Abstract. When the climate is reconstructed from paleoevidence, it shows that the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ca. 21 000 yr ago) is cold and dry compared to the present-day. Reconstruction also shows that compared to today, the vegetation of the LGM is less active and the distribution of vegetation was drastically different, due to cold temperature, dryness, and a lower level of atmospheric CO2 concentration (185 ppm compared to a preindustrial level of 285 ppm). In the present paper, we investigate the influence of vegetation change on the climate of the LGM by using a coupled atmosphere-ocean-vegetation general circulation model (AOVGCM, the MIROC-LPJ). The MIROC-LPJ is different from earlier studies in the introduction of a bias correction method in individual running GCM experiments. We examined four GCM experiments (LGM and preindustrial, with and without vegetation feedback) and quantified the strength of the vegetation feedback during the LGM. The result shows that global-averaged cooling during the LGM is amplified by +13.5 % due to the introduction of vegetation feedback. This is mainly caused by the increase of land surface albedo due to the expansion of tundra in northern high latitudes and the desertification in northern middle latitudes around 30° N to 60° N. We also investigated how this change in climate affected the total terrestrial carbon storage by using offline Lund-Potsdam-Jena dynamic global vegetation model (LPJ-DGVM). Our result shows that the total terrestrial carbon storage was reduced by 597 PgC during the LGM, which corresponds to the emission of 282 ppm atmospheric CO2. In the LGM experiments, the global carbon distribution is generally the same whether the vegetation feedback to the atmosphere is included or not. However, the inclusion of vegetation feedback causes substantial terrestrial carbon storage change, especially in explaining the lowering of atmospheric CO2 during the LGM.


Background/Aim: A large number of diseases are ascribed to Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), particularly chronic active gastritis, peptic ulcer disease and gastric cancer. Successful treatment of H. pylori infection with antimicrobial agents can lead to regression of H. pylori–associated disorders. Antibiotic resistance against H. pylori is increasing, and it is necessary to find new effective agents. Nigella sativa seed (NS), a commonly used herb, possesses in vitro anti-helicobacter activity. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the efficacy of NS in eradication of H. pylori infection in non-ulcer dyspeptic patients. Materials and Methods: The study was conducted on 88 adult patients attending King Fahd Hospital of the University, Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia, from 2007 to 2008, with dyspeptic symptoms and found positive for H. pylori infection by histopathology and urease test. Patients were randomly assigned to four groups, receiving i) triple therapy (TT) comprising of clarithromycin, amoxicillin, omeprazole [n= 23], ii) 1 g NS + 40 mg omeprazole (OM) [n= 21], iii) 2 g NS + OM [n= 21] or iv) 3 g NS + OM [n= 23]. Negative H. pylori stool antigen test four weeks after end of treatment was considered as eradication. Results: H. pylori eradication was 82.6, 47.6, 66.7 and 47.8% with TT, 1 g NS, 2 g NS and 3 g NS, respectively. Eradication rates with 2 g NS and TT were statistically not different from each other, whereas H. pylori eradication with other doses was significantly less than that with TT (P < 0.05). Dyspepsia symptoms improved in all groups to a similar extent. Conclusions: N. sativa seeds possess clinically useful anti-H. pylori activity, comparable to triple therapy. Further clinical studies combining N. sativa with antibiotics are suggested.


The CLEVELAND DIETETIC ASSOCIATION is dedicated to raising the professional standards of Cleveland-area dietitians, and educating the public on healthier eating habits. Lula Graves, supervisor of dietians at Lakeside Hospital, formed the Association in 1915. Its initial purpose was to promote the employment of trained dietitians in area hospitals. Early members also included home-economics teachers and restaurant managers. The CDA developed slowly until 1923, when E. M. Geraghty assumed the presidency. Under Geraghty, membership was limited to hospital dietitians. The emphasis on training increased when in 1927 the first internship program, "School of Dietetics," was introduced at Lakeside Hospital. Members gained experience in diet kitchen, diabetic clinic, and administration problems. In 1934 the association adopted the rules of the Ohio Dietetic Association constitution, reopening membership to all dietitians and setting regulations for officers, elections, committees, dues, and meeting requirements. Throughout the 1940s, publicity and recruitment programs were begun, reaching to the high school level. In 1949 the Association presented a panel discussion on diabetic management; its success established a close working partnership with the Diabetes Association of Greater Cleveland. During the 1950s the association continued to increase its activities through participation in CIVIL DEFENSE. Disaster feeding programs, such as Disaster Relief, Emergency Food Shelf, and Water Purification were designed to feed victims of a natural disaster or wartime attack. In the 1960s the CDA increased its effort to educate the public on matters of nutrition. Listings and descriptions of nutrition books were made available to the CLEVELAND PUBLIC LIBRARY. In 1964 the Dial-a-Dietitian Committee was formed. Based on similar programs in other cities, the program offered professional answers over the phone to questions about nutrition, food preparation, medical diets, etc. Because of its overwhelming success, the CDA decided to reduce other aspects of its publicity campaign. In 1967 the Association held its Tenth Annual Food Fair for the exchanging of institutional recipes. During the 1970s the CDA expanded its awards and scholarships program, and with the annual designation of Nutrition Week by the mayor of Cleveland (later replaced by National Nutrition Month, held each March), it continued to work on the promotion of healthier eating habits among Clevelanders. Each year during National Nutrition Week, dietitians and university lecturers are scheduled to speak on such topics as diet therapy, nutrition, and health, and tours are given of health facilities in the Cleveland area. In 2005 the Association had 300 members. It continued to operate a nutrition hotline as well as providing a variety of community education programs. Cleveland Dietetic Assn. Records, WRHS.


In Music and Probability, David Temperley explores issues in music perception and cognition from a probabilistic perspective. The application of probabilistic ideas to music has been pursued only sporadically over the past four decades, but the time is ripe, Temperley argues, for a reconsideration of how probabilities shape music perception and even music itself. Recent advances in the application of probability theory to other domains of cognitive modeling, coupled with new evidence and theoretical insights about the working of the musical mind, have laid the groundwork for more fruitful investigations. Temperley proposes computational models for two basic cognitive processes, the perception of key and the perception of meter, using techniques of Bayesian probabilistic modeling. Drawing on his own research and surveying recent work by others, Temperley explores a range of further issues in music and probability, including transcription, phrase perception, pattern perception, harmony, improvisation, and musical styles. Music and Probability--the first full-length book to explore the application of probabilistic techniques to musical issues--includes a concise survey of probability theory, with simple examples and a discussion of its application in other domains. Temperley relies most heavily on a Bayesian approach, which not only allows him to model the perception of meter and tonality but also sheds light on such perceptual processes as error detection, expectation, and pitch identification. Bayesian techniques also provide insights into such subtle and advanced issues as musical ambiguity, tension, and "grammaticality," and lead to interesting and novel predictions about compositional practice and differences between musical styles.


Immigration across the US-Mexican border may currently be a hot topic, but it is hardly a new one. Labor issues and civil rights have been interwoven with the history of the region since at least the time of the Mexican-American War, and the twentieth century witnessed recurrent political battles surrounding the status and rights of Mexican immigrants. In Mexican Inclusion: The Origins of Anti-Discrimination Policy in Texas and the Southwest , political scientist Matthew Gritter traces the process by which people of Mexican origin were incorporated in the United States' first civil rights agency, the World War II-era President's Committee on Fair Employment Practices (FEPC). Incorporating the analytic lenses of transnationalism, institutional development, and identity formation, Gritter explores the activities and impact of the FEPC. He argues that transnational and international networks related to the US's Good Neighbor Policy created an impetus for the federal government to combat discrimination against people of Mexican origin. The inclusion of Mexican American civil rights leaders as FEPC staff members combined with an increase in state capacity to afford the agency increased institutional effectiveness. The FEPC provided an opportunity for small-scale state building and policy innovation.?Gritter compares the outcomes of the agency's anti-discrimination efforts with class-based labor organizing. Grounded in pragmatic appeals to citizenship, Mexican American civil rights leaders utilized leverage provided by the Good Neighbor Policy to create their own distinct place in an emerging civil rights bureaucracy. Students and scholars of Mexican American issues, civil rights, and government policy will appreciate Mexican Inclusion for its fresh synthesis of analytic and historical processes. Likewise, those focused on immigration and borderlands studies will gain new insights from its inclusive context.


Compared with all other racial/ethnic groups in the U.S., African American women have the lowest rates of breastfeeding initiation, as well as continuation at 6 months (1). Among infants born in 2012, the rate of breastfeeding at 6 months was 35.3% among non-Hispanic blacks as compared with 51.4% for all infants in the U.S. (1). The rate of exclusive breastfeeding at 6 months was 13.9% among non-Hispanic blacks as compared with 21.9% for all U.S. infants. African American women are 2.5 times less likely to breastfeed than white women (2). Currently, African American women are not meeting any of the Healthy People 2020 objectives for breastfeeding.


Feature interactions in the original sense of the term (i.e. within a telecommunications domain), have now been the subject of significant research activity for over ten years. This paper considers several different sources of interactions in other domains, arising during the course of our research at Lancaster. These interactions are taken from a variety of areas within the field of Distributed Systems, and stand to benefit greatly from the application of techniques developed in the feature interaction community. Furthermore, we believe they represent a potentially important generalisation for feature interaction research.


