This study is the third of a series of seven, and belongs to the second Italian systematic replication of findings from two previous series (Widdowson 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2013; Benelli, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c) that investigated the effectiveness of a manualised transactional analysis treatment for depression through Hermeneutic Single-Case Efficacy Design (HSCED). Major Depression and Subthreshold Depression are often in comorbidity with Anxiety disorders in childhood and adolescence and represent a risk factor for ongoing mental health problems in adulthood. The therapist was a white Italian woman with 15 years of clinical experience and the client, Deborah, was a 15-year old white Italian female adoloscent who attended sixteen sessions of transactional analysis psychotherapy. The conclusion of the judges was that this was a good-outcome case: the depressive and anxious symptomatology clinically and reliably improved over the course of the therapy and these improvements were maintained throughout the duration of the follow-up intervals. Furthermore, the client reported significant change in her post-treatment interview and these changes were directly attributed to the therapy. In this case study, the transactional analysis manualised treatment for depression in adulthood has demonstrated its effectiveness also in treating depressive and anxiety symptoms in adolescence .


The current study was carried out in both pot and field conditions to investigate the effects of three KSB strains of Pantoea agglomerans, Rahnella aquatilis and Pseudomonas orientalis on nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P) and potassium (K) uptake, nutrient use efficiency parameters and nutrients remobilization in rice (Oryza sativa L. cv. Pajohesh). The experiments included 15 treatments of KSB inoculations, commercial K biofertilizer and K chemical fertilizer. The results showed that the inoculums of all three KSB strains increased the K, N and P uptake by grain and straw, especially when applied in combination with 1/2 K chemical fertilizer (47.5 Kg/ha) as compared to the control treatment. The highest value of available K in the soil obtained from NPK chemical fertilizer equal to 140.1 and 134.6 mg K per kg of soil in the pot and field experiments, respectively, which were significantly higher than KSB inoculations treatments. Bacterial inoculums coupled with 1/2 K chemical fertilizer also enhanced the nutrient use efficiency (including agronomic efficiency (AE), apparent recovery efficiency (ARE), physiological efficiency (PE), agro-physiological efficiency (APE), internal utilization efficiency (UE), partial factor productivity (PFP), partial nutrient balance (PNB)) and nutrient remobilization. The results indicated that the bioinoculation with these KSB strains isolated from soil paddy could be considered as an effective way to increase potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus uptake by rice plant and enhance their use efficiency and remobilization to grains in the flooding irrigation conditions.


Although there is an established body of work arguing that teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) is necessary for designing ICT-integrated lessons, little is known about the relationships among teachers' beliefs about learning, their design dispositions, learning design practices and TPACK. Critical inquiry in this aspect is timely as a new culture of learning is emerging from the informal contexts of learning and challenging how school-based learning should be designed to foster 21st century competencies. In this study, a survey instrument was developed to assess and investigate the relationships among pre-service teachers' beliefs about the new culture of learning and school-based learning, their design dispositions, learning design practices and relevant factors of TPACK. Based on the sample size of 223 pre-service teachers in Singapore, the validation shows that the relevant factors pertaining to TPACK, teachers' beliefs and design were distinctive. The study shows that teachers' beliefs about learning and their design capacities changed along with their TPACK efficacy. It also identified factors that might affect teachers' competencies needed to design lessons that could cultivate a new 21st century culture of learning. Implications of the relationships among teachers' beliefs about learning, their design capacities and TPACK to foster 21st century competencies are discussed.


I propose that the notion of cognitive state be broadened from the current predicate-symbolic, Language-of-Thought framework to a multi-modal one, where perception and kinesthetic modalities participate in thinking. In contrast to the roles assigned to perception and motor activities as modules external to central cognition in the currently dominant theories in AI and Cognitive Science, in the proposed approach, central cognition incorporates parts of the perceptual machinery. I motivate and describe the proposal schematically, and describe the implementation of a bi-modal version in which a diagrammatic representation component is added to the cognitive state. The proposal explains our rich multimodal internal experience, and can be a key step in the realization of embodied agents. The proposed multimodal cognitive state can significantly enhance the agent's problem solving.


Near Infrared (NIR) extinction measurements can be used to determine the cerebral hemodynamics of adult patients. To be able to interpret and verify measurement data, it is necessary to know the three-dimensional light intensity distribution in the human head. This light intensity map can advantageously be created by numerical simulations. Such simulations of light intensity in the head are complex, since the light is crossing several tissue types with very distinct optical properties. The Monte-Carlo method proved to represent a reliable tool for simulation of light intensity in turbid media. The desired result of a Monte-Carlo simulation is the spatially resolved average light intensity, which has to be derived from the statistical output of the Monte- Carlo simulation. We propose a novel analysis method which directly tracks the intensity based on a linedrawing algorithm to attain a 3D intensity map of the whole computational domain. The proposed method largely operates independently of the underlying Monte-Carlo algorithm itself. The algorithm is verified through comparison with analytical approximations of the Radiative Transport Equation. As a challenging example, the simulation of the light intensity distribution inside the human head based on segmented MRI data is presented.


As multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar gains popularity, more efficient and better-performing detection algorithms are developed to exploit the benefits of having more transmitters and receivers. Many of these algorithms are based on the assumption that the multiple waveforms used for target scanning are orthogonal to each other in fast time. It has been shown that this assumption can limit the practical detector performance due to the reduction of the area that is clear of sidelobes in the MIMO radar ambiguity function. In this work it is shown that using the same waveform with a different carrier frequency and/or delay across different transmitters ensures relative waveform orthogonality while alleviating the negative effects on the ambiguity function. This is demonstrated in a practical scenario where the probing waveforms consist of Gaussian pulse trains (GPTs) separated in frequency. An approximate theoretical model of the ambiguity is proposed and it is shown that the effects of cross-ambiguity in the MIMO system are negligible compared to the waveform autoambiguities.


