MATLAB which convert the parameters containing dielectric constant, substrate thickness, width and length of patch for obtain resonant frequency of antenna and results obtained from these models are compared with standard formula. The results obtained through these algorithms shows very good agreement with the experimental results available in literature.


The magnetic Barkhausen emission (MBE) technique is considered as a potential non-destructive evaluation (NDE) method for assessing material properties in case-hardened gears. For gear manufacturing industries, the evaluation of material properties such as tempering induced changes in hardness level and the associated microstuctural changes, variations in case-depth of hardened layer, grinding process induced alteration in microstructure, hardness and residual stress distributions are of primary importance in order to ensure the quality of gears during service. This paper presents an overview of different research and developmental studies carried out at Design Unit, Newcastle University on the MBE technique suitable for different applications in the evaluation of quality of gears.


The evaluation of commercial hybrids under limited water availability is of primary importance to assess Sorghum bicolor (Moench) as potential multipurpose bioenergy crop in Mediterranean drought prone environments. Ten genotypes were grown during three growing seasons (2010, 2011 and 2012) in open field trials and in pot experiments (2014). Phenological traits, biomass production, fibre content and biomass chemical composition were measured under irrigated and rainfed conditions. Differences in biomass production among the ten genotypes varied across years. In a three-year experiment significant differences were found among the ten genotypes in terms of duration of vegetative growth (P<0.05) and aboveground dry biomass production (P<0.1) in response to irrigated and rainfed conditions. Among the ten genotypes analysed, the hybrid ABF306 stands for its performance in terms of biomass production and chemical composition. In fact, it showed the lowest biomass yield reduction when grown under rainfed conditions, the highest drought tolerance index (=0.9), a °Brix value comparable to that of sweet sorghum genotypes (8.8 °Brix under rainfed conditions), lignin content that was not statistically influenced by water availability, and a lignin cellulose ratio (0.087) favourable for biogas production. The shoot transpiration efficiency and the total transpiration efficiency recorded at high (Exp1) and low (Exp2) vapour pressure deficit were comparable, and sometimes higher, to that of commercial sorghum hybrids. All these characteristics make ABF306 a suitable candidate for bioenergy production in Mediterranean drought prone environments.


The purpose of this study was to explore and understand how policies and legislative frameworks impact on the planning for water provision in rural areas, and in particular, the Makosha village in the Mopani District Municipality, Limpopo Province. The research method used was qualitative, which is exploratory, descriptive and conceptual in nature. The sample selection method was purposive since it was targeting specific people. Data were collected from a focus group and individuals through in-depth interviews. The findings of the study for the focus group were presented under the following themes:- Problems related to water provision; problems related to rights; communication between the municipality and the community; and respondents' envisaged recommendations related to problems of water supply. The findings for the individual interviews were also presented under the following themes: - The district municipality's expression of its difficulties when providing water; and planning. The results of the study provide evidence that water provision in rural areas is still a challenge. Mopani District municipality does not have the capacity to provide water. Water sources in the Greater Giyani municipality are not able to provide water to the various villages due to inadequate infrastructure. In the Makosha village, technical challenges are a cause of the problem. Illegal connections, lack of public participation in water provisioning activities and lack of skills in water provision were also identified as a cause of the problem. It is noted that the use of the Water Service Development Plan (WSDP) and the Integrated Development Plan (IDP), as planning tools, were not properly implemented. The study recommends that planning for water provision should be in line with the various legislative frameworks put in place in the country. The two planning tools, i.e. Water Service Development Plan (WSDP) and Integrated Development Plan (IDP) must be used in planning for water provision in all municipalities which are either a water service authority (WSA) or a water service provider (WSP). The capacity of the municipality should be improved in terms of skilled human resources, financial resources and infrastructural development. The Water Services and local government sectors should create a culture of public participation in the activities of the municipality. Monitoring and Evaluation should form an integral part of project implementation.


This classic book offers a lively and penetrating analysis of what the overland journey was really like for midwestern farm families in the mid-1800s. Through the subtle use of contemporary diaries, memoirs, and even folk songs, John Mack Faragher dispels the common stereotypes of male and female roles and reveals the dynamic of pioneer family relationships. This edition includes a new preface in which Faragher looks back on the social context in which he formulated his original thesis and provides a new supplemental bibliography. Praise for the earlier edition: "Faragher has made excellent use of the Overland Trail materials, using them to illuminate the society the emigrants left as well as the one they constructed en route. His study should be important to a wide range of readers, especially those interested in family history, migration and western history, and women's history."--Kathryn Kish Sklar "An enlightening study."--American West "A helpful study which not only illuminates the daily life of rural Americans but which also begins to compensate for the male orientation of so much of western history."--Journal of Social History


Supporting URLLC has become one of the major considerations in the design of 5G systems. In the literature, it has been shown that cooperative relaying is an efficient strategy to improve the reliability of transmissions, support higher rates, and lower latency. However, prior studies have demonstrated the performance advantages of relaying generally under the ideal assumption of communicating arbitrarily reliably at Shannon's channel capacity, which is not an accurate performance indicator for relaying in URLLC networks in which transmission is required to be completed within a strict time span and coding schemes with relatively short blocklengths need to be employed. In this article, we address the performance modeling and optimization of relaying-enabled URLLC networks. We first discuss the accurate performance modeling of relay-enabled 5G networks. In particular, we provide a comprehensive summary of the performance advantage of applying relaying in 5G URLLC transmissions in comparison to the case of direct transmission (without relaying). Both a noise-limited scenario and an interference- limited scenario are discussed. Then we present tools for performance optimization utilizing the knowledge of either perfect or average channel side information. Finally, we summarize the proposed optimization schemes and discuss potential future research directions.


Platelets are pivotal to the process of arterial thrombosis resulting in ischemic stroke. Occlusive thrombosis is initiated by the interaction of von Willebrand factor (vWf) and platelet glycoprotein (GP) Iba. Three polymorphisms have been described in GP Iba (Kozak T/C polymorphism, variable number of tandem repeats [VNTR], and the human platelet antigen 2a [HPA-2a] [Thr] or HPA-2b [Met] at position 145), each of which may enhance the vWf and GP Iba interaction. This study investigated whether these polymorphisms are candidate genes for first-ever ischemic stroke. A hospitalbased case-control study was conducted of 219 cases of first-ever ischemic stroke and 205 community controls randomly selected from the electoral roll and stratified by age, sex, and postal code. The subtypes of stroke were classified, the prevalence of conventional risk factors was recorded, and blood was collected to perform genotyping analysis for Kozak C or T alleles, VNTR, and HPA-2a/b. It was found that the Kozak T/C genotype was over-represented in the stroke group (32.2%) compared with controls (22.8%) (odds ratio [OR], 1.6; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.03-2.54; P < .03), and the association was still present even after adjusting for conventional risk factors. There was a trend in the increased prevalence of HPA-2a/b in stroke patients (15%) compared with controls (9.9%) (adjusted OR, 1.8; 95% CI, 0.94-3.4; P 5 .07). No associations were seen with the VNTR polymorphism or with any of the polymorphisms with stroke subtype. It was concluded that the Kozak T/C polymorphism, which is associated with an increase in platelet GP Iba surface expression, is an independent risk factor for first-ever ischemic stroke. (Blood. 2001;98:36-40)


Large organizations play an important role in helping to mitigate and adapt to the consequences of climate change. As a result, they face increasing pressure from Governments and non-governmental organizations to report on the sustainability of their operations. Beyond simple reporting, however, it is difficult for them to identify the most effective actions to take to address the risks associated with climate change and rising energy costs. The problem is hard because it involves tradeoffs between multiple longterm and short-term objectives that must be made under strong budgetary constraints, uncertainties about the future evolution of many system variables, and sometimes simply a lack of shared understanding of what the real objectives are and the potential impacts of various decisions on such objectives. The overall aim of our research is to develop fundamental techniques to help organizations make decisions in this context. As a first step, we are currently applying quantitative goal-oriented requirements engineering technique to model and reason about the sustainability goals of UCL, a large university in central London. The paper also discusses important software systems engineering research challenges in this domain. These are related to the elaboration and evolution of large-scale models, the ability to reason about the timing of system transformations and the delayed impacts of these transformations on goals, and the need to include in the system model funding mechanisms and system governance structures as explicit components that are themselves subject to changes.