This paper investigates the stability of time and risk preferences by exploiting a natural experiment. We use preand post-deployment surveys conducted for the Danish soldiers deployed to Afghanistan in the spring 2011 and exploit the fact that in modern wars, and especially in Afghanistan, combat exposure in the form of ambush, improvised explosive devices, or an exchange of shots is as good as randomly distributed within and between combat units. We test both the effect of deployment and combat on these preferences and personality traits. In general time and risk preferences show a high correlation before and after, and soldiers appear to be relieved after the mission, becoming less neurotic. We also find that combat has an impact on risk preferences making soldiers more risk lover. Furthermore, first-timers appear to be more risk averse in general and become more patient after the mission. JEL Classification: D01; D03, C99.


Two popular authors consider not only what the Ten Commandments say about the people who observe them, but what they say about God. They are not some set of universal rules-they simply offer ways for a certain people to know a certain God-our God. What truths about God can be known through the Ten Commandments? God cares how we treat other people. God cares how we behave in marriage. God cares about the importance of being truthful. God wants people to take a day off from work each week. Readers will encounter Willimon and Hauerwas at their best as they explore the overarching question-What does it mean for people and the way they behave when they know some of these truths about God?


Identifying differentially expressed (DE) genes associated with a sample characteristic is the primary objective of many microarray studies. As more and more studies are carried out with observational rather than well controlled experimental samples, it becomes important to evaluate and properly control the impact of sample heterogeneity on DE gene finding. Typical methods for identifying DE genes require ranking all the genes according to a pre-selected statistic based on a single model for two or more group comparisons, with or without adjustment for other covariates. Such single model approaches unavoidably result in model misspecification, which can lead to increased error due to bias for some genes and reduced efficiency for the others. We evaluated the impact of model misspecification from such approaches on detecting DE genes and identified parameters that affect the magnitude of impact. To properly control for sample heterogeneity and to provide a flexible and coherent framework for identifying simultaneously DE genes associated with a single or multiple sample characteristics and/or their interactions, we proposed a Bayesian model averaging approach which corrects the model misspecification by averaging over model space formed by all relevant covariates. An empirical approach is suggested for specifying prior model probabilities. We demonstrated through simulated microarray data that this approach resulted in improved performance in DE gene identification compared to the single model approaches. The flexibility of this approach is demonstrated through our analysis of data from two observational microarray studies.


My project takes place in Korsten four kilometers north of central Port Elizabeth. Korsten is today known as the industrial center of the city and provides job opportunities throughout the whole region. Central Korsten contains the biggest informal market within Port Elizabeth; it is also functioning as a nodal interchange where buses and minibus taxis provide transport within the city as well as nationwide. In 2010 major changes in the transport system will take place as a part of the 2010 world cup program. The city introduces the new Bus rapid transit system, a transportation system based on trunk buses complimented with minibus taxis. Introducing a new bus-system to Korsten will be a great challenge especially concerning Korstens informal identity and tradition. The informal economy is today an integral part of the South African economy and something that most South Africans come in contact with on daily bases. But it is an economy and movement not measurable or regulated by the government. The informal economy got its own rules and traditions and it flourishes in Korsten. It creates job opportunities as well as a possibility to buy everyday goods to a reasonable price, but it also contributes to a hectic and unstructured environment which gives a chaotic impression. This dissertation highlights the informal tradition and its possibility to be an integral part of the modern Korsten. It investigates the meaning of the public space and what role it plays in our cities and how it can be implemented in Korsten.


This study investigates the impacts of continuous delivery practices in organizations. Continuous delivery is a set of practices designed to optimize the process of taking changes from version control to production or release to manufacturing. Key elements include comprehensive use of version control, automation of the test and deployment process, and the application of continuous integration to rapidly validate the correctness of every change through running the automated build and test process. When viewed through the lens of organizational capabilities theory, CD is an inside-out spanning process. We propose that the use of CD in organizations affects factors that impact the tech workforce today (e.g., perceived burnout and deployment pain), and software delivery performance (e.g., change fail rates and IT performance). We also propose that it indirectly influences organizational performance through IT performance (which is itself a spanning process). We empirically test our model with survey data collected from 4,976 respondents around the world, and find that our hypotheses are supported. The paper's implications for research and practice are discussed.


Insider researchers in international human resource management study not only the organisations or communities they may be members of, but also the people they perceive closeness with or with whom they share identities. The research context for insiders is rich but rarely problem-free. The uncertainty and dynamism of insider research often leaves insider researchers grappling with methodological and ethical challenges, but with no explicit framework to guide how they can be addressed in research practice or research reporting. Indeed, the 'sanitised' methodologies appearing in published work often do not reflect the complexity of the authors' experience. In this article, we call for researchers to give more explicit consideration of what it means to research from an insider position, regardless of the research paradigm from which they work. The article addresses some of the messy details of insider research, drawing on personal accounts of our own research practice. We offer a framework of researcher personae as a tool for reflecting upon researchers' insider positionality before, during and after data have been collected and analysed. Overall, we encourage researchers working from insider positions to adopt three practices: (1) to engage in reflexive consideration of the effects of (changing) positionality on their work as a way to strengthen the ethical and theoretical outcomes of research practice; (2) to acknowledge and leverage, rather than conceal, insiderness as a key strategy for making feasible more research on sensitive and 'taboo' topics; and (3) to make positionality explicit in research reporting in order to enhance the quality of insider research as well as enhance fieldwork learning more generally in the international human resource management field. While the personal accounts we share in this article are based on our research within the field of international human resource management, the intention is that it may also be of value to researchers in other fields.


The impact of the French colonialism on urban space and its management as an ongoing social and political process in the postcolonial Morocco was very significant. The present paper analyses how the French colonial regime used urban design and architecture in Morocco as means of power and domination to impose a specific ideology and to serve the purposes of specific social groups. It demonstrates how urban space and architecture were used to reveal French imperialist ideology and to justify their colonial measures. Building on this, the paper explores the consequences of colonialism in contemporary Morocco. I use the medina (pre-colonial city) of Marrakesh as a case study to show evidence of the way contemporary urban design and architecture are still directly linked to the colonial past and to the ambivalence of its discourse.


This study evaluated impacts of Green Infrastructure (GI) as a stormwater management practice on return flows and the further Implications of climate variability. The goal was to create a model to explore the impacts that bioretention and Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) representing GI had using goldsim and Stormwater Management Modeling (SWMM) software. The software was used to represent impacts that climate variability individually and combined, may have on downstream stakeholders and receiving water systems in Salt Lake city, Utah, USA. Primary stakeholders included downstream water rights users, Farmington Bay waterfowl management area and the migratory birds that rely on Farmington Bay and the advocates that represent them. The steps to reach this goal were broken down incrementally to: (1) Characterize daily inflows to Farmington Bay, (2) Provide daily inflows from natural and urban runoff to the Jordan river, (3) Create a daily water balance model of Farmington Bay, (4) Demonstrate the model with and without stormwater GI and climate variability scenarios and (5) Determine trends of inflow to the Jordan River, duck clubs and Farmington Bay under various scenarios. The simulation results demonstrated that bioretention and RWH individually and combined had minimal impact on downstream water users, Jordan River flows and ultimately Farmington Bay water levels. Bioretention reduced the flow in the Jordan River minimally, with reductions primarily during peak flow. RWH actually kept more water in the natural system on average because less water was needed from the water treatment facilities when outdoor irrigation was supplemented with rainwater. The user reliability did not differ for any of the bioretention and RWH scenarios. The climate variability scenario had the greatest impact to Jordan River flows, Farmington Bay water levels and user reliability. When analyzed without GI implementation, the climate variability induced reduction in tributary flows and precipitation led to an average decrease of 11% in the Jordan River streamflow when compared to average baseline scenario over a 25 year simulation. The user reliability decreased by 5% and most importantly there was found to be an average of 36% decrease in the water levels in Farmington Bay. The resultant of the decrease in Farmington Bay water level is a loss of up to 61 square kilometers (15,000 acres) of open bay that would impact bird habitat, brine shrimp grounds, recreationalists, bird watchers, hunters and more. For this case study the implications of climate variability on the water system are much greater than implementing GI.


Abstract The dissolution rates of natural well-crystallized variscite (AlPO4.2H2O) were measured from the evolution of aqueous Al and P concentrations in closed and mixed-flow through reactors at 25°C and from 1.5 to 9 pH. Measured dissolution rates decrease with increasing pH from 5.05 × 10−16 mol/cm2/s at pH = 1.51 to 4.92 × 10−17 mol/cm2/s at pH = 5.89 and then increase with increasing pH to 1.64 × 10−17 mol/cm2/s at pH = 8.99. Estimates of the time required to equilibrate a mildly acidic, initially Al- and P-free solution with variscite based on measured dissolution rates and solubility products suggests it takes no more than several weeks to equilibrate this mineral with soil pore fluids. This result suggests that variscite can buffer aqueous phosphate concentrations in a significant number of near surface environments.


Conventional wisdom holds that landed elites oppose democratization. Whether they fear rising wages, labor mobility or land redistribution, landowners have historically repressed agricultural workers and sustained autocracy. What might change landowning elites' preferences for dictatorship and reduce their opposition to democracy? Change requires reducing landowners' need to maintain political control over labor. This transition occurs when mechanization reduces the demand for agricultural workers, eliminating the need for labor-repressive policies. We explain how the adoption of labor-saving technology in agriculture alters landowners' political preferences for different regimes, so that the more mechanized the agricultural sector, the more likely is democracy to emerge and survive. Our theoretical argument offers a parsimonious revision to Moore's thesis that applies to the global transformation of agriculture since his Social Origins first appeared, and results from our cross-national statistical analyses strongly suggest that a positive relationship between agricultural mechanization and democracy does in fact exist.


