This study gives a preliminary assessment of the macroeconomic impact of implementing Basel III in Malaysia. This is also an attempt to contribute to the increasing studies for emerging economies, especially focusing on SEACEN members. The Basel III standards seek to significantly increase the quality and required level of banks' capital. Hence, it is expected to strengthen banks' capacity to absorb risks and reduce the probability of future banking crises. Nevertheless, different strategies adopted by banks to meet the new rules—such as increasing lending rates—can impact negatively on the economy. This study uses the structural model to assess the benefits and costs of implementing Basel III. The benefit is estimated using the expected default probability of banks while the cost is estimated from the impact of higher capital requirement on GDP. Results suggest that the benefits still outweigh the costs. The estimated net effect of Basel III implementation in Malaysia is positive, albeit modest.


What was the original purpose of the Gospel of Matthew? For whom was it written? In this magisterial two-volume commentary, Walter Wilson interprets Matthew as a catechetical work that expresses the ideological and institutional concerns of a faction of disaffected Jewish followers of Jesus in the late first century CE. Wilson's compelling thesis frames Matthew's Gospel as not only a continuation of the biblical story but also as a didactic narrative intended to shape the commitments and identity of a particular group that saw itself as a beleaguered, dissident minority. Thus, the text clarifies Jesus's essential Jewish character as the "Son of David" while also portraying him in opposition to prominent religious leaders of his day – most notably the Pharisees – and open to cordial association with non-Jews.
 Through meticulous engagement with the Greek text of the Gospel, as well as relevant primary sources and secondary literature, Wilson offers a wealth of insight into the first book of the New Testament. After an introduction exploring the background of the text, its genre and literary features, and its theological orientation, Wilson explicates each passage of the Gospel with thorough commentary on the intended message to first-century readers about topics like morality, liturgy, mission, group discipline, and eschatology. Scholars, students, pastors, and all readers interested in what makes the Gospel of Matthew distinctive among the Synoptics will appreciate and benefit from Wilson's deep contextualization of the text, informed by his years of studying the New Testament and Christian origins.


The founders of the United Nations established the organization to stop wars and facilitate international cooperation by promoting security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and rule of law. These continue to be at the core of the United Nations's mission, but whereas before the challenges in the international system tended to be localized--limited to a specific geographic region and requiring the engagement of a limited number of state actors--this is no longer the case. Today's agenda is not just international, but increasingly global. A range of challenges like terrorism, climate change, and global health span the globe and cannot be solved by any single national government or even set of governments. These public goods challenges cross-national borders, are contagious, and affect everyone everywhere. They are complex in nature and their impact is not limited to a single sector, but rather affect many sectors, creating feedback and multiplier effects. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The United Nations, with its universal membership and authority on a wide range of substantive areas, is a natural home for dealing with these issues. Historically, however, national decision-making processes have not made full use of the potential of the United Nations to assist them in managing emerging global risks and threats. The United Nations has risen to the challenge in recent years by developing a new model for facilitating and coordinating international engagement to provide global public goods. A New Business Model The new UN model has emerged through a process of evolutionary learning. In the 1980s and 1990s, efforts and initiatives to address transnational challenges were launched within states, within society, and even by entities belonging to the UN system. However, not all these efforts succeeded, mainly because actors operated in isolation and sometimes even at cross purposes. The 2005 World Summit constituted a watershed: it helped define not only the nature of the types of international challenges that the world would increasingly have to face, but also the tectonic shifts that were underway in terms of how issues would need to be resolved. Those at the United Nations closely involved with organizing and managing this process began to see that the United Nations could potentially play a critical role in mobilizing action to deal with the hardest of the global issues. In tackling these most difficult issues, the following became key elements of successful efforts: first, defining "what needs to be done by whom and why" by developing a "global strategy" that would leverage the normative and technical expertise of the UN system working together; second, using the convening authority of the United Nations to build multi-stakeholder alliances, including governments, civil society, and private sector actors; third, engaging leaders in these organizations at the highest levels; fourth, using the Secretary-General's good offices to facilitate negotiations and reach agreements; and finally, using the United Nations as the foundation for an implementation platform. Given his authority, the Secretary-General was obviously uniquely placed to be the catalyst that would mobilize joint action to forge consensus around a "new" global agenda and a new approach to achieve it. And he had a core team that could support him in identifying the targeted interventions that were necessary to build consensus and momentum. Three recent examples of initiatives undertaken by the Secretary-General illustrate this new model of engagement: the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, the United Nations' work toward developing a global strategy to address climate change, and the UN Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health. UN Action on Counter-Terrorism Counter-terrorism has long been one of the most sensitive, most closely held areas for international engagement. …


Using detailed product-level export data for China and a variant of the Antràs and Helpman (2004) model that includes investments in component search, we examine the sectoral determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) versus foreign outsourcing in export processing trade. We exploit the coexistence of two regulatory export processing regimes in China, which specify who owns and controls the imported components for export processing. We find that in the regime that Chinese plants own the imported components, the share of exports from vertically integrated plants is increasing in the intensity of headquarter inputs across sectors, and is decreasing in the contractibility of inputs. These results are consistent with the property-rights theory of intra-firm trade. However, in the regime that foreign firms own the imported components, no significant relationship is found between the prevalence of vertical integration, headquarter intensity and input contractibility across sectors. The positive relationship between productivity dispersion and the export share of integrated plants across sectors, as suggested by the existing literature, is found only in the regime that foreign firms own the imported components. These results are consistent with our model, which considers ownership of imported components as an alternative to asset ownership to alleviate the hold-up problem by the export-processing plant.


Introduction Antibiotic resistance threatens to make Neisseria gonorrhoeae untreatable. Point-of-care tests (POC) that detect antimicrobial resistance (AMR) would allow individually tailored treatment. But rapid access to test results might lead to more treatment overall, resulting in higher resistance levels. We investigated the impact of different clinical pathways for gonorrhoea diagnosis on the spread of AMR gonorrhoea. Methods We used data about the prevalence and incidence of gonorrhoea in men who have sex with men (MSM) and heterosexual men and women (HMW) to calibrate a mathematical model that describes the transmission of N. gonorrhoeae. With this model, we simulated four clinical pathways for the diagnosis and treatment of gonorrhoea: POC test for N. gonorrhoeae with AMR detection (POC+R), POC without AMR detection (POC-R), culture with antimicrobial susceptibility testing (culture), and laboratory-based nucleic acid amplification tests without AMR detection (NAAT). We calculated the proportion of resistant infections, the cases averted after 5 years, and compared how fast resistant infections spread in the populations. Results After 30 years, the proportion of resistant N. gonorrhoeae infections is lowest for POC+R (median MSM: 0.18%, HMW: 0.12%), and increases for culture, NAAT, and POC-R. After 5 years, NAAT leads to a total of 36 366 (median MSM) and 1228 (median HMW) observed cases per 1 00 000 persons. POC+R results in the largest number of cases averted after 5 years (median MSM: 3,353, HMW: 118 per 1 00 000 persons) compared with NAAT. POC tests with intermediate sensitivity for the detection of AMR slow the spread of resistance more than NAAT. POC tests require very high sensitivity to detect AMR to reduce the spread of AMR more than culture. Conclusion POC tests with high sensitivity to detect AMR can keep gonorrhoea treatable for longer than either culture or NAAT. POC tests that do not detect AMR reliably should not be introduced because they result in higher levels of empirical treatment for gonorrhoea and accelerate the spread of AMR.


In this article we focus on a representative firm that can decide when to invest under default risk. On the one hand, this firm can benefit from generous tax depreciation allowances, on the other hand it faces a default risk. Our aim is to study the effects of tax depreciation allowances in a risky environment. As will be shown in our numerical analysis, generous tax depreciation allowances lead to a decrease in a firm's leverage and, in most cases, cause a reduction in default risk. This result has a strong policy implication, in that it shows that an investment stimulus pack is expected neither to increase the default risk nor to cause financial instability.


Abstract: We analyze the effect of a parametric reform of the fully-funded pension regime in Colombia on the intensive margin of the labor supply. We take advantage of a threshold defined by law in order to identify the causal effect using a regression discontinuity design. We find that a pension system that increases retirement age and the minimum weeks during which workers must contribute to claim pension benefits causes an increase of around 2 hours on the number of weekly worked hours; this corresponds to 4% of the average number of weekly worked hours or around 14% of a standard deviation of weekly worked hours. The effect is robust to different specifications, polynomial orders and sample sizes.


In the Book of Genesis there is a dramatic change in the world when God says: Fiat Lux (Let there be light)! Chaos was ended. In our everyday life when we hear a noise while asleep at night, we are afraid because there is no light, and if there is no light we don't see anything, i.e., we do not know. When we turn on the light, everything around us gets organized: light ends the chaos of darkness. In fact, we rely more than 80% on our sight sense to bring us what is happening around us. Light is the genesis of visual perception, and colour is its vehicle. We understand the world around us by the organization of colour stimuli received by our eyes, transmitted to our brain and interpreted there. We can say that colour is the form of space because it is through colour that we perceive the limits and the forms of our environment. Therefore, colour should be studied, together with light, its origin, as the main actor in space perception, and therefore in architecture. With these assumptions in mind, we have to distinguish between Inherent Colour and Perceived Colour. The first is the colour of the surfaces, which could be read by a colorimeter, without the interference of the human perception or the outside lighting conditions. The second is the colour perceived by the human being, always different according to three variables: light, the observer and the surface. If any of these variables change, the perception will be different: if the light changes its position, or its characteristics, if the observer moves to another place or looks in a different direction, if the surface is placed under or above the observer, or with a different angle, etc. Our work as Colour Consultant proves that the knowledge of this continuous variation in colour perception is a tool that we can use to design better spaces for human life and comfort.