A new clustering algorithm Affinity Propagation (AP) is hindered by its quadratic complexity. The Weighted Affinity Propagation (WAP) proposed in this paper is used to eliminate this limitation, support two scalable algorithms. Distributed AP clustering handles large datasets by merging the exemplars learned from subsets. Incremental AP extends AP to online clustering of data streams. The paper validates all proposed algorithms on benchmark and on real-world datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches offer a good trade-off between computational effort and performance.


Three different approaches are used to discuss the possible analogy between the [1,5] hydrogen shift in cyclopentadiene and the prototropy in 1H-pyrazole. In the first, a series of NH→HN hydrogen shifts in cyclic conjugated molecules are considered demonstrating that the case of pyrazole is not intrinsically different from the other systems which are unrelated to [1,5] H shifts. The second approach compares pyrazole and cyclopentadiene with their open-ring structures, pentadiene and aminoazadiene, proving that the N–N bond is essential to describe pyrazole while the C(sp3)–C(sp2) bond in cyclopentadiene can be considered as a perturbation. Finally, the third approach is a study of cyclopentadienide and pyrazolide anions as hydrogen-bond acceptors, the first one being a π-acceptor while the second one is a σ-acceptor through the nitrogen lone pair. The conclusion is that N(sp2)–N(sp2) migrations of hydrogen in aromatic azoles are outside the Woodward–Hoffmann domain of application.


ABSTRACT We aim at assessing neighborhood effects on the socioeconomic integration of poor individuals living in three shanty towns of Salvador, Brazil. Grounded on semi-structured interviews, we demonstrate that the spatial proximity of Nordeste de Amaralina to affluent gated communities fosters the interviewees' economic integration. However, mechanisms of social segmentation impede cross-class interactions. In the peripheral São João do Cabrito, the interviewees' confinement to the local social context along with the absence of positive social references produce their social isolation and constrain their economic integration. Yet in the peripheral Fazenda Grande II/Jaguaripe I, the shared use of urban services by socially dissimilar groups provides an opportunity-enriching environment for the lower echelons. We discuss two mechanisms that account for neighborhood effects: changes in the support structures and the impact of crime. Concluding, we advocate for a multidimensional approach to neighborhood effects, capable of attending to the interrelatedness of micro, meso, and macro-social factors.


The recent property development is increasing progressively. It could be
seen from the increase of the housing development with various types, model and
prices. While the property world has developed properly, Indonesia experiences
economical crisis and fluctuated banking interest. It causes the company to apply
the accurate selling strategy. Besides, it needs to give an appropriate satisfaction
to the consumer within the maintenance of product, price and location.
P.T. Pembangunan Perumahan has taken an efforts to achieve the
consumer maximum satisfaction. The purpose of the research is to identify the
influence between the product (X1), price (X2), location (X3) and the purchasing
decision (Y). The type of the research is explanatory research; the number of
respondent are 94. The sample technique is proportional stratified random
sampling.
The data result was analyzed with qualitative and quantitative data by
using validity and reliability test, cross table, simple linier regression, and doubled
linier regression analysis, and the hypothesis of formula t count. Based on SPSS
counting result, the research shows regression quotation of Y= 0.259+
0.187X1+0.259X2+0.211X3, and the existence of significant and positive
influence between product, price and location and the purchasing decision
stimulatingly (together).
The research shows that the respondents satisfied with product, price and
the location of the housing. The recommendation to the company is that they
should increase the quality by providing the innovative product, economically
price, strategically location to meet with the consumer desire. In addition, the
company should provide maximum satisfaction for the consumers.


Sir We read with interest the paper by Gruber-Blum and colleagues. Three different separate antiadhesive barriers (SABs) fixed to a polypropylene mesh with fibrin glue were compared. A bias exists as the SABs were fixed to the mesh with fibrin glue, whereas the mesh was not covered with glue in the control group. In effect, fibrin glue could have interfered with the inflammatory response. Fibrin sealant is known to be completely biodegradable, and to have adhesive and haemostatic effects1. This study failed to prove that it did not influence in any manner the antiadhesive or even the adhesive process. In order to demonstrate this conclusively, a 'nude' mesh should be compared at 7 and 30 days with another mesh covered with fibrin sealant in this particular instance. Furthermore, although two of the three SABs showed fewer adhesions, they also showed less tissue integration, which may impair abdominal wall reinforcement2. Moreover, tissue integration was very disparate with the use of small 4-cm2 meshes fixed with four sutures. Thus, no conclusion can be drawn from the data presented as it is known that incorporation between mesh and abdominal wall is often only seen at the fixing sutures2. Surprisingly, mesh covered with cellulose (Seprafilm; Genzyme, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) showed significantly fewer adhesions, but had the same foreign body reaction as the others (including control). This is in contrast to findings when mesh with a similar type of 'coating' (Proceed; Ethicon, Johnson & Johnson, Somerville, New Jersey, USA) was used2; large numbers of macrophages degrading remnants of cellulose coating and disorganized fibroblasts were found, without signs of granulation. S. Aellen, M. Cotton, N. Demartines, H. Vuilleumier University Hospital of Lausanne, CHUV, Lausanne, SwitzerlandHB (e-mail: email@example.com) DOI: 10.1002/bjs.7548


In the last decades, learning and knowledge have become key success factors for international competitiveness with the result that intangible and immaterial resources have overtaken physical and tangible assets in order of importance. The introduction of knowledge management (KM) practices and initiatives has provided companies with new opportunities to maximize the value of the knowledge they possess. It has helped as well to increase their capacity to learn and adapt quicker to the environment and to react pro-actively to the changes, performing better than competitors. Learning easier and faster has become one of the key challenges in this new context, putting a special accent on knowledge acquisition, on the speed of reaction and the application of the newly acquired competences and skills. The process of learning now is centered on acquiring new practical oriented skills. Knowledge workers are expected to devote efforts to continuously up-date their qualification, skills and knowledge, manifesting new and better ideas, resulting in better decision making. The only limited resource now is the time – time for learning and for adaptation to the constant changes. The present paper focuses on KM and learning in organizations. It introduces the concepts of tacit and explicit knowledge, considers organizational learning and knowledge workers specifics. In the centre of the paper are the issues of complementarity between KM and learning. The integrity between KM and e-learning is highlighted on the bases of case-study research of KM technologies usage in companies.