DNA vaccination and all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA) result in a survival advantage in a mouse model of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL). Depletion of CD4(+) or CD8(+) cells abolished this effect. CD4(+) depletions of long-term survivors resulted in relapse and death within 3 months, thus demonstrating the need of both CD4(+) and CD8(+) subsets for the generation of DNA-driven antileukemic immune responses and underscoring a crucial role of CD4(+) cells in the maintenance of durable remissions. Degranulation and cytotoxic carboxyfluorescein diacetate succinimidyl ester-based assays showed major histocompatibility complex-restricted APL-specific T cell-mediated immune responses. Sorted APL-specific CD8(+)CD107a(+) T cells showed an increase of antileukemic activity. Effectors from ATRA + DNA-treated mice were shown to secrete interferon-gamma when stimulated with either APL cells or peptides from the promyelocytic leukemia-RARalpha vaccine-derived sequences as detected by ELISpot assays. Our results demonstrate that DNA vaccination with ATRA confers the effective boosting of interferon-gamma-producing and cytotoxic T cells in the leukemic mice.


The planar geometric structure and the rich absorption feature endow porphyrins with interesting optoelectronic properties and also make it promising building blocks for supramolecular assembly. Recent advances in the photocatalytic applications of porphy‐ rins, including homogeneous, heterogeneous photocatalysis, and photoelectrochemical solar cells are highlighted. Porphyrin photocatalysts are involved in the form of mol‐ ecules, supported molecules, nanostructures, and thin film. Related rational design strat ‐ egies are provided for each form with an aim to enhance the light conversion efficiency. Finally, the ongoing directions and challenges for the future development of porphyrin semiconductors in high‐quality optoelectronic devices are also proposed.


In spite of its harsh climate, the Antarctic Seasonal Sea Ice Zone (SIZ) is remarkably diverse and hosts globally significant fisheries resources, such as Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba). Large populations of penguins, other birds, seals and whales symbolize the biological richness of this ecosystem. Today, the distribution of sea ice is beginning to alter in some Antarctic regions due to global warming. It is therefore imperative to understand the ecological significance of sea ice in order to better predict future changes of Antarctic marine ecosystems. The production of ice algae is probably fundamental to sustain the rich life of the Antarctic Sea Ice Zone. Thus, the biological resources from the ice must be transferred into the pelagic food web by species feeding at the ice-water interface. Investigations with a newly developed Surface and Under Ice Trawl (SUIT) yielded the first large-scale multi-seasonal evidence that life at the ice-water interface is surprisingly diverse and abundant. Especially Antarctic krill was closely associated with the underside of sea ice. Comparison with deeper fishing nets showed that the ice-water interface hosts its own species community, hitherto unavailable for quantitative sampling. The composition of this community strongly responds to sea ice properties. These results indicate that both macro- and mesozooplankton play a significant role as trophic energy transmitters between the sea ice and the mesopelagic food web. These findings provide new and direct evidence that sea ice is an important structuring force in the Southern Ocean ecosystem and allow new insights in the response of Antarctic marine ecosystems to changing sea ice characteristics caused by global warming. Consequences for the conceptual view of the pelagic food web in the SIZ are highlighted and future research perspectives are discussed.


This paper presents an overview of color and texture descriptors that have been approved for the Final Committee Draft of the MPEG-7 standard. The color and texture descriptors that are described in this paper have undergone extensive evaluation and development during the past two years. Evaluation criteria include effectiveness of the descriptors in similarity retrieval, as well as extraction, storage, and representation complexities. The color descriptors in the standard include a histogram descriptor that is coded using the Haar transform, a color structure histogram, a dominant color descriptor, and a color layout descriptor. The three texture descriptors include one that characterizes homogeneous texture regions and another that represents the local edge distribution. A compact descriptor that facilitates texture browsing is also defined. Each of the descriptors is explained in detail by their semantics, extraction and usage. The effectiveness is documented by experimental results.


This essay is a review of The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (2014), the last book that Patricia Crone wrote before she died, as well as an overview of her career and a tribute to her as a great historian of Islam. In Crone's subaltern history of the Persian plateau, the "nativist prophets" are a series of Iranian divines, seers, and hooligans whose resentment against Arab domination was expressed in recourse to pre-Islamic Persian ideals and beliefs. Islamic orthodoxy was undefined in the early eighth century, Crone shows, and the law had not yet entered every corner of daily life. There was, moreover, no clerical class at the time to correct heresiarchs on the fringes of the empire. Hence, according to the reviewer, one can easily imagine the situation as Crone does, with the truths of the new faith, in the eastern extremities of the caliphate, mixing with the Zoroastrian, Christian, and Manichaean truths already rooted there. Crone bleeds the categories of "Islamic" and "pre-Islamic" into each other, and thus her history is composed less of blocks of time and welldefined identities than of mutable compounds of belief and usage. The reviewer argues that Crone's sense of an unruly proliferation of popular beliefs is confirmed by the latest archaeology, and then he closes with an extended meditation on the relevance of this early Arab-Persian divide to the contemporary political situation of Islam and the Middle East.


Salmonella genus is widely distributed in nature and causes a spectrum of diseases in man and animals. Salmonella enterica subsp. diarizonae serotype 61: k: 1,5, (7) (SED) is a host adapted to sheep and its presence as saprophytic bacteria in sheep has been described in different countries. Several studies performed in abattoirs reported the presence of SED in healthy sheep in the intestinal content and also in the respiratory tract. In addition, this microorganism has also been isolated from nostril and faecal samples in healthy live animals. For this reason, this microorganism is considered well adapted to sheep, behaving normally these animals as asymptomatic carriers. However, SED has also been reported causing health disorders such as chronic proliferative rhinitis in adult sheep, abortions, testicular lesions in rams or alimentary tract disorders in young animals. The zoonotic potential of this microorganism is also discussed.


HIV is known to affect the epidemiology, transmission, pathogenesis and natural history of HCV infection whilst studies on the effects of HCV on HIV have shown conflicting results and are confounded by the influence of intravenous drug use and anti-retroviral therapy. This study was conducted in KwaZulu-Natal Province in South Africa where HIV is predominantly a sexually transmitted infection. Intravenous drug use is rare in this region and the study population was naive to anti-retroviral therapy. For this study, specimens from selected sentinel sites submitted to a central laboratory for routine HIV testing were screened for anti-HCV IgG antibodies. HIV positive HCVpositive patients were compared to HIV-positive HCV-negative patients in a subgroup of patients within this cohort in order to determine if HCV sero-prevalence was associated with clinical outcomes in a linked anonymous retrospective chart survey. The prevalence of HCV was 6.4% and that of HIV, 40.2%. There was a significantly higher prevalence of HCV among HIV infected patients as compared to HIV negative patients (13.4% vs. 1.73% respectively). HCV-HIV co-infected patients had significantly increased mortality (8.3 vs. 21%). A significant association was found between HCV serostatus and abnormal urea and creatinine levels. Hepatitis B surface antigen seropositivity was not found to be a confounding factor. This study has found that hepatitis C co-infection is more common in HIV positive individuals and is associated with an increased mortality and renal morbidity.


Background—In 2009, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is publicly reporting hospital-level risk-standardized 30-day mortality and readmission rates after acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and heart failure (HF). We provide patterns of hospital performance, based on these measures. Methods and Results—We calculated the 30-day mortality and readmission rates for all Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries ages 65 years or older with a primary diagnosis of AMI or HF, discharged between July 2005 and June 2008. We compared weighted risk-standardized mortality and readmission rates across Hospital Referral Regions and hospital structural characteristics. The median 30-day mortality rate was 16.6% for AMI (range, 10.9% to 24.9%; 25th to 75th percentile, 15.8% to 17.4%; 10th to 90th percentile, 14.7% to 18.4%) and 11.1% for HF (range, 6.6% to 19.8%; 25th to 75th percentile, 10.3% to 12.0%; 10th to 90th percentile, 9.4% to 13.1%). The median 30-day readmission rate was 19.9% for AMI (range, 15.3% to 29.4%; 25th to 75th percentile, 19.5% to 20.4%; 10th to 90th percentile, 18.8% to 21.1%) and 24.4% for HF (range, 15.9% to 34.4%; 25th to 75th percentile, 23.4% to 25.6%; 10th to 90th percentile, 22.3% to 27.0%). We observed geographic differences in performance across the country. Although there were some differences in average performance by hospital characteristics, there were high and low hospital performers among all types of hospitals. Conclusions—In a recent 3-year period, 30-day risk-standardized mortality rates for AMI and HF varied among hospitals and across the country. The readmission rates were particularly high.


Calcium fortified foods and supplements are the preferred options to meet the calcium needs of individuals unable to derive adequate dietary calcium. Although eggshells are a natural source of calcium carbonate, they are mostly disposed off as a waste product. Food, bakery and farm industries produce large amount of eggshells and their disposal poses a great environmental challenge. The aim of this study was to analyze the in vitro bio accessibility of calcium from the egg shell samples and the calcium salts prepared using eggshell powder using an in vitro dialysis procedure simulating intraluminal digestive phase.  Functional properties, total calcium, phosphorus content of eggshells as influenced by heat treatment and with/without membrane were also studied. The results revealed that raw eggshells without membrane had the highest swelling power of 1.92% at 95oC, and boiled eggshells without membrane exhibited highest bulk density of 1.46 g/ml. Water absorption capacity was higher in raw eggshells (with membrane) while boiled eggshells (with/without membrane) had relatively higher oil absorption capacity. Eggshells without membrane had higher calcium content while eggshells with membrane had greater dialyzable calcium compared to skimmed milk powder and commercial calcium  supplement which served as standard. Calcium carbonate prepared from eggshell powder with membrane had highest dialyzable calcium (152 mg/g) followed by eggshell without membrane (91.49mg/g). The present study revealed that the calcium content of eggshell exhibits high bio-accessibility and prospects exist for its utilization as a natural raw material in the preparation of calcium salts.