This handbook is a result of research in identifying potential functions for use in molecular dynamic simulation. Potential functions by name have been listed and then cross-listed by the molecular systems that they have been used to simulate. This handbook will prove useful to anyone involved in performing molecular dynamic simulations. Research continues to be done to locate more potential functions and information about the systems that they can describe.


Until recently, meta-analyses have usually been performed based on summary data methods. Individual patient data methods are becoming more popular, but the advantages of using these methods have not been fully investigated with regards to assessing and exploring heterogeneity.

This thesis has assessed whether there are any clinically important differences in the results from analysing data from three meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials in the area of stroke medicine, using summary and individual patient data methodologies.

Blood pressure ill Acute Stroke Collaboration (BASC)

The management of blood pressure during the acute phase of stroke remains an enigma, therefore a systematic review and meta-analysis of existing randomised controlled trials was conducted to assess the effects of vasoactive drugs on outcome. Trends towards an increase in the risk of death, and death or dependency at the end of trial were found in patients randomised to a vasoactive drug as compared to those randomised to control. When baseline systolic blood pressure was taken into account in the analyses, patients randomised to a vasoactive drug had a significantly higher risk of death at the end of trial. Analyses also indicated that patients recruited early and within 48 hours has significant increases in the risk of death at the end of trial. However, no significant effects were seen for early change in systolic blood pressure.

Community occupational therapy in stroke patients

An evaluation of the efficacy of occupational therapy given in the community to stroke patients was performed using a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. At the end of intervention, patient randomised to occupational therapy had significantly higher scores for extended and personal activities of daily living, and non-significantly higher scores for leisure participation. These effects appeared to be maintained over time. No effects were seen between the groups for death or minor psychiatric disorders as measured in patients or their carers. Subgroup analyses revealed that the benefits of occupational therapy were greatest when targeted interventions were used. Also, being male or independent at baseline was found to be important predictor of extended activities of daily living scores.

Dipyridamole in Stroke Collaboration (DISC)

Results from randomised controlled trials of dipyridamole, given with and without aspirin, for secondary prevention after stroke or transient ischaemic attack have given conflicting results; therefore, we performed a systematic review and meta-analysis. The risk of subsequent fatal or non-fatal stroke was reduced using the dual treatment of aspirin and dipyridamole as compared to either aspirin alone, dipyridamole alone, or control. Additionally, the dual treatment lowered the risk of non-fatal stroke, and subsequent vascular events defined by a composite outcome (non-fatal stroke, non fatal myocardial infarction, or vascular death). Analyses indicated that these results were independent of method of formulation of dipyridamole, dose of aspirin, type of qualifying event, and gender of the patients. However, increasing age was found to be an important predictor of subsequent stroke.

These systematic reviews demonstrate that collaborations within the area of stroke medicine can be successful and much data can be shared. The findings from meta-analyses can be informative about the effectiveness of particular treatment and about which patients should be targeted for treatment; and may help steer the direction of future trials.

Although summary data meta-analyses are practically easier to perform, it is important that assessments and explorations of heterogeneity should always be performed. Meta-analyses based on individual patient data may be needed to allow for more in depth investigations of heterogeneity, especially of patient characteristics. However, they themselves are not the panacea to all difficulties since they are subject to particular problems, mainly related to obtaining individual patient data to enable these in depth analyses to be performed.


Secrecy and informal organisation produce, sustain, and reinforce feelings of loyalty within intelligence and security services. This article demonstrates that loyalty is needed for cooperation between intelligence partners as well as within and between services. Under many circumstances, loyalty plays a larger role in the level of internal and external collaboration than formal work processes along hierarchical lines. These findings are empirically based on the case study of Anglo‒Dutch intelligence cooperation during World War II. By demonstrating that 'loyalty' critically affects the work of intelligence communities, this article contributes to current and future research that integrates history, intelligence studies, and research on emotions.


This thesis examines the divisions over foreign policy that emerged within the Labour movement from 1933, and culminated in a debate between its leaders at the 1935 party conference. In a steadily worsening international environment, pacifists and the Left had tentatively begun to develop influential critiques of the party line, which through the efforts of Henderson, Dalton, Attlee, Bevin and Citrine was becoming increasingly committed to a sanctionist League of Nations. However, it was only in the summer of 1935, with Mussolini's impending invasion of Abyssinia, that the pacifists, led by Lansbury and Ponsonby, the leaders of the Labour party in the two Houses of Parliament, and the leftist Socialist League, led by Cripps, openly began to voice their dissent from the party line. In discussing the various dimensions of this debate, this thesis draws on a wider range of source material than previous accounts of Labour's foreign policy in these years. In addition to the frequently consulted published material, it makes extensive use of private records - those of the Labour party itself, the TUC and also of key individuals. This thesis offers a substantial revision of the established literature, which has tended to overlook the significance of the Labour party's debates over the imposition of sanctions in 1935. It argues that the way in which these intra-party conflicts were resolved at the 1935 party conference placed the movement firmly behind armed collective security. In doing so it re-established Labour's political credibility and facilitated its inclusion in Churchill's wartime government.


This study is the first to empirically examine stock market manipulation on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The dataset contains 40 cases of market manipulation from 1996 to 2009 that were successfully prosecuted by the Hong Kong Securities & Futures Commission. Manipulation is found to negatively impact market efficiency measures such as the bid-ask spread and volatility. Markets appear incapable of efficiently responding to the presence of manipulators and are characterised by information asymmetry. Manipulators were successfully able to raise prices and exit the market. This finding contradicts views that trade-based manipulation is entirely unprofitable and self-deterring. The victimisation of information-seeking investors and the market as a whole provides a strong rationale for all jurisdictions, including Australia, to have effective laws that prohibit manipulation and for robust enforcement of those laws to further deter market manipulation.


Copper (Cu) complexation and distribution were characterized using competitive ligand exchange adsorptive cathodic stripping voltammetry and isotope dilution inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry along two transects (20°S and 10°S) in the eastern tropical South Pacific. In the southern and westernmost stations, Cu showed upper water column depletion to values as low as ∼ 0.26 nmol L−1, the lowest concentrations ever reported. However, Cu levels were much higher within the secondary nitrite maxima of the oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) in the northern (10°S) transect. The enrichment of Cu in the reducing conditions of the OMZ has not been reported before and probably reflects remineralization and offshore transport from the shelf. Free [Cu2+] was typically low throughout the water column, ranging from about 3.15 × 10−15 mol L−1 to 1.34 × 10−13 mol L−1, and depth profiles exhibited similar features to those for dissolved Cu, though they showed more variability near the surface. Offshore and beyond the influence of the OMZ, the lowest dissolved and free [Cu2+] was within the primary nitrite maxima (PNM), where ammonia oxidation and nitrate reduction rates are important. This finding is of interest because the two competing explanations for the PNM—iron limitation of diatoms and high rates of ammonia oxidation relative to nitrite oxidation—have high Cu requirements. The low concentrations of free Cu2+ measured here could impose significant constraints on the rates of these processes.


Detailing a systems approach, Optical Wireless Communications: System and Channel Modelling with MATLAB, is a self-contained volume that concisely and comprehensively covers the theory and technology of optical wireless communications systems (OWC) in a way that is suitable for undergraduate and graduate-level students, as well as researchers and professional engineers. Incorporating MATLAB throughout, the authors highlight past and current research activities to illustrate optical sources, transmitters, detectors, receivers, and other devices used in optical wireless communications. They also discuss both indoor and outdoor environments, discussing how different factorsincluding various channel modelsaffect system performance and mitigation techniques. In addition, this book broadly covers crucial aspects of OWC systems: Fundamental principles of OWC Devices and systems Modulation techniques and schemes (including polarization shift keying) Channel models and system performance analysis Emerging visible light communications Terrestrial free space optics communication Use of infrared in indoor OWC One entire chapter explores the emerging field of visible light communications, and others describe techniques for using theoretical analysis and simulation to mitigate channel impact on system performance. Additional topics include wavelet denoising, artificial neural networks, and spatial diversity. Content also covers different challenges encountered in OWC, as well as outlining possible solutions and current research trends. A major attraction of the book is the presentation of MATLAB simulations and codes, which enable readers to execute extensive simulations and better understand OWC in general.


In this study, the rotational resistance of a spiral-type capsule rotating inside a small intestine is investigated by in vitro experiments and analytical modeling, on which a limited literature is available. The results presented exhibit viscoelastic nature of the intestinal tissue. The significance of various spiral structures and rotating speeds is quantitatively evaluated from the propulsion point of view. Also, an analytical torque model is proposed and subsequently validated. The close match between the experimental results and numerical results from the model shows that the model is reasonably accurate to estimate the rotational resistance torque of the small intestine. Both the experimental and modeling works provide a useful guide to determine the torque required for a spiraltype endoscopic capsule operating in a "really" small intestine. Therefore, the proposed torque model can be used in the design and optimization of in-body robotic systems, which can remotely be articulated using magnetic actuation.


