Henry James called Robert Browning (1812-89) "a tremendous and incomparable modern", and the immediacy and colloquial energy of his poetry has ensured its enduring appeal. This biography sets out to do the same for his life, animating the stereotypes (romantic hero, poetic exile, eminent man of letters) that have left him neglected by modern biographers. He has been seen primarily as one half of that romantic pair, the Brownings; and while the courtship, elopement and marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning remains a perennially seductive subject (and one Finlayson evokes vividly, quoting extensively from their daily letters and contemporary accounts) there is far more to Browning than that. Chronological in structure, this book is divided into three sections which deal with his life's major themes: adolescence and ambition, marriage and money, paternity and poetry. Browning explores the many experiences that inspired his writing, his education and passions, his relationships with family and friends, his continual financial struggles and revulsion at being seen as a fortune-hunter, his most un-Victorian approach to marriage (sexual equality, his helping wean Elizabeth off morphine and nursing her through various illnesses), fatherhood and fame (inviting a leading member of the Browning Society to watch him burning a trunk of personal letters): all of which contribute to a fascinating portrait of a highly unconventional Victorian. This critical biography aims to revolutionise perceptions of the poet - and of the man.


Ixodes pacificus ticks can harbor a wide range of human and animal pathogens. To survey the prevalence of tick-borne known and putative pathogens, we tested 982 individual adult and nymphal I. pacificus ticks collected throughout California between 2007 and 2009 using a broad-range PCR and electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (PCR/ESI-MS) assay designed to detect a wide range of tick-borne microorganisms. Overall, 1.4% of the ticks were found to be infected with Borrelia burgdorferi, 2.0% were infected with Borrelia miyamotoi and 0.3% were infected with Anaplasma phagocytophilum. In addition, 3.0% were infected with Babesia odocoilei. About 1.2% of the ticks were co-infected with more than one pathogen or putative pathogen. In addition, we identified a novel Anaplasmataceae species that we characterized by sequencing of its 16S rRNA, groEL, gltA, and rpoB genes. Sequence analysis indicated that this organism is phylogenetically distinct from known Anaplasma species with its closest genetic near neighbors coming from Asia. The prevalence of this novel Anaplasmataceae species was as high as 21% at one site, and it was detected in 4.9% of ticks tested statewide. Based upon this genetic characterization we propose that this organism be called 'Candidatus Cryptoplasma californiense'. Knowledge of this novel microbe will provide awareness for the community about the breadth of the I. pacificus microbiome, the concept that this bacterium could be more widely spread; and an opportunity to explore whether this bacterium also contributes to human or animal disease burden.


The author argues that there are specific turning points in evolution. Structures and behavioral patterns that evolved in the service of discrete functions sometimes allow for unforeseen new developments as a side effect. In retrospect, they have proven to be pre-adaptations, and serve as raw material for natural selection to work upon. Love and Hate was intended to complement Konrad Lorenz's book, On Aggression, by pointing out our motivations to provide nurturing, and thus to counteract and correct the widespread but one-sided opinion that biologists always present nature as bloody in tooth and claw and intra-specific aggression as the prime mover of evolution. This simplistic image is, nonetheless, still with us, all the more regrettably because it hampers discussion across scholarly disciplines. Eibl-Eibesfeldt argues that leaders in individualized groups are chosen for their pro-social abilities. Those who comfort group members in distress, who are able to intervene in quarrels and to protect group members who are attacked, those who share, those who, in brief, show abilities to nurture, are chosen by the others as leaders, rather than those who use their abilities in competitive ways. Of course, group leaders may need, beyond their pro-social competence, to be gifted as orators, war leaders, or healers. Issues of love and hate are social in origin and hence social in consequence. Life has emerged on this planet in a succession of new forms, from the simplest algae to man-man the one being who reflects upon this creation, who seeks to fashion it himself and who, in the process, may end by destroying it. It would indeed be grotesque if the question of the meaning of life were to be solved in this way. In language that is clear and accessible throughout, arguing forcefully for the innate and "preprogrammed" dispositions of behavior in higher vertebrates, including humans, Eibl-Eibesfeldt steers a middle course in discussing the development of cultural and ethical norms while insisting on their matrix of biological origins.


The internet and, more recently, social networking sites (SNS) have become an important arena for sexual politics. They are used for campaigning on particular issues, for the circulation and finding of information and political news, for debate, for connecting with like-minded people, for awareness-raising activities as well as a publishing platform for a range of vernacular creative outputs ranging from political satire to the celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) subcultures. Social media of the type that encourages users' creativity (like YouTube or Tumblr) have been exploited as an artistic and creative space by marginalized groups of young people to a larger extent than by youth in general. Yet at the same time we need to be aware that SNS, such as Facebook for example, are carefully managed spaces of civility with clear commercial end aims and users are increasingly up against restricting limitations that make them seek out alternatives or attempt to subvert inscribed norms of mainstream sites. These factors combined present us with a rather complex picture in terms of the type, depth, conditions and extent of use. This paper explores the conditions and changing style of LGBT people's digitalized public cultural and political production. It looks at legacies of earlier forms of visual language and aesthetic form of LGBTQ protest as well as developments that are linked to the ways in which media drives and mirrors social transformation. Exploring the employment of commercialized aesthetics, as well as potential acts of resistance and subversion in the digital realm, the paper raises questions about what happens to strongly subcultural traditions as increasingly the production of meaning is formed on line. I will look at some larger scale social media campaigns and compare and contrast these with some DIY media production within grassroots LGBTQ youth communities with the aim to give some insight into the exploitation of digital and social media for political advocacy by younger generations of LGBTQ identified people.


Here we report a new and efficient approach of macrophage specific drug delivery by coating liposomes with albumin. Activated albumin was reacted with liposomes containing polyethylene glycol (PEG) as hydrophilic spacers to create a flexible layer of covalently bound albumin molecules on the liposome surface. Albumin coated liposomes were taken up faster and more efficiently than uncoated liposomes by murine macrophages. Liposome uptake was significantly higher in macropha ges as compared to other cell types tested (endothelial cells, fibroblasts, tumor cells), suggesting specificity for macrophages. In vivo, splenic macrophages phagocytosed BSA coated liposomes (BSA-L) at faster rates compared to conventional liposomes (L) and PEG liposomes (PEG-L). To prove the effectiveness of this new macrophage specific drug carrier, the bisphosphonates clodronate and zoledronate were encapsulated in BSA-L and compared with conventional liposomes. In vitro, treatment of macrophages with clodronate or zoledronate in BSA-L led to cytotoxic activity within a very short time and to up to 50-fold reduced IC50 concentrations. In vivo, clodronate encapsulated in BSA-L depleted splenic macrophages at a 5-fold lower concentration as conventional clodronate-liposomes. Our results highlight the pharmaceutical benefits of albumin-coated liposomes for macrophage specific drug delivery.


Discussions about the allocation of authority between federal and subfederal systems in the implementation of international human rights law typically proceed by staking out one of two initial positions. At one end of the spectrum, a traditional constitutional theory takes a restrictive view of state and local authority, envisioning hierarchical imposition of federally implemented international law norms through the federal treaty power and determination of customary international law by federal courts. At the other end of the spectrum, a revisionist theory assumes greater fragmentation and authority reserved to the states based on federalism and separation of powers limits on federal authority. "These divergent images capture different moments of political promise and despair, at times focused on the immense power of the national project, and other times appreciating the vitality and durability of forms of governance that, without...great resources, continue to have social and political force."Under both models, one system--either federal or sub-federal--has a predominant voice in deciding when and how international human rights law is implemented. Such either/or approaches seek to avoid the conflict and indeterminacy created when the distribution of constitutional authority is uncertain. At the traditional/hierarchical end of the spectrum, the conflict is interference with the ability of the nation to speak with "one voice" in foreign affairs, posed by "divergent and perhaps parochial state interpretations" of international law. At the revisionist/fragmentation end, the conflict, at its core, is interference with states' rights by federal courts (without authorization to do so by the federal political branches) and by the political branches (particularly Congress, when it exercises the treaty power to legislate in areas beyond those specifically conferred in the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8). While the two paradigms described here are idealized and oversimplify the subtlety and hybridity within these paradigms, in fact much of the scholarship on federalism and human rights law in the United States loosely tracks one or the other of these two models, if not always in its purest form.This article argues for a third approach, premised on dialogue and intergovernmental relations as a way to negotiate, rather than avoid, conflict and indeterminacy. This approach links national and subnational governments in a dialogue about rights by "creat[ing] areas of overlap in which neither system can claim total sovereignty." The dialogue emerges in these areas of overlap, particularly where differences arise in the extent to which national and subnational governments incorporate human rights obligations. Conflict and indeterminacy are desired conditions, so long as mechanisms exist to channel and resolve these differences and ambiguities, as a means of clarifying and articulating international human rights domestically. By contrast, where one system has sovereignty to act without the consensus and support of the other, the reach of international human rights law lacks both depth and breadth.Incorporating human rights norms into local law, state and local initiatives--particularly those that are legally binding--may increase the viscosity of human rights law in the United States.In performing these two important functions, state and local initiatives incorporating human rights standards may facilitate legally enforceable commitments at the national level. Far from adopting the revisionist perspective that states should displace the federal government in implementing, interpreting and enforcing international law, however, this article argues that the federal government should play a strong leadership role in coordinating information regarding state and local efforts to publicize best practices, to distill lessons learned, and to extract workable norms for possible adoption at the national level. Moreover, this article stops short of endorsing more ambitious proposals to involve state and local governments directly in the treaty-making process. While recognizing that subnational government units have participated on a limited basis in the World Trade Organization (WTO), in trade negotiations, and in various international environmental conferences, examination of state and local government involvement in such external international arenas is beyond the scope of this article. As for internal domestic incorporation of human rights law, however, a stronger coordination role by the national government is needed because "the Constitution created the institutions of the federal government precisely to avoid such balkanization of foreign policy and international affairs." An Inter-Agency Working Group (along the lines of theme established under Executive Order 13,107) could play such a coordination role.Ultimately, it is in the federal government's national interest to become more involved in monitoring and nurturing these local efforts. Under international law, the federal government is responsible for treaty violations of subnational governments and their officials. Even assuming international law eventually establishes liability for subnational governments, national governments will likely continue to be on the hook so long as these governments continue to assert control over their constituent units.