We describe RavenClaw, a new dialog management framework developed as a successor to the Agenda [1] architecture used in the CMU Communicator. RavenClaw introduces a clear separation between task and discourse behavior specification, and allows rapid development of dialog management components for spoken dialog systems operating in complex, goal-oriented domains. The system development effort is focused entirely on the specification of the dialog task, while a rich set of domain-independent conversational behaviors are transparently generated by the dialog engine. To date, RavenClaw has been applied to five different domains allowing us to draw some preliminary conclusions as to the generality of the approach. We briefly describe our experience in developing these systems.


The Federal Communications Commission's Network Neutrality Order regulates how broadband networks explain their services to customers, mandates that subscribers be permitted to deploy whatever computers, mobile devices, or applications they like for use with the network access service they purchase, imposes a prohibition upon unreasonable discrimination in network management such that Internet Service Provider efforts to maintain service quality (e.g. mitigation congestion) or to price and package their services do not burden rival applications. This paper offers legal and economic critique of the new Network Neutrality policy and particularly the no blocking and no discrimination rules. While we argue the FCC's rules are likely to be declared beyond the scope of the agency's charter, we focus upon the economic impact of net neutrality regulations. It is beyond paradoxical that the FCC argues that it is imposing new regulations so as to preserve the Internet's current economic structure; that structure has developed in an unregulated environment where firms are free to experiment with business models - and vertical integration - at will. We demonstrate that Network Neutrality goes far further than existing law, categorically prohibiting various forms of economic integration in a manner equivalent to antitrust's per se rule, properly reserved for conduct that is so likely to cause competitive harm that the marginal benefit of a fact-intensive analysis cannot be justified. Economic analysis demonstrates that Network Neutrality cannot be justified upon consumer welfare grounds. Further, the Commission's attempt to justify its new policy simply ignores compelling evidence that "open access" regulations have distorted broadband build-out in the United States, visibly reducing subscriber growth when imposed and visibly increasing subscriber growth when repealed. On the other, the FCC manages to cite just one study - not of the broadband market - to support its claims of widespread foreclosure threats. This empirical study, upon closer scrutiny than the Commission appears to have given it, actually shows no evidence of anti-competitive foreclosure. This fatal analytical flaw constitutes a smoking gun in the FCC's economic analysis of net neutrality.


A single stage reversed phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP HPLC) separation of animal fat triacylglycerols (TAGs) has been developed for coupling with atmospheric pressure chemical ionization tandem mass spectrometry using an ion trap mass spectrometer. The method developed offers significant improvements on existing methods for TAG analysis, giving better resolution of TAGs with similar equivalent carbon number (ECN), and good separation of TAGs with odd ECN and TAG regioisomers of animal fats. Although the analysis times for chromatographic analysis of these TAGs are long, this is compensated by better separation of highly unsaturated TAGs. Development of an ultra high performance liquid chromatography method has reduced the run time by half, while maintaining separation and resolution. The TAG profiles of fats reflect their fatty acid (FA) compositions, showing a high proportion of unsaturated FAs for chicken and pork, whereas, saturated FAs are dominant in the major TAGs detected in beef and lamb. The improved RP HPLC separation of TAGs developed in this study has been shown to give more reliable discrimination of different animal species than previous methods including analysis of FAs as the methyl esters and RP HPLC separations of intact TAGs. All animal species separated well in the principal component analysis (PCA) plot of TAG profiles, whereas in the PCA plot of FA, chicken plots very close to pork fat, particularly ham. The profiles of TAGs in animal species highlight a number of components that are important for species discrimination.

The meat products of different species (beef, pork, chicken and lamb) cooked by microwave, roasting and currying are separated well in the PCA scores plot. This work shows that the discrimination of meat from different animal species is possible for both raw and cooked meat products, and reveals that the differences produced by the various cooking methods were less than the variations observed between species. The loadings values for the scores plot of TAGs for raw and cooked meat products are similar to the raw meat in different animal species and have the same important descriptors for discrimination. Hence, analysis of intact TAGs in cooked food products has considerable potential for detection of adulteration of cooked meat-based food products.


The rural area is an extremely varied area, agricultural area, the area occupied by forests and grazing the surface of non-agricultural lands (Riviera sea, etc.) and rural agglomerations is a separate entity from the urban areas characterized by a high demographic concentration and vertical and horizontal structures. Being often under the impact of old production systems, characterized by accelerated development and irrational of industry, the countryside has been subject to economic transformation, social and environmental, which mostly resulted in exodus and impoverishment of the rural population. Given this situation, are downright remarkable efforts of developed countries and not only to balance rural-urban ratio, reconciliation and revival of rural areas is kept of unique material and spiritual values. Rural areas are the result of interactions between man and nature, between interdependencies relations, who are specific to diversity of social actions and their natural environment, between the material and spiritual civilization, which for centuries coexist and evolve in a particular national territory. Image of rural area is emphasized by its size, which is the synthetic expression of social activities that are conducted using specific processes and phenomena of nature. All specific features of rural areas (natural, human, material and spiritual), which define the dimension of rural areas, are highlighted by the following components of the system: territorial administrative, demographic, economic and infrastructural. European rural area was and is the subject of extensive restructuring processes that were the result of a complex interaction of social phenomena, economic, sectoral and regional transfers. In circumstances where over half of the 27 Member States of the European Union lives in rural areas, and it occupies over 80% of the total territory, rural areas have considerable potential for growth, with a vital social role. Rural population and surface area occupied and the importance of rural life for a country, make the problem of rural development to gain a national and international importance. In this article the authors presents rural areas as an important part of a country with all its components. The authors elaborated a comparative analysis of rural areas from Poland and Romania from demographic perspective. The analysis was elaborated using indicators like population density, population structure by gender and age, migrations of population, relying on data from national and european statistics.