SUMMARY Presence of various anti-nutritional factors such as mucilage, linatine, cyanogenic glycosides, and trypsin inhibitors in linseed has confined its usage as broiler feed ingredient. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of linseed, after a high-temperature, high-pressure expansion processing, on dietary anti-nutritional factors and nutrient molecular features. Further, an experiment was carried out in a completely randomized design with chicks fed either a control corn–soy diet or graded levels of expanded linseed (EL; 67, 135, and 203 g/kg). Each diet was fed to 8 groups of 15 chicks. Expansion of linseed increased live weight (LW) and reduced feed conversion ratio (FCR; g feed/g LW) considerably. EL incorporation in the diet of chicks increased digestive α-amylase, lipase, trypsin, and total alkaline protease activity. Incorporation of EL in the diet increased villi height and decreased crypt depth. Abdominal fat increased and pancreas weight decreased by inclusion of EL in diets. Gizzard and jejunum pH increased and duodenum pH decreased in chicks fed diets containing EL. The Fourier-transformed infrared spectroscopy showed only reduction in lipid to carbohydrates ratio in molecular structures. Positive correlation was found between FCR and α-helix to s-sheet ratio and carbohydrate-to-protein ratio. Increased s-sheet height reduced lipase activity, whereas an increased α-helix to s-sheet ratio increased lipase activity. The outcome of this study was that expansion was effective for improving the nutritional value of linseed for broiler chicks.


The type that designers use can say as much to their audience as the actual words on the page. But until now, Web designers have had an extremely limited palette of typefaces from which to choose -- essentially, Arial (yawn), Times (yawn), and Georgia (yawwwwwn). Design is about overcoming the limitations of a medium, and Web design is no different. In this book, Jason shows Web designers how to apply the principles of fluid typography, Web-safe fonts, downloaded fonts, and type on images to create robust scalable designs without resorting to type in images or Adobe Flash.


This paper proposes a noninstrumental method of monitoring the angular distribution of the fibers in fiber-containing materials (FCMs) such as paper, semifinished textile products, and similar materials, based on a computer calculation of the Fraunhofer diffraction pattern using computer microimaging of the surface of the FCM, corrected for illumination by a laser light beam. An algorithm is proposed for the computer processing of the diffraction pattern thus constructed, with output to an angular light-scattering diagram, from which the angular distribution of the fibers in the material can be judged. Our experiments on semifinished textile products and paper showed that the proposed method is workable and that it has an advantage over an analog method of monitoring, using the angular diagram of the backscattering of light.


This study examined whether acquisition of neonatal reflexes in newborn rhesus macaques was influenced by receipt of a single neonatal dose of hepatitis B vaccine containing the preservative thimerosal (Th). Hepatitis B vaccine containing a weight-adjusted Th dose was administered to male macaques within 24 h of birth (n = 13). Unexposed animals received saline placebo (n = 4) or no injection (n = 3). Infants were tested daily for acquisition of nine survival, motor, and sensorimotor reflexes. In exposed animals there was a significant delay in the acquisition of root, snout, and suck reflexes, compared with unexposed animals. No neonatal responses were significantly delayed in unexposed animals. Gestational age (GA) and birth weight (BW) were not significantly correlated. Cox regression models were used to evaluate main effects and interactions of exposure with BW and GA as independent predictors and time-invariant covariates. Significant main effects remained for exposure on root and suck when controlling for GA and BW, such that exposed animals were relatively delayed in time-to-criterion. Interaction models indicated there were various interactions between exposure, GA, and BW and that inclusion of the relevant interaction terms significantly improved model fit. This, in turn, indicated that lower BW and/or lower GA exacerbated the adverse effects following vaccine exposure. This primate model provides a possible means of assessing adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes from neonatal Th-containing hepatitis B vaccine exposure, particularly in infants of lower GA or BW. The mechanisms underlying these effects and the requirements for Th requires further study.


Reducing or eliminating statistical redundancy between the components of high-dimensional vector data enables a lower-dimensional representation without significant loss of information. Recognizing the limitations of principal component analysis (PCA), researchers in the statistics and neural network communities have developed nonlinear extensions of PCA. This article develops a local linear approach to dimension reduction that provides accurate representations and is fast to compute. We exercise the algorithms on speech and image data, and compare performance with PCA and with neural network implementations of nonlinear PCA. We find that both nonlinear techniques can provide more accurate representations than PCA and show that the local linear techniques outperform neural network implementations.


Recent research has generally shown that a small change in the number of species in a food web can have consequences both for community structure and ecosystem processes. However 'change' is not limited to just the number of species in a community, but might include an alteration to such properties as precipitation, nutrient cycling and temperature. How such changes might affect species interactions is important, not just through the presence or absence of interactions, but also because the patterning of interaction strengths among species is intimately associated with community stability. Interaction strengths encompass such properties as feeding rates and assimilation efficiencies, and encapsulate functionally important information with regard to ecosystem processes. Interaction strengths represent the pathways and transfer of energy through an ecosystem. We review the best empirical data available detailing the frequency distribution of interaction strengths in communities. We present the underlying (but consistent) pattern of species interactions and discuss the implications of this patterning. We then examine how such a basic pattern might be affected given various scenarios of 'change' and discuss the consequences for community stability and ecosystem functioning.


The Earth's upper mantle may contain substantial amounts of water dissolved in nominally anhydrous minerals (NAMs) such as the Mg2SiO4 polymorphs, pyroxenes and garnets. This water, incorporated into the crystal lattice as hydrogen defects, can have a profound influence on the physical properties of the mantle, even when present at low concentrations. An understanding of these defects at the atomic level is therefore of fundamental importance for the development of models of the evolution and dynamics of the Earth's mantle.

The incorporation of hydrogen and its influence on the properties of NAMs has been an active area of research for almost three decades. High pressure synthesis of hydrous phases, analyzed using a range of spectroscopic techniques (see Kohn 2006; Libowitzky and Beran 2006; Rossman 2006), have yielded a wealth of information that allow us to determine the concentration of hydrogen that can be accommodated by various NAMs, and provide information on the mechanisms of uptake. However, these data are often complex, and difficult to interpret unambiguously. Computer simulation methods can offer real insights at the atomic level, often not accessible by experiment, and provide an alternative way to explore hydrogen defects in minerals.

The past 20 years have seen an explosion in the use of computational modeling to study a range of phenomena in minerals. These include the high-pressure behavior of mantle (Oganov and Price 2005) and core (Vocadlo et al. 2003) phases, diffusion (Walker et al. 2003), dislocation structures (Walker et al. 2005), and mineral surface reactivity (Kerisit et al. 2005). A broad introduction to the methods and applications to the geosciences is given in the recent MSA volume edited by Cygan and Kubicki (2001). In this chapter we explore the contribution of computational methods to the development of atomistic models of hydrogen …


The article is based on the reception theory by Hans Robert Jauss and analyses how Shakespeare's works were read, evaluated and interpreted in Lithuanian literature in the 19th to 21th centuries. Some traces of Shakespeare's works might be observed in letters by Povilas Višinskis and Zemaitė where Shakespearean drama is indicated as a canon of writing to be followed. It is interesting to note that Lithuanian exodus drama by Kostas Ostrauskas is based on the correspondence between Višinskis and Zemaitė. The characters of the play introduce the principles of the drama of the absurd. Gell's concept of distributed personhood offered by S. Greenblatt is very suitable for analysing modern Lithuanian literature that seeks a creative relationship with Shakespeare's works. The concept maintains that characters of particular dramas can break loose from the defined interpretative framework. Lithuanian exodus drama reinterprets Shakespeare's works and characters. The plays by Ostrauskas and Algirdas Landsbergis explore the variety of human existence and language, the absurd character of the artist, meaningless human existence and the critique of totalitarianism. Modern Lithuanian poetry interprets Shakespeare's works so that they serve as a way to contemplate the theme of modern writing, meaningless human existence, the tragic destiny of an individual and Lithuania, miserable human nature, the playful nature of literature, the clownish mask of the poet, the existential silence of childhood, the topic of life as a theatrical performance, the everyday experience of modern women in theatre. The most frequently interpreted dramas are Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth – Lithuanian literary imagination inscribed them into the field of existentialist and absurd literature.


Background and purpose: Dental caries or tooth decay is one of the most important health problems in human life. In addition, tooth decay is an infectious disease that affects all populations Worldwide. The purpose of this study was to determine the decayed, missing and filled teeth (DMFT) index among a representative sample of 8-12 years old school children in Zahedan City, Iran. Materials and Methods: This descriptive and cross-sectional study was performed in 2012-2013 on 1500 (774 girls and 726 boys) 8-12 years old students were randomly selected in Zahedan City (South East of Iran) to assess the DMFT index. The DMFT index was determined using the standard method suggested by World Health Organization (WHO) and data were analyzed using SPSS software (version 18.0) and presented as mean ± standard deviation (SD). Results: It was observed that 43.6% of the individuals had at least one teeth lesion. The mean and SD of DMFT value for all ages was 1.02 ± 1.36. Male children had higher mean DMFT score of 1.01 ± 1.41 compared with 1.00 ± 1.41 for females (P > 0.05). Also, maximum DMFT (1.38 ± 1.62) was observed among students that never seen a dentist per year. Analysis of variance analysis showed that there is not a significant correlation between DMFT index and brushing times. Conclusion: According to the results of this study, the mean DMFT scores in 8-12 years old students are lower than the global standards suggested by WHO. [Amirabadi F, *Bazrafshan E, Dehghan J, Zazouli MA. Evaluation of Decayed, Missing and Filled Teeth (DMFT) Index in the 8-12 Years Old Students of Zahedan City, Iran. IJHS 2015; 3(2): 52-60] http://jhs.mazums.ac.ir


Objective The study aimed to better define the epidemiology of idiopathic acute pancreatitis (IAP). Methods We identified admissions with primary diagnosis of acute pancreatitis (AP) in Nationwide Inpatient Sample between 1998 and 2007. Idiopathic AP was defined as all cases after excluding International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, codes for other causes of AP (including biliary, alcoholic, trauma, iatrogenic, hyperparathyroidism, hyperlipidemia, etc). Results Among the primary admissions for AP, 26.9% had biliary pancreatitis, 25.1% alcoholic, and 36.5% idiopathic. Idiopathic AP had estimated 81,8025 admissions with a mean hospitalization of 5.6 days. Patients with IAP accounted for almost half of the fatalities among the cases of AP (48.2%) and had a higher mortality rate than both patients with biliary pancreatitis and patients with alcoholic pancreatitis (1.9%, 1.5%, and 1.0%, respectively, P < 0.01). Forty-six percent of patients with biliary pancreatitis underwent cholecystectomy during the index hospitalization, compared with 0.42% of patients with IAP. Patients with IAP had a demographic distribution similar to that of patients with biliary AP (female predominant and older), which was distinct from patients with alcoholic pancreatitis (male predominant and younger). There was a gradual but steady decrease in the incidence of IAP, from 41% in 1998 to 30% in 2007. Conclusions Despite improving diagnostics, IAP remains a common clinical problem with a significant mortality. Standardization of the clinical management of these patients warrants further investigation.


