Haibat Sultan Mountain is a long range with elevation of about 860 m (a.s.l.); the PilaSpi Formation forms its carapace in Koya vicinity, with relief difference of about 300 m from Koisanjaq plain. The PilaSpi Formation consists of well thickly to massively bedded dolostone and dolomitic limestone with thickness of about 120 m in Koya vicinity. The main trend is NW - SE being a limb of Bustana anticline representing part of the southwestern limb, with dip amount that ranges from (15 - 30). On 11th of November 2015 a landslide had occurred after a heavy rainfall along Koya - Dukan main road. The type of the slide was plane sliding due to daylight slope, which was formed after the road cut. The length of the slide area: along the road is 90 m with height of 40 m forming almost a parallelogram shape; the thickness of the slid beds is about 2.5 m. The estimated volume of the slid mass is 9000 m3. The main cause of the landslide is the presence of daylight slope, high slope angle; more than the dip angle, presence of old crack surfaces which are filled by reddish brown clayey residual soil. After the he heavy rain fall, which lasted for 20 hours, the infiltrated rain water in the bedding planes in the well bedded, cracked, and jointed beds has increased the pore pressure and decreased the internal friction angle; therefore, the sliding has occurred. The root of the slid mass is below the base of the paved road; therefore, that part which is above the paved road has slid. The remaining part is highly cracked and partly accumulated in the base of the slid mass. Fortunately, the height of the slid mass is only 40 m and the relief difference between the crown area and the toe area is about 50 m; otherwise the slid mass would be larger than the present slid mass. From the field inspection, it is very clear that the involved area is very unstable and in critical equilibrium. The presence of daylight bedding above the crown area, clayey soil in the fractures and open joints and steep slope all are very favorable conditions for triggering the unstable slope, consequently developing of another landslide with larger mass.


The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) herald a new phase for international development. This article presents the results of a consultative exercise to collaboratively identify 100 research questions of critical importance for the post-2015 international development agenda. The final shortlist is grouped into nine thematic areas and was selected by 21 representatives of international and non-governmental organisations and consultancies, and 14 academics with diverse disciplinary expertise from an initial pool of 704 questions submitted by 110 organisations based in 34 countries. The shortlist includes questions addressing long-standing problems, new challenges and broader issues related to development policies, practices and institutions. Collectively, these questions are relevant for future development-related research priorities of governmental and non-governmental organisations worldwide and could act as focal points for transdisciplinary research collaborations.


Context. The Yarkovsky effect, which causes orbital drift, and the YORP effect, which causes changes in rotation rate and pole orientation, play important roles in the dynamical and physical evolution of asteroids. Near-Earth asteroid (1862) Apollo has strong detections of both orbital semimajor axis drift and rotational acceleration. Aims. To produce a unified model that can accurately match both observed effects using a single set of thermophysical properties derived from ground-based observations, and to determine Apollo's long term evolution. Methods. We use light-curve shape inversion techniques and the Advanced Thermophysical Model (ATPM) on published light-curve, thermal-infrared, and radar observations to constrain Apollo's thermophysical properties. The derived properties are used to make detailed predictions of Apollo's Yarkovsky and YORP effects, which are then compared with published measurements of orbital drift and rotational acceleration. The ATPM explicitly incorporates 1D heat conduction, shadowing, multiple scattering of sunlight, global self-heating, and rough surface thermal-infrared beaming in the model predictions. Results. We find that ATPM can accurately reproduce the light-curve, thermal-infrared, and radar observations of Apollo, and simultaneously match the observed orbital drift and rotational acceleration using: a shape model with axis ratios of 1.94:1.65:1.00, an effective diameter of 1.55 ± 0.07 km, a geometric albedo of 0.20 ± 0.02, a thermal inertia of 140 +140 −100 J m−2 K−1 s−1/2, a highly rough surface, and a bulk density of 2850 +480 −680 kg m −3. Using these properties we predict that Apollo's obliquity is increasing towards the 180◦ YORP asymptotic state at a rate of 1.5 +0.3 −0.5 degrees per 10 5 yr. Conclusions. The derived thermal inertia suggests that Apollo has loose regolith material resting on its surface, which is consistent with Apollo undergoing a recent resurfacing event based on its observed Q-type spectrum. The inferred bulk density is consistent with those determined for other S-type asteroids, and suggests that Apollo has a fractured interior. The YORP effect is acting on a much faster timescale than the Yarkovsky effect and will dominate Apollo's long term evolution. The ATPM can readily be applied to other asteroids with similar observational data sets.


In the context of a collaboration with the NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE), during the CommsNet'13 campaign we deployed a large set of experiments aimed at measuring some network statistics for three protocols for remote data retrieval in underwater networks, namely Uw-Polling (a controlled access scheme), MSUN (a source routing approach with support for mobility) and U-Fetch (a scheme based on two hierarchical levels of controlled access). The main idea behind the trial was to perform some experiments in order to get a hands-on practical experience with the protocols, evaluate their performance in a systematic way, and observe which specific features of a real world experiment can alter the performance of the protocols, compared to a computer simulation. The results obtained help understand the protocols better and can be used to refine their design and improve their performance. The experiments are run thanks to the flexibility of the DESERT Underwater framework, and managed through a newly designed acoustic remote control framework called RECORDS.


In his monograph Czech Problem Drama of the 1960s, David Kroča (b. 1973), a literary scholar and educator at Masaryk University, focuses on a period that can in many respects be viewed as a turning point in the poetics of the original Czech drama. From the varied production of drama in the 1960s, which was rich in genre, he chose to research a specific stream called problem drama in which an ordinary dramatic conflict is substituted with an escalated confrontation of different opinions related to a particular problem. The introductory theoretical and context chapters consider the developmental tendencies in Czech drama as well as some important foreign resources. The core of the work consists of analytical and interpretative chapters which deal with the analysis of those dramas where the authors tackle serious existential problems and question social and moral responsibility.


The synthesis of 9-aryl substituted acridinedione derivatives was achieved by employing nano ferrite catalyst under solvent free conditions. XRD and TEM results exhibits cubic phase of maghemite (γ-Fe2O3) with average particle size of 20-25 nm. Catalytic activity of the nano ferrite was explored for the synthesis of acridinedione. The present approach offers several advantages such as short reaction time, easy purification, high yield and reusability of the catalyst.


Pinter's dramas have been labelled as 'absurd', 'mysterious', 'enigmatic', 'taciturn'.
There has been a constant tendency to reduce the idea of the 'Pinteresque' to language
when Pinter is preoccupied with the tensions between reality and the world of the
imagination. He has, actually and accurately, used theatre as a 'critical act' to denote
the abstracted realities, and he has applied his language to embody his world-view - his
concerns in the contemporary capitalist world.
Pinter has journeyed from the room to the outside world, from the private to the public
social space, and has identified an inescapable sense of pessimism and alienation, and
investigated an alarming world of atrocities. There are cities and landscapes beyond
Pinter's rooms, cities peopled by wandering, displaced figures surveying the self-estranged city that is modern consciousness, and landscapes where his people retreat
into the private realms of memory and fantasy.
This thesis explores the virtual geographies beyond Pinter's rooms through the
vocabulary of some modernist theoreticians and social scientists, as there are significant
parallels between their analytical observations and the poetic perceptions of Pinter, a
practising artist, and the phantom images of his characters.
Pinter's plays and film adaptations tend to portray the city as a colonial present, and the
country as a mythological past. The 1970s' plays portray a community of isolation,
urban decay, dispossession and suffering, through the figure of the 'flâneur' - his
characters' subjective experiences, memories and fantasies in the metropolis. In these
memory plays, men and women have different mental landscapes and desires. To some
extent the city is both a male-constructed world and an image of the twentieth century;
in both senses it is anti-human and in decline.
In his 1980s mature plays, Pinter's lyrical interiors and serene landscapes are colonised
by the metropolis. Here Pinter investigates a universally oppressive space filled with
misery and social dislocation. The city destroys humanity in a decaying modem world.
These plays identify the global city as the locus of existential alienation and as the
centre of political power and oppression - a world of brute masculine power.
The last two plays, in this study explore other wastelands of human isolation and
suffering, and criticise the British suspicion of the 'intelligentsia'. Using scenes that are
ingrained in the contemporary audience's physical memory, Pinter makes the
distinction between being an active participant and being a witness, a 'spectator' in this
alarming world. And thus, he criticises the tradition of mockery of the artistic and the
intellectually curious in Britain, and urges a need for a 'politically curious', at politically questioning theatre-going society.


Systematic reviews are a valuable tool to inform healthcare decision-making.1 2 While a single randomised controlled trial (RCT) is insufficient to definitively guide healthcare decisions, a systematic review synthesising multiple RCTs can overcome this limitation. The results of rigorous systematic reviews possess wide-ranging applicability to numerous stakeholders within the evidence-based medicine 'ecosystem'. Clinicians consult systematic reviews to inform their clinical decisions.3 Researchers rely on systematic reviews to identify knowledge gaps in existing literature.4 Health policymakers use systematic review evidence to inform practice guidelines and legislation.5 6 Journal editors often prioritise systematic reviews for their impact on readership attention and journal metrics.7 Finally, patients are empowered by systematic reviews that assess the beneficial and harmful patient-important outcomes of available management strategies.8 Evidently, systematic review authors have an important responsibility to ensure their findings provide the most accurate results possible.