1. Widespread hunting throughout Amazonia threatens the persistence of large primates and other vertebrates. Most studies have used models of limited validity and restricted spatial and temporal scales to assess the sustainability. 2. We use human-demographic, game-harvest and game-census data to parameterize a spatially explicit hunting model. We explore how population growth and spread, hunting technology and effort, and source–sink dynamics impact the density of black spider monkeys Ateles chamek over time and space in the rainforests of south-eastern Peru. 3. In all scenarios, spider monkey populations, which are vulnerable to hunting, persist in high numbers in much of Manu National Park over the next 50 years. Nonetheless, shotguns cause much more depletion than traditional bow hunting by Matsigenka (Machiguenga) indigenous people. 4. Maintenance of the current indigenous lifestyle (dispersed settlements, bow hunting) is unlikely to deplete spider monkeys and, by extension, other fauna, despite rapid human population growth. This helps explain why large, pre-Colombian human populations did not drive large primates to extinction. When guns are used, however, spider monkeys quickly become depleted around even small settlements, with depletion eventually reversing the short-term harvest advantage provided by shotgun hunting. Thus, our models show that when guns are used, limits on settlement numbers can reduce total depletion. 5. Synthesis and applications. Our framework lets us visualize the future effects of hunting, population growth, hunting technology and settlement spread in tropical forests. In Manu Park, the continued prohibition of firearms is important for ensuring long-term hunting sustainability. A complementary policy is to negotiate limits on new settlements in return for development aid in existing settlements. The advantage of the latter approach is that settlement numbers are more easily monitored than is hunting effort or technology. Similar policies could help to reduce landscape-scale depletion of prey species in human-occupied reserves and protected areas throughout the Amazon.


Roman and Lucanian Grumentum (Potenza province, southern Italy) represents a good archaeological case-study of a site over which no modern city has been built. It was abandoned at the end of the 11th century AD and used as a cultivation area for centuries. The sites provide a highly interesting sequence of data, concerning the first human settlements, the Enotrian and Lucanian phases, the founding of the first city (3rd century BC), the Romanization and the founding of the Roman colony around 50 BC. This book presents the proceedings of a conference on the sites, held in Grumento Nova itself in April 2010. The range of topics is large, from stratigraphical excavations to history, from epigraphy to archaeometry. The chronological range is also wide, from prehistory to modern age. 16 papers in Italian, 5 in English."


ABSTRACT Background: Over the past decade, occurrence of colorectal cancer had escalated markedly in the Asian countries (Sung et al., 2008). World Health Organization (WHO) had reported that incidence of colorectal cancer is of rapid upsurge in many Asian countries, such as China, Japan, Korea and Singapore. Besides the fact that early detection of abnormalities in gut lining recuperates prognostic prospect apart from convalescence and preservation of good quality of life, uptake rate is prominent determinant of disease prevention. This research is piloted with an aim to study the knowledge on risk factors and symptoms of colorectal cancer and its association with attitude towards partaking in colorectal cancer screening. While knowledge enables us to gauge the efficiency of mass edification with regards to colorectal cancer and its detrimental impact on health, we too could assess the community member's general stance towards patronizing in screening programmes, which is crucial for health promotion as well as disease prevention. Materials and Methods: A questionnaire-assisted interview (incorporating adaptation of validated Bowel Cancer Awareness Measure inquiry form), was conducted among respondents aged more than 15 years old to assess their knowledge and attitude towards colorectal cancer screening tests. Endpoint of the research was targeted to discover the association between the knowledge and attitude towards CRC screening via statistical methods namely Pearson Chi-square and Fisher's Exact Test. Result: Among those 104 aspirants, who were interviewed, 95% of participants had poor knowledge on risk factors of colorectal cancer as well as symptoms (both vague and explicit) and its screening programme and amidst those with poor knowledge, 95% of respondents aged more than 50 years old. As many as 78.8% of partakers revealed pessimism towards the screening programs where 92.3% of total respondents never had partaken in colorectal cancer screening programmes. However, poor knowledge does not coincide with discouragement towards practice of screening programmes where the association could not be established (Fisher's Exact Test with p-value = 0.582). Conclusion: The knowledge towards risk factors, symptoms and screening methods for colorectal cancer were imminently poor in the community. In addition, the knowledge does not influence populaces' perception towards practice of screening programmes where 7.1%, 25.0% and none of the respondents with poor, moderate and good erudition on colorectal cancer respectively had underwent the screening. Therefore, comprehensive outreach programmes are necessitated to enlighten our community towards comprehending the emergent of colorectal cancer as our nation's second most commonly occurring neoplasms only next to breast cancer. Citizens too need to be counselled to realize the benefits of disease-preventive and early-diagnostic approach of the screening tools. Keywords: Knowledge, Attitude, Association, Colorectal Cancer, Colorectal Cancer Screening


The purpose of this study was to develop a safe and non-toxic alternative to the conventional conservative treatment of peritoneal carcinomatosis with malignant ascites (PCMA) by investigating the efficacy and safety of local modulated electro-hyperthermia (mEHT) combined with the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) 'Shi Pi' herbal decoction, compared with standard intraperitoneal chemoinfusion (IPCI). A randomized, controlled, single-center, open-label clinical trial (phase II) with two parallel groups (allocation ratio, 1:1) was conducted to investigate the efficacy and safety of mEHT+TCM (study group, SG) vs. standard IPCI (control group, CG) in patients with PCMA by intention-to-treat analysis. A total of 260 patients with PCMA were randomly allocated into the two groups (130/130); mEHT was applied for 60 min per session every second day for 4 weeks, for a total of 14 sessions. The TCM decoction was administered orally, at 400 ml daily. In CG, occlusive IPCI with cisplatin (30-60 mg) and fluorouracil (500-600 mg/m2) was applied twice, biweekly. The objective response rate (ORR), quality of life (QoL) and adverse event rate (AER) in the two groups were evaluated 1 month after treatment, analyzed and compared. The present study is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02638051). No case was lost or excluded (0/260). The ORR in SG was 77.69% (101/130) vs. 63.85% (73/130) in CG (P<0.05). The QoL in SG was 49.23% vs. 32.3% in CG (P<0.05). The AER in SG was 2.3% (3/130) vs. 12.3% (16/130) in CG (P<0.05). All the adverse events were grade I. In conclusion, the combination of mEHT with TCM achieves better control of PCMA compared with standard IPCI, with less toxicity. Both components of the combination are non-toxic treatments easily tolerated by patients. Thus, this combined treatment may be preferred due to the better benefit-harm balance.