Financial fraud activities have soared despite the advancement of fraud detection models empowered by machine learning (ML). To address this issue, we propose a new framework of feature engineering for ML models. The framework consists of feature creation that combines feature aggregation and feature transformation, and feature selection that accommodates a variety of ML algorithms. To illustrate the effectiveness of the framework, we conduct an experiment using an actual financial transaction dataset and show that the framework significantly improves the performance of ML fraud detection models. Specifically, all the ML models complemented by a feature set generated from our framework surpass the same models without such a feature set by nearly 40% on the F1-measure and 20% on the Area Under the Curve (AUC) value.


Background Infusions are an essential part in the treatment of intensive care patients. Due to increasingly complex treatments the simultaneous application of several drugs through a central multi-lumen catheter is unavoidable. This entails the risk of physicochemical and chemical incompatibility reactions. One standard sedative used on the intensive care unit is propofol. Because of its physicochemical and optical properties propofol poses a special risk in identifying stability problems and incompatibilities. Additionally, only limited compatibility data are available. Purpose To optimise the safety of drug treatment in a cardiovascular intensive care unit by preventing drug incompatibilities between propofol and other analgesic and sedative drugs. Material and methods On the cardiovascular intensive care unit documented propofol drug combinations were narrowed down to practice-oriented combinations of propofol 2% with clonidine, midazolam, sufentanil, remifentanil, piritramide, lormetazepam, γ-hydroxybutyric acid und dexmedetomidine which were diluted to standardised concentrations. Mixtures at a ratio of 1:1 were stored at room temperature for 7 days. Samples were taken at defined points of time. The physical and the emulsion stability in particular were determined by pH value, zeta potential and globule size distribution measurements using light backscattering. Analyses on crystal and microbiological growth gave additional information about the stability. The chemical stability determination was carried out by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Results The light backscattering and zeta potential analyses resulted in three stability groups. The least stable group consisted of propofol, remifentanil and lormetazepam. All other mixtures remained stable over a defined period of time. No crystal and bacterial growth could be detected. The HPLC data indicated the chemical stability of all previously tested propofol drug combinations. Conclusion We found evidence of incompatibilities and compatibilities of propofol with analgesic and sedative drugs. Through further investigations the safety of drug treatment should be increased. References and/or Acknowledgements No conflict of interest.


Hypersonic boundary layer flows over a circular cone at moderate incidence can support strong crossflow instability. Due to more efficient excitation of stationary crossflow vortices by surface roughness, such boundary layer flows may transition to turbulence via rapid amplification of the high-frequency secondary instabilities of finite amplitude stationary crossflow vortices. The amplification characteristics of these secondary instabilities are investigated for crossflow vortices generated by an azimuthally periodic array of roughness elements over a 7-degree half-angle circular cone in a Mach 6 free stream. Depending on the local amplitude of the stationary crossflow mode, the most unstable secondary disturbances either originate from the second (i.e., Mack) mode instabilities of the unperturbed boundary layer or correspond to genuine secondary instabilities that reduce to stable disturbances at sufficiently small amplitudes of the stationary crossflow vortex. The predicted frequencies of dominant secondary disturbances are similar to those measured during wind tunnel experiments at Purdue University and the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany.


The Multicast Ping Protocol specified in this document allows for checking whether an endpoint can receive multicast -- both SourceSpecific Multicast (SSM) and Any-Source Multicast (ASM). It can also be used to obtain additional multicast-related information, such as multicast tree setup time. This protocol is based on an implementation of tools called "ssmping" and "asmping".


Objective of the document clustering techniques is to assemble similar documents and segregate dissimilar documents. Unlike document classification, no labeled documents are provided in document clustering. One of the main challenges of any document clustering algorithm is the selection of a good similarity measure. Traditionally, using the vector space model, the number of words common between two documents is used for determining their similarity. This paper introduces a document similarity measure, extensive similarity between the documents. In this approach two documents are considered to be similar if they share a minimum number of common words and they have almost same distance with every other document in the corpus i.e., both are either similar or dissimilar to the other documents. A hierarchical document clustering algorithm, using extensive similarity between the documents is proposed in this article. It is experimentally found on several text data sets that the proposed document clustering algorithm performs significantly better than the traditional document clustering techniques, comparisons for which are based on f-measure and normalized mutual information.


ABSTRACTThe optical properties of aerosol could describe the potential source of prevalent pollutants of certain area. With the annual occurrences of biomass burning over the peat swamp forest, the study of aerosol characters in Central Kalimantan province becomes important. Aerosols from Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) data network combine with some environmental parameters, i.e., rainfall, visibility, surface humidity and hotspot number are investigated. Here we use the data from 2012 to 2014 collected from AERONET in Palangkaraya. We found a strong relationship between aerosol properties and environmental parameters (rainfall, hotspot number, visibility). Variability of aerosol properties such as aerosol optical depth (AOD), Angstrom exponent number, and its fine mode are consistent with the dry period between August and October when most fire episodes occur. In fact, the increase of aerosol loading occurs mostly when the monthly rainfall reaches below 150 mm month–1 (dry period), as the cut off number of our analyses. Considerable reduction of visibility below 500 m occurs whenever AOD is above 3.0. During observation period, we found that aerosol sources at this location originate from dust, marine aerosol, continental and urban aerosol, and biomass burning. The biomass burning aerosol gave a substantially high AOD values that reach almost 6.0 and fine feature as an indication of highly concentrated smoke from peatland source. Moreover, smouldering combustion from peat land is characterized by high value of single scattering albedo observed in the location.


About the book:

This volume not only explores Muslim identities through the lens of sexuality and gender - their historical and contemporary transformations and local and global articulations - but also interrogates our understanding of what constitutes a 'Muslim' identity in selected Muslim-majority countries at this pivotal historical moment, characterized by transformative destabilizations in which national, ethnic, and religious boundaries are being re-imagined and re-made.

Contributors take on the most fundamental questions at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the body. Several overarching questions frame the volume: How does studying gender and sexuality expand and enrich our understanding of Muslim-majority countries, historically and at present? How does the embodiment of 'Muslim' identity get reconfigured in the context of twenty-first-century globalism? What analytical questions are raised about 'Islam' when its diverse meanings and multifaceted expressions are closely examined? What roles do gender and sexuality play in the construction of cultural, religious, nationalistic, communal, and militaristic identities? How have power struggles been signified in and on the bodies of women and sexuality? How have global dynamics, such as the intensification and spread of neoliberal ideologies and policies, affected changing dynamics of gender and sexuality in specific locales? Here global dynamics touch down in diverse contexts, from masculinity crises around war disabilities, transnational marriages, and fathering in Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan; to Muslim femininity narratives around female genital cutting, sexuality in divorce proceedings, and spouse selection; to gender crossing practices as well as protesting bodies, queering voices, and claims of authenticity in literary and political discourse.


With good reason, hundreds of delegations come to cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam every year to study and learn from the cities' consistent efforts to make the bicycle a respected and equal transport form and solve all manner of traffic and societal challenges. Copenhagen wasn't always Copenhagen—and that is so incredibly important to remember. Mistakes have been made, both large and small. This city was as car-clogged as anywhere else on the planet through the 1950s and 1960s. From a cycling peak in 1949, we took the on-ramp to the motorway of two decades of dismantling the city to make space for cars. A great deal of the bicycle infrastructure we had built was removed in the race for automobile space.