The biomedical literature expands by 22 systematic reviews daily,9 with no evidence that production is waning. More systematic reviews are desirable if they identify and inform important research questions that improve patient care.10 However, production of this magnitude is problematic when systematic reviews offer 'extensive redundancy, little value, misleading claims and/or vested interests'.11 As we outlined in part 1, bias is a systematic deviation from the truth in the results of a research study due to limitations in study design, conduct, or analysis.2 Deviations may either overestimate or underestimate a study's true findings depending of the type and magnitude of bias. As the results of a systematic review are only as valid as the studies it includes, pooling biased results from different studies can compromise the credibility of systematic review findings when no assessment, or a poor assessment, of risk of bias is performed.3 12

Inadequate study design, conduct, or analysis …


Thin film CuInSe2 chalcopyrite semiconductors have been prepared on glass substrates by means of two-stage process. The structural properties and atomic compositions of films were determined by energy-dispersive analysis of x-rays (EDAX) and x-ray diffraction (XRD) measurements. Reflectance and transmittance measurements were performed on the films in the photon wavelength range of 300–2200 nm. The samples used in the measurements have different Cu/In ratios. The reflectance and transmittance spectra were analyzed on the basis of multiple reflection model considering the absorbing film on a non-absorbing substrate and then complex refractive-index n*(E) = n(E) + ik(E) and complex dielectric constant e*(E) = e1(E) + ie2(E) were determined. It has been concluded that the films having higher Cu/In ratios show stronger absorption at low photon energy region than those having lower Cu/In ratios.


This article maps more than a century of environmental change and shifting debates tied to agricultural reclamation in Creston, British Columbia. It argues that local notions in Creston about reclamation, wilderness preservation, and the Columbia River Treaty have been continuously shaped by how farmers perceived the landscape and river system. By building the dikes and farming alongside the once-meandering Kootenay River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, farmers inadvertently created and later perpetuated the idea of dangerous flooding and the necessity of constructing a managed environment. What was once understood as a local or regional matter is now enmeshed within complex state organizations and institutions.


Current event detection models under supervised learning settings fail to transfer to new event types. Few-shot learning has not been explored in event detection even though it allows a model to perform well with high generalization on new event types. In this work, we formulate event detection as a few-shot learning problem to enable to extend event detection to new event types. We propose two novel loss factors that matching examples in the support set to provide more training signals to the model. Moreover, these training signals can be applied in many metric-based few-shot learning models. Our extensive experiments on the ACE-2005 dataset (under a few-shot learning setting) show that the proposed method can improve the performance of few-shot learning.


Ontology mapping aims to solve the semantic heterogeneity problems such as ambiguous entity names, different entity granularity, incomparable categorization, and various instances of different ontologies. The mapping helps to search or query data from different sources. Ontology mapping is necessary in many applications such as data integration, ontology evolution, data warehousing, e-commerce and data exchange in various domains such as purchase order, health, music and e-commerce. It is performed by ontology matching approaches that find semantic correspondences between ontology entities. In this paper, we review state of the art ontology matching approaches. We describe the approaches according to instance-based, schema-based, instance and schema-based, usage-based, element-level, and structure-level. The analysis of the existing approaches will assist us in revealing some challenges in ontology mapping such as handling ontology matching errors, user involvement and reusing previous match operations. We explain the way of handling the challenges using new strategy in order to increase the performance.


Why does Gudea wear the roll-brimmed hat? Neo-Sumerian period statues of Gudea, king of Lagash (c. 2100 BCE), were primarily designed to convey the leader's piety before the gods. The traditional interpretation of the roll-brimmed hat suggests that this garment added to Gudea's pious affect, serving as a humbler alternative to the divine horned-headdress worn by Naram-Sin, the last king of the previous Akkadian period. While acknowledging the less overtly ambitious quality of the roll-brimmed hat, I nevertheless argue that other potential meanings of this headgear have been overlooked. In particular, I take a materiality and haptic approach to propose that Gudea's hat suggests that he may have learned from, and improved upon, the grand claims of Naram-Sin. Both the Stele of Naram-Sin and the statues of Gudea share the portrayal of a strong and supple right arm, which Irene Winter has interpreted as making both leaders appear sexually alluring and "well-formed". This paper will argue that the roll-brimmed hat had a similar effect. Exploration of earlier depictions of the roll-brimmed hat from Uruk period artworks and on rock reliefs in the Zagros mountains will demonstrate that this headgear had a history of association with the "well-formed" bodies of powerful rulers. However, those earlier depictions render the hat as a smooth surface. Thus, Gudea's choice to emphasize his headgear's woolly quality was deliberate. It not only gave a humble effect to the garment but also, I will propose, offered a distinct kind of allure. The pattern of the curling sheep's wool on the hat encouraged haptic appreciation, disrupting the smooth materiality for which diorite was usually prized and creating the illusion of a soft, plush texture which contrasted with the rest of Gudea's relatively undecorated garments. More than simply humble, I propose that this headgear was a deliberate artistic strategy designed to make Gudea powerfully attractive to both his people and his gods.


The smartphone usage among people is increasing rapidly. With the phenomenal growth of smartphone use, smartphone theft is also increasing. This paper proposes a model to secure smartphones from theft as well as provides options to access a smartphone through other smartphone or a normal mobile via Short Message Service. This model provides option to track and secure the mobile by locking it. It also provides facilities to receive the incoming call and sms information to the remotely connected device and enables the remote user to control the mobile through SMS. The proposed model is validated by the prototype implementation in Android platform. Various tests are conducted in the implementation and the results are discussed.


In this article, the author addresses the problem of taboos in the Yukaghir languages. These taboos (words as well as phonetic transformations) have not been sufficiently investigated, since their samples are only given in the existing literature. Some of the taboos were already mentioned by V. I. Iochel'son, while others were discussed by I. Nikolaev and G. D. S. Anderson. Yukaghir languages share most patterns of tabooization with the neighboring Altaic languages.


Graph clustering is a basic technique in machine learning, and has widespread applications in different domains. While spectral techniques have been successfully applied for clustering undirected graphs, the performance of spectral clustering algorithms for directed graphs (digraphs) is not in general satisfactory: these algorithms usually require symmetrising the matrix representing a digraph, and typical objective functions for undirected graph clustering do not capture cluster-structures in which the information given by the direction of the edges is crucial. To overcome these downsides, we propose a spectral clustering algorithm based on a complex-valued matrix representation of digraphs. We analyse its theoretical performance on a Stochastic Block Model for digraphs in which the cluster-structure is given not only by variations in edge densities, but also by the direction of the edges. The significance of our work is highlighted on a data set pertaining to internal migration in the United States: while previous spectral clustering algorithms for digraphs can only reveal that people are more likely to move between counties that are geographically close, our approach is able to cluster together counties with a similar socio-economical profile even when they are geographically distant, and illustrates how people tend to move from rural to more urbanised areas.


Despite the lack of political accountability, ancient autocracies maintained a level of monetary stability that rivals modern democracies. This paper hypothesizes that it is the threat of counterfeiting that has constrained currency debasement. Unwilling to share seigniorage with counterfeiters, who are active only if currency is debased, the government refrains from debasement unless in extreme fiscal situations. To document the facts, we build a database of historical Chinese copper coins that covers the period from the Qin dynasty (221BC¨C207BC) to the Republic of China. We also use the introduction of the steam press in late Qing China as a natural experiment to test the theory. The steam press produced coins of fine patterns that counterfeiters were unable to mimic. As the theory predicts, the removal of the threat of counterfeiting triggered the most serious debasement in the history of the Qing dynasty (1644¨C1912).


We provide additional information on our recent study of the electromagnetic emission produced during the inspiral and merger of supermassive black holes when these are immersed in a force-free plasma threaded by a uniform magnetic field. As anticipated in a recent letter, our results show that although a dual-jet structure is present, the associated luminosity is ∼100 times smaller than the total one, which is predominantly quadrupolar. Here we discuss the details of our implementation of the equations in which the force-free condition is not implemented at a discrete level, but rather obtained via a damping scheme which drives the solution to satisfy the correct condition. We show that this is important for a correct and accurate description of the current sheets that can develop in the course of the simulation. We also study in greater detail the three-dimensional charge distribution produced as a consequence of the inspiral and show that during the inspiral it possesses a complex but ordered structure which traces the motion of the two black holes. Finally, we provide quantitative estimates of the scaling of the electromagnetic emission with frequency, with the diffused part having a dependence that is the same as the gravitational-wave one and that scales as Lnon-collEM ≈ Ω10/3−8/3, while the collimated one scales as LcollEM ≈ Ω5/3−6/3, thus with a steeper dependence than previously estimated. We discuss the impact of these results on the potential detectability of dual jets from supermassive black holes and the steps necessary for more accurate estimates.


The case of Peter Humphrey and Yu Yingzeng, convicted in China on August 2014 on charges of unlawful acquisition of citizens' personal information, raises important issues about Chinese law. A narrow but important issue is how Chinese law draws the line between lawful and unlawful acquisition of information, a practice routinely carried out by businesses and individuals. This article examines the trial transcript and judgment in the Humphrey/Yu case and finds that it sheds regrettably little light on what remains a murky question. A broader issue is whether the Chinese legal system can be counted on to operate in a fair and impartial manner. This article presents the results of a study of all reported cases in Shanghai (ninety-two cases) involving the same provision of the Criminal Law that was the basis of the Humphrey/Yu conviction. It finds that the Humphrey/Yu sentences are outliers relative to other cases with comparable facts. In particular, Humphrey's sentence of 30 months' imprisonment was by far the heaviest sentence ever meted out by Shanghai courts, even though the circumstances seem conspicuously less serious than those of many other cases where lesser sentences were imposed.