Summary This paper presents a specific modeling technique that is focused on preparing planning processes in civil engineering. Planning processes in civil engineering are characterized by some peculiarities so that the sequence of planning tasks needs to be determined for each planning project. Neither the use of optimized partial processes nor the use of lower detailed and optimized processes guarantee an optimal overall planning process. The modeling technique considers these peculiarities. In a first step, it is focused on the logic of the planning process. Algorithms based on the graph theory determine that logic. This approach ensures consistency and logical correctness of the description of a planning process at the early beginning in its preparation phase. Sets of data – the products of engineers like technical drawings, technical models, reports, or specifications – form the core of the presented modeling technique. The production of these sets of data requires time and money. This is expressed by a specific weighting of each set of data in the presented modeling technique. The introduction of these weights allows an efficient progress measurement and controlling of a planning project. For this purpose, a link between the modeling technique used in the preparation phase and the execution phase is necessary so that target and actual values are available for controlling purposes. The present paper covers the description of this link. An example is given to illustrate the use of the modeling technique for planning processes in civil engineering projects.


Abstract Land cover assessment and monitoring of land cover dynamics are important to understand social and ecological processes in mountain protected areas. However, variations in the use of legends and classification systems sometimes pose challenges. The landscape of Sagarmatha National Park and Buffer Zone (SNPBZ) has seen many changes in the past few decades. Mapping of land cover in SNPBZ was carried out to fill gaps in basic databases for the area. A review of past land cover initiatives and existing data revealed differences in methodologies and definitions that made them incompatible for cross-region applications. For the present study, a legend was developed using the standard Land Cover Classification System (LCCS) methodology developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, a comprehensive and standardized a priori classification system designed for mapping exercises independent of scales or means. The changes in land cover were analyzed using Landsat Thematic Mapper, Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus, and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer images from 1992 to 2006. Land cover maps were generated using object-based image analysis supplemented by ancillary information. Extensive fieldwork was carried out for ground truthing and validation. The use of LCCS was instrumental in bringing general understanding of the classification systems and helping to gain greater clarity and accuracy in the results. About 70% of the SNPBZ area is covered by snow and ice, glaciers, bare rocks, and bare soil. Altitude and its influence on climatic conditions have dominated the distribution pattern of vegetation in SNPBZ. The analysis showed that forest is being converted into shrub at elevations between 3000 and 4000 m, while shrub is decreasing between 4000 and 5000 m. A major decrease in snow cover is seen above 5000 m. Harmonization of the classification system helped to gain more reliable information on changes, as comparisons were made between the classes with consistent definitions.


The most definitive, accurate, and reliable method for diagnosing oral mucosal lesions is the scalpel biopsy. The oral brush biopsy coupled with computerassisted analysis (OralCDx, OralScan Laboratories, Inc., Suffern, NY) has been developed as a technique for evaluating unexplained clinically detectable alterations of the surface epithelium of the oral mucosa whether cancer or precancer is suspected (Sciubba et al, 2003). The goal of the oral brush biopsy is to provide a highly sensitive and specific technique that is less painful and simpler to perform than a scalpel or punch biopsy.


The Stability and Growth Pact has been under fire ever since it was born. But is the Pact a flawed fiscal rule? Against established criteria for an ideal fiscal rule, its design and compliance mechanisms show strengths and weaknesses. The latter tend to reflect trade-offs typical of supra-national arrangements. In the end, only a higher degree of fiscal integration would remove the inflexibility inherent in the recourse to predefined budgetary rules. No alternative solution put forward in the literature appears clearly superior. This does not mean that the original Pact of 1997 could not be improved. The debate on the SGP has shown that any reform should aim at overcoming the excessive uniformity of the rules, improving their transparency, correcting pro-cyclicality and strengthening enforcement. The reform of the Pact agreed in 2005 moves in this direction but leaves open a number of issues.


This paper describes an experiment in which Boolean feedback (a kind of checklist) was used to provide feedback on the paragraph structures of first year students in an Academic Literacy course. We begin by introducing the major problems with feedback on L2 writing and establishing why a focus on paragraph structures in particular is of importance. The experiment conducted was a two-draft assignment in which three different kinds of feedback (technique A: handwritten comments, B: consciousnessraising through generalised Boolean feedback, and C: specific Boolean feedback) were presented to three different groups of students. The results indicate that specific Boolean feedback is more effective than the other two techniques, in small part because a higher proportion of the instances of negative feedback on the first draft was corrected in the second draft (improvements), but much more substantially because in the revision a much lower number of changes to the text resulted in negative feedback on the second draft (regressions). For non-specific feedback, almost as many regressions occurred as improvements. In combination with automatic analytical techniques made possible with software, the results from this study make a case for the use of such checklists in giving feedback on student writing. Keywords: Boolean feedback, checklist, academic literacy, analytical techniques, improvements, regressions, L2 writing


This research continues the perceptual evaluation of "composers9 pulses" begun by Repp (1989a) and Thompson (1989). Composers9 pulses are patterns of expressive microstructure (i. e., timing and amplitude modulations) proposed by Clynes (1983). They are said to convey individual composers9 personalities and to enhance their characteristic expression when implemented in computer performances of their music. For the present experiments, the initial bars of five piano pieces by each of four composers (Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert) were generated with each of four pulse microstructures similar to Clynes9s composer-specific patterns, and also in a deadpan version. Listeners representing a wide range of musical experience judged to what extent each computer performance had the composer9s individual expression, relative to the deadpan version. Listeners showed an overall preference for the Beethoven and Haydn pulses. The pattern of pulse preferences varied significantly among individual pieces, but little among different composers. These results indirectly support the general notion that expressive variation is contingent on musical structure, but they offer little evidence in support of fixed, composer-specific patterns of expressive microstructure.


A sweeping offensive to prevent infectious disease through vaccination remains a compelling goal in the movement toward improved public health in industrialized and developing societies. Expectations are high that vaccines will also soon be deployed in less conventional ways: to destroy tumors and prevent autoimmune diseases, for example. Yet the current range of vaccine targets remains remarkably narrow. How, then, will the scope and power of vaccination be improved?