An optimal symbol-by-symbol detection scheme for duobinary signaling (Class I PRS) which exploits the inherent correlation properties of partial response signaling (PRS) is postulated. Analytical results indicate a maximum improvement of approximately 0.7 dB over conventional split shaping duobinary detection at a 10-4error rate. Although duobinary signaling is emphasized, sufficient generality within the formulation is maintained to accommodate any class of PRS.


TO THE EDITOR: In the September 2007 issue of the Journal, David Mamo, M.D., M.Sc., et al. (1) reported that at clinically effective doses (10–30 mg/day) aripiprazole exerts more than 80% striatal dopamine D2 receptor occupancy in patients with schizophrenia. Correspondingly, higher striatal D2 occupancy (>90%) was associated with the development of extrapyramidal side effects (dystonia, parkinsonism). Aripiprazole was distinguished by a low serotonin 5-HT2:D2 affinity ratio (52% [SD=18%] versus 87% [SD=4%], respectively) and a low 5-HT1A receptor occupancy (mean=16%) (1). The authors implied that aripiprazole's partial D2 agonist properties accounted for a low propensity for extrapyramidal side effects. In several controlled trials, the rate of aripiprazole-induced extrapyramidal side effects was reported similar to placebo; however, it was the rate of aripiprazole-induced akathisia reported as being significantly higher (approximately 20%) in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar mania (2, 3). The estimated rate of aripiprazole-induced akathisia in naturalistic settings has been shown to be even higher (4). The pathophysiological mechanisms and treatment of akathisia differ from that of other extrapyramidal side effects. Anticholinergic agents that are efficacious in treating dystonia and parkinsonism are apparently ineffective in treating akathisia. In contrast, a robust anti-akathisia effect of mianserin and mirtazapine (both with marked 5-HT2A antagonism), comparable with propranolol (the drug of choice for treating akathisia), has consistently been shown in patients treated with firstgeneration antipsychotic agents, underscoring the role of 5HT2A receptor antagonism in the pathophysiology and treatment of akathisia (5). Preliminary evidence indicating an anti-akathisia effect of the selective 5-HT2A inverse agonist ACP-3 (6) supports this assumption. Notably, the 5-HT1A agonist buspirone was ineffective as an anti-akathisia agent (7). We suggest that aripiprazole's partial agonism at the D2 and 5HT1A receptors accounts for the low incidence of extrapyramidal side effects but does not "protect" against akathisia. Noteworthy, five (42%) of 12 participants in the study developed restlessness (1), which may well have been an expression of akathisia. A sufficient degree of the 5-HT2A antagonism and a high 5-HT2A:D2 occupancy ratio are essential to prevent or ameliorate drug-induced akathisia. Elucidation of pathophysiological mechanisms and efficacious treatment of akathisia are imperative because of akathisia's association with non-compliance and suicidal and violent behavior.


Fear is one of the oldest and most basic of human emotions. In this thesis, I will explore the topic of fear in relation to literature, both a staple of the horror genre as well as a device in literary works, as well as in my own writings. In addition, I will use Sigmund Freud's theory of the "uncanny" as a possible device to examine the complexities of fear and its effects both on the mind and body through the medium of literature, and, more specifically, where and how these notions are used within my own short stories. By exploring how and why certain fears are generated, we may be able to better examine our own reactions in this regard.


The deformed Calogero-Sutherland (CS) model is a quantum integrable system with arbitrary numbers of two types of particles and reducing to the standard CS model in special cases. We show that a known collective field description of the CS model, which is based on conformal field theory (CFT), is actually a collective field description of the deformed CS model. This provides a natural application of the deformed CS model in Wen's effective field theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE), with the two kinds of particles corresponding to electrons and quasi-hole excitations. In particular, we use known mathematical results about super Jack polynomials to obtain simple explicit formulas for the orthonormal CFT basis proposed by van Elburg and Schoutens in the context of the FQHE.


About the book: One of the issues underlying current debates between practitioners of art history, visual culture and aesthetics is whether the visual is a unique, irreducible category, or whether it can be assimilated with the textual or verbal without any significant loss. Can paintings, buildings or installations be 'read' in the way texts are read or deciphered, or do works of visual art ask for their own kind of appreciation? This is not only a question of choosing the right method in dealing with visual works of art, but also an issue that touches on the roots of the disciplines involved: can a case be made for the visual as an irreducible category of art, and if so, how is it best studied and appreciated? In this anthology, this question is approached from the angles of three disciplines: aesthetics, visual culture and art history. Unlike many existing overviews of visual culture studies, it includes both painting and architecture, and investigates historical ways of defining and appreciating the visual in their own, contemporary terms.

Dealing with the Visual will be of great use to advanced students because it offers an overview of current debates, and to graduate students and professionals in the field because the essays offer in-depth investigations of the methodological issues involved and various historical ways of defining visuality. The topics included range from early modern ways of viewing pictures and sixteenth-century views of Palladio's villas in their landscape settings to contemporary debate about whether there is life yet in painting.


The gum resin of the guggul tree Commiphora mukul has been used in Ayurvedic medicine since 600 B.C. to treat a wide variety of ailments, including obesity and lipid disorders. Although not well known in Western medicine, an extract of this resin (guggulipid) is clinically approved and widely used in India as a cholesterol-lowering agent. Urizar et al. show that guggulsterone, the active agent in this extract, is a potent antagonist ligand for the nuclear hormone receptor FXR. As the primary bile acid sensor, FXR plays a central role in cholesterol metabolism; thus, this antagonist function is likely to be the molecular basis for guggulsterone's lipid-lowering activity. These results raise the exciting possibility that FXR and other nuclear hormone receptors may mediate the effects of other biologically active natural products that could provide new leads for drug development. N. L. Urizar, A. B. Liverman, D. T. Dodds, F. V. Silva, P. Ordentlich, Y. Yan, F. J. Gonzalez, R. A. Heyman, D. J. Mangelsdorf, D. D. Moore, A natural product that lowers cholesterol as an antagonist ligand for FXR. Science 296, 1703-1706 (2002) [Abstract] [Full Text]


Background The variety of alarms from all types of medical devices has increased from 6 to 40 in the last three decades, with today's most critically ill patients experiencing as many as 45 alarms per hour. Alarm fatigue has been identified as a critical safety issue for clinical staff that can lead to potentially dangerous delays or nonresponse to actionable alarms, resulting in serious patient injury and death. To date, most research on medical device alarms has focused on the nonactionable alarms of physiological monitoring devices. While there have been some reports in the literature related to drug library alerts during the infusion pump programing sequence, research related to the types and frequencies of actionable infusion pump alarms remains largely unexplored. Objective The objectives of this study protocol are to establish baseline data related to the types and frequency of infusion pump alarms from the B. Braun Outlook 400ES Safety Infusion System with the accompanying DoseTrac Infusion Management Software. Methods The most recent consecutive 60-day period of backup hospital data received between April 2014 and February 2017 from 32 United States-based hospitals will be selected for analysis. Microsoft SQL Server (2012 - 11.0.5343.0 X64) will be used to manage the data with unique code written to sort data and perform descriptive analyses. A validated data management methodology will be utilized to clean and analyze the data. Data management procedures will include blinding, cleaning, and review of existing infusion data within the DoseTrac Infusion Management Software databases at each hospital. Patient-identifying data will be removed prior to merging into a dedicated and secure data repository. This pooled data will then be analyzed. Results This exploratory study will analyze the aggregate alarm data for each hospital by care area, drug infused, time of day, and day of week, including: overall infusion pump alarm frequency (number of alarms per active infusion), duration of alarms (average, range, median), and type and frequency of alarms distributed by care area. Conclusions Infusion pump alarm data collected and analyzed in this study will be used to help establish a baseline of infusion pump alarm types and relative frequencies. Understanding the incidences and characteristics of infusion pump alarms will result in more informed quality improvement recommendations to decrease and/or modify infusion pump alarms, and potentially reduce clinical staff alarm fatigue and improve patient safety.  Registered Report Identifier RR1-10.2196/10446


Globalization of trade means that intangible informational resources are now produced, bartered and consumed anywhere and everywhere defying jurisdictional borders. Intellectual property has moved into the mainstream of national economic and developmental planning; in the recent past it has also emerged as the central impetus in multilateral trade relations. The authors of this original and progressive textbook trace the evolving remits of intellectual property, which are rapidly expanding to embrace new subject matter and increase the scope of protection. This creates conflicts with current trade, development, cultural, ethical, human rights and economic mores.This book reflects on intellectual property as it stands at the crossroads of these values. It considers the challenges presented by such developments as the commodification of persona, the commons, and life itself. Most significantly perhaps, the book examines the impact of intellectual property on the international stage, especially in respect of trade, development, economics and biological and cultural diversity. It is sure to become an invaluable reference work for scholars and students of intellectual property, international law, public policy, politics, government, human rights and development, as well as legal practitioners.