The list includes periodical literature which appeared in 2000 and contained Northern material (excluding reports of archaeological excavations and finds), as well as booklets or pamphlets which are not otherwise noticed. The items are enumerated under the titles of the journals and other publications inspected, arranged alphabetically: the titles of articles are abbreviated when necessary to save space.


The lidar of the Radio Science Center for Space and Atmosphere (RASC; Kyoto, Japan) make use of two pure rotational Raman (MR) signals for both the measurement of the atmospheric temperature profile and the derivation of a temperature-independent Raman reference signal. The latter technique is new and leads to significant smaller measurement uncertainties compared with the commonly used vibrational Raman lidar technique. For the measurement of temperature, particle extinction coefficient, particle backscatter coefficient, and humidity simultaneously, only four lidar signal are needed the elastic Cabannes backscatter signal, two RR signals, and the vibrational Raman water vapor signal. The RASC lidar provides RR signals of unprecedented intensity. Although only 25% of the RR signal intensities can be used with the present data-acquisition electronics, the 1-s -statistical uncertainty of nighttime temperature measurements is lower than for previous systems and is < 1K up to 11-km height for, e.g., a resolution of 500 m and 9 min. In addition, RR measurements in daytime also have become feasible.


The rapid development of high-throughput technologies has enabled the generation of data from biological or disease processes that span multiple layers, like genomic, proteomic or metabolomic data, and further pertain to multiple sources, like disease subtypes or experimental conditions. In this work, we propose a general statistical framework based on Gaussian graphical models for horizontal (i.e. across conditions or subtypes) and vertical (i.e. across different layers containing data on molecular compartments) integration of information in such datasets. We start with decomposing the multi-layer problem into a series of two-layer problems. For each two-layer problem, we model the outcomes at a node in the lower layer as dependent on those of other nodes in that layer, as well as all nodes in the upper layer. We use a combination of neighborhood selection and group-penalized regression to obtain sparse estimates of all model parameters. Following this, we develop a debiasing technique and asymptotic distributions of inter-layer directed edge weights that utilize already computed neighborhood selection coefficients for nodes in the upper layer. Subsequently, we establish global and simultaneous testing procedures for these edge weights. Performance of the proposed methodology is evaluated on synthetic data.


Exercise is a type of physical activity. Exercise is activity that is planned and done on a regular basis (e.g., several times a week) for enjoyment or for improving any aspect of physical fitness – strength, flexibility, or endurance. There are two main types of physical activity or exercise that the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) recommends for adults: aerobic (cardiovascular or "cardio") and muscle-strengthening (resistance).


It is shown that a simple modification of synaptic structures (of the Hopfield type) constructed to produce autoassociative attractors, produces neural networks whose attractors are correlated with several (learned) patterns used in the construction of the matrix. The modification stores in the matrix a fixed sequence of uncorrelated patterns. The network then has correlated attractors, provoked by the uncorrelated stimuli. Thus, the network converts the temporal order (or temporal correlation) expressed by the sequence of patterns, into spatial correlations expressed in the distributions of neural activities in attractors. The model captures phenomena observed in single electrode recordings in performing monkeys by Miyashita et al. The correspondence is as close as to reproduce the fact that given uncorrelated patterns as sequentially learned stimuli, the attractors produced are significantly correlated up to a separation of 5 (five) in the sequence. This number 5 is universal in a range of parameters, and requires essentially no tuning. We then discuss learning scenarios that could lead to this synaptic structure as well as experimental predictions following from it. Finally, we speculate on the cognitive utility of such an arrangement.


Background: Septoplasty is one of the commonest nasal surgeries performed by otolaryngologist. Silicone is the most common material used for nasal splints. Trans-septal suturing technique has been described to approximate the mucosal flaps after septal procedures to reduce the complication rate; however there are few studies proving the efficacy. Objective: This study is to elucidate the efficacy of trans-septal suture method in preventing complications, discomfort and pain in comparison with intranasal splinting using silicone plates after septoplasty. Patients and methods: This is a prospective study of 59 adult patients underwent Septoplasty, between August 2013-January 2014 in Rizgary Teaching Hospital Erbil city. Patients were divided into 2 groups; trans-septal suture and silicone, 29 and 30 patients respectively. Visual analogue scale was used to evaluate postoperative pain, bleeding, post-nasal drip, dysphagia and sleep disturbance for three days. Epiphora and septal hematoma are also evaluated. Septal perforation, crustation, and adhesion were evaluated at 4 postoperative week. Results: The severity of pain and post nasal drip were significantly lower in trans-septal suture group than silicone group (P< 0.05). The septal hematoma and septal perforation were not seen in the study. No any significant difference found concerning epiphora, crustation and adhesion. Conclusion: we conclude that, suturing can be used safely in septoplasty specially when the septal deformity is not so complicated. Key Word: Septoplasty, trans-septal suturing, silicone.


Acknowledgments Preface Note on the Interviews Glossary Introduction: In-migrations, Timber, and Owls: Background to a Transformation Part I: In the Country 1. Peter Alten and Larry Lyon This is not an area to become a millionaire in. It never was. The only difference now is, not only can you not become a millionaire, you cannot have any peace and quiet either. 2. Barbara Roland I felt lonesome, to walk down my city street and not see a face that I recognized. 3. Kevin Sjorn If the environmentalists had grown up the way I did, they wouldn't be environmentalists... That's why they seem so distant. 4. Roslyn Sellers I remember being proud that my dad worked in a mill. 5. Vera and Chuck Carter I don't think it's less community--I think it's more a group of communities. 6. Gary Carter Boy, anymore you try and go back to some of the places where we used to go and fish, or we used to go and swim. Somebody's down there and they're calling the cops. They're sicing the dog on you, they're pulling a gun on you. 7. Theresa Carter Generations are changing from my parents' "Just do what ever you want," to knowing that you can't do whatever you want. 8. Wayne Douglas They didn't want any non-whites spending a night in Grants Pass. Part II: In Our Lives 9. Rhonda Marshall You see all of the people here in the valley going through this withdrawal they're holding the anger in their houses. 10. Sue Cleary We're all hating each other for no reason. 11. Kathy Dodge I dropped out of school when I was a freshman, and again when I was a sophomore... It was, like, "Well, if you don't want to be in school, then fine." 12. George Thomas My father was never big into supporting the bureaucracy. And I really go right along with that. 13. Dorothy Harris It's a real dangerous occupation... I worried about my husband working in the woods when he was setting chokers...and he did have a couple of real close calls. 14. Henry Dubnik We were probably part of the first wave of Californians...The dreaded Californians. Part III: What Kind of Future 15. Margaret and Stanley Norman What do we all do? Become park rangers? 16. Amy Sturman I think the environmentalists are going to win. Nature has the public sympathy. 17. Ellen Tigart It seems like life has really been kind of a survival test. 18. Nathan Cullenbach We've been confronted with so many personal problems, and nobody knows how to deal with them. 19. Ralph Pendleson They have to drop down to a five-, six-dollar-an-hour job. And they wonder why people are losing their homes. 20. Caroline Coldbrook I don't think anybody else wants to be where women are in the service economy. 21. Conclusion: Language, Complexity, and Power: Life Stories and a Community in Transition 22. An Environmentalist Reflection - Art and Paula Downing Postscript References Index


Citizens have the duty and opportunity to help make many group decisions about complex issues. Group decisions are those in which two or more people have a voice or vote. The decision may affect one or more persons individually or as a group. The group decision may be of a local nature such as a change in school tax, or a state problem such as water legislation, or a national issue such as commodity referendum.