The brisk pace of genome-related discoveries brings hope of revolutionary change for vaccine biology, as thousands of new targets and avenues for research emerge. But it will also be essential to maintain and renew investment in the exploration of basic immunology. This is reflected in this special issue, which visits some areas of immunity that are integral to vaccine research. Germain (p. [240][1]) starts the ball rolling by discussing how the perspective of "systems engineer" might guide us toward an integrated view of the immune system. Ultimately, this may lead to new rationales in the design of vaccines and other forms of immune manipulation.

Vaccination relies on the immune system's memory of antigens that it encounters, yet our understanding of this fundamental characteristic remains limited. Sprent and Tough (p. [245][2]) discuss current thinking on how memory T cells develop and the various factors that regulate their actions. Some new thoughts on how immune memory is maintained are also offered by Fearon and colleagues (p. [248][3]), who reason that memory lymphocytes might be akin to self-renewing stem cells that are held in a state of arrested differentiation and perpetual readiness for encounters with antigens.

According to Zinkernagel and Hengartner (p. [251][4]), the significance of balancing antigen in the immune equation is often underappreciated, as inherent features of antigen contribute significantly to the regulation of immune responses. Information about the pathogens from which antigens are derived is also important, and this is deciphered by dendritic cells, which guide T lymphocyte responses. As discussed by Pulendran et al. (p. [253][5]), this is developing as a far-reaching paradigm in immunology and one that is increasingly applicable to vaccination strategies.

The News stories in this issue examine several ways in which new immunological tools are already being applied to vaccinemaking. A report on tuberculosis by Martin Enserink (p. [234][6]) describes a fascinating conjunction of events that have led to trials of at least five new TB vaccines. Jon Cohen reports on a second area of technology (p. [236][7]), focusing on a small biotech company's efforts to create antigens using a method called "DNA shuffling" to produce immune responses stronger than those generated by natural antigens. Finally, Giselle Weiss (p. [238][8]) reviews the history—and uncertain future —of a renowned home for immunology in Europe: the Basel Institute of Immunology, now converted to a center for medical genomics.

This collection is full of contrasts: Immunology, which has been overshadowed in some ways by genome studies, is now using the tools of genomics to open exciting new avenues of basic and applied research. And although infectious diseases such as HIV and TB are on the rise, researchers are optimistic about their chances of developing new vaccines against these threats. The challenges for immunology and the possibilities for vaccine biology are enormous.

 [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1062946
 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1062416
 [3]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1062589
 [4]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1063005
 [5]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1062060
 [6]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.293.5528.234
 [7]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.293.5528.236
 [8]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.293.5528.238


A cool phase of the interstellar medium has been observed in many giant elliptical galaxies, but its origin remains unclear. We propose that uneven heating from Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), together with radiative cooling, can lead to the formation of the cool phase. The basic idea is that since SNe Ia explode randomly, gas parcels that are not directly heated by SN shocks will cool, forming multiphase gas. We run a series of idealized high-resolution numerical simulations and find that cool gas develops even when the overall SN heating rate H exceeds the cooling rate C by a factor as large as 1.4. We also find that the time for multiphase gas development depends on the gas temperature. When the medium has a temperature T = 3 × 106 K, the cool phase forms within one cooling time ; however, the cool phase formation is delayed to a few times for higher temperatures. The main reason for the delay is turbulent mixing. Cool gas formed this way would naturally have a metallicity lower than that of the hot medium. For constant H/C, there is more turbulent mixing for higher-temperature gas. We note that this mechanism of producing cool gas cannot be captured in cosmological simulations, which usually fail to resolve individual SN remnants.


Learning from Label Proportions (LLP) is a machine learning problem in which the training data consist of bags of instances, and only the class label distribution for each bag is known. In some domains label proportions are readily available; for example, by grouping social media users by location, one can use census statistics to build a classifier for user demographics. However, label proportions are unavailable in many domains, such as product review sites. The goal of this paper is to determine whether an LLP classifier fit in one domain can be modified to classify instances from another domain. To do so, we propose a domain adaptation algorithm that uses an LLP model fit on the source domain to generate label proportions for the target domain. A new LLP model is then fit on the target domain, and this self-training process is repeated to adapt the model from source to target. Our experiments on five diverse tasks indicate an 11% average absolute improvement in accuracy as compared to using LLP without domain adaptation. In contrast to existing domain adaptation algorithms, our approach requires only label proportions in the source domain, and the results suggest that the approach is effective even when the target domain is substantially different from the source domain.


Continuing with the tradition of offering the best and most comprehensive coverage of Red Hat Linux on the market, Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed includes new and additional material based on the latest release of Red Hat's Fedora Core Linux distribution. Incorporating an advanced approach to presenting information about Fedora, the book aims to provide the best and latest information that intermediate to advanced Linux users need to know about installation, configuration, system administration, server operations, and security.Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed thoroughly covers all of Fedora's software packages, including up-to-date material on new applications, Web development, peripherals, and programming languages. It also includes updated discussion of the architecture of the Linux kernel 2.6, USB, KDE, GNOME, Broadband access issues, routing, gateways, firewalls, disk tuning, GCC, Perl, Python, printing services (CUPS), and security. Red Hat Linux Fedora 5 Unleashed is the most trusted and comprehensive guide to the latest version of Fedora Linux.


Innovation is an inherently uncertain process. Success is typically coupled with risk and we can only hope that those with great ideas will persevere. To encourage innovation, society reduces some of the innovation risk through structures like funding systems, regulation, and of course intellectual property rights. But what happens when uncertainty strikes the legal protection devices themselves? Faced with unclear rules and increasingly speculative rewards, some innovators may simply stop playing the game.

Such uncertainty has recently been a topic of great concern in the U.S. patent system. Some believe that the suddenly unknowable nature of fundamental questions like what is patentable has had the effect of dramatically undermining legal incentives. But others question whether a crisis really exists. They point out that uncertainty can have positive effects and even be a source of strategic advantage. How can we tell good uncertainty from bad?