Translations rendered by machine translation have been found to be error-prone when translating medical communication language. Issues are especially frequent when Persian is either the source or target language. The source of errors has been attributed to machine translation's utilization of word-for-word translation and disregard for the formulaic nature of language. The aim of this research was, then, to investigate how multiword units (MWUs) of formulaic language (FL) are processed by a commonly used machine translator, Google Translate (GT). To do this, a medical-specific corpus was created to identify non-transparent MWUs. Adopting the framework by Simpson-Vlach and Ellis' (2010) n-gram criteria for MWUs, 20 frequently occurring MWUs were identified in the corpus. A comparison of GT's results with manual translations suggests that GT did not take FL into consideration in 50% of the data. These findings have implications for improving the accuracy of machine translation algorithms and reducing processing time.


Visual perception depends on saccadic eye movements to bring objects of interest onto the fovea. To achieve this with continuing efficiency, the oculomotor system needs to calibrate saccades so that they reliably land on their targets. Saccades can be made to systematically miss their target by shifting its position during the saccade, when the observer is oblivious to such a change. As a result, saccadic magnitude will progressively adapt until the saccades finally land close to the artificially displaced target. This saccadic adaptation is thought to be spatially selective, dropping off with distance from the adapted target saccade vector. Although this is a robust finding, it is hard to envision an error in the oculomotor system that would make such spatially specific calibration in saccade landing sites necessary. Global adaptation mechanisms for overall gain in all directions, or in directions of specific ocular muscle groups would seem more ecologically valid. To test for global adaptation, we implemented an adaptation paradigm in which saccades had random directions and amplitudes, following a quasi random walk within the display. During each saccade the target was displaced 25% closer to the current fixation position. We found that adaptation was indeed spatially generalized and, moreover, developed very fast. In fact, saccades adapted faster than during traditional adaptation, where typically only one saccade vector is adapted. Our findings suggest that the generality and speed of saccadic adaptation depend on the distribution of feedback the oculomotor system receives. We conclude that a global saccadic correction occurs rapidly whereas directional selectivity is probably implemented by slower and later stages of adaptation.


Planning for Crime Prevention: A Transatlantic Perspective, Richard H. Schneider and Ted Kitchen, London, Routledge, 2002, xix + 331 pp., £24.99 (p/b) This book is certainly timely in its publication and attempts to tackle one of the tougher issues in both planning and crime prevention, namely, how can these two practices be truly integrated? Local authorities and police forces throughout the UK are still grappling with the implications of the Crime and Disorder Act, section 17 of which specifies that local authorities are required to consider crime prevention issues in connection to all their other duties. The general message of this book is twofold: first, it is advocating a partnership approach to `place-based' crime prevention involving both professionals and local communities and, second, it is calling for the accumulation of more empirical evidence in identifying `what works, what doesn't, what's promising' (Sherman et al., 1997) in attempts to reduce both crime and the fear of crime. In delivering this message the authors draw on policy development and case studies from the UK and the US and compare and contrast between the approaches, a theme which is taken throughout the book. The information is organised into three parts. Part I sets the context and introduces some of the key ideas and theories of place-based crime prevention planning. This kicks off with a general discussion about how important tackling crime and improving safety is for communities, and informs us that this is an important quality of life issue to many people; it explains the difference between peoplefs perception of risk (or fear of crime) and its true levels; and it gives some rather alarming figures on the costs of crime. Furthermore, the reader gets a commentary on the various methods by which crime has been contained: through punishment, through treatment of offenders, through treatment of crime targets and through place-based strategies. We are also given an account of crime rates and trends in both the UK and the US, which concludes that, in general over the last twenty years, the UK has been showing increases, whereas the US has shown decreases. While this is interesting, it leaves the reader a little frustrated since we get little detail of how this varies at the more local level, an issue which is central in the place-based approach. Chapter 3 is a gem, as it gives a historical account of the way in which humans have built defensive measures into their dwellings since they gave up on being hunter-gatherers. It includes illustrated case studies showing, for instance, the Tower of Jericho, a `motte and bailey' castle construction and the structure of Hadrian's Wall. Chapter 4 covers the definitions of what Schneider and Kitchen term `four theories' of place-based crime prevention; that is, defensible space, crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), situational crime prevention and environmental criminology. This is a brave attempt to categorise some of the important issues here, but the extent to which environmental criminology can be seen as a `theory' and not a field of study in its own right is debatable to say the least. The chapter is useful, however, for bringing together the information that practitioners, students and academics alike need in order to get a grasp of the philosophies that place-based prevention is built upon. Having assimilated the contextual information covered in Part I, the reader is keen to get his or her teeth into some meaty examples of policy and practice in place-based prevention and allow the fairly disconnected information from Part I to fall into place. This appears to be the purpose of Part II, entitled `Policy and Practice'. It begins with an account of American policy and practice, which we are informed is fairly fragmented and locally driven due to the structure of the American federal system. This produces great variability in the programmes adopted, which has the advantage that it allows innovation, but the disadvantage that prevention programmes are sometimes not seen as a priority by local agencies. …


Bidirectional vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system utilizes the batteries of parked electric-drivevehicles to provide energy storage and backup services in a power system. Such services in a V2G-equipped microgrid system can be used as an enabler of enhancing the renewable energy source (RES) penetration by storing the energy during the surplus of RES supply and supplying the energy during the lack of RES supply. In this research, we aim at enhancing the storage capacity of V2G system by introducing a novel vehicle-to-vehicle power transfer operation that runs on the top of V2G services. The vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) operation transfers the energy from the source vehicles (which are parked for relatively longer times) to the destination vehicles (which are parked for relatively shorter times). The depleted energy of the source vehicles is fulfilled by the surplus RES supply in the future. In this way, the destination vehicles are effectively charged by RES supply, thereby enhancing the storage capacity of the V2G system. We can also say that the V2V operation would become beneficial only when there is a sufficient amount of surplus RES supply in the future. We propose a decision rule to distinguish if a vehicle should be a source vehicle or a destination vehicle during the V2V operation. The decision rule is designed based on the two factors, namely the state-of-charge of vehicles battery, and the remaining time of vehicle to depart. In this research, we conduct a comprehensive study to analyze the impacts of state-of-charge and mobility pattern of vehicles on different performance metrics via simulation. The results shows that in order to achieve better performance of V2V operation, the state-of-charge of vehicles battery should be given more priority over the remaining time of vehicle to depart. The vehicle mobility pattern with unexpected departure greatly reduced the overall performance of the V2G system.


A general circulation model (GCM) and hydrological model SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) under forcing from A1B, B1, and A2 emission scenarios by 2030 were used to assess the implications of climate change on water balance of the Gorganrood River Basin (GRB). The results of MPEH5C models and multi-scenarios indicated that monthly precipitation generally decreases while temperature increases in various parts of the basin with the magnitude of the changes in terms of different stations and scenarios. Accordingly, seasonal ET will decrease throughout the GRB over the 2020s in all seasons except in summer, where a slight increase is projected for A1B and A2 scenarios. At annual scale, average quick flow and average low flow under the B1, A1B, and A2 scenarios are projected to decrease by 7.3 to 12.0% from the historical levels. Over the ensembles of climate change scenarios, the simulations project average autumn total flow declines of ∼10% and an overall range of 6.9 to 13.2%. In summer, the components of flow at the studied basin are expected to increase under A2 and A1B scenarios but will slightly decrease under B1 scenario. The study result addresses a likelihood of inevitable future climate change.


Thermal conductivity of HFC-152a was measured in a coaxial cylinder cell operating in a steady state. The measurements were performed along several quasi-isotherms between 300 and 455K in the gas phase and the liquid phase. The pressure range covered varies from 0.1 to 55 MPa. An empirical equation is presented which describes the thermal conductivity outside the critical region as a function of temperature and density from 300 to 455 K. A careful analysis of the various sources of error leads to an estimated uncertainty of approximately ′1.5%.


We describe 5 cases (4 males, 14-43 years old; 1 female, 61 years old) of primary cutaneous T-cell lymphoproliferative lesions expressing a CD8/granzyme/CD30-positive phenotype. Four cases were compatible with lymphomatoid papulosis (LyP) based on the clinical course, which was recurrent asymptomatic papular nodular lesions over years responding to methotrexate; granulomatous inflammation and lack of other inflammatory cell elements were characteristic. In 1 case, an initial erroneous diagnosis was made of aggressive epidermotropic CD8+ T-cell lymphoma. The fifth case in this series was first interpreted as representing primary cutaneous anaplastic large cell lymphoma but was later recategorized as primary cutaneous aggressive epidermotropic CD8+ cytotoxic T-cell lymphoma owing to the extent of extracutaneous dissemination, including testicular involvement and disease progression despite chemotherapeutic intervention. Although all cases of LyP showed sharp cytoplasmic membrane staining with perinuclear Golgi accentuation with CD30, the recategorized case of aggressive epidermotropic CD8 cytotoxic T-cell lymphoma manifested only a weak cytoplasmic staining pattern. CD8 LyP defines a distinctive entity with characteristic light microscopic and phenotypic findings and has a predilection for young males. CD30 expression can occur in other forms of CD8 lymphoproliferative disease unrelated to primary cutaneous anaplastic large cell lymphoma or LyP.