Two strongly oil-prone source intervals are present in the West Siberian Basin, the Togur Formation (Early Toarcian, Early Jurassic) and the Bazhenov Formation (Volgian-Berriasian, Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous). Clay sediments of the Togur Formation were deposited in a system of intracontinental sub-basins in the southern half of the West Siberian Basin. The marine deposits of the Bazhenov Formation accumulated throughout the entire basin. Two types of extractable bitumens and oils - marine and non-marine - may be identified from their isotopic carbon composition, sulphur content, bulk composition, and biomarker hydrocarbons (normal alkanes, pristane/phytane, C (sub 27-30) steranes, hopanes and homohopanes). Marine oils, accounting for 80% of oil resources, are sourced from the Bazhenov Formation. The genetic relationship between oils in Upper Jurassic and Cretaceous reservoirs and the organic matter from the Bazhenov Formation is indicated by great similarities in their biomarker hydrocarbon compositions and their maturation levels. Non-marine (lacustrine) oils are sourced from the Togur Formation and account for 11% of oil resources.


In a seventeenth-century manuscript inspired initially by the fear that she would die in childbirth, Lady Mary Carey included among the prose meditations several poems on the suffering of motherhood.(1) The longest of the poems, and the final entry in the manuscript, is an occasional meditation on the miscarriage of her last child. The loss of the fetus was a danger many pregnant women faced, a threat far more common than the risk of maternal death in childbirth, but no other seventeenth-century woman appears to have written at any length about the experience her contemporaries variously referred to as "abortment," "mischance," and "untimely birth."(2) Miscarriage, much less poems about miscarriage, is not in fact a common literary subject until the second half of the twentieth century. Aside from veiled references in the novels of Dickens, Eliot, or Hardy, authors address the human dimensions of the loss openly in literature only when medical, social, and psychological studies begin to recognize and understand the magnitude of this silent sorrow.(3) Lady Carey's meditative poem on her own miscarriage provides an opportunity for another occasional piece on this and the similar, largely neglected poems written in the last decades. Together the emotional pain unmistakable despite the changing cultural attitudes toward birth and death reveals a common threat to the self in the unfulfilled promise of life. Over the centuries that separate Mary Carey from her modern counterparts, death has moved gradually out of the house into the hospital and hospice, losing some of its familiarity and becoming more frightening. Women now able to control their fertility through better methods of contraception and often choosing to narrow that period of fertility also tend to put a greater premium on the timely and successful pregnancy than earlier generations did. The debate over the right to life and the increasingly sophisticated technologies used to monitor the fetus have added to a consciousness of in utero existence; numerous help groups formed to deal with fetal and neonatal loss further contribute to the growing sensitivity toward the physical and psychological effects of miscarriage. And yet the poems themselves suggest that the experiences of spontaneous abortion or miscarriage have much in common.(4) "Upon [y.sup.e] Sight of my abortive Birth [y.sup.e] [31.sup.th] of December 1657" helps understand more fully how both Mary Carey as well as later poets cope with the emptiness, self-doubts, and guilt unique to the suffering of miscarriage. Whatever their immediate engagement and gender, theirs is a loss not easily resolved. I Mortality rates for earlier periods are notoriously difficult to establish, and even now in England a fetal loss before the twenty-eighth week of pregnancy need not be registered. Seventeenth-century Bills of Mortality, however incomplete, nonetheless document in their lists of "Abortive, and stilborn" an awareness of miscarriage apparent in the contemporary medical texts and guides to midwifery.(5) Their considerable concern about causes and prevention reveals obvious sensitivity to the many pregnancies that end in miscarriage.(6) Most spontaneous abortions occur in the first trimester, generally from the seventh to fourteenth week, and reflect fetal abnormalities caused by infections as well as genetic disorders; later miscarriages often involve placental and uterine difficulties of attachment.(7) Yet common misperception then and now held the mother responsible for the mischance or abortment. Detailed advice about temperate habits and moderate conduct during this "Sickness of nine Months" counseled against undue emotion, excessive exercise, and restrictive clothing, certain that even severe coughing and sudden noises could end the pregnancy.(8) Throughout the seventeenth century the often lengthy advice found in such works as Child-birth, The Womans Doctour, or The Compleat Midwife's Practice Enlarged varied little in content and expression; all reflect the belief expressed in The Midwives Book: "almost all men and women desire to be fruitful naturally, and it is a kind of self-destroying not to be willing to leave some succession after us" (Sharp 164). …


In the wake of a personal scandal that Horace Walpole dubbed 'The Gunninghiad', Susannah Gunning returned to literary writing after some years' absence from the scene. The two works she published with William Lane's Minerva Press in 1792, Anecdotes of the Delborough Family and Virginius and Virginia. A Poem, in Six Parts. From the Roman History, demonstrate both Gunning's artistic range and Lane's marketing genius. Together, Gunning and Lane capitalised on the Gunninghiad scandal in an attempt to rehabilitate Gunning's reputation as a writer and fill the coffers of the press. This article re-examines Gunning's undervalued literary career to argue that publishing with Lane afforded her opportunities to rewrite the scandal of which she'd been a part, experiment with literary genres she had yet to explore, and profit from what she lived and wrote.


This chapter aims to describe the conceptual design and operating mode of an innovative thermoelectric heating unit (THU) prototype in a heating mode. Firstly, the conceptual design of THU system and improvements are described to investigate the effects of design in the thermal performance. Secondly, the THU prototype was compared with a conventional air-conditioning system using the typical economic indicators (investment costs, maintenance costs and operational costs). The results indicate that the overall cost of this project was approximately 84,860 Euros, of which 69.27% of the total investment cost are for the engineering costs. By focused on the investment costs of the THU system, the results reveal that the conventional air-conditioning system is economically viable than a THU system. The analysis shows that the design has a direct effect on the costs. The maintenance costs show that THU v1.2 prototype is more economically viable in maintenance than the conventional air-conditioning system. Likewise, the operational costs show that THU v1.2 had a more stable thermal behaviour than the conventional air-conditioning system. Based on the results, the authors concluded that the THU system could be a viable option for a heating room.


The tumor microenvironment controls the intensity of cancer-associated Wnt signaling. Some tumors are composed of heterogeneous cells, and an emerging concept is that a subset of these cells are "cancer stem cells," which can undergo proliferation and self-renewal or can differentiate and contribute to the mass of the tumor (see Korkaya and Wicha). Noting that colon carcinomas, which have mutations that should increase Wnt signaling (APC mutations), exhibit heterogeneity in the abundance of nuclear β-catenin (the effector of Wnt signaling), Vermeulen et al. expressed a Wnt reporter gene (TOP-GFP) in cultured patient colon cancer cells that were positive for markers of cancer stem cells to explore how Wnt signaling heterogeneity affected tumorigenic potential and the maintenance of "stemness." Clones from single cells exhibited a large variation in β-catenin nuclear localization and in green fluorescent protein (GFP) intensity, which allowed the authors to divide the cells into high (TOP-GFPhigh), intermediate (TOP-GFPintermediate), and low (TOP-GFPlow) populations. Microarray analysis of TOP-GFPhigh cells showed that these cells had higher expression of genes associated with stem cells, whereas TOP-GFPlow cells had higher expression of genes associated with epithelial differentiation. The clonogenic potential and the ability to form tumors in immunocompromised mice also correlated with the strength of Wnt signaling, with TOP-GFPhigh exhibiting the highest frequency of clone and tumor formation and TOP-GFPlow exhibiting the lowest. The tumors from the xenografted TOP-GFP cells exhibited morphological characteristics of the tumor from which the TOP-GFP cells were created and, like the tumor from which they were created, the TOP-GFP tumors showed variation in nuclear β-catenin and GFP intensity, suggesting that the tumor microenvironment controls the intensity of the Wnt signal. Myofibroblasts are stromal cells associated with colorectal cancer. When colon cancer cells positive for markers of cancer stem cells were cultured in the presence of serum, markers of differentiation were expressed and morphological changes associated with differentiation occurred. Coculture of these colon cancer cells with myofibroblasts or with myofibroblast-conditioned medium (MFCM) suppressed this in vitro differentiation. Cells cultured with MFCM exhibited increased nuclear β-catenin, GFP intensity, and clonogenic potential compared to cells grown in serum-containing medium. Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), which is secreted by myofibroblasts, recapitulated the effects of MFCM, and cells exposed to HGF exhibited decreased activity of glycogen synthase kinase 3β (a negative regulator of Wnt signaling), increased activity of the kinase Akt, and increased stability of β-catenin. Exposure of TOP-GFPlow cells to MFCM induced transcripts associated with the cancer stem cell phenotype and increased clonogenic potential to nearly that of the TOP-GFPhigh cells, suggesting that stromal-derived signals can induce the cancer stem cell fate. Indeed, analysis of either xenografted tumors or patient tumor samples revealed that the cells with the greatest nuclear β-catenin (patient samples) or highest GFP intensity (TOP-GFP xenografts) were located adjacent to myofibroblasts. Finally, coinjection of TOP-GFPlow cells with myofibroblasts or with MFCM and artificial extracellular matrix resulted in increased tumorigenesis. Thus, by increasing the intensity of Wnt signaling, stromal signals drive a subpopulation of the tumor cells to adopt a cancer stem cell phenotype. L. Vermeulen, F. De Sousa E Melo, M. van der Heijden, K. Cameron, J. H. de Jong, T. Borovski, J. B. Tuynman, M. Todaro, C. Merz, H. Rodermond, M. R. Sprick, K. Kemper, D. J. Richel, G. Stassi, J. P. Medema, Wnt activity defines colon cancer stem cells and is regulated by the microenvironment. Nat. Cell Biol. 12, 468–476 (2010). [PubMed] H. Korkaya, M. S. Wicha, Cancer stem cells: Nature versus nurture. Nat. Cell Biol. 12, 419–421 (2010). [PubMed]


Smart cities technologies are gradually changing our urban landscape thanks to the proliferation of billions of smart devices permanently connected through the internet. Among technologies with highest impact on citizen's quality of life are intelligent transportation systems and in particular, smart parking applications. In this paper, we present a study evaluation the design of a smart parking assistant developed in our lab. The system is implemented as mobile app with an integrated GUI adapted for Android tablets. The app extends common park guidance information systems (PGI) offering suggestions based on parking fee or proximity to destination. Two novel features – beyond the state of the art of current available systems – are added: the use of natural language and the ability to react in real-time to changes in parking occupancy. If the number of parking lots drops to critical level, the application redirects the driver to another parking place. Furthermore, the app includes GPS and Google maps interfacing modules which enable the application to detect the driver location and calculate the nearest car park distance. A group of five experts with background in interface design and natural language processing evaluated the prototype using Nielsen's set of heuristics in a think-loud approach. Results and implications for further interaction design are extensively discussed.