This article provides a novel framework for evaluating patent uncertainty that explains how complaints and complacency can exist contemporaneously. It draws on the behavioral economics literature to provide a deeper understanding of how innovators react to unknown legal environments. Based on this analysis, the article identifies three different types of legal uncertainty: (1) investment-killing; (2) if-then; and (3) remedial uncertainly. It asserts that only the first creates a problem that must be addressed by legal reform, while the others are actually essential to a healthy innovation system. The article concludes with specific prescriptions for addressing negative uncertainty that depend on both firm and policymaker action.


Classical recommender systems provide users with a list of recommendations where each recommendation consists of a single item, e.g., a book or DVD. However, several applications can benefit from a system capable of recommending packages of items, in the form of sets. Sample applications include travel planning with a limited budget (price or time) and twitter users wanting to select worthwhile tweeters to follow given that they can deal with only a bounded number of tweets. In these contexts, there is a need for a system that can recommend top-k packages for the user to choose from.
 Motivated by these applications, we consider composite recommendations, where each recommendation comprises a set of items. Each item has both a value (rating) and a cost associated with it, and the user specifies a maximum total cost (budget) for any recommended set of items. Our composite recommender system has access to one or more component recommender system, focusing on different domains, as well as to information sources which can provide the cost associated with each item. Because the problem of generating the top recommendation (package) is NP-complete, we devise several approximation algorithms for generating top-k packages as recommendations. We analyze their efficiency as well as approximation quality. Finally, using two real and two synthetic data sets, we subject our algorithms to thorough experimentation and empirical analysis. Our findings attest to the efficiency and quality of our approximation algorithms for top-k packages compared to exact algorithms.


Abstract Macartney rose is a range management problem on 500,000 acres of rangeland in Texas. Roller chopping followed by burning is an effective method of improving infested rangeland. However, uncertainty associated with implementing effective burns adversely affects economic feasibility of the treatment sequence. Discrete stochastic programming is used to determine optimal burning schedules under uncertainty. Optimal schedules and expected net returns vary with changes in the probability of a successful burn.


A mask-less and selective printing of conductor patterns is of significant importance for all display applications. Printing on structured surfaces such as microlenses or gratings is a challenge. Typically used processes require thermal curing to achieve the conductivity. This limits the applicability to flexible display applications where low temperature processes are preferred, especially for roll to roll (R2R) scale up. We have used an approach of printing a catalyst containing ink, followed by an electroless plating of copper. This paper details the processes, microstructures and properties of highly conductive and printed copper on patterned flat surfaces as well as structures with micro-optic lens structures. A process has been developed on surfaces with lens structures where the conductor is required to be in the valley between the lenses and between structures with narrow lines and narrow pitch. This is a low temperature process, requiring a plating bath temperature of <;45°C and thus very compatible with flexible substrates and R2R processing.


Dr. Annabelle Volgman from the Rush University Medical Center, Chicago IL moderated the topic "New Anticoagulants vs Warfarin: Take Your Choice" with Drs. Peter Kowey from Main Line Health and Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, PA, James Reiffel from Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, and Albert Waldo from University Hospitals Case Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH. The discussion focused primarily on: How to approach a patient with a Congestive heart failure, Hypertension, Age ≥75, Diabetes mellitus, Stroke (CHADS2) score of 1; the lack of efficacy of aspirin as an oral anticoagulant to prevent stroke in atrial fibrillation; recommendations of various recent guidelines concerning the use of aspirin; the use of aspirin and clopidogrel in comparison to new anticoagulants as an alternative to warfarin; clarification of the American College of Chest Physicians guidelines for 2012; stroke risk prediction with the Congestive heart failure, Hypertension, Age ≥75, Diabetes mellitus, Stroke, Vascular disease, Age 65–74 years, Sex category (CHA2DS2-VASc) score; balancing the risk of stroke against the risk of bleeding risk and falls; estimation of bleeding risk with Hypertension, Abnormal Renal/Liver Function, Stroke, Bleeding History or Predisposition, Labile International Normalized Ratio, Elderly, Drugs/Alcohol Concomitantly (HAS-BLED) scores; choice of anticoagulant in different patients; and support for patients with active bleeding on dabigatran or rivaroxaban in comparison to warfarin. (Med Roundtable Cardiovasc Ed. 2014;3(4):262–270). ©2014 FoxP2 Media, LLC


Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland represent difficult cases for theories of conflict resolution: the consociational structures of governance in each case reflect and, arguably, reproduce the segregation that characterizes everyday life. In each country, truth recovery and reconciliation processes have been seen as ways of overcoming the polarizing effect of ethnonational division. This article suggests that this faith is misplaced on two accounts: firstly, while the intent to reconcile erstwhile ethnic opponents is laudable and admirable, it ignores obvious and complicated practicalities - particularly, the lack of consensus over the past. More fundamentally, however, I argue that the truth and reconciliation paradigm is politically redundant: insofar as it is constitutive of its own reality, it answers questions contained within its own logic and defers consideration of alternative concerns. In other words, by attempting to reconcile ethnonational identities the truth and reconciliation paradigm starts one step too far ahead of itself and by failing to problematize those identities it ends by reproducing them. I suggest that "dealing with the past" becomes saturated with political and social significance.Keywords: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Ireland, truth recovery, ethnicity, reconciliation, consociationalism'... there's a great gap between a gallons story and a dirty deed' (Synge, 1963 [1907]: 227).Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) continue to reside in a kind of Faulknarian gloaming in which the past continues to haunt the present.1 As such, despite their differences, both represent "hard" cases for theories of peace building and conflict resolution. While both countries continue to enjoy relative peace, the legacies of their divided pasts still hold a residual but important grip over contemporary politics. In part, the continued presence of the past is linked to the elaborate consociational structures of governance in each country. Designed with the purpose of moving Northern Ireland and BH away from their bloodied histories, the unintended consequence of these structures was to institutionalize the divisions of those histories by providing incentives to ethnic entrepreneurs to pursue exclusivist rather than integrative policy agendas. In both cases, the consociational carve-up at the decision-making level of politics echoes segregation at other levels of society, including schooling and ideological outlook.The backdrop of ethnicity in everyday life is in each case pervasive. It is underpinned and supported by the more craven aspects of professional politics. In Northern Ireland, for example, the debates over the politics of the past and contemporary societal needs recently fused in scepticism over a scheme to "regenerate" the "footprint" left by the removal of a British army barracks in north Belfast by building a new social housing estate on the site. The moderate nationalist grouping, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), objected that the original plans had been appropriated by the two main ethnonationalist parties, Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to ensure that the houses allocated would reflect and maintain the current ethnoreligious status quo in the area. The SDLP complained that that allocation would be detrimental to the Catholic/Nationalist population of the city where greater social housing needs existed. The party claimed that a deal had been done between Sinn Fein and the DUP in which the latter gained guaranteed that houses would go to Protestants/Unionists (whose population has been declining in the area) in return for the former Maze gaol being turned into a 'Conflict Transformation Centre' - an initiative that the DUP had long resisted due to the belief that it wouldbecome a shrine for paramilitary prisoners.3In the countries of the former Yugoslavia a similar ethnicization of contemporary politics is underpinned by the salience of discourses about the past - particularly, discourses over historical culpability and claims of victimhood. …