Accentuated striae (AS) are developmental defects in tooth enamel that form during periods of physiological stress, and have been used in skeletal studies to measure stress and health levels in past populations. However, the assumption that the presence of AS necessarily indicates poor health has not been sufficiently tested. This project builds on past research by investigating the relationship between AS and age at death, since the presence of more AS in younger individuals (those with a higher risk of dying) would support the relationship between AS and poor health. Analytical improvements for testing this relationship include a focus on individuals as the unit of analysis and the use of survival analysis, which corrects for some skeletal sample biases and allows for both juveniles and adults to be included. "Weak" and "strong" AS in permanent teeth from 85 medieval Danish skeletons (ages at death: 0-30 years) are identified in digital images of tooth thin sections and developed into individual defect chronologies using daily and long-period increments in enamel. Chronologies span the period from birth until death or canine crown completion, whichever occurs first. Survival analysis is used to test the relationship of AS in different periods of childhood to the risk of dying at subsequent ages. Weak AS occurring before age seven predict a lower risk of dying after age seven while strong AS show the opposite pattern. It could be that weak AS indicate "good" stress and should be distinguished from strong AS when trying to measure health for past populations. Strong AS occurring just between ages two and four are predictive of a lower risk of dying in that age interval, an example of the complex patterns of mortality selection during childhood. Research is needed to determine whether these patterns are population-specific; if populations vary in the ages of AS formation that are negatively and positively related to current or subsequent risk of dying, future comparisons of AS across populations will need to take this into account. The implications that these findings have for future enamel defect research and for interpreting health in medieval Denmark are discussed.


This paper presents a new sensorless vector control system for high performance induction motor drives fed by a matrix converter with nonlinearity compensation and disturbance observer. The nonlinear voltage distortion that is caused by commutation delay and on-state voltage drop in switching device is corrected by a new matrix converter modeling. The lumped disturbances such as parameter variation and load disturbance of the system are estimated by the radial basis function network (RBFN). An adaptive observer is also employed to bring better responses at the low speed operation. Experimental results are shown to illustrate the performance of the proposed system.


Dates: 2001-2009 These photographs come from a long-term and ongoing project concerned with how we perceive and are affected by changes in the places we inhabit. Each of the three places depicted here, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, finds itself in a precarious position relative to the "natural" demands of its geographic location. Eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded in 2005; as many of us now realize, most of the city is located below the level of the water that borders it. The probability of San Francisco experiencing a seismic event equal to or greater than the 1906 earthquake in the next 30 years, geologists tell us, is greater than 50 percent. And Las Vegas, still one of the fastest growing cities in the country, has no feasible long-term plan to keep its development from outstripping its ability to supply its inhabitants with fresh water. Due to where they are physically located, these cities in 50 years will most likely look nothing like they do now. Coincident to or perhaps because of its location, each of these cities has developed an identity that represents a diversion from the cultural norms associated with mainstream America. Many Americans I know prefer that what happens in Las Vegas stays there. San Francisco wears proudly its identity as a place of alternative lifestyles and liberal foment. New Orleans, known as the Big Easy for the ease with which musicians could find work, displays front and center its difference from the rest of America during its celebration of Mardi Gras. What should be an obvious truth, that a place's physical location and features have a profound affect on the lives and outlooks of its inhabitants, is often overlooked. Saying we live "in" a place, rather than "on" or "with" it, concedes how entirely a place encompasses us physically. It acknowledges the pervasive affect the place's external imperatives have upon our psyches, our perceptions of self and others, and the desires we pursue. Now that popular consensus is embracing the fact that our world is growing warmer, the uncertain futures these three cities face today may well be harbingers of change facing the places we all live in. Has a sequence of events already been set in motion that will irrevocably alter how and where all of us will be able to live? And if so, how will this fact affect how we relate to each other and to the places we inhabit? These photographs describe relationships between elements in the landscape that are specific to a particular day, hour, and fraction of a second. Some were made seven years ago, some just a few months ago. What is important to keep in mind is that each triptych (or multiple image panoramic) presented here comprises a series of individual and distinct photographs. Each individual "frame" within the triptych is its own point in time and each corresponds to a distinct piece of film that I exposed and developed. Taking in the scene presented by the triptych is * email: email@example.com Consilience Kolster: Changing Places analogous to how each of us encounters a prospect. By pausing slightly and regularly we set into motion a mental "imagining" in order to see things more completely. I hope each piece's particularity, its reference to a specific location in time as well as space, stimulates speculation about how different that place appears at this very moment, were you able to behold it for yourself. And more exciting is to ponder what it might look like tomorrow, next month, and 50 years hence.


Sex assessment plays an important role in the forensic and bioarchaeological spheres. Teeth are invaluable elements in non-living populations for sex determination, since they commonly resist post-mortem damages and are latent sources of information about dimorphism. Aim: The present study consisted in an odontometric analysis willing to examine sexual dimorphism in Uruguayans. Methods: One hundred and twelve inferior dental stone casts, 56 from males and 56 from females, aged between 21 and 60 years, from one orthodontic clinic of Montevideo, capital of Uruguay, were analyzed. Several measurements and calculations were made, such as mesiodistal diameter and gingivoincisal length of mandibular canines, intercanine distance, mandibular canine index and the area of a virtual triangle. Results: Only mesiodistal diameter and gingivoincisal length of right canine, and the area of the triangle showed statistically significant differences between both sexes. The authors obtained a logistic regression model for sex determination with a reliability rate of 72.3% and a classification and regression tree with an accuracy of 77.7%. Conclusions: The results revealed that this method can be applied in forensic anthropology, as an auxiliary tool in human identification.


The DEMO plant will demonstrate by mid-century the feasibility of electric power generation by nuclear fusion. In the scope of design studies coordinated by the European Commission, CRPP and ENEA are developing two force flow conductor layouts as candidates for the toroidal field (TF) coils of DEMO. The operating conditions include 82 kA operating current and 13.5 T peak field, placing the DEMO TF conductor at substantially higher performance compared to the ITER TF (68 kA/11.5 T). The innovative winding layout is graded, layer wound with Nb3Sn/NbTi hybridization for both conductor designs, aiming at minimizing the size and the cost of the superconductor: one of the conductors is a wind and react cable-in-conduit conductor with reduced void fraction and has a rectangular shape. The other conductor is a react and wind flat cable with copper segregation and thick conduit assembled by longitudinal weld. The conductor designs were first drafted in 2012 and reviewed in 2013 based on a first round of assessments and on an updated requirements catalog. The manufacture of full-size prototypes is planned in 2014.


We report on a search for electronic recoil event rate modulation signatures in the XENON100 data accumulated over a period of 4 yr, from January 2010 to January 2014. A profile likelihood method, which incorporates the stability of the XENON100 detector and the known electronic recoil background model, is used to quantify the significance of periodicity in the time distribution of events. There is a weak modulation signature at a period of 431_{-14}^{+16} day in the low energy region of (2.0-5.8) keV in the single scatter event sample, with a global significance of 1.9σ; however, no other more significant modulation is observed. The significance of an annual modulation signature drops from 2.8σ, from a previous analysis of a subset of this data, to 1.8σ with all data combined. Single scatter events in the low energy region are thus used to exclude the DAMA/LIBRA annual modulation as being due to dark matter electron interactions via axial vector coupling at 5.7σ.


A complete set-up for local annealing of Shape Memory Alloys (SMA) is proposed. Such alloys, when plastically deformed at a given low temperature, have the ability to recover a previously memorized shape simply by heating up to a higher temperature. They find more and more applications in the fields of robotics and micro engineering. There is a tremendous advantage in using local annealing because this process can produce monolithic parts, which have different mechanical behavior at different location of the same body. Using this approach, it is possible to integrate all the functionality of a device within one piece of material. The set-up is based on a 2W-laser diode emitting at 805nm and a scanner head. The laser beam is coupled into an optical fiber of 60(mu) in diameter. The fiber output is focused on the SMA work-piece using a relay lens system with a 1:1 magnification, resulting in a spot diameter of 60(mu) . An imaging system is used to control the position of the laser spot on the sample. In order to displace the spot on the surface a tip/tilt laser scanner is used. The scanner is positioned in a pre-objective configuration and allows a scan field size of more than 10 x 10 mm2. A graphical user interface of the scan field allows the user to quickly set up marks and alter their placement and power density. This is achieved by computer controlling X and Y positions of the scanner as well as the laser diode power. A SMA micro-gripper with a surface area less than 1 mm2 and an opening of the jaws of 200(mu) has been realized using this set-up. It is electrically actuated and a controlled force of 16mN can be applied to hold and release small objects such as graded index micro-lenses at a cycle time of typically 1s.