For extensive form games with perfect information, consider a learning process in which, at any iteration, each player unilaterally deviates to a best response to his current conjectures of others' strategies; and then updates his conjectures in accordance with the induced play of the game. We show that, for generic payoffs, the outcome of the game becomes stationary in finite time, and is consistent with Nash equilibrium. In general, if payoffs have ties or if players observe more of each others' strategies than is revealed by plays of the game, the same result holds provided a rationality constraint is imposed on unilateral deviations: no player changes his moves in subgames that he deems unreachable, unless he stands to improve his payoff there. Moreover, with this constraint, the sequence of strategies and conjectures also becomes stationary, and yields a self- confirming equilibrium.


The paper describes a method for semantic errors detection arising during incorrect code copy-paste made by the developer. The method consists of two basic parts. The first part detects code clones based on lexical analysis of the program. A sequence of tokens is constructed based on the LLVM lexer and then all pairs of maximal, non-intersected matched token sequences are detected. The pairs of identical subsequences are then partially parsed to retain the constructs allowed by the programming language and to remove the incomplete sequences. When the remaining subsequences are big enough, the second stage is applied for them. A Program Dependence Graph (PDG) is constructed for the corresponding function code, and then identical subsequences' subgraphs are considered. If two subgraphs have shared vertices, then outgoing edges of these vertices are analyzed. This allows detecting semantic errors with high accuracy. The described method is implemented for the LLVM/Clang compiler. Due to this semantic mistakes are detected during program compile time, so there is no need for separate lexical and semantic program analysis. A number of widely used open source libraries and software systems were analyzed. The paper contains the list of detected semantic errors for Linux kernel 2.6 and Android 4.3. For these systems, the true positive rate achieved by our approach is above 65%.


The effect of composition and processing conditions on the spatial structural variation in dynamically vulcanized injection molded poly(propylene)/ethylene-propylene-diene rubber (PP/EPDM) was investigated using matrixing microbeam X-ray system and transmission optical microscopy techniques. The structure gradient in the thickness direction in these samples is composed of very thick, highly oriented, skin regions followed by core regions of lower preferential chain orientation. In these samples, the shear-crystallized layers are observed to be much thicker than the comparably processed pure PP. The nucleation densities in the PP phase were too high to allow for observation of individual crystallites in most of the regions except near the very core, where sparsely distributed PP crystallites, that appear bright under cross polars, were observed. The wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS) patterns taken at different distances from the skin indicate that chain axes are mostly oriented in the flow direction, and distinct bimodal c-axis and a * axis oriented dual population of orientation is observed in the PP phase, c-axis orientation factors, f c , start at intermediate values at the skin and increase steadily and after showing a maximum roughly in the middle of the shear crystallized region, decrease towards the core, and in most cases never achieve a state of isotropy. In the blends that contain very small polypropylene fractions (ca ∼ 15%), unusually high orientation levels were observed. This was attributed to the shear amplification phenomena that dominates the thin PP regions between the rubber particles and causes significant orientation levels in the thin layers of PP coating, the rubber particles with the relative motion of the particles in the shear flow field.


Seasonal changes in sea temperature levels affect the swimming performance of fish. This study investigates if a change of 5°C from 7 to 12°C in water temperature has a significant effect on the maximum swimming performance of whiting, Merlangius merlangus, which is one of the most common species caught in the bottom trawl fisheries of the North Sea. The effect of this seasonal change on swimming performance was shown by two experiments. A temperature increase from 7°C to 12°C was shown to cause a decrease in the minimum twitch contraction time of the lateral muscle, when stimulated by an electric pulse, from 45.8ms to 33.9ms. This gives a maximum tail beat frequency of 10.9Hz at 7°C rising to 14.7Hz at 12°C. In the second set of experiments, the escape response of fish to sound stimuli at these two temperatures was investigated. The Mauthner Escape Reflexes of the fish were found to be significantly slower at 7°C than at 12°C. Mean escape latency at 12°C (27.6) was significantly shorter than that at 7°C (34.8) (t test, P< 0.001). The mean value of the time taken to complete stage 1 at 12°C (45.6ms) was significantly faster than that at 7°C (57.7ms) (t test, P< 0.001). Similarly, the mean value of the time taken to complete stage 2 at 12°C (119.9ms) was significantly faster than that at 7°C (154.3ms) (t test, P< 0.05). The general underlying physiological effect of a temperature increase of 10°C was to almost double the speed of fish maximum swimming ability (Q10°C =1.81). The results of these experiments have shown that, due to low water temperature, the maximum swimming speed of whiting in late winter and spring is lower than that in late summer and autumn.


Glomerulonephritis (GN) has been associated with many solid and hematologic malignancies. However, cancer prevalence at the time of GN diagnosis has been rarely examined. We aimed to evaluate the cancer prevalence in patients with GN at the time of kidney biopsy and to compare the results to those of the general population. A total of 1,155 patients who underwent kidney biopsy between 2003 and 2017 were included. We investigated patients diagnosed with cancer within one month of kidney biopsy. The occurrence of cancer was compared with that of the Korean general population using the observed-to-expected rates (O/E ratio). Twenty-nine patients with GN had cancer. The mean age of patients with and without cancer was 49 and 66 years old, respectively. The proportion of male patients with and without cancer was 49.4% and 58.6%, respectively. The glomerular filtration rate was different between the groups (78.1 ± 37.0, 58.0 ± 43.6 ml/min/1.73 m2, p = 0.006), but the urine protein/creatinine ratio was not (3.21 ± 4.01, 5.38 ± 7.47 g/gCr, p = 0.172). Immunoglobulin A nephropathy (IgAN) was the most common GN (37.9%), followed by membranous GN (13.5%), focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (9.7%), minimal change disease (9.2%), amyloidosis (1.2%). Amyloidosis was the most common GN associated with malignancy (20.7%). In patients with amyloidosis, cancer was observed almost 28 times more than expected and these patients showed higher cancer occurrence than patients with other GN (Relative Risk [RR]: 15.73; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 4.82–51.30; p < 0.01). Cancer occurrence was three times greater in GN patients aged > 50 years compared to the general population (O/E ratio: 3.42; 95% CI: 1.37–5.46; p = 0.027). Patients with GN, especially amyloidosis, have higher risk of cancer than the general population at the time of GN diagnosis. Older age (> 50 years) was one of the major determinants of the presence of cancer in GN patients.


[Abstract] This research sought to examine the term "inclusion" in the old critical writings, employing the historical approach in tracing the term in its original sources. It also presented the terms which replaced its use in contexts, sources of the term, mechanisms of inclusion, as well as its advantages as being an artistic skill which plays an important role in building texts. [Keywords] Inclusion; criticism; oration; eloquence; rhetoric Introduction Inclusion, like other terms, appeared in the circulation of knowledge, giving it semantic dimensions, which stimulate the researcher to enter the domain itself in order to benefit from the whole related field approaches and to deliberately aim at discussing them to trace the constituents of the term problems. The study attempts to deal with this field taking into account that it should abide by the ethics of difference of opinions, which guarantees the rights of researchers through their manifestation and recognition. The purpose of this study is to raise more questions than to decide answers. It is not the concern and mission of people of criticism and literature to say the last word. This research tries to perceive the term of inclusion in old critical writings as this term always tries to escape. The researcher understood the definitions of critics and people of rhetoric and the mobility implied in this term, as they defined it in different ways, meanings and contexts. These contexts were involved with other overlapping definitions with the definition of inclusion, which made it difficult to identify and control even its name. A lot of terms substituted its use, which forced some critics to remove the confusion between it and some of these terms. The term "inclusion" is divided according to several considerations; inclusion of "poetry," according to critics and people of rhetoric, has a name which depends on the size of the included if it is a verse or half a verse or part of it, and the inclusion of the Holy Quran and Hadith (prophetic Tradition) has another name and so forth. The researcher used the historical method to examine the divergence of the term. There is no doubt, as emphasized by the researcher, that the term "inclusion" is one of the strongest terms which the composers of old times used to strengthen, embellish and enrich their texts. The interpreters of Quranic texts used it to adequately read those which include quotation, reference or indirect reference to show the richness of words with inclusion of different meanings and indications. The research examined the advantages of inclusion, its sources, and its synonyms. To achieve this, the researcher discussed the topic through the following main cores as being a part of connected series. Importance of the Term The researcher thinks that the literary origin of the term of "inclusion" started with Abu Obadiah Muhammad Bin Al - Muthanna (210 of the Hegira), who considered inclusion as the concealed meaning in the mentioned word. It was cited in Ibn Salam's Tabaqat Fuhoul AL- Shuara (232 of the Hegira) that people of AL- Badiyah heard a verse of AL-Nabigha narrated by AL-Zabrukan Bin Badr: Wolves attack people who have no dogs But they are afraid of people who have dogs. This verse was quoted by AL- Zabrukan in his poem as a saying. Arab poets used to quote a verse from another poem to enrich their poetry. AL-Jahidh (255 of the Hegira) considered an oration without quotation from the Holy Quran as something deformed. He went further than that by considering quotation from the Holy Quran as jewelry which embellishes texts syntactically and semantically. This is a clear indication of the value and effect of inclusion. AL-Bakilani (403 of the Hegira) was the first to talk about the two tracks of inclusion: structurally directed inclusion and a phrase directed one. He was also the first to refer to its potent advantages such as briefing and eloquence. …