The Modular Multilevel Matrix Converter (M3C) is a new topology which extends the Modular Multilevel Converter (M2C) family for converters to low speed drive applications. The energy pulsation and therefore the amount of the installed capacitance is very important for the design of such a converter. This paper presents a method to estimate the required amount of capacitance for a given application. Additionally, the design of a newly proposed coupled z-winding arm inductor is explained. It is verified that the use of this inductor allows considerable savings of core and coil material.


Water is vital for plants. A reduction in water availability may affect crops transpiration and leaf growth. The objective of this study was to determine the response of transpiration and leaf growth to the fraction of transpirable soil water (FTSW) in two potato clones (an old and a new) adapted to Southern Brazil. Three experiments were carried out under a plastic shelter in Santa Maria, RS, Brazil, using two potato clones, an old ('Macaca') and a new ('SMINIA793101-3'). Two of the experiments were in spring (planting on 08/20/2008 (E1) and 10/20/2008 (E2)), and one in fall, (planting on 03/25/2009 (E3)). Soil water, represented by the FTSW, transpiration and leaf growth were measured on a daily basis during the period of soil drying. The threshold FTSW, when transpiration begins to be affected, which is an indicator of stomata closure, was 0.39, 0.47 and 0.28 for the clone 'Macaca' and 0.47, 0.49 and 0.33 for 'SMINIA793101-3' in E1, E2 and E3, respectively, whereas leaf growth was affected at a higher FTSW threshold for 'Macaca'. These results indicate that 'SMINIA793101-3' is more tolerant to soil water deficit than 'Macaca'.


This document is aimed at discussing the concept of employability, characterizing the level, structure and trends of employment and unemployment in the Southern Cone, and suggesting policy directions to increase decent employment in the region. The paper is focused on the case of Argentina, with illustrations to the rest of the countries in the region: Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. In order to analyze changes in employability in Argentina, the authors estimate a model that captures the relationship between capital accumulation, international trade and the labor market, while to explore employment dynamics, the authors exploit the rotating panel structure of the Argentina?s household survey.


PMM testing is a method used to identify the added mass and damping coefficients used in the equations of motion of a vehicle by attempting to decouple the forces on a body due to velocity and acceleration as a result of creating "hydrodynamically pure" velocities and accelerations. This makes it possible to use quasi-steady state models with terms independent of both velocity and acceleration. This paper explores the ability of simple damping models (solely a function of velocity) with added mass terms (solely a function of acceleration) to simulate the heave force of an 8:1 ellipsoid undergoing PMM testing. In order to help explain the complexity of the flow during PMM tests, a flow analysis of the 8:1 spheroid is provided, which discusses the flow topology of spheroids at steady angle of attack, validity of quasi-steady models, and some other basic flow features seen in PMM testing. In this paper, a simple proportionality relationship between a linear and quadratic damping model is revealed. It is also shown that variations in the heave force response during PMM tests are most heavily influenced by viscous effects, especially cross flow separation. Finally, it is shown where these models break down, owing to the increasing nonlinearity of the flow induced by the harsher motions of large amplitude and/or large frequency tests.


In a preliminary study, passersby in a large shopping mall were significantly more likely to help a same-sex accomplice (by retrieving a dropped pen or providing change for a dollar) when these helping opportunities took place in the presence of pleasant ambient odors (e.g., baking cookies, roasting coffee) than in the absence of such odors. Participants also reported significantly higher levels of positive affect in the presence of pleasant odors. In a second study, the order in which passersby were exposed to a helping opportunity and rated their current mood was systematically varied. Results similar to those of the first study were obtained; order of task had no effect on either mood or helping, but helping was significantly greater in the presence of pleasant fragrances than in their absence. In addition, there was some evidence that fragrance-induced increments in helping were mediated by increments in positive affect.


Most of the academic research on the developments of EU Justice and Home Affairs (EU JHA) tends to overlook the role played by technologies in their relations with classical 'human' and institutional actors. This is particularly problematic because in official discourses, technologies are requested, designed, and built as cornerstones of European security and its external dimension. Still, apart from 'technicalities', their use and design are generally assumed as politics-free. On the contrary, this contribution brings technologies to the forefront of the research and reframes them in terms of socio-technical assemblages. From this perspective, it analyses the role of the 2011 EU Passenger Name Record project in the making of European security and its external dimension. The lesson learned is that human institutions are neither the only players nor the passive victims of technological determinisms. Rather, focusing on a socio-technical assemblage means to inquire the effective participation of different actors and thus critically discuss the making of European security in terms of politics.


email@example.com Abstract | Mountains have played a prominent role in ancient civilizations and rituals and have always been admired by people but they deserve more attention in Iran due to a topography specific to this country. They were of considerable importance to such an extent that civilizations such as Elamite and Sumerian built their ziggurats resembling a mountain like Chogha Zanbil. Albourz as the most magnificent and highest mountain range is located in the north of Tehran. Being a vital natural element determining the limits of Tehran, these mountains are regarded as one of the factors constructing the identity of the city. Today, a merely physical consideration of these mountains has caused that there is not a good relationship between the city and the mountains, but these mountains as the most important urban edge of Tehran naturally can play a key role in identity construction and development of a good relationship with the city. With regard to the importance of Albourz and its massive impact on the city, the present article aimed to examine the role of these mountains within the urban planning of Tehran through the main document of the comprehensive plan adopted in 2007. The day have been collected based on qualitative research and the case study.


The lie detector test has long been treated with suspicion by the law. Recently, several authors have called this suspicion into question. They argue that the lie detector test may have considerable forensic benefits, particularly if we move past the classic, false positive-prone, autonomic nervous system-based (ANS-based) control question test, to the more reliable, brain-based, concealed information test. These authors typically rely on a 'comparative advantage' argument to make their case. According to this argument, we should not be so suspicious of lie detection evidence if it has comparative advantages over the epistemic methods currently utilised by the legal system. In this article, I add to this growing support by making a novel comparative advantage argument in favour of brain-based lie detection evidence. The argument focuses on the P300 concealed information test (P300 CIT), which has several unique properties, and on the effect it may have on pre-trial bargaining in criminal cases rather than in-court evidence. The thesis is that the P300 CIT could allow for innocent defendants to credibly signal their innocence to investigators and prosecutors during pre-trial bargaining more effectively than current proposed methods for doing the same thing. I defend this argument from a number of objections, and suggest that it opens up an interesting avenue in the ongoing debate about the merits of this technology. Although the argument is presented with the criminal law in mind, it could form part of a more general cumulative case in favour of this technology.


Since 1982, imported water originating in the Sierra Nevada has been used to recharge the Rialto-Colton ground-water basin, about 100 km east of Los Angeles. Stable isotopes of oxygen (oxygen-18) and hydrogen (deuterium) were used to determine the disposition of artificially recharged, imported water within the basin. Delta oxygen-18 ratios in water from wells sampled in spring and summer 1992 ranged from -7.65 to -10 permil. Delta deuterium ratios ranged from -46.5 to -65.0 permil. The imported water is isotopically lighter than the native ground water in the basin. For the imported water, delta oxygen- 18 ratios ranged from -8.6 to -10.1 permil, and delta deuterium ratios ranged from -65 to -75 permil. The isotope data show no evidence of mixing between the imported water and the native ground water in the sampled wells. Statistical analyses show that the difference in the isotopic composition of the imported water and the native ground water is highly significant and that the stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen can be used to determine the fate and movement of the imported water in the Rialto-Colton basin.