A non-binary Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) can be solved directly using extended versions of binary techniques. Alternatively, the non-binary problem can be translated into an equivalent binary one. In this case, it is generally accepted that the translated problem can be solved by applying well-established techniques for binary CSPs. In this paper we evaluate the applicability of the latter approach. We demonstrate that the use of standard techniques for binary CSPs in the encodings of non-binary problems is problematic and results in models that are very rarely competitive with the non-binary representation. To overcome this, we propose specialized arc consistency and search algorithms for binary encodings, and we evaluate them theoretically and empirically. We consider three binary representations; the hidden variable encoding, the dual encoding, and the double encoding. Theoretical and empirical results show that, for certain classes of non-binary constraints, binary encodings are a competitive option, and in many cases, a better one than the non-binary representation.


Starting in 1996 and continuing into 1997, there were several major sampling and analysis campaigns undertaken to characterize the contents of the Active Liquid Low-Level Waste (LLLW) tanks located at ORNL and the Old Hydrofracture Facility (OHF) tanks located in Melton Valley within Waste Area Grouping (WAG) 5. The active LLLW tanks include the Melton Valley Storage Tanks (MVST) and the Bethel Valley Evaporator Service Tanks (BVEST). The characterization data obtained for these campaigns are summarized in three earlier ORNL technical reports. Included in these reports are data which addresses waste processing options, performance assessment (PA) for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), criticality concerns, and DOT requirements for transporting the waste. Also, included is an evaluation of the waste`s characteristics with respect to the waste acceptance criteria (WAC) for WIPP and Nevada Test Site (NTS). As part of these campaigns there were also other miscellaneous tests performed and data collected to address important engineering and remediation issues that were not included in the previous reports. These miscellaneous tests are summarized in this report and include (1) fusion preparations for total anion analysis on selected MVST, BVEST, and OHF sludges, (2) settling tests performed on the BVEST and OHF sludges, (3) dried density data for the MVST sludges, (4) particle size analysis on selected BVEST and OHF sludges, and (5) the analysis of hydroxylamine in the BVEST supernates and sludges. Also, the viscosity and flow curves for BVEST waste are restated in this report using apparent viscosity with further detail included about the flow characteristics that were observed.


The present paper is firstly concerned with protections of investors in the Italian legislation and within a European context. Part I shall discuss in detail the definition of 'investors' as consumers in the European as well as in the Italian legislation. Part I shall therefore provide the reader with sufficient constructive elements in order to understand the present inconsistencies of definitions that instead deserve the utmost attention at both European and national levels. Secondly, in contrast with a legislative policy that seems to encourage recourse to private remedies, the argument supported in Part II of this paper questions the effectiveness of excessive private remedies if they are not buttressed by a consistent and rational framework. After dealing with the Italian offer of out-of-court settlement procedures (guarantee indemnification funds; no-fault funds) and collective redress procedures (collective injunctions; damages class actions; compulsory settlement), the argument put forward in Part II of this paper is that private remedies and access to justice lack clarity and are still excessively complex. An efficient protective system should first seriously enforce public remedies available (criminal sanctions and fines); secondly, it should simplify remedies and access to justice through the establishment of a hierarchy of remedies mandatory settlement attempts should come first, leading to an indemnity guarantee and excluding other ordinary suits. Only in case of failure an ordinary lawsuit may then be brought, either via individual actions or through class actions for damages, leading eventually to the awarding of economic damages. Last: access to indemnity funds should be permitted only in cases of defendant insolvency.


The abundance of the cell adhesion molecule N-cadherin is one factor that contributes to dendritic spine plasticity. When N-cadherin activity is compromised, spine number is decreased. Yasuda et al. found that conditions that stimulate excitatory synapses, such as maximal electroconvulsive seizure in mice or application of glutamate or agents that elevate the concentration of adenosine 3′,5′-monophosphate (cAMP) to cultured hippocampal neurons, increased the abundance of arcadlin, a protocadherin protein that was recruited to excitatory dendrites. Furthermore, arcadlin coimmunoprecipitated with N-cadherin from rat hippocampi after stimulation, as well as from transfected cultured cells. Cultured cells transfected with arcadlin and N-cadherin exhibited diminished homophilic adhesiveness. Stimulated hippocampal cultures exhibited decreased abundance of N-cadherin at the cell surface (based on a surface biotinylation assay and immunofluorescent analysis). In neurons cultured from acad–/– mice, increases in cAMP concentration did not decrease N-cadherin surface abundance. A yeast two-hybrid screen identified a kinase that the authors named TAO2β, which appears to be an alternative splice variant of TAO2, as a protein that interacted with arcadlin. This interaction was confirmed by coimmunoprecipitation of the two proteins from hippocampi of mice after maximal electroconvulsive seizure and in colocalization studies in transfected cells. TAO2 is a mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase kinase (MAPKKK), and when transfected cells or primary cultures of rat hippocampal neurons were treated with the arcadlin extracellular domain (Acad-EC) to ligate the arcadlin proteins, phosphorylated mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase 3 (MEK3) and p38 MAPK were detected, suggesting that TAO2β is also a p38 MAPKKK. The abundance of arcadlin at the cell surface, as well as that of N-cadherin, was decreased in response to Acad-EC through a mechanism that required TAO2β and p38 activity. TAO2 could not substitute for TAO2β in triggering arcadlin endocytosis, yet endocytosis required p38, suggesting a possible feedback mechanism depending on TAO2β. Indeed, in vitro phosphorylation assays confirmed that TAO2β was a substrate for p38, and, in cells transfected with mutants that lacked the phosphorylation site, the importance of this phosphorylation for triggering endocytosis of arcadlin was confirmed. Finally, the increase in spine density seen in cultured neurons from acad–/– mice was reversed by knockdown of N-cadherin. Thus, arcadlin appears to link the endocytosis of N-cadherin to excitatory stimuli through a MAPK pathway. S. Yasuda, H. Tanaka, H. Sugiura, K. Okamura, T. Sakaguchi, U. Tran, T. Takemiya, A. Mizoguchi, Y. Yagita, T. Sakurai, E. M. De Robertis, Activity-induced protocadherin arcadlin regulates dendritic spine number by triggering N-cadherin endocytosis via TAO2β and p38 MAP kinases. Neuron 56, 456-471 (2007). [PubMed]


In order to save time in extracting specific information from high volume of data in web documents, this paper proposes an architectural model of generic web document classification system using design patterns for classifying web documents. This work implements two classification techniques for classifying Thai web documents, namely centroid classification and neural network classification, based on the proposed model and compares their classification effectiveness empirically. The training data sets in this experiment consist of 500 web documents of the following five categories (100 documents for each category): mobile phone sales, book sales, travel sales, education information and company profile. Another two hundred and fifty web documents were then used to test the two classifiers. The experiment results showed that the centroid classifier outperforms the neural network classifier both in term of efficiency and effectiveness.


Ionising radiation induces complex molecular responses in human cells resulting in changes at mRNA and protein expression. Limited data is available on the transcriptional status of functional genes in response to ionising radiation using peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs). In the present study, transcriptional profiles of Histone 2B , CTP synthase and PLK3 were studied. Blood samples were collected from ten random healthy males with informed consent. Whole blood irradiation was done at four different dose groups (0.3, 0.6, 1.0 and 2.0 Gy) at a dose rate of 0.68 Gy/minute. PBMCs were separated immediately as well as 4 hours post-irradiation. Total RNA was isolated, transcribed to cDNA and real-time quantitative PCR was performed. Our results revealed a dose-dependent significant upregulation at H2B and CTP synthase at 4 hours post-irradiation. At PLK3 significant upregulation was observed at 2.0 Gy ( P = 0.007). In conclusion, these genes can be used for population monitoring programme.


The main statement of the essay is that these days the rigid frames of the classical social class–identity are fading. In relation with profit and labour market, post–modern dimensions have appears (common values, and cultural medium) and the creative social class, which is deeply rooted in this medium, can be characterised with new entity. With the strengthening of the creative class, the interpretation which is based on the consciousness of urban life, on information, multiculturalism and the exchange of concepts and lifestyles are getting stronger. This study, based on the author's doctoral thesis in a revision form attempts to introduce the way of information society-type of development on the Great Plain. To shed light on its many-sidedness ranging from the falling behind to the creative groups due to the modernisation process.


The emergence of citizen journalism has prompted the journalism field and scholars to readdress what constitutes journalism and who is a journalist. Citizen journalists have disrupted news-media ecosystems by challenging the veracity and representativeness of information flowing from mainstream news-media newsrooms. However, the controversy related to the desired level of citizen involvement in the news process is a historical debate that began before the citizen-journalism phenomenon. As early as the 1920s, journalist and political commentator Walter Lippman and American philosopher John Dewey debated the role of journalism in democracy, including the extent that the public should participate in the news-gathering and production processes.
 This questioning of citizen involvement in news reemerged as an issue with the citizen journalism phenomenon around the late 1990s. People with no news-media organizational ties have taken advantage of the convenience and low cost of social computing technologies by publishing their own stories and content. These people are referred to as citizen journalists. Scholars have assessed the quality and credibility of citizen-journalism content, finding that citizen journalists have performed well on several standards of traditional news-content quality. Levels of quality differ dependent upon citizen journalists' goals and motivations, such as serving the public interest, increasing self-status, or expressing their creative selves.
 As it is an emerging area of study, unarticulated theoretical boundaries of citizen journalism exist. Citizen-journalism publications emphasize community over conflict, advocacy over objectivity, and interpretation over fact-based reporting. In general, citizen journalists have historically acted when existing news-media journalists were not fully meeting their community's informational needs. Scholars, however, vary in how they label citizen journalists and how they conceptually and empirically define citizen journalism. For example, researchers have shifted their definitional focus on citizen journalists from one of active agents of democratic change to people who create a piece of news content. The mapping of the citizen-journalism literature revealed four types of citizen journalists based on their levels of editorial control and contribution type: (1) participatory, (2) para, (3) news-media watchdog, and (4) community. Taken together, these concepts describe the breadth of citizen-journalist types. For those of us interested in journalism studies, a more targeted approach in the field of citizen journalism can help us build community around scholarship, understand citizen journalists' contributions to society and practice, and create a more a stable foundation of knowledge concerning people who create and comment on news content.