The phone-tapping scandal blew up with the revelation that murder victim Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked, seeming to demonstrate that the public are much more concerned with the feelings of bereaved families than with the reputations of celebrities or politicians. Therefore any regulation that arises from Hackgate is likely to include the area of contact between journalists and the grieving. This paper considers whether families actually need more "protection" from journalists and, drawing on evidence from interviews with bereaved relatives, argues that what they actually need is informed access to the media. It also considers "hacking" and lifting material from social media sites, which, while being legal, similarly prompts many ethical concerns. Journalists' attitudes to using these sites in covering personal traumatic events will be explored using data collected from questionnaires mostly from reporters of five years or less experience. In particular the paper will examine whether journalists consider "virtual door-stepping" to be more or less intrusive than traditional approaches and whether they use these sites to limit contact with the bereaved. It will attempt to assess the benefits and harms of a probable increased usage of social networking sites in the intrusive reporting process.


A study was conducted among 194 RISDA'sfrontline workers throughout Peninsular Malaysia.
The aim of the study was to identify front line workers' training needs in technical and non-technical
areas. The findings of the study should serve as a useful guide in curriculum development for inservice
training of RISDA 's front line workers. The study indicated that the front line workers need
training in the areas related to the modernization programme specifically in diversifying income
sources for the rubber smallholders. The areas identified are the rearing of sheep, cattle and buffaloes
(76 per cent), fresh-water fish rearing (73.65 per cent), agricultural economics (73.4 per cent) and
poultry rearing (73.28 per cent). The officers were also found to have low job-competencies in these
areas probably because the areas are comparatively new within the. whole range of rubber smallholders
development programmes.


Objective The aim of this retrospective study was to assess the long-term results of stripping the insufficient great saphenous vein (GSV) with stump coagulation, closure of the cribriform fascia and some additional measures, which will be described in detail. Methods Patients treated from 1998 to 1999 for varicose veins had been invited in 2009 for follow-up colour-coded duplex sonography and had been asked to answer a quality-of-life questionnaire. In 2009, the examinations for the study were conducted at a clinic of angiology by an independent and experienced sonographer. Results From a total of 165 patients, 91 (136 limbs) had been willing to participate in the study. Duplex ultrasound after a mean follow-up of 10.7 years revealed only clinically non-relevant (Ø < 0.3 cm) neovascularizations in 1.5% of all treated legs. No clinical relevant varicosities from the groin had developed. Conclusion The crossectomy combined with stump coagulation and suture of the fossa ovalis, completed with some additional measures, is a successful method to reduce neovascularization and recurrent varicosities, even for redo-crossectomies, without increasing the risk of perioperative complications.


In her early work on Modernist poetry and avant-garde poetics, Julia Kristeva proposed a bifurcated view of the poetic text as simultaneously constituted by both a "genotext" and a "phenotext."  Reading the "genotext" of any given poem might start by "pointing out the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic devices (such as the accumulation and repetition of phonemes or rhyme) and melodic devices (such as intonation or rhythm)"; and, in her words, it would also need to take into consideration "the way semantic and categorial fields are set out in syntactic and logical features." This essay seeks to demonstrate how Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge might be analyzed at the level of its genotext, taking (arbitrarily) as its primary example the first of the book's eighty poems to illustrate how a straightforwardly genotextual analysis might proceed. The essay contends that, by closely observing the genotext of Mullen's poetry in Muse & Drudge, one may eventually arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of the "polyvocal" and "polymorphous" nature of the language and poetic design of the poems in this enigmatic collection.


Today, angiosperms are fundamental players in the diversity and biogeochemical functioning of the planet. Yet despite the omnipresence of angiosperms in today's ecosystems, the basic evolutionary understanding of how the earliest angiosperms functioned remains unknown. Here we synthesize ecophysiological, paleobotanical, paleoecological, and phylogenetic lines of evidence about early angiosperms and their environments. In doing so, we arrive at a hypothesis that early angiosperms evolved in evermoist tropical terrestrial habitats, where three of their emblematic innovations – including net‐veined leaves, xylem vessels, and flowers – found ecophysiological advantages. However, the adaptation of early angiosperm ecophysiology to wet habitats did not initially promote massive diversification and ecological dominance. Instead, wet habitats were permissive for the ecological roothold of the clade, a critical phase of early diversification that entailed experimentation with a range of functional innovations in the leaves, wood, and flowers. Later, our results suggest that some of these innovations were co‐opted gradually for new roles in the evolution of greater productivity and drought tolerance, which are characteristics seen across the vast majority of derived and ecologically dominant angiosperms today.


SDN controllers must be periodically upgraded to add features, improve performance, and fix bugs, but current techniques for implementing dynamic updates---i.e., without disrupting ongoing network functions---are inadequate. Simply halting the old controller and bringing up the new one can cause state to be lost, leading to incorrect behavior. For example, if the state represents flows blacklisted by a firewall, then traffic that should be blocked may be allowed to pass through. Techniques based on record and replay can reconstruct controller state automatically, but they are expensive to deploy and do not work in all scenarios. This paper presents a new approach to implementing dynamic updates for SDN controllers. We present the design and implementation of a new controller platform called Morpheus that uses explicit state transfer to implement dynamic updates. Morpheus enables programmers to directly initialize the upgraded controller's state as a function of its existing state, using a domain-specific language that is designed to be easy to use. Morpheus also offers a distributed protocol for safely deploying updates across multiple nodes. Experiments confirm that Morpheus provides correct behavior and good performance.


How do people do or make things that come to be seen as works of art? In other words, when is there artification? The answer to this question is simultaneously symbolic, material, and contextual. It has to do with meanings, objects, interaction, and institutions. We seek to define not what art is nor how it should be considered, but how and under what circumstances it comes about by way of methodical observation and inquiry in a variety of fields. Circus acrobats, breakdancers, fashion designers, chefs, graffiti artists, printers, photographers, and jazz musicians are some of the examples we explore. This pragmatic and empirical perspective enables us to present a typology of forms of artification and examine its sources as well as the questions of de-artification and obstacles to artification.


ABSTRACT This article discusses radical democratic citizenship in the context of the 'Rojava Revolution', an ongoing society-building effort that emerged in majority Kurdish regions in the context of the Syrian war. It describes aspects of the political vision of Abdullah Öcalan, as interpreted and applied by activists involved in the democratic self-governance system in Rojava (northern Syria), since 2012. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the region, the article focuses on the ways in which activists frame their revolution and notions of radical democratic citizenship as consciousness-raising efforts against the state system. Centering the role of educational institutions, it argues that theoretical discussions within the Kurdish freedom movement seek to emancipate political action from state-centric ways of articulating political will, justice demands, and wider geopolitical interests. Lastly, it encourages studying radical democracy efforts by taking seriously the political vocabularies, everyday practices, and long-term perspectives advanced in collective self-organisation from below.


Schools are essential in forming human capital and in improving the long-term health of the economy. They are also heavily reliant on state and local funds, which were severely depleted during the Great Recession. To alleviate some of the strain on local budgets, the federal government passed and implemented a large stimulus package, which included funds for school districts. However, the stimulus funds were drawn down beginning in 2011, at a time when state and local revenues were still under pressure. In this paper, we use a detailed panel data set of all school districts in New Jersey for the period 1999 through 2012 and analyze the impact of this series of events on New Jersey school finances using a trend-shift analysis. We find that the recession led to cuts in funding and expenditure. While the stimulus served as an effective stopgap against major cuts, the picture was very different once the stimulus funds were depleted, with significantly deeper cuts in both funding and spending. With cutbacks in state aid and the withdrawal of the stimulus funding, local funding played a larger role, despite the fact that local funding was also decreasing relative to trend. Examining the components of expenditure, we find that instructional categories were prioritized over noninstructional, so instructional expenditure only sustained small cuts in the initial years after recession. But when the stimulus dried up and the economy was still stagnating, instructional expenditure received severe cuts. We analyze variations by metropolitan area, and find that Camden experienced the largest cuts while Wayne experienced the smallest (although the declines in funding and expenditure were still significant). Our findings are an important step in understanding how recessions and fiscal policy affect school finances and inform future policy decisions relating to school finances during fiscal crises.


The area and contour of a stimulus have been indicated experimentally as factors in its visibility. In order to evaluate the role of such factors in radar presentation, an experiment was conducted to determine the effect upon visibility of changes in the size and shape of a radar pip. A wide range of beam widths (which determine the angular dimension of the pip) and pulse lengths (which determine its radial dimension) was investigated at each of three test field brightnesses. Resuits show that visibility, on a decibel scale, is a linear function of the logarithm of beam width at each of the three brightness levels used. For the dim background visibility is also a linear function of the logarithm of pulse length. For the brighter backgrounds, on the other hand, visibility is shown to be a curvilinear function of the logarithm of pulse length. It is suggested that the reason for the difference between an increase in beam width and an increase in pulse length lies in the time factor. Doubling the beam width, for example, results in a greater increase in the time during which the pip is exposed to the eye than does a corresponding increase in the pulse length.