Successful endodontic treatment requires chemical preparation in addition to mechanical preparation. The most common material for chemical preparations is sodium hypochlorite. One way to reduce the effects of pH adjustment is the use of sodium hypochlorite. The present paper was conducted to examine the effect of dilution with hydrochloric acid and sodium bicarbonate and reduce pH on ability of tissue solubility of sodium hypochlorite. The present study was conducted in vitro on bovine muscle tissue. Ability of tissue solubility was conducted in four groups respectively with active ingredient including 1) sodium hypochlorite diluted with distilled water 2) sodium hypochlorite diluted with sodium bicarbonate 3) sodium hypochlorite diluted with hydrochloric acid and finally 4) distilled water (control group). Each sample was firstly weighed and then placed in contact with 10 m/L solution for 60 minutes (five 12 -minute intervals). The sample was weighted every five minutes and solution was renewed. The results were analyzed using SPSS-21 Software based on variance analysis, Tukey and T-test (α=0.05). The findings showed that there was significant difference between first, second and third groups in terms of ability of tissue solubility. However, the tissue solubility in second and third groups was lower than first group and it was similar in second and third groups (P Value <0.001). Reduction of sodium bicarbonate PH using sodium hypochlorite and hydrochloric acid reduces ability of tissue solubility in sodium hypochlorite


The idea that equal education exists in the United States is a misconception, and positive youth development programs are a proposed response to inequitable education. Youth development programs have the potential to increase one's social capital, particularly for youths who are marginalized by inequitable access to quality education. The study described here focused on the contribution of urban positive youth development to social capital and social justice. Findings indicate that 4-H initiatives related to social capital are reaching marginalized youths. However, barriers are preventing 4-H from reaching these youths adequately and/or consistently.


In cooperation with UNICEF, Millbrook Press has created this poignant photographic journey of a family in the aftermath of the devastating tsunami. A portion of the proceeds of each book sold will go to the tsunami relief effort. The devastation of the recent Tsunami affects everyone, including children. Ann Morris and UNICEF photographer Heidi Larson traveled to the region of Thailand hit by the recent Tsunami to tell the story of a family before and after the event. The book discusses the family's experience during the storm and the chaos immediately following. But the focus is on what life was like immediately after the disaster: coping with loss; the availability of food, shelter, and clothing; post-flood disease control; and the children's attempt at re-entry into elementary school life.


The US states of California and Washington have filed a suit against the drug and device maker Johnson and Johnson, alleging that the company hid its knowledge about potential adverse effects, some of which were permanent, associated with its vaginal mesh devices used to treat pelvic prolapse and stress incontinence.

"It's difficult to put into words the horrific injuries and pain many women are still suffering as a result of Johnson and Johnson's deception," said Bob Ferguson, Washington state attorney general. "They believed they were making informed medical decisions, but that was impossible when Johnson and Johnson was spreading inaccurate information about its products' risks, essentially duping doctors into using their own patients as clinical trials."

In a simultaneous announcement California's attorney general, Kamala Harris, said, "Johnson and Johnson put millions of women at risk of …


Dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) have been traditionally studied for their roles in reward-related motivation or drug addiction. Here we study how the VTA dopamine neuron population may process fearful and negative experiences as well as reward information in freely behaving mice. Using multi-tetrode recording, we find that up to 89% of the putative dopamine neurons in the VTA exhibit significant activation in response to the conditioned tone that predict food reward, while the same dopamine neuron population also respond to the fearful experiences such as free fall and shake events. The majority of these VTA putative dopamine neurons exhibit suppression and offset-rebound excitation, whereas ∼25% of the recorded putative dopamine neurons show excitation by the fearful events. Importantly, VTA putative dopamine neurons exhibit parametric encoding properties: their firing change durations are proportional to the fearful event durations. In addition, we demonstrate that the contextual information is crucial for these neurons to respectively elicit positive or negative motivational responses by the same conditioned tone. Taken together, our findings suggest that VTA dopamine neurons may employ the convergent encoding strategy for processing both positive and negative experiences, intimately integrating with cues and environmental context.


Background To report on the optic nerve sheath diameter (ONSD) in patients with normal-tension glaucoma (NTG) compared with controls without known optic nerve (ON) or intracranial disease. Methods In 18 patients with NTG (mean age 64.9±8.9 years; 7 women and 11 men), CT of the orbit was performed. 17 age- and gender-matched patients without ON or intracranial disease, who underwent CT of the orbits for non-ophthalmological reasons, served as controls. The widest intraorbital ONSD in axial sections was measured using a standardised technique. Study design: unmasked. Statistical analysis was performed using an independent two-tailed t Test and the non-parametric Spearman correlation test. Results ONSD was significantly (p<0.001) increased in NTG patients (right side: mean 7.9±0.9 mm SD; left: 8.0±1.1 mm) compared with controls (right: 6.3±0.5 mm; left: 6.1±0.6 mm). Neither the NTG nor the control group had a significant difference in ONSD between males and females or between right and left sides. Conclusions An increased ONSD is generally associated with increased intracranial pressure; however, ONSDs in a group of NTG patients also were significantly increased compared with controls. ON sheath compartmentation and thinning of the ON sheath are two possible explanations for an increase in the ONSD in patients with NTG.


Reimagining Political Ecology is a state-of-the-art collection of ethnographies grounded in political ecology. When political ecology first emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s, it was rooted in the neo-Marxism of world system theory. This collection showcases second-generation political ecology, which retains the Marxist interest in capitalism as a global structure but which is also heavily influenced by poststructuralism, feminism, practice theory, and cultural studies. As these essays illustrate, contemporary political ecology moves beyond binary thinking, focusing instead on the interchanges between nature and culture, the symbolic and the material, and the local and the global.

Aletta Biersack's introduction takes stock of where political ecology has been, assesses the field's strengths, and sets forth a bold research agenda for the future. Two essays offer wide-ranging critiques of modernist ecology, with its artificial dichotomy between nature and culture, faith in the scientific management of nature, and related tendency to dismiss local knowledge. The remaining eight essays are case studies of particular constructions and appropriations of nature and the complex politics that come into play regionally, nationally, and internationally when nature is brought within the human sphere. Written by some of the leading thinkers in environmental anthropology, these rich ethnographies are based in locales around the world: in Belize, Papua New Guinea, the Gulf of California, Iceland, Finland, the Peruvian Amazon, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Collectively, they demonstrate that political ecology speaks to concerns shared by geographers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and anthropologists alike. And they model the kind of work that this volume identifies as the future of political ecology: place-based "ethnographies of nature" keenly attuned to the conjunctural effects of globalization.

Contributors. Eeva Berglund, Aletta Biersack, J. Peter Brosius, Michael R. Dove, James B. Greenberg, Soren Hvalkof, J. Stephen Lansing, Gisli Palsson, Joel Robbins, Vernon L. Scarborough, John W. Schoenfelder, Richard Wilk


Abstract: With the eruption of mass movements for democratic change throughout the Arab world in 2011, hopeful analysts of global democratic prospects have focused attention on the Middle East. But if a new regional wave of transitions to democracy unfolds in the next five to ten years, it is more likely to come from East Asia: Thailand is progressing back toward democracy; Malaysia and Singapore show signs of entering a period of democratic transition; Burma, to the surprise of many, is liberalizing politically for the first time in twenty years; and China faces a looming crisis of authoritarianism that will generate a new opportunity for democratic transition in the next two decades and possibly much sooner.


Peter Brook is the most consistently innovative director in Western theatre. In these three essays he returns to the concept of his first book The Empty Space and examines what that means for the life of a production. How can a company establish its own "empty space" - a rehearsal and performance environment which will encourage the actors to abandon the security of the hackneyed and release their true creativity?The potency of Brook's writing lies in his ability invest general truths with fresh vigour and to be as simple as he is profound.


Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) is an electronic system that allows the vehicle to slow while approaching another vehicle and accelerate again to the preset speed when traffic is cleared. It also warns the driver and/or applies brake support if there is a high risk of a collision. The project aim is to design a GPS equipped ACC system that (apart from performing normal ACC functions) slows down the vehicle intelligently when it enters speed restricted zones such as schools and colleges. It is also capable of detecting the speed breakers ahead and controls the vehicle dynamically according to the speed limit set for that part of the road. The system also continuously monitors driver distraction and driver health condition and brings the vehicle under ACC control if the need arises. There are a variety of ways in which drivers can get distracted while driving, for example looking sideways, talking over a mobile phone etc. Driver head movement indicates if he is distracted or not. Our system is capable of sensing this. Another major issue is drivers in city buses or cars who are aged above 40 are at a higher risk of heart attack or similar heart related problems. A heart attack for a city bus driver while driving is fatal not only to him but also for the passengers. Heart rate is a vital symptom for identifying this condition. Our system senses the heart rate of the driver. In real-world scenario this system should need to perform the operation within some timing deadline and must be extremely responsive or the result is fatal. Hence the system utilizes the services of a RTOS (Real-Time Operating System). GPS aided ACC with Driver Status Monitoring can be implemented in all types of vehicles where safety will be given first priority and has the potential to become a standard part of any future vehicle.


In this paper we study the disability transition probabilities (as well as the mortality probabilities) due to concurrent factors to age such as income, gender and education. Although it is well known that ageing and socioeconomic status influence the probability of causing functional disorders, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the combined effect of those factors along the individuals' life and how this affects the transition from one degree of disability to another. The assumption that tomorrow's disability state is only a function of the today's state is very strong, since disability is a complex variable that depends on several other elements than time. This paper contributes into the field in two ways: (1) by attending the distinction between the initial disability level and the process that leads to his course (2) by addressing whether and how education, age and income differentially affect the disability transitions. Using a Markov chain discrete model and a survival analysis, we estimate the probability by year and individual characteristics that changes the state of disability and the duration that it takes its progression in each case. We find that people with an initial state of disability have a higher propensity to change and take less time to transit from different stages. Men do that more frequently than women. Education and income have negative effects on transition. Moreover, we consider the disability benefits associated to those changes along different stages of disability and therefore we offer some clues on the potential savings of preventive actions that may delay or avoid those transitions. On pure cost considerations, preventive programs for improvement show higher benefits than those for preventing deterioration, and in general terms, those focussing individuals below 65 should go first. Finally the trend of disability in Spain seems not to change among years and regional differences are not found.