The data mining community is focused on a variety of methods and algorithms to manipulate incompletely specified or uncertain data and their dependencies. The major obstacle in the representation and visualization of incompletely specified data is the size explosion problem through defining undefined or uncertain values, which commonly raises questions about suggested heuristics and their practical applicability. Recently, there is a renewed interest in resolving the size explosion problem for incompletely specified and uncertain data based on symbolic techniques. One of such techniques, decision diagram, has been successfully applied to many knowledge visualization and data manipulation problems.


Where has the passion in food gone? The focus of food has been on the obesity epidemic, as people demand fast, cheap, and easy foods. The symbol of food is no longer seen as a basic need for survival because of the abundance and options of goods. Being unaware of food and its' power to bring and express so many facets of life, has given me the chance to discover areas that could be redesigned. During these past few years learning about food has made me fully understand these processes as a symbiotic relationship. In today's society, what separates people from seeing the value of food is the lack of food knowledge and the connection to their food systems. The disjointed path from farmer to consumer has muted the awareness and ability to understand what happens as a whole. This thesis addresses the need for changes to happen on multiple levels: macro (buying), meso (making), and micro (individual) scales. The result is three different ways people can redesign the way they eat food. The first, a mobile food system promotes and distributes fresh local produce in Honolulu. Secondly, being able to teach children as well as share a process of making food. The third, having an understanding of what and how people eat. The goal is for people to rekindle their passion for food. Library of Congress Subject Headings Food habits--United States--Psychological aspects; Food industry and trade--Health aspects; Cooking--Psychological aspects; Food containers--Design Publication Date 6-24-2012 Document Type Thesis Department, Program, or Center School of Design (CIAS) Advisor Lobos, Alex Advisor/Committee Member Miran, Michael Comments Note: imported from RIT's Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works. Physical copy available through RIT's The Wallace Library at: GT2853.U5 C44 2012 Recommended Citation Chen, Nicole, "Passion for food: Redesigning the way we eat" (2012). Thesis. Rochester Institute of Technology. Accessed from https://scholarworks.rit.edu/theses/6197 Campus RIT – Main Campus  Download SHARE THESES Enter search terms: Search


There has been a significant increase in the number of adult offspring continuing to reside in the family home in Western societies, especially in major cities. Multi-generational households tend to be larger in size than other household types and are demanding large dwellings. They have sought to reduce costs by locating mostly in fringe areas of major cities. Most seek to own rather than rent their properties, and there is a high propensity to 'knock-down' and rebuild their dwellings. Multi-generational cohabitation is more common in other societies, especially Asian and middle eastern cultures. In Australia, it might be partly explained by the increased prevalence of such cultural groups. However, it has also been understood in terms of delayed family formation decisions that are partly due to financial or economic constraint, or lengthening participation in education. These trends are also complicated by the coincident trend of the ageing of the population (with older age groups depending on the younger). Even so, in Australia there has not been a more comprehensive rethink of how this practice affects family relationships, nor how this might affect how these households think of 'family' and 'home' in the Australian context. The authors argue that there is scope for further examination of this issue and point to possible policy concerns. For example, planning policy needs to recognize the demand for properties that better meet the needs of multi-generation households, including apartment properties in the context of urban consolidation. Also, reflecting the fact that the composition of multi-generational families is often fluid (with people cohabiting for periods of time before moving off to independent living), housing forms might need to be adaptable to meet the changing needs of households (e.g. this might further justify the use of universal or adaptable design). Planning for the provision of aged-care services will also need to take into account the complexities of multigenerational households. Provision of aged-care in multi-generation households will often be within a setting which provides opportunities for mutual help and support. This might provide opportunities for the promotion of family-based models of aged care, as are already common place in many other countries.


"Feeling Backward" weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses - losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet."Feeling Backward" makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. It looks at early-twentieth-century queer novels often dismissed as "too depressing" and asks how we might value and reclaim the dark feelings that they represent. Heather Love argues that instead of moving on, we need to look backward and consider how this history continues to affect us in the present.Through elegant readings of Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and through stimulating engagement with a range of critical sources, "Feeling Backward" argues for a form of politics attentive to social exclusion and its effects.


Anti-freeze intoxication is most frequently encountered in dogs and cats after accidental consumption of the liquid emptied from car radiators. In ruminants, the intoxication can appear as a consequence of erratic contamination of grazing fields with the liquid from tractor tires. Other cases have been reported, due to erronate treatments applied to silage, when ethilenglicole is mistaken taken for formic acid, or after contaminated water consumption. Ethylen glycol is oxidized by alcohol dehydrogenase in the liver to glycoaldehide, wich is in turn oxidized to glycolic acid, glyoxalate, and finally, oxalate. Calcium oxalates crystals may be found in tubular lamina, tubular cells and the interstitium; they are light yellow, arranged in rosettes or prisms, and are birefringent in polarized light. Tubular lesions range from fat degeneration to necrosis. Large numbers of crystals in tubules are pathognomonic for ethylene glycol poisoning.


The drive towards globalisation has not only environmental and social implications, as there is a marked effect also on designers and the design process. Today, the mass production of electronic and electrical products is typically outsourced, and it is apparent that most end up being discarded while still functioning properly. With the intention of raising a critical discussion and promoting a reflection on the issues of electronic waste, product longevity and sustainability, the third year industrial design students in the Department of Industrial Design at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Turkey undertook an undergraduate project that aimed at re-contextualising the wind-up radio. This paper presents the conclusions and insights gained from that design education project, in which particular emphasis was on incorporating sustainable design considerations (i.e., localisation, integrated scales of design and production, post-use and engaging design) into the idea generation phase of the prod...


The greater the technological dependencies of an electronic text on other layers of (software, hardware, networking) technology, the higher the probability that one or more layers will break and make the piece unreadable, and even unpreservable. In the past two decades of electronic poetry, this has happened more often than not. Even with sensible choices of file formats, electronic publication is radically more unstable than print. A common understanding of electronic literature as an expansion of simple text has sped up its slide into technical obsolescence. For better or worse, an in-bred academic poetics, multimedia ideology and rather uncritical choices of technology have contributed to this situation. More sustainable types and cultures of online writing do exist, but suffer from the little technological excitement they offer to new media scholars.


Garner et al. have explored the topic of how PDZ domain-containing proteins contribute to synaptic organization and signaling. The review focuses primarily on the structure of the presynaptic density and covers such issues as the role of various PDZ-containing proteins in clustering receptors and contributing to downstream signaling events at glutamatergic synapses, organizing the cytoskeleton, and membrane and receptor recycling. Garner, C.C., Nash, J., and Huganir, R.L. (2000) PDZ domains in synapse assembly and signalling. Trends Cell Biol. 10: 274-280. [Online Journal]


We provide a thorough analysis of the effectiveness of different Variance Reduction Techniques (VRTs). We consider both stand-alone and combined applications of two input techniques, Antithetic Variates (AV) and Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS), and two output techniques, Control Variates (CV) and Poststratified Sampling (PS). Previous research in the area mainly focuses on asymptotic variance reduction. In this experimental study, we measure the performance of VRTs under finite simulation run lengths and analyze their effects. Our findings show that the asymptotic variance reduction results do not readily apply to finite-length simulations. We consider three different types of systems (M/M/1, serial production line and (s, S) inventory control systems) and compare the VRTs under various experimental conditions. We observe that a variance reduction cannot be guaranteed for every instance a VRT is applied. Our results also indicate that the output VRTs (CV, PS) are better than input VRTs (AV, LHS) on the average for the single systems considered in this study. More interestingly, the less-sophisticated techniques (AV, CV) often perform better than the relatively more-complex techniques (LHS, PS). A comprehensive bibliography is also provided.


Abstract Background. Community health workers (CHWs) are lay people trained to assist with health care in their communities. This study took place at two sites in Khayelitsha, a township in the Cape Peninsula, from 2000 to 2002. Objectives. To describe the process of developing an intervention programme for primary prevention of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) in general and cardiovascular disease in particular, targeting CHWs. Method. Forty-four CHWs were assigned to either an intervention or a control group. The intervention group, living in Site C, received training on lifestyle modification with emphasis on healthy eating and physical activity, while the control group, living in Site B, did not receive any training until a year later. The process was undertaken in four stages. Stage 1 involved assessment of the CHWs' risk factors by obtaining anthropometric measurements. CHWs were interviewed and focus group discussions were held on the socio-cultural factors associated with body weight and body image, and barriers to physical activity. Stage 2 involved developing and implementing a training programme for primary prevention of NCDs among CHWs. Stage 3, conducted at Site C, involved a situational assessment of available resources in the community for promoting healthy lifestyles. The fourth and final stage involved the implementation of community interventions by the CHWs. Results. A large percentage of CHWs were overweight and obese, and therefore at risk for NCDs. They had misconceptions about causes and treatment of these diseases, and also lacked knowledge on nutrition and the risk of high fat intake. Easy access to cheap unhealthy food, rather than fresh fruit and vegetables, limited their ability to make healthy food choices. The findings from stage 1 led to a community participatory intervention. Conclusions. Developing community-targeted interventions for NCDs can be achieved by involving CHWs at the initial stage and utilising a multifaceted approach. Education of community members and CHWs does not guarantee behaviour modification. Unless the environment encourages healthy living, NCDs will continue to be a burden in the poor populations of South Africa.