Objective To summarise existing systematic reviews that assess the effects of non-pharmacological, pharmacological and alternative therapies on activities of daily living (ADL) function in people with dementia. Design Overview of systematic reviews. Methods A systematic search in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, DARE, Medline, EMBASE and PsycInfo in April 2015. Systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials conducted in people with Alzheimer's disease or dementia measuring the impact on ADL function were included. Methodological quality of the systematic reviews was independently assessed by two authors using the AMSTAR tool. The quality of evidence of the primary studies for each intervention was assessed using GRADE. Results A total of 23 systematic reviews were included in the overview. The quality of the reviews varied; however most (65%) scored 8/11 or more on the AMSTAR tool, indicating high quality. Interventions that were reported to be effective in minimising decline in ADL function were: exercise (6 studies, 289 participants, standardised mean difference (SMD) 0.68, 95% CI 0.08 to 1.27; GRADE: low), dyadic interventions (8 studies, 988 participants, SMD 0.37, 95% CI 0.05 to 0.69; GRADE: low) acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and memantine (12 studies, 4661 participants, donepezil 10 mg SMD 0.18, 95% CI 0.03 to 0.32; GRADE: moderate), selegiline (7 studies, 810 participants, SMD 0.27, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.41; GRADE: low), huperzine A (2 studies, 70 participants, SMD 1.48, 95% CI 0.95 to 2.02; GRADE: very low) and Ginkgo biloba (7 studies, 2530 participants, SMD 0.36, 95% CI 0.28 to 0.44; GRADE: very low). Conclusions Healthcare professionals should ensure that people with dementia are encouraged to exercise and that primary carers are trained and supported to provide safe and effective care for the person with dementia. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors or memantine should be trialled unless contraindicated. Trial registration number CRD42015020179.


In this paper, we present a method for automated calibration of an implanted anisotropic magnetoresistive (AMR) sensor for measuring the internal-external rotation in a prosthetic knee without using any reference measurement. The measurement system consists of a permanent magnet and a 2-D AMR sensor configured and embedded into the prosthesis. Using the physical relation between the measurements of channels of sensor, we proposed a reference-free calibration method through the optimization. The parameters of the measurement model of the sensor obtained via the calibration were directly used in an angle estimator. Two different optimization approaches were tested, and the resultant estimates were compared with the reference angle with the expected ± standard deviation of error of -1.69° ± 0.65° and -1.17° ± 1.13°. The reference-free calibrated estimators were also compared with the reference-dependent least-square estimators. This latter comparison showed an offset error difference among the estimators while the coefficients of determination for the both reference-free and reference-dependent estimators were high, i.e., larger than 0.91. The good performances were maintained even when using a small portion of data for the optimization. The sensor-magnet misalignment effect was also investigated. The misalignment slightly worsened the mean error of the estimates, but neither dramatically affected the variance of error nor the coefficient of determination.


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Sydney Brenner After earning his doctorate from Oxford in 1952, Sydney Brenner worked in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge until 1987, serving as its director until 1992. During these years he collaborated in the discovery of the triplet code messenger RNA, established the importance of C. elegans in the analysis of complex biological processes, and in the 1980s turned to the study of vertebrate genomics. He is currently director of the Molecular Science Institute in Berkeley, CA.

A t 72 I am almost half the age of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and belong to the generation that made the 20th-century revolution in biology. We have lived through a century of momentous changes, both in science and society, and more is still to come.

In the grim days of the Cold War, with the threat of global nuclear war hanging over us, who could have imagined that Communism would undergo a total collapse, that the Soviet Union would disintegrate, and that Russia would rapidly become a poor country controlled by gangsters. Our world now has an immediacy of contact never experienced before. Technology has brought all of humanity together, and nearly everything can be watched live—war in the Middle East, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and people dying of starvation and disease in Africa. Whereas it once took days or weeks for news to travel and a year for an influenza epidemic to spread, news can now be transmitted instantaneously and a new virus can spread all over the world in 24 hours.

All around I see evidence of the impact of science on society. This is so obvious and so well known that little more remains to be said about it. Science and the technologies it has spawned form the basis of all human activity, from the houses that we live in, the food that we eat, the cars that we drive, to the electronic gadgetry in almost every home that we use to remain informed and entertained.

Yet, despite these technological innovations, the paradoxes that I noticed when I was young are still with us: In advanced societies an increasing proportion of national wealth is now spent on health and recreation and large sums of money are devoted to military enterprises, while in the underdeveloped world famine and pointless wars still exact a terrible toll of human lives, malnutrition and disease are still rife, and even the basic necessities of life such as food and shelter cannot be provided for all. There is no doubt that great advances could be made in the treatment of malaria and other parasitic diseases that afflict more than half of the world's population, but the people who have these diseases also have another called MDD—money deficiency disease. There are many problems that science and technology, by themselves, are unable to solve given the economic structure of the world that we live in. So when we speak of the impact of science on society we are speaking about the more advanced countries, and when we speculate on the future, it usually concerns the same areas of the world.

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Following the advent of molecular biology came the technologies and their applications. For many years it was widely held that molecular biology was a completely useless subject, a "fundamental" science of no interest to those working on practical matters. Then suddenly it came to be viewed as dangerous, and genetic engineering was considered an almost Satanic activity. Biological scientists became suspect and trust in this science diminished, as fantastical scenarios were played out to an increasingly terrified public. Our times are characterized by a view that we can accomplish everything in this generation, especially if we can find and apply the right technology. Thus when a newspaper journalist accused me of being one of the scientists who is going to make people in a test tube, I had to reply that I could think of a much more pleasant and cheaper way of making people than genetic engineering. The fixation on technology gives us a slanted view of human existence. For example, immortality may be a futile notion, yet some believe that through the use of high technology it might nevertheless be brought off.

The history of the last 25 years teaches us the profound lesson that it is necessary for scientists to communicate to society at large not only the content, use, and misuse of scientific discoveries, but also what their work tells us about the intrinsic limitations of our bodies and minds. This is not an easy task, especially in a science whose content becomes more complicated every day.

I do not know whether I want to speculate on what impact science will have on society in the next 150 years. I wish I could say that we will banish hunger and war, and I wish I could reassure readers that we will still have a planet to live on. As everybody knows, this does not depend on science alone but on economic forces and political wills, something that scientists do not control.

However, there is another subject that is not often discussed in this context: the impact of society on science, the inverse of the general theme of this essay series. Much like the evidence for the impact of science on society, the evidence for the impact of society on science is all around for everyone to see, mainly in the form of the large (but never sufficient) funding that science enjoys in the more advanced countries. Society and its arm of action, government, understands that science has developed powerful methods for solving a large number of problems. What distinguishes science from all other kinds of problem-solving activities is the demand that the answers it discovers work in the real world. It is why rulers gave up slaughtering animals to examine their entrails: Magic does not exist in any world at all. However, in stimulating and supporting science, society, as the paymaster, has taken a much shorter term view of research than most scientists would like. There has been much discussion about the different kinds of science. We call one pure, another applied, and a possible third, strategic—it could also be called "apploid"—that is pure but destined to become applied. Then there is mission-directed as opposed to curiosity-driven research, a distinction that I find particularly obnoxious because one can almost see the word "idle" in front of curiosity. Actually, the answer to the question of which type of science to fund is quite simple: Since all science is problem driven, it should be judged by the quality of the problems posed, and the quality of the solutions provided.

Governments support research because its findings contribute greatly to social ends such as the health and wealth of citizens, causes that get politicians re-elected and for which people pay taxes. Of course governments indulge in other activities that cost much more than scientific research, and one can always find military expenditures that could keep a lot of labs going for a long time. The increased funding for scientific research in recent years, especially in the health fields, has resulted in a great expansion of the number of scientists and thus in increased competition for academic and research funds. We have established an elaborate system of peer reviews to deal with this competition, and a similar process is in force for the publication of scientific results. All of this has subtle consequences for the scientific enterprise. If you know what sort of research is wanted by a committee you write your grant to satisfy these expectations, and if you know what the oligarchy believes is the correct view of a subject, you give your paper that slant. Ironically, all of this was originally introduced to ensure fairness and to eliminate the older system where powerful people got all the money, appointed who they liked to their laboratories, and published only papers written by their friends. Both the old feudal system and the new bureaucracy have consequences for scientific innovation; the former narrowed its pursuit to only a few, while the latter discourages its pursuit by all. But there are also more insidious effects because in most countries research and education are now linked almost exclusively to universities: Postdocs learn from professors, students learn from postdocs, and the art of surviving is very quickly transmitted. It is only through the use of subterfuge such as applying for money for work already done that innovative research can be freely pursued.

We need to take these matters seriously, otherwise science will lose the independence of thought required for innovation that it has cherished for centuries. In my own subjects, genetics and molecular biology, research has become so directed toward medical problems and the needs of the pharmaceutical companies that most people do not recognize that the most challenging intellectual problem of all time, the reconstruction of our biological past, can now be tackled with some hope of success. I hope it is not too much to ask that rich societies provide more support for this and other fundamental fields of biology. We need to assure the future of biological research and prevent it from becoming stilted and boring. We can only do this by attracting new young minds to our science and offer them problems as challenging as those that excited my generation.