This article focuses of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's role against the apartheid system of racism and socio-political inequality in the Republic of South Africa. Tutu often denounced apartheid in his speeches and public advocacy promoting equality, reconciliation, and peaceful coexistence of all South Africans. The ideology of apartheid robbed the black race in South Africa of their human dignity which contradicts the Holy Bible which states, "So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27). Despite this, the white National Party of South Africa in 1948 legitimized apartheid as a political system and gained support from the Dutch Reformed Church despite its anti-Christian ethics. Apartheid was adopted to place the white minority in the upper class, while the black majority was left with fewer rights and fewer privileges in South Africa. Desmond Tutu was one of the few Christian leaders in Africa who championed the course for black theology in the demolition of apartheid in South Africa. Tutu's attitude during the apartheid struggle was not by violent protest or riots but rather through his sermons and public participation in activities clamoring for national unity, love, and equality of all South Africans.


Rapid single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) with 1,1'oxalylimidazole chemiluminescence (ODI-CL) detection was developed for the early diagnosis of human mad-cow disease. Mutated single strand DNA (ssDNA) sequence discovered from patients having human mad-cow disease rapidly hybridize with complementary probe conjugated with chemiluminescent dye. The hybridization between target ssDNA and complementary probe was dependent on four different variables such as pH, temperature, incubation time, and the type of nanoparticles (e.g., multi-walled carbon nanotubes, graphene oxide) capable of capturing mismatched ssDNAs and excess complementary probe. However, three different types of mismatched ssDNAs also slowly hybridize with complementary probe with the increase of incubation time. The problem was solved by using ODI-CL detection instead of fluorescence detection of conventional SNP because ODI-CL is about 100 times more sensitive than fluorescence. In other words, it was possible to reduce the interaction between mismatched ssDNAs and complementary probe with short incubation time (15 minutes) using highly sensitive ODI-CL detection. Based on the results, in conclusion, it is expected that SNP with ODI-CL can be applied as a cost-effective, rapid, and simple analytical method to diagnose and prognose various diseases.


Water (including increasing use relative to availability, and deteriorating quality) may be one of the most severe stresses on the exponentially growing human population in the next century. Problems are becoming increasingly complex and diverse and require more and more specific knowledge from both a technical and non-technical perspective. These complexities create the need to understand and comprehend the more detailed technical components as well as broader managerial and societal issues. These non-complementary elements will increasingly demand the efficient integration of various disciplines, sectors, countries, and societies. The major challenges addressed are whether we are capable of and prepared to realize the needed integration and whether we can resolve the large amounts of existing gaps and barriers. The paper analyzes major past and desired future trends in fresh water management. There is an attempt to draw from the three main socio-economic regions: the developed world, Central and Eastern Europe (including countries of the former USSR) and the developing world. A number of issues are selected with regards to integrated freshwater management: (1) Identification, occurrence, and perception of various problems (e.g. eutrophication, acidification, global warming, salinization, groundwater contamination, eco-system degradation, land cover changes, vulnerability); (2) Current integration of methodologies; their strengths and weaknesses; Large scale projects; dams, irrigation schemes and water transfers; (3) Global urbanization; (4) Wastewater treatment and pollution control types (considering also consumption emissions); (5) Modeling and monitoring; (6) Planning and environmental impact assessment; (7) Legislation and institutions; (8) Education and public awareness; (9) Sustainable development and time preference; (10) The role of science and engineering.

The past two decades showed tremendous developments in the management of water as seen from many different perspectives. In spite of these advancements there is still room for improvement. The focus of the present discussion lays mostly on the dissemination of lessons and questions which are crucial to likely future problems and desired improvements.


BACKGROUND
The utility of insulinlike growth factor (IGF) axis and collagen markers for a growth hormone (GH) doping test in sport depends on their stability and reproducibility. We sought to determine short-term within-subject variability of these markers in a large cohort of healthy individuals.

METHODS
We measured IGF-I, IGF binding protein 3 (IGFBP-3), acid labile subunit (ALS), and the collagen markers N-terminal propeptide of type I procollagen (PINP), C-terminal telopeptide of type I collagen (ICTP), and N-terminal propeptide of type III procollagen (PIIINP) in serum samples obtained on multiple occasions (median 3 per participant) over a 2- to 3-week period from 1103 elite athletes (699 men, 404 women) ages 22.2 (5.2) years [mean (SD)]. We estimated between-subject and within-subject variances by mixed-effects ANOVA.

RESULTS
Within-subject variance accounted for 32% to 36% and 4% to 13% of the total variance in IGF markers and collagen markers, respectively. The within-subject CV ranged from 11% to 21% for the IGF axis markers and from 13% to 15% for the collagen markers. The index of individuality for the IGF axis markers was 0.66-0.76, and for the collagen markers, 0.26-0.45. For each marker, individuals with initial extreme measured values tended to regress toward the population mean in subsequent repeated measurements. We developed a Bayesian model to estimate the long-term probable value for each marker.