We conducted probabilistic seismic hazard analysis for Thailand and adjacent areas using a method proposed by Cornell (1968). We produced seismic hazard maps showing peak ground acceleration (PGA). Twenty-one seismic source zones covering all of Thailand and extend into adjacent areas were employed. The seismicity data used in this study was a merged data set covering 1963-2007 from several international earthquake catalogues and a single Thai catalogue. We selected the strong ground-motion attenuation model for this study by applying several existing attenuation models to recorded strong groundmotion data and choosing the model that best fit our data. Seismic hazard analysis was carried out for 2521 grid points on a 0.25° × 0.25° mesh within a rectangle defined by longitudes 92-106°E and latitudes 0°-21°N. The resulting PGA maps for a 2% probability of exceedance for a 50-year time period suggest that ground motion of 0.3 to 0.4 g may occur in northern and western Thailand and from 0 to 0.2 g in other parts of Thailand. The seismic hazard analysis presented here is an important step toward an accurate evaluation of a seismic hazard potential in Thailand and adjacent areas. Further work is needed to refine the analysis. More observations of strong ground motion in the region are needed and further seismo-tectonic research should be encouraged.


Bryan Sykes, the world's first genetic archaeologist, takes us on a journey around the family tree of Britain and Ireland, to reveal how our tribal history still colours the country today. In 54BC, Julius Caesar launched the first Roman invasion of Britain. His was the first detailed account of the Celtic tribes that inhabited the Isles. But where had they come from and how long had they been there? When the Romans eventually left five hundred years later, they were succeeded by invasions of Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. Did these successive invasions obliterate the genetic legacy of the Celts, or have very little effect? After two decades tracing the genetic origins of peoples from all over the world, Bryan Sykes has now turned the spotlight on his own back yard. In a major research programme, the first of its kind, he set out to test the DNA of over 10,000 volunteers from across Britain and Ireland with the specific aim of answering this very question: what is our modern genetic make-up and what does it tell us of our tribal past? Are the modern people of the Isles a delicious genetic cocktail? Or did the invaders keep mostly to themselves forming separate genetic layers within the Isles? As his findings came in, Bryan Sykes discovered that the genetic evidence revealed often very different stories to the conventional accounts coming from history and archaeology. "Blood of the Isles" reveals the nature of our genetic make-up as never before and what this says about our attitudes to ourselves, each other, and to our past. It is a gripping story that will fascinate and surprise with its conclusions.


The main purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between organisational behaviour (OB) and concurrent engineering (CE). A conceptual model has been established, in which OB factors are classified under six major categories. Using a questionnaire based on the model, the relationship between OB and CE has been studied in 161 responded companies from different selected industries in Isfahan province of Iran in 2005. The results reveal that major barriers to the development of CE are: 1) being responsible; 2) risk taking; 3) compensation ways; 4) creativity and innovation (in organisational communication); 5) oral communication; 6) entrepreneurial attitude; 7) achievement motivation. The relationship values between OB factors and CE have been found less than 0.323 in all categories. The outcomes are believed to enhance the capabilities of managers in dealing with OB effectiveness, which in turn leads to the development of entrepreneurship.


Abstract Imagine a region suffering from a widening income gap that becomes eligible for a generous transfer programme (the treatment). Imagine difference-in-differences analysis (DD) — a before-and-after comparison of the income-level difference — shows that the handicap has risen. Most observers would conclude to the policy's inefficiency. But second thoughts are needed, because DD rests heavily on the validity of a key assumption: parallel paths in the absence of treatment; an assumption that is often violated. To cope with this problem, economists traditionally include polynomial (linear, quadratic…) trends among the regressors, and estimate the treatment effect as a once-in-a-time trend shift. In practice that strategy does not work very well, because inter alia the estimation of the trend uses post-treatment data. What is needed is a method that i) uses pre-treatment observations to capture linear or non-linear trend differences, and ii) extrapolates these to compute the treatment effect. This paper shows how this can be achieved using a fully-flexible version of the canonical DD equation. It also contains an illustration using data on a 1994–2006 EU programme that was implemented in the Belgian province of Hainaut.


The research addressed the factors affecting physicians' and nurses' professional satisfaction and implications for patient care at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kenya. A descriptive quantitative research design was used. Data was collected using a structured questionnaire that was administered to a stratified sample of 82 Physicians and 220 Nurses. All the completed questionnaires were entered into IBM SPSS 21.0 statistical software and data analysed for descriptive statistics. The results were presented in tables and figures. The study was powered to 95% confidence interval. From the study findings it was deduced that most of the respondents were satisfied with the assessed factors that influenced their professional satisfaction. The factors can be classified as either intrinsic or extrinsic. These intrinsic factors included achievement, recognition, autonomy and advancement. Extrinsic factors include interpersonal relations, working conditions/workload and compensation. The study concluded that the factors that influence physicians and nurses' professional satisfaction include workload, compensation (salary/pay), working conditions, supervisors' role, physicians-nurses' relationship, career advancement and autonomy. Overall, the results clearly indicate the importance of intrinsic and extrinsic factors in influencing physicians' and nurses' professional satisfaction. The study recommends focused efforts towards improving both intrinsic and extrinsic factors that influence physicians' and nurses' professional satisfaction in order to translate to improved patient care. Healthcare systems need to mainstream organizational structure in order to facilitate patient care through consultative processes with physicians and nurses. The need for interdepartmental support and strengthened working relationships between physicians and nurses in healthcare environment is an important strategy to influencing satisfaction. Keywords: Determinants, Factors, Physicians, Nurses, Professional Satisfaction, Moi Teaching, Referral Hospital, MTRH, Kenya DOI : 10.7176/JHMN/64-02 Publication date :July 31 st 2019


Objective Familial Mediterranean fever (FMF) is the most common autoinflammatory disease. Most of the identified disease-causing mutations are located on exon 10. As the number of studies about the effect of the exonal location of the mutation and its phenotypic expression is limited, we aimed to investigate whether the exonic location of the Mediterranean fever (MEFV) mutation has an effect on the clinical manifestation in patients with FMF. Methods Study population was derived from the main FMF registry that included 2246 patients from 15 different rheumatology clinics. We categorized the mutations according to their exon locations and retrieved the clinical and demographic information from the database. Results Patients having the MEFV mutations on exon 2 or 10 (n:1526) were divided into three subgroups according to the location of the MEFV mutations: Group 1 (exon 2 mutations), Group 2 (exon 10 mutations), and Group 3 (both exon 2 and exon 10 mutations). Group 2 patients were of a significantly younger age at onset, and erysipel-like erythema, arthritis, amyloidosis, and a family history of FMF were more common in this group. Conclusion Patients with FMF and exon 10 mutations show more severe clinical symptoms and outcome. Exon 2 mutations tend to have a better outcome.


Objectives: Recent research suggests that hearing impairment is declining among older adults compared with earlier generations of the same age. Tinnitus is often associated with hearing impairment, so one might hypothesize that the prevalence of tinnitus is declining in a similar manner. The purpose of this study was to use multigenerational data with repeated measures to determine whether the prevalence of tinnitus is declining among more recent generations. Design: Using data from the Epidemiology of Hearing Loss Study (1993–1995, 1998–2000, 2003–2005, and 2009–2010) and the Beaver Dam Offspring Study (2005–2008), the authors examined birth cohort patterns in the report of tinnitus for adults aged 45 years and older (n =12,689 observations from 5764 participants). Participants were classified as having tinnitus if they reported tinnitus in the past year of at least moderate severity or that caused difficulty falling asleep. A low-frequency (500, 1000, and 2000 Hz) and high-frequency (3000, 4000, 6000, and 8000 Hz) pure tone average from the worse ear was used to summarize hearing status. Other potential risk factors for tinnitus were also explored to determine if changes in the prevalence of these factors over time could explain any observed birth cohort differences in the prevalence of tinnitus. These included the following: education, history of head injury, history of doctor-diagnosed ear infections, history of cardiovascular disease (myocardial infarction, stroke, or angina), current noisy job, longest-held job, target shooting in the past year, number of concerts ever attended, alcohol use in the past year, doctor diagnosis of arthritis, current aspirin use, regular exercise, and consulting with a physician in the past year about any hearing/ear problem. Birth cohort effects were modeled with alternating logistic regression models which use generalized estimating equations to adjust for correlation among repeated measurements over time that are nested within families. Results: The report of tinnitus tended to increase with more recent birth cohorts compared with earlier birth cohorts. For example, at ages 55 to 59 years, 7.6% of participants born between 1935 and 1939 reported tinnitus, compared with 11.0% of those born in 1940 to 1944, 13.6% of those born between 1945 and 1949, and 17.5% of those born between 1950 and 1954. Similarly, at ages 65 to 69 years, 7.9% of participants born between 1925 and 1929 reported tinnitus, compared with 10.0% of those born between 1930 and 1934, 11.9% of those born between 1935 and 1939, and 13.7% of those born between 1940 and 1944. Final alternating logistic regression model results indicated that, on average, after adjusting for age and other factors, participants in a given generation were significantly more likely to report tinnitus than participants from a generation 20 years earlier (odds ratio = 1.78, 95% confidence interval = 1.44, 2.21). Conclusions: Increased reports of tinnitus may reflect increased prevalence of symptoms, increased awareness of symptoms, or higher health expectations among more recent generations of adults. Regardless of the reasons, the increasing prevalence of tinnitus suggests that health care providers may see an increased number of patients bothered by this common but little understood symptom.