RAYMOND M. KLEIN and PATRICLA A. MCMULLEN (Eds.) Converging Methods for Understanding Reading and Dyslexia Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999, 536 pages (ISBN 0-262-11247-7, us$60, Hardcover) Reviewed by MEREDYTH DANEMAN In the preface to this volume, the editors Raymond Klein and Patricia McMullen promise a book that will "illustrate different approaches used by scientists to understand the complex skill of reading and its breakdown" (p. xi). As long as readers of this volume understand that Klein and McMullen are referring to "the reading of single words" (p. 1), and not the reading of sentences or paragraphs or whole texts, they will not be disappointed by this book. Indeed, Klein and McMullen have put together an impressive collection of state-of-the-art chapters by scientists who address the issue of single-word reading from a variety of standpoints and disciplines. The coverage is both extensive and intensive, and the quality of the contributions is uniformly high. There are chapters on normal adult reading and its development (Rayner; Goswami; Levy), developmental dyslexia (Lovett; Olson, Datta, Gayan, & DeFries), acquired dyslexia (Behrmann; Buchanan, Hildebrandt, & MacKinnon; Farah), neouroimaging (Demb, Poldrack, & Gabrieli; Posner & McCandliss), and computational modeling (Plaut; Masson; Besner), as well as a final chapter that offers an integrative summary of the different approaches (Carr). Rayner provides a comprehensive review of what we have learned about normal adult reading from examining readers' eye movements. He shows how eye movements have revealed important information about perceptual processes in reading, such as how much information readers acquire during a single fixation, the kind of information they integrate across fixations, the factors that control where they fixate. And he shows how eye movements have revealed important information about the moment-- to-moment cognitive processes during reading, such as how readers process ambiguous structures and ambiguous words, how they process anaphoric terms such as pronouns, and how they make inferences. Most of what we know about single-word processing has come from studies in which words are presented in isolation (see other chapters in this volume), and so there is always the concern that the results might not generalize to normal everyday reading (see Daneman & Reingold, 1993). What I like about Rayner's eye movement methodology is that it allows him to study how words are processed in the context of natural connected text. Goswami and Levy both focus on the acquisition of reading skills. Goswami argues that the phonological skills needed to discriminate onset from rime (e.g., b from eak in the word beak) are very important in the early stages of learning to read English, and that children use rime analogies to learn new words (e.g., use beak to learn peak and weak). If Goswami is correct, then reading instruction programs that emphasize onsets and rimes should be better than those that emphasize phonemes or whole words. Levy's training studies provide only marginal support for Goswami's position. The main message from Levy's studies is that the different training methods "all contribute to an important but different aspect of reading development" (p. 77). For example, training that emphasizes onsets or rimes leads to faster acquisition of new reading vocabulary than does training on whole words, but training on whole words is more important for developing reading fluency. Developmental dyslexia is the term applied to children who have unusual difficulty acquiring basic reading skills. The chapters by Lovett and Olson et al. reflect two rather different approaches to understanding developmental dyslexia: remediation effectiveness and behavioural-genetic analysis. Lovett describes two deficit-directed remediation programs aimed at helping disabled readers acquire reliable word identification skills - one program targets deficits in phonological processing and the other program targets deficits in cognitive strategy use. …


In developing Drosophila embryo, pathways that produce distinct accumulations of specific maternal mRNAs control axis determination. One gene that is involved in both the dorsoventral axis and the posterior axis determination is orb, which encodes a protein similar to Xenopus cytoplasmic polyadenylation element-binding protein (CPEB), which is required to activate translation of masked maternal mRNAs. Orb is properly localized before the arrival of mRNAs encoding the axis determinants; and in oocytes from flies with disrupted orb genes, axis determination is abnormal. The localization of Orb mRNA is known to depend on the 3′ untranslated region (UTR). Tan et al. show that the 3′ UTR of Orb can act as a dominant negative when expressed in both the sense and antisense direction. Furthermore, their studies indicate that Orb mRNA localization is dependent on the expression of the Orb protein in a dose-dependent fashion and that Orb protein directly binds Orb mRNA, suggesting that Orb localization is controlled through an autoregulatory positive feedback loop. Thus, Orb mRNA interacts with Orb protein to promote Orb expression, which is then available to bind and activate more Orb mRNA. The chicken and egg question still remains about how the first Orb protein or mRNA gets properly targeted, but this paper provides a mechanism for the accumulation of Orb once the site has been established. L. Tan, J. S. Chang, A. Costa, P. Schedl, An autoregulatory feedback loop directs the localized expression of the Drosophila CREB protein Orb in the developing oocyte. Development 128, 1159-1169 (2001). [Online Journal]


A wide range of products and services has been commoditized as a result of globalization, and a lot of companies have been progressively working to draw on the knowledge creation of their employees to be more competitive. In this respect, some would argue that a "Creative Class" of employees determines the business results of a company. Social networking among employees is a platform for creativity, so when management supports such social networks, the strength of the organization increases. In this paper, we present a quantitative association from our previous research and a theoretical contemplation to provide a management method between the communication of employees and organizational collaboration. Further, we take the case of a company, which is an ICT (Information and Communication Technology) system integrator, using an RFID system, and confirm whether there are causal relationships through a multiple regression analysis of Bayesian statistics. As a result, we found that the egocentric collaboration networks of the Creative Core grew by activating communications (sending emails) among employees. Further, we propose some implications that allow control of collaboration within a company by encouraging communication of the "Creative Core," that is, the central members of the Creative Class by considering the results of this and previous research.


Intercept-based methods of generating a point estimate of a calibrated radiocarbon date are very popular, but exhibit undesirable behaviour. They are highly sensitive to the mean of the radiocarbon date and to adjustments of the calibration curve. Other methods give more stable results. The weighted average of the probability distribution function is recommended as the best central-point estimate, but more consideration should be given to using the full probability distribution rather than a point estimate in developing age-depth models.


The wood fuel pellet industry demands energy efficient solutions for their production since these not only save energy but also money. One way of achieving this is to use additives. Choosing the right additive can save money but also increase the quality of the pellets, a win win situation. In this work, it is investigated how different kind of additives affect the energy use of the pelletizing equipment and also how it affects the durability of pellets. The best results were achieved using oxidized cornstarch as an additive during pellet production, it not only decreases the energy used the most but also produce the pellets with highest durability.