 [1]: pending:yes


In this paper we study convergence among Russian regions. We find that while there was no convergence in 1990s, the situation changed dramatically in 2000s. While interregional GDP per capita gaps still persist, the differentials in incomes and wages decreased substantially. We show that fiscal redistribution did not play a major role in convergence. We therefore try to understand the phenomenon of recent convergence using panel data on the interregional reallocation of capital and labor. We find that capital market in Russian regions is integrated in a sense that local investment does not depend on local savings. We also show that economic growth and financial development has substantially decreased the barriers to labor mobility. We find that in 1990s many poor Russian regions were in a poverty trap: potential workers wanted to leave those regions but could not afford to finance the move. In 2000s (especially in late 2000s), these barriers were no longer binding. Overall economic development allowed even poorest Russian regions to grow out of the poverty traps. This resulted in convergence in Russian labor market; the interregional gaps in incomes, wages and unemployment rates are now below those in Europe. The results imply that economic growth and development of financial and real estate markets eventually result in interregional convergence.


Nitric oxide promotes the degradation of a subfamily of ERF transcription factors, thereby contributing to regulation of seed germination. Group VII ethylene response factor (ERF) transcription factors function as homeostatic sensors of oxygen and are degraded by an N-end rule pathway in the presence of oxygen and accumulate under hypoxic conditions. The N-end rule degradative pathways involve the recognition of proteins with specific N-terminal residues that can be posttranslationally modified, such as cysteine, which is oxidized and then arginylated (the Arg/N-end rule pathway). Gibbs et al. showed that the Arg/N-end rule pathway also regulates the stability of a subset of ERF transcription factors in response to nitric oxide (NO) and thereby regulates seed germination and contributes to other developmental processes. Treatment of seedlings with NO scavengers stabilized Arg/N-end rule reporter proteins, whereas NO donors promoted the degradation of the reporters. The stability of the reporters was unchanged in prt6 or ate1ate2 plants lacking enzymes in the Arg/N-end rule pathway. To determine whether group VII ERFs were also subject to Arg/N-end rule degradation in response to NO, the abundance of methionine-cysteine (MC)–RAP2.3 tagged with hemagglutinin (HA) on the C terminus (MC-RAP2.3-HA) or a mutant initiated with methionine-alanine (MA) was assessed. MC-RAP2.3-HA, but not MA-RAP2.3-HA, was stabilized by exposure to an NO scavenger, and this response was compromised in plants deficient in the Arg/N-end rule pathway. The abundance of MC-RAP2.3-HA or another group VII ERF MC-HRE2-HA was increased by hypoxia (induced by submersion in water) or in plants deficient in the enzymes needed to produce NO. NO stimulates seed germination by reducing the response to abscisic acid (ABA), and NO donors stimulated germination of dormant seeds from wild-type plants but not those from prt6 or ate1ate2 mutants. If the effect of loss of PRT6 function is an increase in the abundance of group VII ERFs, then knocking out the relevant ERFs in the prt6 background should reduce seed dormancy and reduce the sensitivity to ABA. Seeds from plants in which rap2.12, rap2.2, and rap2.3 were knocked out required less time under cold conditions to stimulate germination (thus indicating reduced dormancy) and required higher concentrations of ABA to inhibit germination. These effects were not seen in seeds from plants in which hre1 and hre2 were knocked out. Analysis of a reporter with the promoter of abi5 (encoding ABI5, an ABA-responsive transcription factor that inhibits germination) and chromatin immunoprecipitation experiments indicated that the RAP subfamily stimulated the expression of this gene. Furthermore, in seeds, the activity of the reporter was inhibited by exposure to an NO donor and was enhanced in prt6 seeds. Thus, Arg/N-end rule mediated degradation of a subset of ERFs functions in plant responses to both oxygen and NO. D. J. Gibbs, N. Md Isa, M. Movahedi, J. Lozano-Juste, G. M. Mendiondo, S. Berckhan, N. Marín-de la Rosa, J. Vicente Conde, C. Sousa Correia, S. P. Pearce, G. W. Bassel, B. Hamali, P. Talloji, D. F. A. Tomé, A. Coego, J. Beynon, D. Alabadí, A. Bachmair, J. León, J. E. Gray, F. L. Theodoulou, M. J. Holdsworth, Nitric oxide sensing in plants is mediated by proteolytic control of group VII ERF transcription factors. Mol. Cell 53, 369–379 (2014). [PubMed]


This poster paper presents the design and implementation of an RDFS reasoner based on a backward chaining approach and implemented on a clustered RDF triplestore. The system presented, called 4sr, uses 4store as base infrastructure. In order to achieve a highly scalable system we implemented the reasoning at the lowest level of the quad store, the bind operation. The bind operation in 4sr traverses the quad store indexes matching or expanding the query variables with awareness of the RDFS semantics.


From America's liveliest writer on mathematics, a witty and insightful book on the stock market and the irrepressibility of our dreams of wealth. In A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market best-selling author John Allen Paulos demonstrates what the tools of mathematics can tell us about the vagaries of the stock market. Employing his trademark stories, vignettes, paradoxes, and puzzles (and even a film treatment), Paulos addresses every thinking reader's curiosity about the market: Is it efficient? Is it rational? Is there anything to technical analysis, fundamental analysis, and other supposedly time-tested methods of picking stocks? How can one quantify risk? What are the most common scams? What light do fractals, network theory, and common psychological foibles shed on investor behavior? Are there any approaches to investing that truly outperform the major indexes? Can a deeper knowledge of mathematics help beat the odds?All of these questions are explored with the engaging erudition that made Paulos's A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper and Innumeracy favorites with both armchair mathematicians and readers who want to think like them. Paulos also shares the cautionary tale of his own long and disastrous love affair with WorldCom. In the tradition of Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street and Jeremy Siegel's Stocks for the Long Run , this wry and illuminating book is for anyone, investor or not, who follows the markets-or knows someone who does.


Progress has been made recently towards the elucidation of phylogenetic relationships among subfamilies and tribes of the Ranunculaceae – the most recent hypothesis was published in 2016 by our team. Although relationships among the 10 tribes of the subfamily Ranunculoideae remain incompletely supported, this hypothesis provides an interesting framework to address the key issue of the ancestral vs. derived nature of a differentiated perianth within the family, and at the level of Ranunculales as a whole. Here, we present ancestral state reconstructions for several perianth characters, such as differentiation into sepals and petals, shape of petals, presence/absence of nectaries, and petaloid or sepaloid aspect of sepals. Characters were scored using the PROTEUS database and optimized on the most recent phylogeny of Ranunculaceae using parsimony and maximum likelihood methods. The results are discussed with regard to recent evo-devo studies focused on identifying genes involved in floral organs identity (the so-called ABC model) in Ranunculales.


This paper proposes a new semi-blind data-selective affine projection algorithm for channel equalization. This algorithm generalizes the concept of set-membership filtering to be used when the transmitted symbols belong to an M-PSK constellation. Moreover, the criterion for updating the estimate is based on error measure considered relevant to the constellation. The proposed algorithm incorporates appropriate constraints to the set-membership affine projection (SM-AP) algorithm resulting in a generalized adaptive algorithm for M-PSK equalization (SM-AP-CMA) which results in fast convergence while keeping a reduced number of coefficient updates. Simulation results using a UMTS channel model are presented in order to confirm the improved features attained by the proposed algorithm.


Background and objective: Feeding the infant after birth and in the first years of his or her life is one of the most important factors involved in the growth and development of infant. It is recommend that exclusive breastfeeding to continue for 6 months and the breastfeeding to continue for 2 years after the birth due to benefits of breastfeeding for mothers and infants. Given the importance of the mothers in this regard, this research was conducted to evaluate the factors affecting exclusive breastfeeding in the first 6-month life of the infants and discontinuation of breastfeeding from the viewpoint of mothers.
Methodology: This qualitative study was conducted using phenomenological method. It was conducted on sample of 40 women, who had breastfeeding experience. Based on purposeful sampling, research sample was selected among the women, admitted to health centers of Iranshahr and data were collected by focus group discussion method until data saturation. Then, the obtained data were analyzed.
Results: Results showed that the participants in all groups considered the factors of mother's perception of inadequate or lack of breast milk, mother's perception of inappropriate weight gain of infant, and impairment in growth of infant, use of infant formula, maternal comfort, high education and employment of mother outside of home, specific disease of mother and the use of certain drugs such as psychiatric pills, re-pregnancy, loss of physical fitness, breast sagging as the important factors affecting the non-breastfeeding and discontinued breastfeeding. They also stated that Islam and religious teachings, husband's support, health centers staff support, and support of relatives and adults and mother's knowledge are the most important factors involved in promoting exclusive breastfeeding and continued breastfeeding.
Conclusion: Based on the statements of the groups, the use of supportive resources and enhancing the knowledge of mothers by holding educational classes in health centers before delivery and during breastfeeding, the presence of breast milk counselor in health centers and advertising through mass media on the complications of the artificial milk (infant formula) and benefits of breastfeeding can play key role in promoting exclusive breastfeeding and continued breastfeeding.