Injectable hydrogels are promising candidates for adhesives because of their ease of administration, minimal invasion, and biocompatibility. While developing surgical adhesives with strong wet tissue adhesion, controlled degradability and mechanical properties, and excellent biocompatibility have still been a significant challenge. Herein, inspired from nature, we report a novel mussel-inspired tissue-adhesive hydrogel composed of poly(γ-glutamic acid) and dopamine (γ-PGA–DA) that can bond tissues well and stop bleeding in a wet environment by improving its tissue adhesiveness via a horseradish peroxidase-mediated reaction. The hydrogel exhibited 10–12 fold stronger wet tissue adhesion strength (58.2 kPa) over the clinically used fibrin glue and more effective hemostatic ability following liver impalement in animal models (41.2% reduction in the average amount of bleeding compared with fibrin glue). In addition, the hydrogels demonstrated controlled gelation time, swelling ratio, microscopic morphology, biodegradability and tissue-like elastomeric mechanical properties, and exhibited excellent cyto/tissue-compatibility. The overall results suggest that the γ-PGA–DA hydrogels can be considerably applied as promising wet-resistant adhesives and hemostatic materials.


This note considers possible arrangements of the sectors of a generalised dartboard. The sum of the pth powers of the absolute differences of the numbers on adjacent sectors is introduced as a penalty cost function and a string reversal algorithm is used to determine all arrangements that maximise the penalty, for any p ≥ 1. The maximum value of the penalty function for p = 1 is well known in the literature, and has been previously stated without proof for p = 2. We determine it also for p = 3 and p = 4.


The dynamic evolution of ecological systems in which predators and prey compete for survival has been investigated by applying suitable mathematical models. Dynamic systems theory provides a useful way to model interspecies competition and thus the evolution of predator and prey populations. This kind of mathematical framework has been shown to be well suited to describe evolution of economical systems as well, where instead of predators and prey there are consumers and resources. Maintenance and testing activities absorb the most relevant part of the total life-cycle cost of software. Such economic relevance strongly suggests to investigate the maintenance and testing processes in order to find new models allowing software engineers to better estimate, plan and manage costs and activities. We show how dynamic systems theory could be usefully applied to maintenance and testing context, namely to model the dynamic evolution of the effort. When programmers start trying to recognize and correct code defects, while the number of residual defects decreases, the effort spent to find out any new defect has an initial increase, followed by a decline, in a similar way as prey and predator populations do. The feasibility of this approach is supported by the experimental data about two real world software projects.


1. A technique of recording electrical activity from an intact, essentially normal specimen of Hydra is described. 2. The existence of regularly recurring co-ordinated longitudinal contractions of the ectodermal muscles is confirmed and re-emphasized. 3. Such contractions are found to consist of a patterned series of individual coordinated contractions, each preceded by a single large, compound potential. The overall contraction, consisting of a variable number between 5 and 12 or more contractions depending on species, is thus called a contraction burst. 4. These contraction-burst potentials originate endogenously; they are considered to be the most important effector activity in Hydra . 5. Contraction-burst potentials originate in the hypostome and are conducted throughout the column at approximately 15 cm./sec. 6. Contraction-burst patterns have been studied quantitatively in two species, showing interspecific differences between both regular contraction bursts and those associated with locomotion. 7. Certain extrinsic and intrinsic variables affect contraction-burst frequency. Daylight, and nutritional state, both modify this rate, with the former giving rise to a circadian activity cycle under natural conditions. 8. Single electric shocks usually cause a single co-ordinated muscle contraction. Such stimuli can markedly reduce endogenous contraction-burst activity. 9. Sudden illumination interrupts contraction bursts temporarily, even halting those in progress. Blue light is most effective. This stimulus has been used as a tool to investigate the properties of the pacemaker systems concerned with contraction bursts. 10. The nature and properties of these pacemakers is discussed.


The paper represents an outline of the most important natural and
 anthropogenic tourist values on which the development of tourism of Jadar is
 based. It is pointed out to the most important deposits of thermomineral
 sources as the preconditions of the origin and development of spa centres.
 The largest economic effects are realized through development of health
 tourism in Banja Koviljaca which is the only one among spa centres that
 acquired the market affirmation as individual tourist motive. Banja Badanja
 has favorable conditions for development, still insufficiently affirmed and
 in shadow of far more famous Banja Koviljaca. The priorities of development
 of spa tourism are defined in the paper, and it is pointed to the
 significance of selective offer that depends on the conditions of successful
 organization of health spa, wellness-spa programmes and offered recreational
 contents.


As psychoanalysis enters its second century, practitioners and researchers are shifting away from a focus on the isolated individual and toward analysis of the individual in the context of his or her society and culture. To understand the way people live, says Edward Shapiro, we must explore the boundary of experience, where inner and outer worlds converge. In this highly readable collection, nine leading psychoanalysts and psychologists - including Roy Schafer, Arnold Modell, Carol Gilligan, Otto Kernberg, and Joyce McDougall - investigate the changing analytic situation. This book is intended for mental health professionals, organizational theorists, psychologists, sociologists, and others with an interest in how opening the analytic situation beyond the two-person field is broadening the theory and illuminating the nature of unconscious interaction.


Analyses of data from spectroscopic and astrometric surveys have led to conflicting results concerning the vertical characteristics of the Milky Way. Ages are often used to provide clarity, but typical uncertainties of >40 per cent from photometry restrict the validity of the inferences made. Using the Kepler APOKASC sample for context, we explore the global population trends of two K2 campaign fields (3 and 6), which extend further vertically out of the Galactic plane than APOKASC. We analyse the properties of red giant stars utilizing three asteroseismic data analysis methods to cross-check and validate detections. The Bayesian inference tool PARAM is used to determine the stellar masses, radii, and ages. Evidence of a pronounced red giant branch bump and an [α/Fe] dependence on the position of the red clump is observed from the K2 fields radius distribution. Two peaks in the age distribution centred at ∼5 and ∼12 Gyr are found using a sample with σage < 35 per cent. In comparison with Kepler, we find the older peak to be more prominent for K2. This age bimodality is also observed based on a chemical selection of low-[α/Fe] (≤0.1) and high-[α/Fe] (>0.1) stars. As a function of vertical distance from the Galactic mid-plane (|Z|), the age distribution shows a transition from a young to old stellar population with increasing |Z| for the K2 fields. Further coverage of campaign targets with high-resolution spectroscopy is required to increase the yield of precise ages achievable with asteroseismology.


In Algeria, Emydidae is represented by only one species, the European pond turtle Emys orbicularis (Linnaeus, 1758). A population has been studied during the spring 2013 in the Parc National d'El Kala. The objective of this survey was identification and the quantification of leech species. Placobdella costata (Fr. Muller, 1846) (Hirudinida: Glossiphoniidae) proved to be the only species of leech that parasitizes our population of Emys orbicularis . The prevalence was 26.41 %, it was very weak at the juvenile stages (10.28 %). The intensity was 0.51± 1.20 for the population; it was lower at the juvenile stages (0.14 ± 0.37). No relationship exists between the parasitic load and the morphological parameter. Indeed, plastron and posterior part (hind limbs) were the most parasitized with respectively 44.44 % and 29.63% of parasite load.


Segmentation of carotid plaques in standard B-mode ultrasound is challenging due to irregular lumen shapes, noise, artifacts, and plaque echolucency. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel carotid plaque segmentation method which exploits the benefits of simultaneously acquired B-mode ultrasound (BMUS) and contrast enhanced ultrasound (CEUS). We first estimate the anatomical motion from the BMUS image sequence, using nonrigid intensity-based image registration, and apply to BMUS and CEUS image sequences for motion compensation. We average the motion-compensated image sequences to obtain single BMUS&CEUS images with improved signal-to-noise ratio, which serve as `epitome' images. We apply vessel detection to distinguish single and multiple branches in the CEUS epitome. The lumen-intima layer is segmented from the epitomes by a joint-histogram classification approach, followed by a 1D dynamic programming procedure. Then, the media-adventitia layer is segmented by using dual (2D) dynamic programming (DDP). As media-adventitia layer and adventitial wall are almost parallel to each other, DDP is used to find two almost parallel and smooth lines by combining their costs. For validation, the lumen-intima and media-adventitia layers of 13 carotid arteries with atherosclerotic plaques were manually segmented by two observers and compared to the automated results. The average of the two manual segmentations was considered as ground-truth. For the lumen-intima layer, average ± std. dev. root-mean-square-error was 283±123μm. The inter-observer variability was 261±128μm. For the media-adventitia layer, average root-mean-square-error was 334±170μm. The inter-observer variability was 225±130μm. The differences between automated and ground-truth contours are in the same order as those between two observers. In conclusion, we present an accurate, robust, and novel fully automated plaque segmentation method in combined BMUS&CEUS images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to exploit the combination of BMUS&CEUS to solve the segmentation challenges for carotid plaques.


A Thesis Submitted to the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS) in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Master of Arts in International Relations


NaYF4:Er3+,Yb3+,Ce3+ nanocrystals (NCs) were synthesized by using a solvothermal approach. Under the excitation of a 980 nm laser, the 1.53 μm emission band of Er3+ ions in the NCs was enhanced by 6 times after codoping Ce3+ ions owing to the efficient energy transfer between Ce3+ and Er3+: 4I11/2 (Er3 +) + 2F5/2 (Ce3+) → 4I13/2 (Er3+) + 2F7/2 (Ce3+). By dispersing the NaYF4:Er3+,Yb3+,Ce3+ NCs into SU-8 2005 polymer matrix, we constructed Er3+-doped polymer-based optical waveguide amplifiers (EDPOWAs) and measured their performances. The measured optical gain of the EDPOWA doped with NaYF4: Er3+,Yb3+,Ce3+ NCs was enhanced by ~2dB in comparison with that doped with NaYF4:Er3+,Yb3+ NCs. These results showed that NaYF4:Er3+,Yb3+,Ce3+ NCs are promising candidates for building high gain EDPOWAs.