Objective: The aim of this study was to describe the association between ischaemic heart disease (IHD), diabetes mellitus (DM) and heart failure (HF) and the prevalence of cognitive impairment. Methods: In a cross-sectional, community-based study in Karlskrona, Sweden, 1402 participants of the Swedish National Study on Ageing and Care (60–96 y) underwent a medical examination and psychological testing including the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE). Of these, 58% stated that they were treated for hypertension, IHD, DM or HF, or had ECG abnormalities (positive screen). Results: The prevalence of cognitive impairment (MMSE score < 24) in patients treated for IHD, DM or HF was 28.5% compared to 16.1% in the population with a negative screen without cardiovascular disease or DM. After stratification by age, the difference was seen to be due to a higher prevalence of cognitive impairment in the age group 70–79 y, where 68.8% of the cognitively impaired came from the group treated for IHD, DM or HF. The odds ratio for cognitive impairment in this age group was 4.4 (95% CI 1.7–11.4), when compared to those with a negative screen as baseline. Conclusion: This study has shown that the patient group treated for IHD, DM or HF has a higher prevalence of cognitive impairment and a higher risk of developing early cognitive impairment between the ages of 70 and 79 y. Although this study has not provided conclusive evidence that cardiovascular disease and DM are associated with the early development of cognitive impairment, it provides incentive for further studies.


Imaging photoplethysmography (iPPG) has gained a lot of popularity as a contactless heart rate (HR) monitoring technique. However, most of the existing approaches to estimate HR are based on block-wise processing schemes, which are not optimal for real-time applications. The aim of this study was to investigate robust HR estimation methods having a short estimation delay, which would be suitable for real-time HR monitoring applications using iPPG. The three following algorithms were evaluated: 1) an algorithm based on adaptive sliding-window singular value decomposition (SWASVD), 2) an adaptive band-pass filter (OSC-ANF-W), 3) a notch-filter bank (NFB) estimation method. The database used to evaluate these algorithms was composed of 46 records, acquired in the light using an RGB camera or the dark using an NIR camera. The subjects were asked to perform different tasks to induce HR fluctuations. For the visible/dark sequences, average absolute errors (AAE) of 3.42/5.25, 3.14/4.21 and 3.98/6.02 bpm were obtained for the SWASVD, the OSC-ANF-W and the NFB algorithms, respectively. The corresponding averaged estimation delays were 4 seconds for the SWASVD and OSC-ANF-W, and 3 seconds for the NFB.


Based upon focus groups with 12 secondary school physical education (PE) teachers working in north-west England, this paper examines: (i) how young disabled people and pupils with special educational needs (SEN) were assessed in National Curriculum Physical Education (NCPE) 2000; and (ii) how teachers managed the constraints on them to assess these pupils in the same manner as other young people. The findings indicate that the NCPE assessment criteria were often perceived as inappropriate, inadequate and attainable by only a few pupils. Although teachers were constrained to use these criteria because of their statutory nature, the assessment of pupils was very much a matter of personal judgement and guess work that resulted in pupils being awarded grades that were not necessarily accurate or sufficiently indicative of their abilities. It is concluded that the competing pressures on teachers to include young disabled people and those with SEN in mainstream lessons resulted in a series of unplanned outcomes that were not intended nor desired by government, and which came to limit the extent to which pupils' abilities could be assessed, in any meaningful way, within the NCPE 2000 statutory assessment arrangements.


Platelet count to spleen diameter ratio (PSR) was studied extensively as a noninvasive method of diagnosis for varices. The present study aimed to systematically assess the performance of PSR in the diagnosis of varices. PubMed, EMBASE, and article references were searched. The summary receiver operating characteristic curves (AUSROCs), sensitivities, specificities, positive and negative likelihood ratio, and diagnostic odds ratio were calculated. The heterogeneity, quality, and publication bias of studies were evaluated. Subgroup and sensitivity analyses were performed. A total of 49 papers were included. The AUSROCs of PSR for any varices and high-risk varices were 0.8719 and 0.8132, respectively. The summary sensitivities of PSR for any varices and high-risk varices were 0.84 and 0.78, respectively. The summary specificities of PSR for any varices and high-risk varices were 0.78 and 0.67, respectively. The AUSROC of PSR for any varices at the threshold of 909 was 0.8867. The AUSROC of PSR for any varices in viral liver cirrhosis was 0.8675. The overall quality of studies was moderate. Significant heterogeneity and publication bias existed in the study. In conclusion, PSR can be used to identify varices in liver cirrhosis. PSR had a high sensitivity in viral liver cirrhosis.


The Northern Territory is a unique jurisdiction that defies the Australian average in many ways. Recently, the smallest economy in the nation has experienced strong economic growth due to the expansion of the resources sector. The neoclassical growth model which was pioneered by Robert Solow (1956) proposes that sustained economic growth is almost entirely dependent on productivity growth. The central question becomes whether or not the Northern Territory's remarkable economic growth is sustainable in the long run. To answer this question the thesis estimates total factor productivity growth for the Northern Territory using the methodology employed by Krugman (1994) and Young (1994). This is accompanied by an outline of the model and its assumptions, a review of similar studies, and a trend analysis of key economic indicators for the Northern Territory. The thesis will then explore the policy implications of the findings.


Background— Hyperglycemia on admission is associated with an increased mortality rate in patients with acute myocardial infarction. Whether metrics that incorporate multiple glucose assessments during acute myocardial infarction hospitalization are better predictors of mortality than admission glucose alone is not well defined. Methods and Results— We evaluated 16 871 acute myocardial infarction patients hospitalized from January 2000 to December 2005. Using logistic regression models and C indexes, 3 metrics of glucose control (mean glucose, time-averaged glucose, hyperglycemic index), each evaluated over 3 time windows (first 24 hours, 48 hours, entire hospitalization), were compared with admission glucose for their ability to discriminate hospitalization survivors from nonsurvivors. Models were then used to evaluate the relationship between mean glucose and in-hospital mortality. All average glucose metrics performed better than admission glucose. The ability of models to predict mortality improved as the time window increased (C indexes for admission, mean 24 hours, 48 hours, and hospitalization glucose were 0.62, 0.64, 0.66, 0.70; P<0.0001). Statistically significant but small differences in C indexes of mean glucose, time-averaged glucose, and hyperglycemic index were seen. Mortality rates increased with each 10-mg/dL rise in mean glucose ≥120 mg/dL (odds ratio, 1.8; P=0.003 for glucose 120 to <130 mg/dL) and with incremental decline <70 mg/dL (odds ratio, 6.4; P=0.01 versus glucose 100 to <110 mg/dL). The slope of these relationships was steeper in patients without diabetes. Conclusions— Measures of persistent hyperglycemia during acute myocardial infarction are better predictors of mortality than admission glucose. Mean hospitalization glucose appears to be the most practical metric of hyperglycemia-associated risk. A J-shaped relationship exists between average glucose and mortality, with both persistent hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia associated with adverse prognosis.


Dairy industry is one of the major food industries in India, and India ranks first among the maximum major milk producing nation. Of these, about 50% of the units are yet to attain satisfactory performance level with regard to installation and operation of effluent treatment plants. These wastewaters, if discharged without proper treatment severely pollute receiving water bodies. To treat these wastewaters combined with alternate energy source, environmentalists are developing a high rate anaerobic reactor. To minimize the economical burden of treatment on industrialist, having low cost anaerobic reactor with alternate energy source serves the best option. This paper reviews in brief the essential information on the fundamentals of anaerobic reactor treatment as well as technology. Also, it focuses on various anaerobic reactor configurations and operating conditions used for the treatment of dairy industry wastewaters so as to produce alternate energy source as BIO-GAS.