The statutory requirement of identifying the first and true inventor is often muddled by the mores and practices of academic science. Unfortunately, and despite claims of scientists and attorneys to the contrary, I contend that the inventive entity is not discovered but rather determined in and through social relationships. Although universities should always strive to promulgate policies which fully comport with the law, the biggest incentive for universities to insist on correct inventorship is financial. I argue that the rise in mentee claims for sole or joint inventorship, as well as the ever-present threat of an inequitable conduct defense in a patent infringement suit, jeopardizes the ability of the university to generate royalties from licensing agreements. To protect this revenue stream, I contend that universities must revisit their "hands off" approach to the inner workings of the academic research group, at least with respect to determining the correct inventorship for a patent application.


In networks, autonomous nodes have action choices along two dimensions: They can forward/process incoming service requests - or not, and they can establish new links and maintain or terminate existing ones. In other words, a node can choose both an action-selection and a link-selection strategy. Nodes in networks are either humans (as in social networks) or agents controlled by humans, so the question how humans forming networks behave is important. Humans behave boundedly rational at times, e.g., game-theoretic predictions do not always hold. This paper investigates the questions whether individuals being nodes in a network find and actually use strategies leading to efficiency (in the economic sense), how exogenous parameters influence behavior, and what are characteristics of the resulting network. We do so by carrying out laboratory experiments with human subjects (120 altogether) who form a network and have those action choices. Our work is different from previous work on P2P systems which lets nodes choose their actions or their links, but not both. Main findings are that link selection increases cooperation and results in optimal payoffs in relative terms. Thus, link selection fosters efficiency.


Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a major type of primary liver cancer and one of the rare human neoplasms etiologically linked to viral factors. Chronic infections with the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and the hepatitis C virus (HCV) have been implicated in about 80% of cases worldwide, and other known environmental risk factors, including alcohol abuse and dietary intake of aflatoxin B1, might synergize with viral infections. Recent insight into the molecular mechanisms leading to HCC development has been provided by the identification of major genetic abnormalities revealed by genomewide allelotype studies and molecular cytogenetic analysis. Moreover, several oncogenic pathways have been implicated in malignant transformation of liver cells. Inactivation of the p53 tumor suppressor gene by mutations and allelic deletions in about 30% of HCC cases has been associated predominantly with exposure to aflatoxin B1 and HBV infection. By contrast, a mutation in the -catenin gene in around 22% of HCCs is more rare in HBV-associated tumors. Activation of cyclin D1 and disruption of the Rb pathway are also commonly involved in liver tumorigenesis. New major challenges include the identification of candidate genes located in frequently altered chromosomal regions and that of oncogenic pathways driven by different risk factors. This search might shed some light on the tumorigenic role of HBV and HCV. It might also permit accurate evaluation of major targets for prognostic and therapeutic intervention.


To determine whether the Nicotiana tabacum preproHypSys homolog in Nicotiana attenuata (NapreproHypSys) mediates anti-herbivore responses, we silenced (IRsys) and ectopically over-expressed (OVsys) NapreproHypSys in N. attenuata. Neither herbivore simulation nor methyl jasmonate (MeJA) application increased transcripts in wild-type (WT) or transformed lines. Compared to WT plants, OVsys plants had marginally higher constitutive levels but normally induced levels of trypsin proteinase inhibitors (TPIs) and nicotine; IRsys plants did not differ from WT plants. Herbivory-associated signalling [salicylic acid-induced protein kinase (SIPK) activity, jasmonic acid (JA), jasmonic acid-isoleucine/leucine (JA-Ile/Leu) and ethylene production or perception] did not differ strongly among the lines, but JA, JA-Ile/Leu and ethylene were marginally higher in OVsys plants. Manduca sexta larval performance did not differ among the lines, but feeding induced levels of TPI and nicotine in OVsys plants and decreased them in IRsys plants relative to WT. The secondary metabolite profiles of plants transplanted into N. attenuata's native habitat in the Great Basin Desert (UT, USA) mirrored those of glasshouse-grown plants, and compared to WT plants, OVsys plants suffered marginally less damage from grasshoppers, mirids and flea beetles but did not differ in their ability to attract Geocoris predators. We conclude that NapreproHypSys does not play a central role in anti-herbivore defense signalling in this native tobacco.


Abstract The Cooling the Tube Programme was set up to implement London Underground's intention to mitigate future warming of the underground system and to control tunnel temperatures. As part of this programme the use of groundwater from the Chalk in open-loop systems was considered for cooling a number of stations and a groundwater model was determined as a requirement by the Environment Agency to assess impacts on the Chalk aquifer. It seemed plausible that the plumes of injected, warmed water would interact hydraulically and possibly also thermally with each other at some locations. Furthermore, London Underground wished to investigate any longer-term warming effects and potential loss in cooling benefit. This paper provides an overview of the hydrogeological modelling approach that was adopted to assess the potential hydraulic and thermal effect of the proposed schemes and summarizes some of the findings that may be of broader interest. A staged approach was used to guide and refine the modelling. Initially, analytical solutions were used to investigate the processes of heat transport in the Chalk and to derive parameters from a field-scale test. The results indicated that, even for low fissure-to-matrix contact areas, heat is likely to be conducted far into the Chalk matrix. Over longer time scales, significant heat loss occurs into the under- and overlying formations and the available analytical solutions are of less use in scoping heat calculations for open-loop schemes at this scale. Distributed, finite-element, numerical models were constructed to simulate the interactions within groups of ground source cooling systems and to investigate specific operating conditions at single schemes. Extensive sensitivity analysis was carried out to assess the level of uncertainty in the model predictions, and the relative sensitivity to the various parameters. The greatest uncertainty was associated with detailed aspects of the conceptual model of heat flow. Model results were sensitive to the assumed vertical distribution of permeability in the Chalk. Additional uncertainty was associated with the selection of appropriate thermal boundary conditions and the extent of interaction with the under- and overlying formations. Uncertainty in the model hydraulic and thermal material parameters had less effect on the simulated performance of the systems. Operational conditions, such as the amount of heat injected and the separation of the abstraction and injection boreholes, were assessed and this paper provides some quantification of the significance of these factors. This work also demonstrates that equivalent MT3D and FEFLOW models give reasonable agreement and both approaches are feasible for modelling heat transport, as density-driven flow is not significant for the temperature differences associated with these cooling schemes.


The paper concerns the automorphism groups of Cayley graphs over cyclic groups which have a rational spectrum (rational circulant graphs for short). With the aid of the techniques of Schur rings it is shown that the problem is equivalent to consider the automorphism groups of orthogonal group block structures of cyclic groups. Using this observation, the required groups are expressed in terms of generalized wreath products of symmetric groups.


The objective of this paper is to offer qualitative and quantitative insights on the perceptions of the actors in the EU food supply chain on a broad spectrum of topics that characterise its operation and conduct, highlighting also potential differences in North and South European countries. Issues explored pertained to actors' relations with up- and downstream partners, the future dynamic and challenges of the food sector, the influence of policy intervention and attitudes towards genetically modified products (GMPs) and organic production. For this purpose, a total of 34 food supply chain actors in Denmark and Greece were interviewed using a semi-structured interview process. A comparative analysis of the interviews pinpointed many similarities in the behaviour and the perceptions of the Greek and Danish farmers, cooperatives, processors and retailers alike. Still, while it is evident that companies and farmers of both countries struggle with a lot of the same problems, several differences in perceptions are also identified. These refer mainly to attitudes towards mergers and acquisitions, innovations, GMPs and the effects and limitations of EU policy intervention.


This study deals with the structure of echinoderm assemblages and their relationships with the biotic and abiotic conditions in the Canakkale Strait in 2006 and 2007. A total of 25 echinoderm species were found, 4 species of which [Amphiura securigera (Duben & Koren, 1846); Amphiura lacazei Guille, 1976; Amphiura cherbonnieri Guille, 1972; and Thyone fusus (O.F. Muller, 1776)] were new records for Turkish fauna; 1 species [Ophiopsila annulosa (M. Sars, 1859)] was new for the Turkish Strait System; and 22 species were first reports for the Canakkale Strait. Echinocyamus pusillus (O.F. Muller, 1776), Amphipholis squamata (Delle Chiaje, 1829), and Ophiothrix fragilis (Abildgaard, 1789) were the most important species, representing 71% of the total abundance. Ophiuroids were found to be the dominant group, but asteroids also played a significant role in the echinoderm community structure. No seasonal differences were found, while finer sediments and the percentage of organic carbon (TOC) seemed to encourage echinoderm behavior. Hydrodynamism seems to be the factor regulating benthic assemblages' structure and distribution in the Canakkale Strait. An identification key to the Mediterranean species of the genus Amphiura is provided.


The behavior of stone groundwood / polypropylene injection-molded composites was evaluated with and without coupling agent. Stone groundwood (SGW) is a fibrous material commonly prepared in a high yield process and mainly used for papermaking applications. In this work, the use of SGW fibers was explored as a reinforcing element of polypropylene (PP) composites. The surface charge density of the composite components was evaluated, as well as the fiber's length and diameter inside the composite material. Two mixing extrusion processes were evaluated, and the use of a kinetic mixer, instead of an internal mixer, resulted in longer mean fiber lengths of the reinforcing fibers. On the other hand, the accessibility of surface hydroxyl groups of stone groundwood fibers was improved by treating the fibers with 5% of sodium hydroxide, resulting in a noticeable increase of the tensile strength of the composites, for a similar percentage of coupling agent. A new parameter called Fiber Tensile Strength Factor is defined and used as a baseline for the comparison of the properties of the different composite materials. Finally the competitiveness of stone groundwood / polypropylene / polypropylene-co-maleic anhydride system, which compared favorably to sized glass-fiber / polypropylene GF/PP and glass-fiber / polypropylene / polypropylene-co-maleic anhydride composite formulations, was quantified by means of the fiber tensile strength factor.