CANADA AND THE TWO WORLD WARS J.L. Granatstein and Desmond Morton Toronto: Key Porter, 2003. xv, 360 pp, $42.00 paper (ISBN 1-55263-509-0)J.L. Granatstein and Desmond Morton, each a prominent Canadian military historians in his own right, have collaborated to produce Canada and the Two World Wars, a synthesis of their earlier works Marching to Armageddon and A Nation Forged in Fire. This one-volume history of Canada's participation during two world wars is well-written and broad in its scope. The authors' basic thesis is that "more than any other set of events the two world wars shaped our world and that victory was vital to Canada's existence as a civilized society" (1). That might be overdrawn somewhat since they acknowledge that change would have occurred in any event. They are right to argue, however, that war served as a catalyst for every imaginable reform ranging from women's suffrage in 1917 to the birth of the social welfare state during the Second World War. Not only do they examine the myriad of political, economic, and social changes taking place in Canada during the period covered by the book, but they also delineate the continuities of Canadian military history, namely, popular disdain of all things military, woefully inadequate defence budgets, improvisation, and our enviable war-fighting record through two horrific wars.The authors explore the battles in which Canadian soldiers took part and the effects of those battles on the soldiers, as well as the changes taking place on the home front. Granatstein and Morton argue that Canada's contribution to the First World War ensured that it became a sovereign nation. It did so at great cost, not only in terms of the number of casualties but also because war tore the country apart along political, ethnic, language, gender, and class lines. Some of the most heated debates at home played out against the backdrop of the war-conscription, education/language rights, prohibition, and the place of French-Canadians and women in Canadian society, to name but a few. Not surprisingly, these debates served to divide Canadians, not unite them. Nevertheless, the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers helped pave the way toward independence and gave Canada a voice on both the international stage and within the empire.The authors move with ease from the battlefield to the factory floor and back again, giving roughly equal attention to the exploits of individual soldiers and the corps as well as rhe experiences of civilians-men and women alike-toiling in munitions factories across the country in support of the Canadian war effort. They are careful to draw out the connection between technology and tactics to the performance of the armies in the field while Canada struggled to meet the ever-increasing manpower and industrial contributions demanded of its politicians and allies in order to secure an allied victory. The authors painstakingly chronicle the rise of the Canadian Expeditionary Force from a force of rank amateurs at the outset of the First World War to the professional force that by war's end spearheaded the Allied advance. This section of the book traces the trials and tribulations of this development, using to good effect numerous diaries and personal letters written by men who participated in the battles. Accompanying the lively prose are a number of excellent photographs and maps to situate the reader geographically.Similarly, the second half of the text is equally detailed. The authors set the context for this portion of the book with the rise of the dictators and trace events in Europe and Asia and Canada's preparedness, or lack thereof, for the coming conflict. …


Nerve growth factor (NGF) induces neurite outgrowth and differentiation in a process that involves NGF binding to its receptor TrkA and endocytosis of the NGF–TrkA complex into signaling endosomes. Here, we find that biogenesis of signaling endosomes requires inactivation of Rab5 to block early endosome fusion. Expression of dominant-negative Rab5 mutants enhanced NGF-mediated neurite outgrowth, whereas a constitutively active Rab5 mutant or Rabex-5 inhibited this process. Consistently, inactivation of Rab5 sustained TrkA activation on the endosomes. Furthermore, NGF treatment rapidly decreased cellular level of active Rab5-GTP, as shown by pull-down assays. This Rab5 down-regulation was mediated by RabGAP5, which was shown to associate with TrkA by coimmunoprecipitation assays. Importantly, RNA interference of RabGAP5 as well as a RabGAP5 truncation mutant containing the TrkA-binding domain blocked NGF-mediated neurite outgrowth, indicating a requirement for RabGAP5 in this process. Thus, NGF signaling downregulates Rab5 activity via RabGAP5 to facilitate neurite outgrowth and differentiation.


How nonenveloped viruses such as simian virus 40 (SV40) trigger the lytic release of their progeny is poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate that SV40 expresses a novel later protein termed VP4 that triggers the timely lytic release of its progeny. Like VP3, VP4 synthesis initiates from a downstream AUG start codon within the VP2 transcript and localizes to the nucleus. However, VP4 expression occurs ∼24 h later at a time that coincides with cell lysis, and it is not incorporated into mature virions. Mutation of the VP4 initiation codon from the SV40 genome delayed lysis by 2 d and reduced infectious particle release. Furthermore, the co-expression of VP4 and VP3, but not their individual expression, recapitulated cell lysis in bacteria. Thus, SV40 regulates its life cycle by the later temporal expression of VP4, which results in cell lysis and enables the 50-nm virus to exit the cell. This study also demonstrates how viruses can generate multiple proteins with diverse functions and localizations from a single reading frame.


Behavioral public administration was coined as a term to describe a field focused on the psychologically based study of individual level behavior and attitudes with relevance for the public sector. Although it holds important insights on human behavior, the literature on behavioral genetics has so far largely been missing in this field. In this paper, I propose that behavioral genetics is concurrent with the scope of behavioral public administration and that it complements the popular theory of bounded rationality. Next, I outline the logics of the twin studies that underlie much of behavioral genetics, and synthesize relevant existing results both inside and outside public administration that relies on behavioral genetics. Functionally, I arrange these insights as they relate to citizens, employees, and managers and present examples of how gene-environment interactions allow for integration of behavioral public administration and behavioral genetics. I argue that insights from behavioral genetics are needed to maximize explanatory power and avoid biased estimates of the effects of socialization when examining these three groups. I conclude by presenting points for practitioners.


Although assisted dying has been most commonly presented within a medicalised framework, the notion of de-medicalisation is employed in this paper to suggest that there are emerging models of assisted dying in which some medical aspects assumed to be an integral part of the phenomenon are both challenged and diminished. The paper considers cases where relatives have facilitated a loved one's assisted suicide abroad, cases of assisted death in which the assistor in the actual suicide act is a non-medic, and the growing debate surrounding non-medical grounds for desiring death. In evaluating the potential impact of partial de-medicalisation on the assisted dying debate, the argument presented is that whilst a de-medicalised model could well contribute to a richer understanding of assisted dying and a better death for the person who is assisted, there are cogent reasons to retain some aspects of the medicalised model and that a completely de-medicalised model of assisted dying is unrealistic.


The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of lean management components on improved service quality in public hospitals of Kohgiluyeh and Boyerahmad and Bushehr provinces. Fifty thousand employees of public hospitals of Kohkiloyeh-Boyer Ahmad and Bushehr provinces were selected using single-stage random cluster sampling method. Then, a researcher-made questionnaire was used to respond all employees of these hospitals. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze data. Structural equation modeling analyses confirmed the match between research model and experimental data. The results showed that the standard coefficient of all paths of communicative, processes, management, technology, structure, and human components of lean management to improved quality is significant. This means that all components of lean management have a direct impact on improved quality. Lean management leads to improved quality of services in public hospitals of Kohgiluyeh and Boyerahmad and Bushehr provinces.


This thesis explores the feeding relationships of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) on its major prey species within the Barents Sea using the newly developed Atlantis model for the region. Atlantis is an end-to-end model designed to explore the response of the ecosystem under different biological, environmental and fisheries scenarios. However, before one can develop such scenarios, the model needs to be tuned through a diet matrix that should reflect the observed diets of the major species in the system. Generating a realistic diet composition is achieved by adjusting indices linked to the strength of the predation for each prey species. The major work carried out within the thesis has been on the tuning of the cod diet. Five different model runs with different diet indices are presented and evaluated by comparing the results with the cod diet documented in the joint Russian-Norwegian (PINRO-IMR) stomach content database. Emphasis in the thesis was placed upon the prey species, capelin (Mallotus villosus) and polar cod (Boreogadus saida). A diet matrix was achieved that was able to reproduce, within an order of magnitude, the natural consumption with regards to relative amounts in terms of number of individuals and biomass of the different prey species. Higher predation pressure was found to reduce prey abundance as expected, and a negative correlation was found between cod and capelin, and also with polar cod but the relationship was much weaker than for capelin. The abundance of polar cod correlated with the amount of capelin consumed, i.e. high predation of cod on capelin results in increasing polar cod abundance. Individual weight of cod was observed to decline when there was high abundance of cod suggesting evidence of density dependent processes. Although the relative rankings of prey species consumed based on numbers of individuals and biomass generally matched the database, the absolute values did not with the model underestimating the total consumption. Suggestions for improvements in the tuning process are provided such as tuning more parameters, for example, growth and consumption rates and resolving temporal as well as geographic distributions to better determine the overlap between predators and prey. Finally, possible future research using the Atlantis model is presented.


Adhesives are increasingly being employed as alternatives to mechanical fasteners in aerospace and other engineering applications. While structural adhesives are commonly employed on aircraft, electrical bonding continues to be achieved with rivets as the existing electrically conductive adhesives suffer from low strength due to the high loading (typically 25-30 vol.%) of conductive filler particles. Carbon nanotubes are one of the more attractive candidates for development of multifunctional adhesives for both structural and conductive bonding because of their high conductivity and high aspect ratio. The latter enables creation of conductive pathways at much lower loading (< 1 vol.%) and, therefore, conductivity can be achieved without degrading mechanical performance. Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) offer the highest intrinsic conductivity and aspect ratio as well as the lowest percolation threshold, which is associated with higher conductivity at a fixed loading. In this work, SWCNTs were incorporated at low loading (0.5 - 3 wt%) into an unfilled aerospace-grade epoxy system, to impart electrical conductivity while maintaining structural bonding capability. Mechanical properties of composite-tocomposite joints were evaluated using ASTM-based lap shear and peel tests. Bulk electrical conductivities over 1 S/m were achieved without degrading the joint structural performance in the selected test methods. The mechanical and electrical performance of a SWCNT-modified epoxy adhesive was also studied for aluminumto- aluminum bonding. It was found that the integration of 1 wt% SWCNTs can considerably improve joint Mode I fracture toughness by ~ 35% due to mechanisms such as crack bridging. The electrical resistance of the bondline was also consistent with the electrical conductivity of SWCNT-modified adhesive films (~10-3 S/m), but slightly lower than the bulk electrical conductivity measured on thicker samples.