. Food webs show the architecture of trophic relationships, revealing the biodiversity and species interactions in an ecosystem. Understanding which factors modulate the structure of food webs offers us the ability to predict how they will change when in fl uential factors are altered. To date, most of the research about food webs has focused on species interactions whereas the in fl uences of surrounding environments have been overlooked. Here, using network analysis, we identi fi ed how the structure of aquatic food webs varied across a range of geophysical conditions within a whole stream system. Within a headwater basin in the Cascade Mountain Range, Oregon, USA, macroinvertebrate and vertebrate composition was investigated at 18 sites. Predator – prey interactions were compiled based on existing literature and dietary analysis. Several structural network metrics were calculated for each food web. We show that the structure of food webs was predictable based on geophysical features at both local (i.e., slope) and broader (i.e., basin size) spatial extents. Increased omnivory, greater connectance, shorter path lengths, and ulti-mately greater complexity and resilience existed downstream compared to upstream in the stream network. Surprisingly, the variation in food web structure was not associated with geographic proximity. Structural metric values and abundance of omnivory suggest high levels of stability for these food webs. There is a predictable variation in the structure of food webs across the network that is in fl uenced by both longitudinal position within streams and patchy discontinuities in habitat. Hence, fi ndings illustrate that the slightly differing perspectives from the River Continuum Concept, Discontinuity Patch Dynamics, and Process Domains can be integrated and uni fi ed using food web networks. Our analyses extend ecologists ' understanding of the stability of food webs and are a vital step toward predicting how webs and communities may respond to both natural disturbances and current global environmental change.


This paper explores tensions arising from the dynamics of educational change. The focus is on higher education programmes preparing teachers for the learning and skills sector (LSS) in England. Recent policy initiatives relating to this provision have insisted on the development of subject specialist pedagogy. Powerful social, political and economic considerations, together with practical concerns, have combined in recent decades in a way that has propelled the LSS curriculum, and the training of those who deliver it, in an opposite direction to this new imperative. The momentum for change at both the macro and micro levels within the LSS has been, since the 1980s, towards the provision of multidisciplinary curricula and generic teacher training. Resistance to this trend has largely been seen as reactionary and conservative. Teacher educators for the LSS are now being required to implement curriculum change that, at an abstract level, is not consistent with the predominant model and they are (apparently) without a practicable mechanism for doing so. One means that has the potential to address the 'subject specialist pedagogy' requirement has been relatively neglected. A collaborative initiative involving four universities in exploiting new technology to address the policy priority for subject specialist pedagogy is outlined and a number of critical contextual issues are identified.


A synthetic lethal interaction is a type of genetic interaction where the disruption of either of two genes individually has little effect but their combined disruption is lethal. Knowledge of synthetic lethal interactions can allow for elucidation of network structure and identification of candidate drug targets for human diseases such as cancer. In Drosophila, combinatorial gene disruption has been achieved previously by combining multiple RNAi reagents. Here we describe a protocol for high-throughput combinatorial gene disruption by combining CRISPR and RNAi. This approach previously resulted in the identification of highly reproducible and conserved synthetic lethal interactions (Housden et al., 2015).


Introduction: The research knowledge translation along with evidence-based learning in health systems has increased during the last decade, particularly because of the recognition of its importance for achieving many of the Millennium Development Goals. Till now, no studies have highlighted the learning atmosphere in dental learning institutions. Aim: To assess learning culture in a dental institution in National Capital Region of India applying the dimensions of the learning organization questionnaire (DLOQ). Materials and Methods: DLOQ pro forma was distributed among 236 employees at all levels of the dental institution. Data were analyzed using SPSS software version 19.0; Chicago; IL, USA and was subjected to quantitative analysis and nonparametric tests. Results: The dimension "embedded system" scored the lowest mean of 2.36, while the dimension "systems connection" scored the highest mean of 4.02 in general. A significant difference (P ≤ 0.05) between the means of the different professions was noted, whereas on comparison of the relation between each of the professions were performed and a significant difference (P ≤ 0.05) with respect to all the seven dimensions was also noted. Conclusion: The results provided sufficient inputs about the multidimensional learning organization capacity of a dental school in a rapidly developing country like India. This tool can be used as a reliable assessment technique in a dental learning setting to inculcate a wave of individual and organizational learning.


Developers and designers of interactive digital systems are faced with many challenges, some less visible than others. One of these more subtle balancing acts is between personalized user support and unrestricted user autonomy. It raises the question how a supportive design that takes a user's needs and preferences into account can be implemented within a technical system while at the same time allowing the user to make decisions freely without restrictions. How can autonomy by design be incorporated into the process? In this paper we describe the breadth of choice heuristic, which can show where the support of the user by the system stops and a restriction of the user's autonomy begins. To this end, we reference existing literature on similar issues, develop our own conclusions and apply them to our work in a project on IT for elderly people.


Australia's Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) is a federal statute prohibiting behavior that offends, insults, humiliates, or intimidates people based on their race, nationality, ethnicity, or immigration status. It appropriately limits the right to freedom of expression where the exercise of that right encroaches on other, equally fundamental rights to equality and freedom from discrimination. The RDA is one of Australia's few human rights laws focused on fighting racism. It is especially important for protecting the rights of minorities since Australia lacks a constitutional or federal bill of rights. Unfortunately, in 2014 and 2015, conservative politicians called for a repulsion of key RDA provisions in the interest of promoting freer speech. Had this proposal been successful, Australia would have reinforced its "right" to be bigoted, while depriving its racial minorities of their only legal recourse for Australia's pervasive racism. This Note argues that shrinking Australia's human rights framework would most acutely impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the traditional custodians of Australia, who have been marginalized and subjugated by social, institutional, and systemic racism since the time of British colonization. The RDA controversy illustrates the need for Australia to augment, rather than shrink, its human rights framework so it can better meet its human rights obligations toward Australian minorities. Improving and expanding the RDA, and introducing a federal or constitutional bill of rights, will allow Australia to adequately protect the human rights to equality and freedom from discrimination, in balance with the "right" to be bigoted.


Abstract: Taking users' viewpoints into account in evaluation is increasingly recommended. The rationale and methods of user-oriented approaches have been described in theoretical papers. Less often reported are critical and empirical observations on how evaluators should interpret users' views. In the case of information technology, users' views may be gathered for the purpose of both evaluation and development. This double function is best served when a theory-driven framework clarifies the processes underlying the utilization of technology. This article delves into empirical results stemming from an evaluation of an interactive software designed to support health promotion planning. The authors contend that users' viewpoints should be exploited in a meaningful manner, one that goes beyond a summation of the pros and cons and that explains why and how users make use of technology.


A detailed experimental study of the adsorption behavior at equilibrium of pure nitrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide gases on a commercial carbon molecular sieve (Shirasagi MSC 3K-161) is reported at temperatures between 115 K to 323 K and pressures up to 5 MPa. A volumetric-type apparatus was used to obtain over 200 excess (Gibbs) adsorption capacity data over this range of pressure and temperature with an estimated uncertainty of 4 %. The absolute adsorption isotherms were type I in the IUPAC classification with the adsorption capacity at constant pressure increasing significantly with decreasing temperature. For each gas, the adsorption data were regressed to a four parameter Toth equation to represent the temperature and pressure dependence of the data with a relative standard uncertainty of 4 %. The optimized parameters from the Toth equation included the isosteric enthalpies of adsorption that were 17 kJ·mol−1, 27 kJ·mol−1, and 18 kJ·mol−1 for N2, CO2, and CH4, respectively.