An approach to developing and using Bayesian networks to model watershed management decisions is presented with a case study application to phosphorus management in the East Canyon watershed in Northern Utah, USA. The Bayesian network analysis includes a graphical model of the key variables in the system and conditional and marginal probability distributions derived from a variety of data and information sources. The resulting model is used to 1) estimate the probability of meeting legal water quality requirements for phosphorus in East Canyon Creek under several management scenarios and 2) estimate the probability of increased recreational use of East Canyon Reservoir and subsequent revenue under these scenarios.


Student feelings towards the laboratory component of an introductory chemistry unit were evaluated in an action research study, over a three-year period at the University of Western Australia. In 2013 we found that the percentage of students with negative feelings towards the laboratory increased over the duration of a semester. In 2014 we developed and introduced the use of pre-laboratory online activities, which the students found to be helpful in preparing them for the laboratory. However, there was no change in trend of negative feelings towards laboratory classes from 2013 to 2014. In 2015 we introduced the Prepare, Do, Review model and found that there was a reduction in the percentage of students with negative feelings towards laboratory classes compared with previous years. The Prepare, Do, Review model allows students more time to process the information given in the laboratory. We believe that this model could apply to laboratory programs in any discipline.


This paper presents trainable methods for generating letter to sound rules from a given lexicon for use in pronouncing out-ofvocabulary words and as a method for lexicon compression. As the relationship between a string of letters and a string of phonemes representing its pronunciation for many languages is not trivial, we discuss two alignment procedures, one fully automatic and one hand seeded which produce reasonable alignments of letters to phones (or epsilon). Top Down Induction Tree models are trained on the aligned entries. We show how combined phoneme/stress prediction is better than separate prediction processes, and still better when including in the model the last phonemes transcribed and part of speech information. For the lexicons we have tested, our models have a word accuracy (including stress) of 78% for OALD, 62% for CMU and 94% for BRULEX, allowing substantial reduction in the size of these lexicons.


This study employs a mixed-methods methodology to capture and analyze quantitative and qualitative data on child labor in the small-scale gold mining sector in Suriname. The study addresses issues including, but not limited to, the worst forms of child labor (WFCL) in the gold mining sector, risk factors associated with and pathways into child labor, types of work performed, living and working conditions, and perceptions of the situation from those involved. Using a combination of network analysis, geomapping of the gold sector, and expert interviews, the researchers identified and conducted interviews with 167 child workers drawn from a nonprobability sample of three mining areas (Brokopondo, Meriam, and Sella Creek), and conducted direct observation of mining operations. Findings of the study demonstrate that all child gold miners are engaged in hazardous aspects of mining. Worksite and living conditions are poor and lack the most basic services, such as electricity, toilets, or clean water. At the same time, a distinction is evident between the activities of full-time workers (9.7 percent of those interviewed) and part-time workers (89.3 percent). Full-time workers typically work in the mining pits, where they use sharp tools and dangerous machinery, while the balance are more often engaged in gold panning, which exposes them to the toxic effects of mercury. Gold mining work by children occurs in isolated locations deep within Suriname's underdeveloped interior; miners come from the impoverished Maroon population, where many households are large families headed by single mothers. Child miners are mostly boys, who are often drawn into the work through the influence of a matrilineal uncle who has the cultural status of a father. Access to high-quality, native-language education is limited; virtually all the children interviewed had a low level of educational achievement partly because they had missed school for work or because they were too physically and mentally exhausted from work to focus on their studies. However, the immediate need to supplement family income or have money of their own, combined with a lack of alternatives, compels children to work in gold mining.


Three approaches for visualization of transparent micro-objects from holographic data using phase-only SLMs are described. The objects are silicon micro-lenses captured in the near infrared by means of digital holographic microscopy and a simulated weakly refracting 3D object with size in the micrometer range. In the first method, profilometric/tomographic data are retrieved from captured holograms and converted into a 3D point cloud which allows for computer generation of multi-view phase holograms using Rayleigh-Sommerfeld formulation. In the second method, the microlens is computationally placed in front of a textured object to simulate the image of the textured data as seen through the lens. In the third method, direct optical reconstruction of the micrometer object through a digital lens by modifying the phase with the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm is achieved.


Abstract We present the results of preliminary investigations of globular moss growth on the surface of Falljökull, a temperate outlet glacier of the Vatnajökull ice cap, southern Iceland. Supraglacial debris has provided a basis for moss colonization, and several large (>500m2) patches of moss growth (Racomitrium spp.) are observed on the surface of the glacier. Each area of moss-colonized supraglacial debris shows a downslope increase in sphericity and moss cushion size and a decrease in percentage surface coverage of moss-colonized and bare clasts. It is suggested that moss growth on supraglacial debris allows preferential downslope movement of clasts through an associated increase in both overall mass and sphericity. Thermal insulation by moss cushions protects the underlying ice surface from melt, and the resulting ice pedestals assist in downslope sliding and toppling of moss cushions. The morphology and life cycle of supraglacial globular mosses is therefore not only closely linked to the presence and distribution of supraglacial debris, but also appears to assist in limited down-glacier transport of this debris. This research highlights both the dynamic nature of the interaction of mosses with supraglacial sedimentary systems and the need for a detailed consideration of their role within the wider glacial ecosystem.


In this study insights are gained on the impact of a future expansion of Norwegian Hydro Power. Two scenarios are analyzed for the year 2030 that differ with regard the ambition of Norway to participate in the EU power markets to balance supply and demand; Niche storage and Big Storage. In addition to the insights gained on trade flows and production, the market prices and their volatility are especially of interest to gain insight on the business case for Hydro Conventional Storage and Hydro Pumped Storage (PS) in Norway. While hydro conventional units benefit from high electricity prices, Hydro PS units benefit from high price volatility since it is both a consumer and producer of electricity. From the perspective of a hydro PS operator Niche Storage scenario is most preferred due to higher price volatility, and Big Storage is most preferred from the perspective of a hydro conventional operator due to higher electricity prices. Especially the developments in EU grid expansion are identified as important as a strong EU grid is able to accommodate fluctuations in supply and demand to a significant extent and is thus regarded as a competitor to Hydro PS in Norway.


Abstract : Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are comprised of wireless systems that communicate without the assistance of centrally managed routers or base stations. MANET research and development has increased due to computing technologies offering smaller, faster, smarter, and more power efficient platforms to operate on. Largely the testing and evaluation of new and existing MANET protocols has resided in simulation environments. This is due in part to the complexities and expenses incurred when conducting real world tests. Many researchers have come to recognize that these current simulations tend to assume away critical components of the MANET domain. These assumptions are made either to simplify the physical layer of the simulation so that the protocol can be tested or out of necessity because the current simulation platforms are not capable of providing a more realistic physical layer simulation environment. This thesis is focused on addressing these assumptions that affect the physical layer of the MANET protocol by gathering data in the real world and then modifying the simulation environment to model as closely as possible to the gathered results. This modified environment is then compared to the basic MANET simulation environment by analyzing packet delivery and propagation effects of both models.


The Brassington Formation of the Pennines is the most extensive onshore Miocene succession in the UK. It is preserved as outliers in Lower Carboniferous Limestone. During the Cenozoic, central England underwent uplift, with erosion of post-Mississippian strata from the Pennine axis in the Peak District. The Brassington Formation is hence significant in reconstructing Cenozoic geological history. It is non-marine, derived from Triassic sandstone and of Mid–Late Miocene age. The c. 60 outliers occur in three clusters over c. 220 km2. They are remnants of a sedimentary prism at least 75 m thick and with a volume of c. 10 km3. Suffosion of bedrock, conditioned by aggressive precursor fluids of hypogenic origin, was the major control on subsidence. The calculated volume of the fills in the Bees Nest and Green Clay outliers is 3.7–5.0 × 106 m3. Referenced to a sub-Miocene surface at c. 450 m OD in pre-subsidence times, the original volume of this subsidence complex was c. 21.8 × 106 m3 and the aggregated volume of the Late Neogene White Peak palaeokarst was at least 0.66 km3. Subsidence was concomitant with Pliocene uplift of the Pennine Axis, suggesting suffosion accommodation of 3 × 106 m3 per km2 or 244 m3 per annum.


This paper describes some possible applications of stochastic methods which may be used in ecological studies. The role of stochastic methods in investigations of the dynamics of ecosystems is gaining in importance. It is a new trend which has arisen in ecological studies, related to the development of methods for the control of the environment. Stochastic methods are very useful for investigating the stability of ecosystems and the criteria of stability of natural systems, especially where the influence of permanent small-scale random disturbances have been noticed. Some criteria have been suggested and examples of use of these criteria are given in this paper. It must also be noted that the complex problems of predicting and controlling processes in natural systems must be solved by mathematical tools which permit analysis of anthropogenic factors without in-situ experimentation.