In recent years the X‐FEM based on the partition of unity method and the strong discontinuity approach (SDA) have shown to be powerful tools to model crack growth. Both methods model the crack surface by introducing additional d.o.f.. In the X‐FEM the nodes in the mesh around a crack are globally enhanced with new d.o.f. while in in the SDA the new d.o.f. are commonly introduced as internal ones. Thus the jump displacement fields are constant across elements. Therefore the d.o.f. can be condensed on element level which results in jumps in the displacement field at element edges. In this contribution the strong discontinuity approach is used approximating the displacement jump linearly across the crack length similar as e.g. in [3]. New additional nodes of the cracked elements that lie on the element edges are introduced but are not considered as internal nodes but remain global. Thus crack path continuity is automatically given. These global d.o.f. approximate the discontinuous part of the displacement field. The sum of the aforementioned part and the continuous displacement field represent the total displacement field including a possible jump. (© 2006 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)


This study is an interpretation of the Muslim jurist Abu Ja'far Muhammad b. Jarir al-Tabari's (d. 923 C.E.) universal history The History of Messengers and Kings (Ar. Ta'rikh al-Rusul wa'l-Muluk). It is one of the most frequently consulted sources in studies of Islamic history, yet only recently have scholars begun to conceive of it as a literary unit, held together by discourses not considered by historians who have nevertheless based their con-clusions on it. Thus my study aims at contribut-ing to the understanding of al-Tabari's history by a comparative histo-riographical interpretation. The interpretation departs from the thought of Michel de Certeau, historian of French religious history. Certeau approaches historiography as a scholarly operation which takes place in an interrelation between an institution and a discipline, which produces a scholarly practice, and a subjective discourse. The result of such operations is to assign to a historical period, or event, or source, a specific 'place' in the existing body of historical writings which, taken together, make up history as it is preserved. Since the 'place' assigned to a historical period is the product of a histo-riographical operation, there is a correspondence between it and the 'place' of the operation. This holds true for all historiography, religious or secular, pre-modern or modern. The significant difference concerns modes of intelligibil-ity and practice, which are related to social expressions of identity and legitimacy. This expression is practiced in writing through acts of relating and separating 'selves' and 'others.' From this viewpoint, secular studies of religious history express institutional, disciplinary, and subjective identities in relation to, and separation from relig-ious history. Certeau thus interprets historical religious discourses by relating them to the 'places' of their authors as well as of the interpreting historian. Certeau's method also involves reflecting on the meaning of 'religion' in writings separate from us in terms of practice and mode of intelligibility. I have therefore begun by describing my subjective values in relation to my discipline, History of Religions. On this basis I proceed to a critical evaluation of the practices of the specific branch of Islamic studies termed 'Orientalism.' The purpose is to arrive at a more complex understanding of the issues of culture and rationality involved in studies of Islamic history, histori-ography, and al-Tabari. I argue that the comparative studies of the Bible and Islamic writings practiced in History of Religions in Uppsala contribute by shedding new light on the meaning of religious sym-bols and discourses in relation to social institutions and scholarly disciplines. In order to bring out the many levels of reference of the term 'religion' as applied to my sources, I have formulated an operative definition.The title 'The True New Testament' expresses my twofold assumption, that the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament, and al-Tabari's history are 'testaments' to the universal justice of the imperial governments of respec-tively Iran, Rome, and Islam, and that al-Tabari wrote his history as 'The True New Testament' to make the Prophet Muhammad and the caliphate the fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible's prophecies of a Saviour and a kingdom of peace and justice. On the basis of comparisons with the Hebrew Bible, I interpret discourses on 'the covenant' and 'the prom-ised land' in al-Tabari's history in relation to a system of vassalage connected to a Persian legacy of imperial government. I suggest that 'covenant' refers to a social contract, concerning religious communities and legislation, administration, military, and peasants, and their relations to the sovereign political power, the Abbasid caliphate. In this system of vassalage, legal principles and practices of land assignment concern all social groups, whence the sym-bolism of 'the promised land.' In al-Tabari's historiographical operation, 'the promised land' refers also to Sufi juris-tic ethics and hermeneutics, founded on a Neoplatonic ontology and theory of correspondences between God and man, with reason as the point of communication. Reason is seated in the heart, where it coincides with identity. The new covenant of the heart thus signifies for al-Tabari the change in imperial identity and legitimacy, and enlighten-ment of reason which takes place in the mission of the Prophet Muhammad.


(Re)thinking Bodies: Deleuze and Guattari 's becoming-woman seeks to explore the notion of becoming-woman, as put forth by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their collaborative 1982 text, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and as received by such prominent feminist theorists as Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz. Arguing that the fairly decisive repudiation of this concept by some feminist theorists has been based on a critical misunderstanding, this project endeavors to clarify becomingwoman by exploring various conceptions of the body put forth by Baruch de Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone de Beauvoir. These conceptions of the body are indispensible to an appreciation of Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a body lived on both an immanent and transcendent plane, which, in turn, is indispensable to an appreciation of the concept of becoming (and, in particular, the concept of becoming-woman) as intended by Deleuze and Guattari.


With the advent of new multimedia applications the demand for in time delivery of data is increased as compared to the reliability. Usually the Transport Layer Protocols, User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are used to transfer the data over the IP based network like Internet. TCP provides a reliable mechanism to transfer the data but its reliable mechanism results in increase in delay. UDP lacks in providing any acknowledgment mechanism and it does not provide any congestion control mechanism also. However the unreliable behavior of UDP results in less delay in data transfer. Now a days one of the important issues is the Quality of Service (QoS) assurance as the behavior of transport layer protocols can affect the QoS. So in order to avoid these issues some new transport layer protocols have been developed by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Two important transport layer protocols, Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) and Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) are used in this study. DCCP is specially designed to avoid congestion in the network. DCCP is suitable for in time delivery of data and also for its congestion control mechanism. DCCP is an unreliable transport layer protocol, as the real time applications demands for in time delivery rather than reliability. SCTP is another transport layer protocol that provides reliable data transfer. In this research work performance of SCTP, DCCP and UDP has been evaluated using MPEG-4 video over Mobile WiMAX/IEEE 802.16e. The performance of these three transport layer protocols is analyzed in terms of performance metrics like packet loss, jitter, delay and throughput. By analyzing these performance measures it is found that the performance of DCCP and SCTP is much better as compared to UDP but DCCP gives much better performance then SCTP when compared in terms of throughput and packet loss. Comparing SCTP and DCCP with UDP in terms of delay and jitter shows that UDP has less delay and jitter as compared to SCTP and DCCP, but because of less throughput and large number of packet loss, UDP can badly degrade the video quality. So, it is found that the DCCP is the most suitable transport layer protocol for transportation of MPEG-4 traffic over Mobile WiMAX/IEEE 802.16e.


ABSTRACT It has long been known that Henricus Isaac (ca. 1450––1517) wrote mass-propers for Constance cathedral. These are preserved in his posthumously printed, three-volume collection entitled Choralis Constantinus . Yet the first generation of postwar Isaac researchers showed that the Choralis contains music not only for Constance but for the Imperial court as well. Since then several theories have been advanced regarding the intended recipients of parts of the Choralis repertory. The present paper assesses these conflicting theories. It concludes that with one small possible alteration, the original division advanced by Gerhard Paatzig can stand, and that more recent proposals are not compelling. In addition, the new suggestion that Constance cathedral would have expected not only mass-propers in their commission but also mass-ordinaries is put forward, and a specific ordinary-setting which could have served this role is identified. The evaluation of the conflicting theories for how the Choralis divides leads, in the process, to a new model for the transmission of CCIII.


Abstract According to a 1998 World Health Organization Survey of 26 000 primary care patients on five continents, 22% reported persistent pain over the past year. Part of the problem lies with some health-care providers who have failed to keep up with the advances in pain medicine and continue to follow the biomedical approach, which regards a specific pathway as the only source of pain. In this model, all pain is regarded as a warning signal of tissue injury, and if conservative treatment fails, some surgical technique will be able to correct the problem. The modern paradigm of pain management has moved from this biomedical to the broader biopsychosocial approach, where pain mechanisms now integrate input from sensory, emotional and cognitive systems.


Artistic research is a relatively new form of research that makes use of the attitudes and methods of artists and designers during the research process. This simply implies that researchers work from a visual and associative perspective and have an open attitude that makes it possible for them to notice that which others may fail to see. For a better understanding, we will place artistic research next to three other research paradigms in this text: design-oriented research, practice-oriented research, and academic research. We do this in order to make the social relevance of artistic research visible, a notion that stems from the direct ambition to create a space for artistic research in which the elderly, caregivers, and researchers can gather new insights. Not only does this topic require extra attention because artistic research has a different social value, but also because it is still relatively young: artistic research needs to develop its vocabulary to make itself intelligible towards the already more developed forms of research. This article is an initial attempt in doing so.