The Research Impact Assessment (RIA) is expected to increase the efficiency with which public funds are used, and to improve more broadly the functioning of the research and innovation system and its contribution to address a wide range of socio-economic and environmental issues. Both standard economic approaches, which aim to estimate the economic benefits of research investments, and case-study approaches, which aim to analyse the processes of impact generation, have been applied to agricultural research in practice. Standard economic approaches generally focus on public research as information on private efforts in agricultural research is limited, and on economic impacts such as productivity growth. Case studies provide richer information, through a narrative, and highlight the complex relationships among the various variables, events and actors, but it is difficult to standardise results and scale them up. The challenge for RIA is to take into account broader impacts that go beyond science and economic impacts, and to improve knowledge on impact-generating mechanisms. This has become more difficult as agricultural research and innovation systems are increasingly open and complex, and changing quickly. Observation of practices applied to agricultural research in five selected organisations confirms the difference found in RIA between academic research and in practice. In both, the assessment systems pursue the same objectives: 1) Learning: enhance the know-how to produce an environment conducive to socio-economic impact; 2) Capacity building: spread the culture of socio-economic impact to its researchers; and 3) Reporting to stakeholders: from accountability purposes to advocacy targeted to various audiences. The accountability objective, including estimating returns on the financial investment, poses complex challenges and is in tension with the learning and capacity building objectives. The future of RIA will depend on the capacity to improve estimation methods and gather quality information (which also takes into account non-economic impacts) and the sharing of good practices.


From an anthropological perspective, formal post-secondary schooling is not an abstractentity with an intrinsic value that everyone finds desirable, but rather one alternative among many that young people evaluate from their different positions in the social field. The problem discussed in this paper is the diverging life trajectories that young men and women in a concrete rural context, at the end of the 20th century, shape for themselves at the ages of 14-16, a moment of decision created by national legislation regarding mandatory education (LGE, 1970, General Education Law, and LOGSE, 1990, General Organic Law of the Education System). Despite a strong cultural norm of equal inheritance divided among all children, male and female, and despite the equal educational opportunities provided by the Spanish State, different meanings of possession and use-rights over land and the resulting culturally accepted gendered division of work converge to orient men and women differently towards post-secondary schooling. Observation of the age, gender, and civil status structure of the population led to the preliminary query: Why do men and women, in this town, behave differently with respect to migration and marriage? The main hypothesis was that women's longer school trajectories and resulting migration and men's anchoring in the town and their higher rates of celibacy were not drastic changes in values, in the positional-relational sense of Bourdieu (1988, 2002), but the current outcome of previously existing dissimilar relations to property that produce dissimilar mobility. Through their schooling and work choices, young men and women, at very early ages, locate themselves in, or decide to belong to, different contexts that later reveal very different possibilities of finding marriage partners. This paper is based on an ethnographic study of a small rural town (302 inhabitants in 1950; 193 in 2000) near Leon. Although this paper deals with the situation in the final decades of the 20th century, we must also consider the first half of the century, where some elements that shape this situation have their roots. Fieldwork was carried out between 1988 and 2001, in periods of differing length and intensity. The social subjects discussed here are the domestic unit and its component members. They were studied in conjunction, analyzing the life-trajectory decisions of specific persons in the framework of the domestic unit and the relations among people and property which comprise it. The tried-and-true methods of ethnographic research –participant observation, interviews, and life-histories, etc.- were employed. Archival research was also important for producing demographic data. Demographic analysis, the analysis of the composition and transformation of domestic units, and the creation of life trajectories were among the principal techniques used. The theoretical analysis was oriented by Bourdieu's (2002) framework of the social field, habitus, and difference.


This essay presents an analysis of the Russian director Alexandr Mindadze's feature film Innocent Saturday , released precisely 25 years after the Chernobyl' accident in Ukraine.  In a comparative study between the Russian-speaking and non-Russian-speaking reception of the film, I will show that the philosophical dimension, depicting Chernobyl' not as a "great" historical, technological event, but in terms of how it affected peoples' minds and feelings, constitutes the main theme in the Russian reception, but is more or less absent in the non-Russian-speaking reception. Building upon this divergence in reception, I will further explore the theme of Soviet heroism in a hermeneutical analysis of the film. My conclusions are that Mindadze, in depicting a hero who "does not escape", points towards the existential impossibility of "escaping from your own self", thus challenging not only the rules of an action movie, but also the Soviet myth of heroism, still a politically intense debate in the former Soviet Union. Keywords: Russia, Ukraine, Soviet Union, film, reception, Chernobyl', nuclear accident, Mindadze, Innocent Saturday, myth of heroism, existentialism, Bakhtin, non-alibi in Being


Criminal procedure has undergone several well-documented shifts in its doctrinal foundations since the Supreme Court first began to apply the Constitution's criminal procedure protections to the States. This Article examines the ways in which the political economy of criminal litigation – specifically, the material conditions that determine which litigants are able to raise criminal procedure claims, and which of those litigants' cases are appealed to the United States Supreme Court – has influenced these shifts. It offers a theoretical framework for understanding how the political economy of criminal litigation shapes constitutional doctrine, according to which an increase in the number of indigent defense or-ganizations has expanded the Supreme Court's freedom to select cases that frame constitutional issues in ways that conform to the ideological preferences of the Court's Justices. This framework exposes a potential, but heretofore unidentified, link between the Warren Court's decision in Gideon v. Wainwright and the relative conservatism of contemporary criminal procedure doctrine. Specifically, by mandating the creation of a vast number of state-subsidized organizations representing poor defendants, the Court's deci-sion in Gideon weakened the power that such organizations once had to constrain the Supreme Court's criminal procedure agenda. This Article thus complicates the traditional narrative of constitutional criminal pro-cedure's doctrinal shifts, in which the liberal innovations of the Warren Court were simply eclipsed by the decisions of later and more conserva-tive Courts, by attending to the economic and institutional conditions that underpin those shifts.


Intra-Household Behavioral Responses to Cash Transfer Programs: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design* This paper investigates the behavioral responses of coupled men and women to a cash transfer program in Uruguay – Asignaciones Familiares-Plan de Equidad (AFAM-PE) –, by analyzing its effect on labor market responses, marital dissolution, and the decision-making process regarding the use of money. The identification strategy exploits both the fact that the monetary transfer is targeted to women and a local random assignment into the AFAM-PE which exogenously changed the intra-household distribution of resources across applicant households. Based on a regression discontinuity design and on a follow-up survey matched with administrative records of applicant households to the program, the insights of this study may be summarized in four broad results. First, while no significant effects are found for men, the program has significant negative effects on the formality choice of women at the eligibility cut-off, but no robust effect on the margin of employment. Secondly, these responses seem to be associated with a decline in women's movement into formal labor from unregistered jobs. These responses do not depend on their partner ́s labor supply. Third, contrary to findings for various welfare programs in developed countries, no effect on marital dissolution is found. Fourth, we find suggestive evidence that the AFAM-PE results in women taking greater (perceived) responsibility for decisions in specific spheres of household expenditures. In conclusion, considering the overall effects, these results suggest that conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) do not necessary imply an increase in women's control over household resources, offering suggestive considerations for the ongoing debate in developing countries and suggesting the need to discuss new designs for social assistance. JEL Classification: H31, O15, D13, J22