This thesis describes and analyzes the location and size distribution of artand entertainment establishments and metropolitan regions in the UnitedStates. The included sectors are sound recording, motion picture and video,book and newspaper publishing as well as the live performing arts. Their sizeis analyzed by total employment and brought in context to their respectivemarkets and the rank-size rule. The results are interpreted within the economictraits specific to the art and entertainment industry.The results show that most analyzed sectors are over proportionally concentratedin one location, making it the center for these activities. In addition, thesize distribution in all sectors except sound recording follows Zipfs law to agreat extend. Explanations for this can be found in lock-in mechanisms overtime and classic agglomeration advantages.


We consider the production of $W\gamma$ and $Z\gamma$ pairs at hadron colliders. We report on the complete fully differential computation of radiative corrections at next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD perturbation theory. The calculation includes the leptonic decay of the vector boson with the corresponding spin correlations, off shell effects and final-state photon radiation. We present numerical results for $pp$ collisions at 7 and 8 TeV and we compare them with available LHC data. In the case of $Z\gamma$ production, the impact of NNLO corrections is generally moderate, ranging from 8% to 18%, depending on the applied cuts. In the case of $W\gamma$ production, the NNLO effects are more important, and range from 19% to 26%, thereby improving the agreement of the theoretical predictions with the data. As expected, the impact of QCD radiative corrections is significantly reduced when a jet veto is applied.


1 Dr Francesca Alice Vianello, Professor Devi Sacchetto. Contact address: Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology, University of Padua, Via M. Cesarotti 10/12, 35123 Padova, Italy. Drawing on a longitudinal research we conducted over fi ve years (2010–2015) with 40 documented migrant workers who lost their job at the beginning of the recession, this article analyses their routes to the informal economy in Northern Italy. Moving away from the expulsion and exit dichotomous theories on participation in underground work, we argue that it is necessary to take into consideration both the structural constraints pushing migrants to enter the informal economy and their subjective motivations, both economic and non-economic. Th rough two waves of in-depth interviews with Moroccan and Romanian workers, we investigate the migrants' working paths in order to understand diff erent conditions and motivations driving them to work off the books. First, we highlight that migrants who work irregularly are not only the unemployed, but also poor casual workers and deprived self-employed. Moreover, we sustain that working irregularly is not only a poverty escape strategy to deal with the casualization, worsening and reduction of formal working opportunities, but it is also a way to meet identity and social needs.


I am currently entering my 11th year in the once fledgling field of "mobiles for development." The story of "m4d," as it is fondly known, and the countless stories of how mobiles have impacted the lives of hundreds of millions of people throughout the developing world, are ones that are closely tied to my own. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I would like to share some of those stories with you, along with a few highlights from my own journey--lessons learned, the impact of mobile phones on the lives of ordinary (and not so ordinary) Africans, the background to my own FrondineSMS project, and how mobile technology fosters "democratized development" across the world. But let us start at the beginning. A Traveler's Tales My interest in Africa goes back exactly 20 years when, in 1993, I set out to help a school-building project for a small community in Northern Zambia. In 1995,1 returned to the continent, this time to Uganda, to help complete a hospital building. Three years later, I was back in Uganda, this time spending the summer carrying out conservation work. In all this time, the only way I could communicate with friends and family back home was by airmail or by using the odd payphone if we were lucky enough to (a) find one, and (b) find it working. The Internet had hardly taken off at home let alone in much of the developing world, and mobile phones were the stuff of rich businessmen and women in the West. I have been fortunate to have spent time in Africa both before and during its communication revolution. I have been able to return to towns and villages, which during my earlier visits had no telecommunications infrastructure to speak of, and see the considerable impact it has now had. In the summer of 2008, 1 did just that. During a field trip with the Grameen Technology Centre, I returned to Masindi, a town in Western Uganda with a population of around 35,000. I was previously there in 1998, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but a lifetime in the short history of the mobile phone. Back then the town's dominating mobile phone mast was not there and neither were any of the mobile phone shops, Internet cafes, or village phone operators. The only phone line out of town--if and when it was working--was courtesy of the local post office. Every couple of weeks we would drive to Masindi to collect our post from the Ugandan Wildlife Authority office, post our letters, have a cold beer, and buy a few "luxuries." Occasionally, we would join the long queue and attempt to phone home. There was no text messaging in those days. Just as I had done ten years earlier, I sat in the Travellers Rest drinking coffee, watching Masindi life go by. Unfinished buildings littered the edge of town, a scene not unlike the last time I was there, except this time, endless mobile advertising banners broke the view. In a bold marketing ploy, the entire cafe was branded "Celtel red," yet it was only just managing to compete with the "MTN yellow" across the road. People were busy in their shops--busy carrying goods, busy ferrying passengers on their bikes, and busy on their phones. The mobile revolution was here, there, and everywhere for all to see. What has happened in Masindi is happening all over Africa, a continent which now boasts almost 800 million subscribers and a penetration rate fast approaching 70 percent. Early Signs The beauty is that no one expected it. Back in 2004, I co-authored one of the earlier reports on the potential of mobile phones in conservation and development work. Focused mainly on Africa, we wrote it at a time when most people believed that rural Africans on a couple of dollars a day would never be able to afford a phone, let alone the credit to keep it going. Of course, nine years ago, mobile phones were expensive, but in many places, the rampant growth of second-hand markets made affordable handsets available for the first time. …


The corporate network is often used for sharing information among the participating companies and facilitating collaboration in a certain industry sector where companies share a common interest. It can effectively help the companies to reduce their operational costs and increase the revenues. However, the inter-company data sharing and processing poses unique challenges to such a data management system including scalability, performance, throughput, and security. In this paper, we present Best Peer++, a system which delivers elastic data sharing services for corporate network applications in the cloud based on Best Peer -- a peer-to-peer (P2P) based data management platform. By integrating cloud computing, database, and P2P technologies into one system, Best Peer++ provides an economical, flexible and scalable platform for corporate network applications and delivers data sharing services to participants based on the widely accepted pay-as-you-go business model. We evaluate Best Peer++ on Amazon EC2 Cloud platform. The benchmarking results show that Best Peer++ outperforms Hadoop DB, a recently proposed large-scale data processing system, in performance when both systems are employed to handle typical corporate network workloads. The benchmarking results also demonstrate that Best Peer++ achieves near linear scalability for throughput with respect to the number of peer nodes.


The purpose of this research was to relate the influence of site suitability variables to Eastern monarch butterfly migratory patterns and behavior. Weather, land use, and physical geography layers were input into a site suitability model using geographic information systems (GIS) to compare geocoded butterfly locations with site specific conditions. Elevation, temperature, precipitation, and land use data layers were overlaid to collectively consider how these variables affected the way that butterflies migrated, recolonized, and overwintered during the 2016/2017 migratory cycle. The variables were collected as individual raster layers which were reclassified into layers ranking suitability as either bad, good, or great with respective scores of one, three, or five. Map overlay methods were used to create a model weighting the variables equally, with a second model that individually weighted the variables allowing for variations in influence. The results of this study indicated that site suitability was a large driving factor for migratory monarchs with a heavier emphasis placed on average temperature and land/cropland use. Possible displaced and sink populations were identified for further study, while the effects of agriculture and climate change were considered regarding flyway connectivity and behavior.


Pacific oysters have been introduced into the Wadden Sea by aquaculture in the 1980sand subsequently established. As oyster larvae need hard substrates for settlement, theyare overgrowing resident epibenthic mussel beds (Mytilus edulis). The impact of C.gigas on the native ecosystem was assessed by investigating the populationdevelopment and the scope for coexistence with M. edulis. The invasion of C. gigas inthe northern Wadden Sea started slowly with abundances remaining low for about 15years. Only a succession of three summers with anomalous high water temperatures ledto a massive increase in abundances. Field experiments revealed differential settlementof both species and faster growth of C. gigas compared to M. edulis. A high survivalrate of juvenile oysters was presumably caused by low predation pressure by the mainbenthic predators, shore crabs and starfish, which both strongly preferred mussels tooysters. As C. gigas is well adapted to the recipient ecosystem and competitive superiorto their native congeners, the development of massive oyster reefs on the expense ofmussel beds is expected. A massive increase of the oyster population may lead to foodlimitation of other suspension feeders, and to a decline of benthic predators.


A diverse range of international human rights instruments prescribe minimum standards and essential elements of equal access to civil justice. Those ratified by Kenya form part of the municipal law by virtue of Article 2(6) of the Constitution of Kenya (2010). The Constitution guarantees the right of access to justice and establishes a hierarchy of national tribunals that exercise judicial authority in the adjudication of competing claims. It forms the foundation for the extant policy, legal and organisational frameworks for the administration of civil justice. The threefold purpose of this study is: (a) to conduct an appraisal of the policy and legal frameworks in Kenya; (b) to evaluate the level of consumer satisfaction in the civil justice system with particular reference to the principles of proportionality, party autonomy, expedition, fairness of process, extent and equality of opportunity to access; and (c) to recommend appropriate policy and legislative reform strategies for expeditious claim adjudication and the augmentation of equal access to civil justice. The study establishes that the current Kenya's policy and legal frameworks are not well suited to guarantee the effective delivery of, and equal access to, civil justice, and that the system of procedural justice is not well suited to deliver quality outcomes and effective remedies. In response to these inadequacies, the study addresses pertinent conceptual issues and recommends various reform measures founded on what it considers as the conceptual imperatives for the efficient delivery of civil justice. The proposed reform strategies draw from beneficial examples of international best practices and from strategic interventions undertaken in other jurisdictions.