Air pollutants have been shown to cause a vast amount of different adverse health effects. These effects include impairment of many respiratory (e.g. asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and cardiovascular (ischemic heart disease, infarction, stroke) diseases. However, in recent years, the evidence showing effects beyond the lungs and circulatory system are becoming more evident. Neurological diseases, namely Alzheimer´s disease (AD) has shown to be associated with living near traffic. However, reason for this has remained unresolved until today. Our new H2020 project TUBE aims on revealing the mechanisms of action of ultrafine particles involved in neurological diseases. The TUBE consortium includes experts in areas of aerosol technology, emission research, engine and fuel research, human clinical studies, epidemiology, emission inventories, inhalation toxicology, neurotoxicology and disease mechanism studies. This enables research of resolving the effects of nanoparticles from different traffic modes for both air quality and concomitant toxic effect of these air pollutants. We will investigate adverse effects of air pollutants using cell cultures, animal exposures and volunteered human exposures as well as the material from epidemiological cohort study. These are going to be compared according to inflammatory, cytotoxic and genotoxic changes and furthermore beyond the current state of the art to neurotoxic and brain health effects. With this approach, we are aiming to a comprehensive understanding of the adverse brain effects of nanoparticles from traffic.


Data Augmentation for Information Transfer Why Controlling for Confounding Effects in Radiomic Studies is Important and How to do it Michael Götz, Klaus Maier-Hein Medical Image Computing Group, Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (DKFZ) email@example.com The major goal of radiomics studies is the identification of predictive and reliable markers. It is, therefore, crucial to account for unwanted confounding effects that affect the radiomic features like scanning noise, annotator bias, or the used imaging device and parameter. Usually, these confounding effects are not sufficiently represented in the main cohort of radiomics studies and consequently are investigated in smaller side-studies. Within our study [1], we looked into two questions: a) are those side-studies necessary and b) how to use the information from those studies on the feature stability in the radiomics modelling process. For this, three different methods for incorporating prior knowledge into a radiomics modelling process were compared: the näıve approach (ignoring feature quality), the most common approach consisting of removing unstable features based on correlation ranking, and a novel approach using data augmentation for information transfer (DAFIT). The predictive power and the ability to estimate the predictive power were assessed by looking at the ROC Area under Curve (AUC) and the difference between the AUC from data with and data without confounding effects present. Synthetic and publicly available real lung imaging patient data were used for the experiments.The experiments showed the importance of controlling for confounding effects. Differences between the estimated and true performance of a model of up to 20 and 25 percentage points for real and synthetic data, respectively, showed the possible impact of ignoring confounding effects. Removing unstable features improved the performance estimation, while slightly decreasing the model performance, i.e. decreasing the area under curve achieved with the model. We argue that the reduction of features led to an effective reduction of information that is available to build the model. This point is addressed by the proposed approach, which performed superior both in terms of the estimation of the model performance and the actual model performance.


A compelling and perceptive tale of intimacy, memory and relationships from the No.1 bestselling author. How can you know someone you've never met? Joyce Conway remembers things she shouldn't. She knows about tiny cobbled streets in Paris, which she has never visited. And every night she dreams about an unknown little girl with blonde hair. Justin Hitchcock is divorced, lonely and restless. He arrives in Dublin to give a lecture on art and meets an attractive doctor, who persuades him to donate blood. It's the first thing to come straight from his heart in a long time. When Joyce leaves hospital after a terrible accident, with her life and her marriage in pieces, she moves back in with her elderly father. All the while, a strong sense of deja vu is overwhelming her and she can't figure out why ...


This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Algorithms for Computational Biology, AlCoB 2016, held in Trujillo, Spain, in June 2016. The 13 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 23 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: biological networks and modelling; biological structure processing; phylogenetics; and sequence analysis and rearrangement. In addition one invited talk is included


Abstract : This paper presents a practical solution to the problem of high-fan-in, high-bandwidth synchronized TCP workloads in datacenter Ethernets-the Incast problem. In these networks, receivers often experience a drastic reduction in throughput when simultaneously requesting data from many servers using TCP. Inbound data overfills small switch buffers, leading to TCP timeouts lasting hundreds of milliseconds. For many datacenter workloads that have a synchronization requirement (e.g., file system reads and parallel data intensive queries), incast can reduce throughput by up to 90%. Our solution for incast uses high-resolution timers in TCP to allow for microsecond-granularity timeouts. We show that this technique is effective in avoiding incast using simulation and real-world experiments. Last, we show that eliminating the minimum retransmission timeout bound is safe for all environments, including the wide-area.


About this book: 'Neural Network Theory is a major contribution to the neural network literature. It is a treasure trove that should be mined by the thousands of researchers and practitioners worldwide who have not previously had access to the fruits of Soviet and Russian neural network research. Dr. Galushkin is to be congratulated and thanked for his completion of this monumental work; a book that only he could write. It is a major gift to the world.' Robert Hecht Nielsen, Computational Neurobiology, University of California, San Diego 'Professor Galushkin's monograph has many unique features that in totality make his work an important contribution to the literature of neural network theory. He and his publisher deserve profuse thanks and congratulations from all who are seriously interested in the foundations of neural network theory, its evolution and current status.' otfi Zadeh, Berkeley, Founder of Fuzziness 'Professor Galushkin, a leader in neural network theory in Russia, uses mathematical methods in combination with complexity theory, nonlinear dynamics and optimization, concepts that are solidly grounded in Russian tradition. His theory is expansive: covering not just the traditional topics such as network architecture, it also addresses neural continua in function spaces. I am pleased to see his theory presented in its entirety here, for the first time for many, so that the both theory he developed and the approach he took to understand such complex phenomena can be fully appreciated.' Sun-Ichi Amari, Director of RIKEN Brain Science Institute RIKEN


There is no sharp dividing line between the foundations of physics and philosophy of physics. This is especially true for quantum mechanics. The Author proposes a treatise devoted to the foundations of quantum physics and the role that causality plays in the microscopic world governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. There is no sharp dividing line between physics and philosophy of physics. This is especially true for quantum physics where debate on its interpretation and the status of the various entities postulated has raged in both the scientific and philosophical communities since the 1920s and continues to this day. Although it is readily granted that quantum mechanics produces some strange and counter-intuitive results, it is argued in [i]Quantum Causality[/i] that quantum mechanics is not as weird as we might have been led to believe. – The dominant theory of quantum mechanics is called Orthodox Quantum Theory (also known as the Copenhagen Interpretation). Orthodox Quantum Theory is a 'theoretical tool' for making predictions for the possible results of experiments on quantum systems and requires the intervention of an observer or an observer's proxy ([i]e.g.[/i] a measuring apparatus) in order to produce predictions. Orthodox Quantum Theory does away with the notion of causality and denies the existence of an underlying quantum realm. – The Causal Theory is not well known within the physics community and many physicists who do know of it are generally dismissive in their attitudes. This is a historical legacy inherited by the majority of the physics community from the most influential founders of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. They both denied the independent existence of a quantum level of reality and declared that causality does not apply to quantum events. – [i]Quantum Causality[/i] shows that the Causal Theory of Quantum Mechanics is a viable physical theory that provides realistic explanations for quantum phenomena. Much of what is argued for in this book will be controversial but, at the very least, these arguments will likely engender some lively debate on the various issues raised. – Chapter 1, General Introduction; – Chapter 2, Preliminaries; – Chapter 3, The Causal Theory of Quantum Mechanics; – Chapter 4, Energy and the Wave Field; – Chapter 5, Energy-Momentum Transfer and the Quantum Potential; – Chapter 6, The Exclusion Principle; – Chapter 7, Conclusions. M.-M. V.


One of the major environmental concerns associated with waste disposal is the large amount of generated landfill leachates (LL), which are considered a type of wastewater with a complex composition. There is an urgent need to find an effective LL treatment method. LL were subjected to pretreatment followed by the Fe0/H2O2 process. Pretreatment efficiency was coagulation at pH 6.0 >> coagulation at pH 9.0 > acidification at pH 3.0. Coagulation at pH 6.0 in an optimal Fe3+ dose of 1000 mg/L decreased total organic carbon (TOC) from the initial concentration of 1061 mg/L to 491 mg/L while acidification to pH 3.0 decreased TOC to 824 mg/L. After acidification, the Fe0/H2O2 process with 8000/9200 mg/L Fe0/H2O2 reagent doses decreased TOC to 499 mg/L after a processing time of 60 min. Performance of the Fe0/H2O2 process after coagulation at pH 6.0 for optimal Fe0/H2O2 8000/5540 mg/L reagent doses decreased TOC to 268 mg/L (75% TOC removal). Treatment of landfill leachates with combined process coagulation and Fe0/H2O2 also increased their susceptibility to biodegradation, expressed as the biochemical oxygen demand/chemical oxygen demand (BOD5/COD) ratio from 0.13 to 0.43, allowing LL to be considered as susceptible to biodegradation. Fe0/H2O2 process kinetics was described. A statistical analysis confirmed the obtained results. The proposed method can be successfully applied for LL treatment.