Shame Not the Same for Different Styles of Blame: Shame as a Mediating Variable for Severity of Childhood Sexual Abuse and Trauma Symptoms in Three Attribution of Blame Groups Tabitha N. Webster School of Family Life, BYU Master of Science This study examined the role of internalized shame in mediating the relationship between severity of childhood sexual abuse and adult symptoms in three groups based on attribution of blame. The random community sample of 318 female survivors completed the Trauma Symptom Checklist-40 (Briere, 1996), Internalized Shame Scale (Cook, 2001), questions about frequency of abuse, duration, and specific characteristics (no physical contact to vaginal/anal intercourse with force) and the degree to which they blamed self, fate, or perpetrator. It was hypothesized that severity (measured by abuse characteristics, frequency, and duration) would predict symptoms (measured by subscales of dissociation, anxiety, sexual problems, depression, and sleep disturbance from TSC-40) and that Internalized shame would be a potential mediator in all three groups (blame self, blame fate, or blame perpetrator). Multiple group analysis in Structural Equation Modeling showed that severity and shame were related for all groups and that the relationship was strongest when survivors blamed themselves and weakest when they blamed perpetrators. Shame was a significant predictor of symptoms for all three groups with no significant differences between groups. Severity was a significant predictor of symptoms for the blame self and blame fate groups but not for the blame perpetrator group, with symptoms being the strongest in the blame self-group. Sobel tests showed that shame was a significant mediator for all three groups. Given these findings, therapists treating adult survivors who blame fate or the perpetrator for the abuse should consider addressing the underlying shame. When treating adult survivors that blame themselves, therapists should consider addressing this attribution of blame and its meaning in addition to focusing on shame.


Abstract This essay uses the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge at the Port of Laredo to examine Catholic parish life at la Parroquia Santo Niño in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Considering how infrastructure works, how it literally keeps people and objects moving, nuances our understanding of the devotional rhythms and space sacralization processes of actors who move and wait in a border environment. Contributing to debates about rhythm and mobility in border studies, it highlights religion's temporal particularities—specifically the role that an international bridge plays in influencing where, when, and how often border-based actors manage worship and spaces of reflection. Thinking with scholars of material religion, this essay maintains that accounting for border infrastructure is worthwhile. Using infrastructure as a primary reference point can productively challenge still influential distinctions between American and Latin American religion. It will also show that infrastructure not only animates religious practice and dictates devotional rhythms within the walls of la Parroquia, but also facilitates or at times deters movement to and from that site of worship. Mapping out routes and relationships among objects, places, and people, it traces how parish life and international bridge usage are inextricably linked across several planes—geographic, temporal, cultural, and economic; it is impossible to understand the significance of one without attending to the other.


Research on the economic history of copyright and music publishing turned up an unusual source of data on the value of copyrights, namely detailed accounts of public auctions of musical items that were held in London between 1794 and 1960 of, inter alia, copyrights and the engraved plates from which musical works were printed. The standard contract between song writers/composers and music publishers in the 19th century bought out all rights and therefore the sale of the plates was also the sale of the copyright to the work, enabling the new owner to print and distribute the work. The sales also facilitated entry into and exit from the industry.This paper describes the historical circumstances of copyright and the market for printed music and presents some of the more notable data, with calculations of their present day values. Though insufficient for a full statistical analysis, the paper provides some hard evidence of the asset value of copyright in musical works as perceived by the music publishers of those times. The paper also suggests a basis for further research.


East Asia's small open economies were hit in varying degrees by the sharp drop in the output of major industrial countries during the global financial and economic crisis of 2008-2009. This highlights the role of monetary policy regimes in cushioning small open economies from adverse external output shocks. To assess the welfare impact of external shocks on key macroeconomic variables under different monetary policy regimes, we numerically solve and calculate the welfare loss function of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We find that CPI inflation targeting minimizes welfare losses for import-to-GDP ratios from 0.3 to 0.9. However, welfare under the pegged exchange rate regime is almost equivalent to CPI inflation targeting when the import-to-GDP ratio is one while the Taylor-type rule minimizes welfare when the import-to-GDP ratio is 0.1. We calibrate the model and derive welfare implications for eight East Asian small open economies.


We present a new approach for non-rigid surface-registration of 3D objects. By representing the surfaces as the zero-level of a signed distance function in 3D space, our algorithm becomes independent of topology. We propose an extension of Thirion's Demons algorithm to register the distance images. Our extension includes the use of a curvature term to guide the registration in the direction tangential to the zero level set. Our experiments show that our algorithm is suitable to register objects of complex topology, such as human skulls. Further, the curvature term leads to better correspondence in comparison to the standard Demons algorithm.


Entrepreneurship is gaining international recognition as a pathway for the economic and social development of countries. Within New Zealand the entrepreneurial ability of the indigenous population, Māori, is receiving an increased amount of attention in the scholarly literature. In particular, research from 2005 has indicated that Māori are the third most entrepreneurial population in the world, however, the success of Māori entrepreneurial endeavor was low (Frederick & Chittock, 2005). The focus of the present research is to identify the factors that influence Māori entrepreneurial success. Essentially, the research on Māori entrepreneurship remains in the early stages of development. In particular, Henry (2011, September) noted a lack of conceptual and theoretical models "to better understand, predict and enhance Māori entrepreneurship" (p. 930). Previous models of Māori entrepreneurship are limited in number, applicability, and empirical support. The question arises as to what constitutes Māori entrepreneurship, in theory and practice. The aim of this thesis is to empirically explore the construct of Māori entrepreneurship, from the perspective of Māori, in order to enable the theoretical and practical development of the field of Māori entrepreneurship. A qualitative, exploratory research approach is implemented using the methods of indepth interviews and observation. This approach is suited when an in-depth and detailed understanding of a phenomenon is desired (Morse & Richards, 2002); and when the research topic is in a preliminary stage (Babbie, 1989). Purposeful and convenience sampling identifies eight Māori participants who work within the field of Māori entrepreneurship. The interview transcripts, observations, and field notes are analysed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), which is commonly used in qualitative research and involves the identification of recurring themes within the data. In essence, an understanding into the entrepreneurial traits and characteristics, and the process of Māori entrepreneurship is explored. This thesis identifies the factors that impede and enhance Māori as they undertake entrepreneurial activity. Based on this research, three elements are identified as influential to Māori entrepreneurship: The cultural environment, the education system, and the institutional infrastructure available to Māori entrepreneurs. A definition and process of Māori entrepreneurship are


TThe Comparative Efficacy of Kinesiology Tape vs. Prehabilitation Training on Dynamic Stability in Uninjured Participants: A Pilot Study
The epidemiology and aetiology of ankle sprain injuries has been well documented. Traditionally multi-modal exercise interventions have formed the basis of prehabilitation, however more contemporary developments in the applications of kinesiology tape warrant consideration. The aim of the present study was to compare the efficacy of a proprioception training programme and kinesiology tape application on measures of ankle joint stability. Methods: 48 recreationally active Sports Therapy students, with no ankle joint injury history or instability were randomly assigned within three experimental conditions: a 6 week (12 sessions) training programme comprising rehabilitative exercises (R), kinesiology tape (KT) application using a joint stabilisation technique across the talocrural joint, and a control (C) condition. Overall (OSI) and directional medio-lateral (MLI) and anterio-posterior (API) stability indices were quantified during an athletic single leg stance (ASLS) on the Biodex Stability System (BSS). Results: Both the Rehabilitation (R) and Kinesiology Tape (KT) interventions produced a significant (P=0.02) improvement in OSI. Whilst the magnitude of improvement was equivalent between interventions, the mechanism was different. The R group achieved the reduction in OSI primarily through a reduction in MLI, whereas in the KT group the improvement in OSI was primarily attributable to a reduction in API. This alteration in balance strategy as a result of the interventions has implications for injury prevention. Over 6 weeks, both a training program and prolonged kinesiology tape application produced equivalent improvements in single legged balance performance. The interventions resulted in altered balance strategies, with the reduction in inversion-eversion seen in the Rehabilitation group preferable for the prevention of ankle sprain injury.


The current state of health and biomedicine includes an enormity of heterogeneous data 'silos', collected for different purposes and represented differently, that are presently impossible to share or analyze in toto. The greatest challenge for large-scale and meaningful analyses of health-related data is to achieve a uniform data representation for data extracted from heterogeneous source representations. Based upon an analysis and categorization of heterogeneities, a process for achieving comparable data content by using a uniform terminological representation is developed. This process addresses the types of representational heterogeneities that commonly arise in healthcare data integration problems. Specifically, this process uses a reference terminology, and associated "maps" to transform heterogeneous data to a standard representation for comparability and secondary use. The capture of quality and precision of the "maps" between local terms and reference terminology concepts enhances the meaning of the aggregated data, empowering end users with better-informed queries for subsequent analyses. A data integration case study in the domain of pediatric asthma illustrates the development and use of a reference terminology for creating comparable data from heterogeneous source representations. The contribution of this research is a generalized process for the integration of data from heterogeneous source representations, and this process can be applied and extended to other problems where heterogeneous data needs to be merged.


The study was designed to explore the antioxidative effect of pomegranate seed oil (PSO) at different concentrations (5 and 7%) against oxidation of plant-based oils (canola oil and sunflower oil) during storage (60 days) as compared to artificial antioxidant butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA, 200 ppm). Rancimat and Schaal oven analysis were employed for the assessment of potential consequences of PSO against oxidation in plant based oils. The variation in total phenolic contents (TPC), antioxidant activity, peroxide value (POV), and tocopherol contents during storage were evaluated by Schaal oven test at 62 °C. The substantially (P≤0.05) higher induction period (IP) values were observed for PSO blended oil samples as compared to blank oil samples. The addition of PSO in plant-based oils improved the oxidative stability by enhancing the antioxidant potential and TPC, decreasing POV, and slowing down the degradation of tocopherol contents during storage. The findings of the present study suggest that PSO might be used as an alternative potential antioxidant to synthetic antioxidants.