With a full space program in progress, new types of materials are needed for spacecraft construction. These materials need to be strong, have good thermal stability and be good insulators. One of the materials with these properties is Kapton, manufactured by Dupont. Being a polyimide, it provides these characteristics, and being quite stable to ultraviolet light makes it the best of its kind for space use. The only concern is that, at the altitudes where earth observing spacecrafts orbit the earth, high concentrations of monoatomic oxygen (AO) react with the organic material and produce CO and H20. In an attempt to solve the problem, layers of protective paint or silicon oxide are used to coat the surface of the polymer. They seem to protect the material very well but, after long exposure to the AO, the coatings crack causing corrosion of the polymer underneath. Silicon blends with Kapton were also subjected to AO at length, but harmful fumes are produced contaminating adjacent components, e.g. solar arrays. Using the silicone Kapton blend as a reference point, other chemical elements were evaluated to find a similar protective mechanism without the contamination problem. Zirconium (Zr) was the element of choice. Besides producing stable oxides, it is heavier than silicon and doesn't produce fumes. As for the silicon blend, the Zr additive {Zr(acac)4}2 will be introduced throughout the polymeric material. Upon the attack of the monoatomic oxygen, a layer of Zr oxide will eventually be formed and polymeric material will remain underneath it. In case of any crack formation, there will be enough material left to form more oxide and stop the polymeric oxidation. Zr(acac)4 is a commercially available additive. viii Several techniques were used to characterize the films made from the polymer containing the additive, and to answer questions such as: (1) How is the strength of the material affected by the addition of the additive?, (2) How long does it take to form the oxide surface and how much polymer material is left underneath?, (3) Is the addition of Zr(acac)4 a good choice or does it cause phase separation? It has been found that the addition of the additive reduces the strength of the material about 50%, i.e., not to an extent that it becames useless. Plasma studies show that as the concentration of Zr in the Kapton is increased, the rate of erosion is reduced about 75%. With state of the art electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy, no evidence of phase separation was observed. Instead, some particles were found in the films, their concentration independent of the concentration of the additive. In summary, the addition of the Zr(acac)4 inorganic additive causes a trade off between tensile strength and AO resistance.


Our world is three-dimensional and complex, continuously changing over time and appearing different at different scales. Yet, when we model it in a computer using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), we mostly use 2D representations, which essentially consist of linked points, lines and polygons. These representations are relatively easy to use and efficient, and a wide variety of methods is built on top of them. However, 2D representations are necessarily limiting. They force us to reduce problems to two dimensions, limit the type of objects we can represent, and complicate storing the relationships between different objects—especially when these are across time and different scales. Nevertheless, most research in GIS is devoted to improving these 2D representations, as well as to the development of new methods that build on them to solve problems, both old and new. This thesis explores a new, fundamentally different modelling approach—integrating both spatial and non-spatial characteristics as dimensions in the geometric sense, specifically targeting the cases of time and scale. While this has been proposed before at a conceptual level, this thesis aims to realise the fundamental aspects of a higher-dimensional GIS by developing higher-dimensional (nD) representations, as well as new methods operating on them to create, manipulate and visualise geographic information. As this thesis shows, the higher-dimensional approach is undoubtedly memory-intensive, but it is also very powerful, as it provides a simple and consistent way to store geometry, attributes and the topological relationships between objects of any dimension. This generic approach can also be easily extended to handle other non-spatial characteristics, enabling better data management that is consistent across dimensions and more powerful operations, such as checking if two objects are adjacent at any point in time. In order to model higher-dimensional space, it is best to consider an nD space subdivision as a base, which is conceptualised as an n-dimensional simplicial complex or cell complex. This can then be implemented with a simplex-based data structure, with an incidence graph, as a set of Nef polyhedra, or—as done in this thesis—by using ordered topological models such as the cell-tuple and generalised/combinatorial maps. Creating computer representations of higher-dimensional objects can be complex. Common construction methods used in 2D and 3D, such as directly manipulating combinatorial primitives, or using primitive-level construction operations (such as Euler operators), rely on our intuition of 2D/3D geometry, and thus do not work well in higher dimensions. It is therefore all too easy to create invalid objects, which then cannot be easily interpreted or fixed—a problem that is already exceedingly apparent in three dimensions. As a way to easily create representations of higher-dimensional objects, this thesis proposes three novel higher-level methods, all of which are intuitive to use and attempt to create valid output. Extrusion takes an (n-1)-dimensional cell complex and a set of intervals per cell, projecting them parallel to a new axis in order to create an n-dimensional cell complex. Incremental construction describes an n-dimensional object based on its (n-1)-dimensional boundary, from dimension zero (points) and then upwards. Finally, a 4D model can be constructed from a series of 3D models at different levels of detail (LODs) by linking them. In order to visualise higher-dimensional models, as well as to be able to process them in existing software, it is important to have methods to extract meaningful 2D/3D subsets from them. % Such methods would consist of two steps: (i) selecting a subset of the objects in the model and (ii) projecting this subset to a lower dimension. As a stepping stone towards such methods, this thesis shows how n-dimensional to (n-1)-dimensional orthographic and perspective projections can be defined. Finally, this thesis placed an emphasis on validating the algorithms with real-world datasets, which was only possible by developing methods to repair the invalid datasets that are widespread in practice. This thesis thus contains methods to create valid polygons and planar partitions using a constrained triangulation of the input, as well as a method to repair polyhedra and space subdivisions by snapping together lower-dimensional primitives and removing overlaps using Boolean set operations on Nef polyhedra. This allowed tests with up to 6D datasets based on real-world data—a good base for higher-dimensional GIS. In the future, the work in this thesis will be extended with higher-dimensional modification operations, true 4D spatiotemporal datasets and repair methods with quality guarantees. All implementations made for this thesis are publicly available under open source licences.


The JOBS Act of 2012 reflects the largest deregulatory change to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 over its more than 75 year history. It contracts the coverage of those companies subject to the obligations of 'publicness' and it introduces an 'on ramp' that will permit most newly-public companies to meet a lesser set of disclosure, internal control and governance obligations for up to five years. We set these changes against a larger discussion of when a private enterprise should be forced to take on public status in securities regulation, a topic that has been entirely under theorized. We conclude that the change from 500 to 2000 shareholders of record made by the JOBS Act, while entirely clear in its deregulatory thrust, misses a key point: 'record' ownership is an antiquated metric for any measuring of publicness and Congress needs to find a better one, such as public trading. More broadly, we observe that Congress increasingly has defined public obligations in securities regulation less by the traditional touchstone of investor protection and more by ways that our largest companies affect constituencies beyond their investor base. Our boundary-setting thus should include two tiers of public companies with the smaller tier limited to core disclosure and governance obligations. Finally, our review of these boundary questions reveals a larger pattern that ought to inform how we understand securities regulation. Entrepreneurs and their advisors regularly occupy new unregulated space created in the wake of technological change or by gaps in regulation revealed as markets evolve. Government response, seemingly inevitably, is piecemeal and reactive. The result is a regulatory process that is more informal than administrative law theory usually suggests and more opaque than we might want in contemplating regulatory change.


The natatorium environment is one of the most challenging environments to design and build in northern climates. This is due to the large swings in levels of humidity and temperature between interior and exterior conditions. The challenge remains how to balance the interior pool environment, requiring a consistent temperature and humidity level with the exterior; while taking into account the atmospheric by-products of chlorination. This article reviews the predominant elements present within the pool environment. It discusses elements that cover a broad range of pool related design issues and explores considerations to be aware of when designing a natatorium and its interfaces. The discussion will first define the basic elements within the pool environment that must be understood, air temperature and humidity, air quality and movement and air pressure. The remainder of the article will cover a broad range of pool-related design issues and explore considerations to be aware of when designing a natatorium and its interfaces. Some of the factors that should be considered during the design phase of a project include the functionality of the mechanical system, the ratio of solid to void in the exterior skin, massing of the pool volume, curtain wall and glazing, finishing materials (interior and exterior) and their durability and control of the vapour migration and roof and ceiling finishes. All will have an impact on decision making. The intention of all decisions is to create an enduring enclosure that provides comfort and recreation to its patrons.


"Swimmer's ear" or acute otitis externa is a common condition involving the exterior part of the ear, including the ear canal and the pinna. Inflammation and pain are the main features, with bacterial infection mainly due to Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. It can easily be treated in its uncomplicated stage, and the symptoms usually do not last for more than 72 hours. Management ranges from primary care to a specialist otolaringological intervention. Several nonpharmacological treatments, in addition to various pharmacological options, are employed in the treatment and prevention of swimmer's ear. These treatments range from simple, adequate and appropriate ear cleaning, to topical antibiotics, corticosteroids and analgesics. Severe cases may require systemic antibiotics, oral anti-inflammatory drugs and even opioid analgesics.


Interlanguage is the type of language or linguistic system used by secondand foreign-language learners who are in the process of learning a target language. Interlanguage is dynamic and permeable as it serves as a bridge between L1 and L2 when learners lack knowledge and fine mastery of rules. They refine certain rules and obtain new ones. (Study.com, 18 June 2018). Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis paved the way for Interlanguage theory in describing L2 learners' errors in the acquisition process of L2 (El khereshah 2015). Interlanguage changes all the time but can become fossilized language when the learners do not have the opportunity to improve. It is important for teachers to understand this and also to see interlanguage as a series of learning steps. The theory of Internalization put forward by Vygotsky suggests that an individual is able to observe and internalize the ideas and processes of their surroundings as they partake in social interaction defined as, "new ways of thinking" (Duchesne, S., & McMaugh, A., 2016).The continuous transformation of social meanings into private meanings and private meanings into social ones partly explains the richness and complexity of the second language learning processes (2013 Azarola). This is why the internalization area can widen the scope to illustrate the errors of the learners and minimize them. Through the usage of secondary information, internet and personal observation, as one of the processes of the qualitative research method would implicate better learning strategies and more progressed learners.


In 2018 the National Museum Prague (NMP) is celebrating its 200th anniversary. Today the Museum is facing its most valuable development: brand new permanent exhibitions. Our monumental historic building was constructed in 1891 in the heart of Prague. After more than one hundred years we had to close the building and remove all exhibitions which were older than 40 years. The building has about 8,000m2 and is divided into two parts. One belongs to our Natural History Museum (NHM) collections with Zoology, Palaeontology, Mineralogy, Botany and Mycology exhibitions. Our new natural history galleries will open in autumn 2019. Housed all on one floor, the galleries will be full of animals like invertebrates, fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals. The second floor will focus on palaeontology spanning more than 500 million years of evolution covering the geographical area of the modern Czech Republic.
 At the beginning we had to ask ourselves a few simple questions. How do we develop permanent exhibitions that will last for decades? Is excluding modern technology the right thing to do? Should we focus on a more informative/education style or should the interpretation be more populist? And what about the display cases? Should we use old repaired ones or modern cases?
 It would be great to have answers to all these questions but we still have to deal with the vision and constraints of our curators, collections, budget, legislation, technology and construction of the building.
 The project has no similar equivalent in the history of the Czech Republic so it was an extraordinary challenge to create our own process of developments with ongoing improvements. Through these developments we have formed new cooperation with technological partners and the creative industries. We are defining a new modern approach to the development and preparation of exhibitions in the Czech Republic. Now that we have reached the half way point towards our vision, it is a good time to report on progress.


The aim of this thesis is to examine the relationship between tourism and remembrance in a landscape of war, specifically the Normandy beaches of World War II where the D-Day Landings of June 6, 1944 took place. The anthropological investigation employs a theoretical framework that incorporates tourist performance, tourism worldmaking, landscape, cultural memories of war and remembrance. The thesis also examines the tourism-remembrance relationship by way of the various vectors that inform cultural memory, such as the legend of D-Day, national war mythologies and war films, and how these are interpreted and refashioned through tourism.


Fluidized beds are conventional components of many industrial processes, such as coal gasification for energy generation and syngas production. Numerical simulations help to properly design and understand the complex multiphase flows occurring in these reactors. Two modeling approaches are usually adopted to simulate multiphase flows: the two fluids Eulerian-Eulerian model and the continuous/discrete Eulerian-Lagrangian model. Since fluidized beds account for an extremely large number of particles, tracking each of them could not assure to get results within a reasonable computational time. The Computational Particle-Fluid Dynamics (CPFD) approach, which belongs to the Eulerian-Lagrangian models class, groups together particles with similar key parameters (e.g. composition, size) into computational units (parcels). Parcel collisions are modeled by an isotropic solid stress function, depending on solid volume fraction. In this paper, the bubbling fluidized bed (BFB) upstream gasifier of the EU research infrastructure ZECOMIX (Zero Emissions of Carbon with Mixed technologies) has been simulated using a CPFD approach via Barracuda® software. The effect of different fluidizing agent injection strategies on bed bubbling and mixing, for non-reacting cases, has been studied. The numerical results for a reacting case have been compared to the available experimental data, gathered during the coal gasification campaign. The model has proved to be very useful in the choice of the more efficient injection configuration that assures a more effective contact of the gas with the solid bed and a good bubbling fluidization regime, together with a satisfactory prediction of the outlet gas composition. The numerical approach has turned out to be robust and time-saving and allowed to dramatically reduce the computational cost with respect the classical two fluids Eulerian-Eulerian models.


Apoptosis is an intrinsic cell-suicide programme, which ensures tissue homeostasis and safeguards the organism by eliminating unnecessary and unwanted cells, or cells that may constitute some form of danger to the organism, for example, tumour cells. Both during embryonic development and in the adult life of organisms, there is a need for a perfect balance between cell proliferation, differentiation and death. This balance is achieved, in part, through the precise regulation of apoptosis, which involves complex molecular events that ultimately activate, or prevent the activation of caspases (cysteine-aspartic acid proteases). The activation of caspases is, in most cases, irreversible and represents the commitment to the cell death fate.

Key concepts:

Apoptosis is a genetically determined process, by which unwanted or unnecessary cells are eliminated from organisms.

Apoptosis is important in many biological contexts and deregulation of apoptosis may cause diseases, either in the case of insufficient apoptosis, which may contribute to excessive cell proliferation and cancer, or excessive apoptosis, which may cause degenerative and other disorders.

Many molecules and several signalling pathways contribute to the regulation of apoptosis; both intrinsic and extrinsic factors contribute to the regulation of apoptosis in a cell.

Keywords:

apoptosis;
caspases;
IAPs;
Bcl-2;
p53;
c-myc


This paper explores student and teacher perspectives of challenges relating to the levels of competence in English of Chinese students studying overseas from the perspective of critical pedagogy. It draws on two complementary studies undertaken by colleagues at the University of Reading. The first—a research seminar attended by representatives from a wide range of UK universities—presents the views of teachers and administrators; the second draws on four case studies of the language learning of Chinese postgraduate students during their first year of study in the UK, and offers the student voice. Interview and focus group data highlight the limitations of current tests of English used as part of the requirements for university admission. In particular, university teachers expressed uncertainty about whether the acceptance of levels of written English which fall far short of native‐speaker competence is an ill‐advised lowering of standards or a necessary and pragmatic response to the realities of an otherwise uneven playing field. In spite of this ambivalence, there is evidence of a growing willingness on the part of university teachers and support staff to find solutions to the language issues facing Chinese students, some of which require a more strategic institutional approach, while others rely on greater flexibility on the part of individuals. Although the studies reported in this paper were based on British universities, the findings will also be of interest to those involved in tertiary education in other English‐speaking countries which are currently attracting large numbers of Chinese students.


Recently, techniques for applying convolutional neural networks to graph-structured data have emerged. Graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) have been used to address node and graph classification and matrix completion. Although the performance has been impressive, the current implementations have limited capability to incorporate uncertainty in the graph structure. Almost all GCNNs process a graph as though it is a ground-truth depiction of the relationship between nodes, but often the graphs employed in applications are themselves derived from noisy data or modelling assumptions. Spurious edges may be included; other edges may be missing between nodes that have very strong relationships. In this paper we adopt a Bayesian approach, viewing the observed graph as a realization from a parametric family of random graphs. We then target inference of the joint posterior of the random graph parameters and the node (or graph) labels. We present the Bayesian GCNN framework and develop an iterative learning procedure for the case of assortative mixed-membership stochastic block models. We present the results of experiments that demonstrate that the Bayesian formulation can provide better performance when there are very few labels available during the training process.


A new biological cross-linker, microbial transglutaminase (mTGase), has been used to catalyze the immobilization of lactoferrin onto the wool fabrics, and the antibacterial properties of immobilized wool on both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria are studied. It is found that the minimal inhibitory concentration of lactoferrin against S·aureus and E·coli is 0.5mg/mL and 0.25mg/mL respectively. As compared to the control sample, the amount of lactoferrin adhered onto the wool fabric improves from 4.87 mg . (g fabric) -1 to 12.96 mg . (g fabric) -1 , indicating that the crosslinking reaction initiated by mTGase can increase the amount of lactoferrin fixed onto wool fabric obviously. The ratios of bacteriostasis to S.aureus and E.coli of wool fabrics immobilized with lactoferrin are bound to be 57.95% and 69.96% respectively, showing good antibacterial property.


This paper argues that it is time to consider a paradigm change in semantics and pragmatics. The present paradigm prioritises a distinction between truth conditional meaning and non-truth conditional meaning. This distinction has merit for many parts of a natural language. But a truth conditional bias in semantics does not help, and has not helped for several thousand years, in the analysis of indicative conditional sentences. Indicative conditionals do not have truth conditions: they are not a part of fact-stating discourse. The new paradigm recognises and exploits this intuition. The new paradigm, for conditionals, replaces truth conditions with subjective conditional probabilities and recognises that we must acknowledge that "different parts of our language have meaning in different ways" (Kneale, 1949: 89). This acknowledgement has implications both for current conceptions of the semantics-pragmatics interface and for a theory of the interface between truth conditional and probabilistic semantics.


The potential of natural zeolite as a low-cost adsorbent was investigated for the removal of zinc from aqueous solution using a continuous fixed bed column. The zeolite tested was taken from the same source (Jabal Uniza in south Jordan) and subjected to crushing and sieving only, without any treatment. The two samples tested are UNZ1 (0.42–0.841 mm) and UNZ2 (0.21–0.42 mm). The Thomas model analysis of the measured breakthrough curves revealed that the adsorbent UNZ2 has a higher value of adsorption capacity to zinc ions (50.75 mg/g) than UNZ1 (33.68 mg/g). The time to 50% breakthrough was determined by the Yoon and Nelson model. It has been found that the time needed to reach 50% breakthrough is 2,006 minutes and 3,171 minutes for UNZ1 and UNZ2, respectively. This indicated that UNZ2 provides better performance with larger service time. Both UNZ1 and UNZ2 agreed to a high degree with the Thomas and Yoon and Nelson models.