CONCLUSIONS
These results indicate that in healthy individuals the within-subject variability was greater for IGF-I than for the collagen markers, and that where a single measurement is available, it is possible to estimate the long-term probable value of each of the markers by applying the Bayesian approach. Such an application can increase the reliability and decrease the cost of detecting GH doping.


The resource constrained scheduling problem involves the scheduling of a number of activities over time, where each activity consumes one or more resources per time period. For a feasible solution to exist, the total resource consumption per time period must not exceed the available resources. In addition, the order in which activities may be scheduled is determined by a precedence graph. In this paper, valid inequalities proposed for the resource flow-based formulation in previous studies are investigated to determine what effect they may have on computing times. It is shown empirically that improved computing times may be obtained if these valid inequalities are, in fact, omitted from the resource ow-based formulation. In addition, a heuristic is proposed for the generation of initial starting solutions and for estimating the extent of the scheduling horizon which, in turn, is required to calculate the latest starting times of activities. The computational results are based on well-known problem test instances as well as new randomly generated problem instances. Keywords: Scheduling, mixed integer linear programming, valid inequalities


Background: September asthma epidemic has been well documented. Whether a similar pattern of asthma exacerbation is observed in children returning to school from winter and spring break is unknown. Objective: To assess whether the September asthma epidemic occurs in Olmsted County, Minnesota and determine whether similar asthma epidemics occur after winter and spring break. Methods: The study included all asthmatic children ages 5-18 who had received medical care at our institution as of March 12, 2008 (n=3092). Asthma status was defined by physician diagnosis in the medical records. We compared the frequency of all asthma-related hospitalizations, ED visits, outpatient visits, and corticosteroid therapies for acute asthma symptoms between August and September of 2008 and 2009. Similarly we compared the frequency of all asthma-related visits or treatments between during and after spring break and between during and after winter break. Results: The frequency of asthma-related visits and treatments in September of 2008 and 2009 was 2.1% per person-month, which was significantly greater than that in August of 2008 and 2009 (1.1% per person-month) (p=0.003). Similarly, the frequency of asthma-related visits and therapies during the period after spring break of 2008 and 2009 (1.89% per person-month) tended to be greater than that during spring break (0.75% per person-month) (p = 0.063). There was no difference in asthma-related visits or therapies during and after winter break (p=0.59). Conclusions: The September asthma epidemic does occur in our study setting, but this may not be a September-specific concern. Clinicians should consider a step-up therapy and reinforce medication compliance for asthma exacerbation-prone children returning to school.


The purpose of the study is to examine effects on study efficiency of specially designedadmission procedures, Step-wise admission, used for selection to medical education. In Step-wise procedures, written tests and interviews are used to assess personality traits such as motivation, social competence, patience, empathy and devotion. The selection of variables is based on assumptions about the influence of personal characteristics on success both academically and in the profession. By using data from a large-scale longitudinal project (VALUTA), the students admitted via Step-wise admission are compared to those admitted through regular admission, grades from upper secondary school and scores from the Swedish Scholastic Aptitude Test (SweSAT). Efficiency in studies is measured by achieved credit points, interruptions in studies, drop-outs and obtained degrees. The results indicate that admissions based on the Step-wise procedures had the highest point production, in spite of lower grades, and lower SweSAT scores than the SweSAT group. Previous research has emonstrated that upper secondary grades and SweSAT scores provide good measures for predicting study success in higher education. However, in this study those admitted through grades obtain somewhat fewer points, and those admitted via SweSAT scores produce by far the lowest average number of credit points. Thus, it does seem quite interesting to investigate why the Step-wise procedure results in the selection of more successful students, and to look more closely into the relative importance of cognitive factors and other personal characteristics for achievement in medical education.


Previous studies had shown that wax ester-rich lipid extracted from calanoid copepods could be a useful alternative to fish oil as a provider of long-chain n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in diets for use in salmon aquaculture. Effective utilization of wax ester requires digestion and metabolism in the intestine with the fatty alcohol component being oxidized to fatty acid in intestinal cells through the combined activities of alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) and aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH). We studied wax ester utilization in Atlantic salmon using a candidate gene approach, focusing on ADH and ALDH as sequence information was available for these genes, including fish sequences, facilitating isolation of the cDNAs. Here, we report on the isolation and cloning of full-length cDNAs for ADH3 and ALDH3a2 genes from salmon intestinal tissue. Functional characterization by heterologous expression in the yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, showed the products of these cDNAs had long-chain ADH and ALDH enzyme activities. Thus, ADH3 was capable of oxidizing long-chain fatty alcohol, and ALDH3a2 was capable of oxidizing long-chain fatty aldehyde to the corresponding fatty acid. The genes were highly expressed in intestinal tissue, particularly pyloric caeca, but their expression was not increased in salmon fed dietary copepod oil in comparison to fish fed fish oil.


Aboriginalisation or localisation of leadership in schools in remote areas of the Northern Territory is becoming more widespread in this last decade of the second millennium. Emerging models or ways in which Indigenous leadership is practised in some of these schools is the focus of this research project. Developing understandings of the history of education in its western guise and ways in which teacher education has been practised, as well as other influences which have impacted on people within remote communities are essential in order to contexualise the changes which are occurring in school governance and decision-making. Group interviews with senior Aboriginal teachers in five remote schools provide the core data for an analysis of preparation for leadership for executive teachers, decision-making structures, strengths, supports and difficulties in leadership, and areas for localised decision-making. Preparation for leadership for executive teachers in remote areas which occurs primarily through mentoring programs and accredited study courses in educational administration are detailed to provide a framework for initiatives which are being taken. Leadership theories from the western perspective provide a partial understanding of what is occurring in the localisation of educational leadership and management of some remote Aboriginal schools. A number of significant developments have occurred including ways of incorporating shared leadership into the executive of the school, greater collaboration between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members, and an increase in collegiality. This interplay between traditional and western leadership styles has the potential for transforming education in remote communities.


Some haze-fog events in Asia have been attributed to tropical cyclone activity; however, uncertainty exists regarding the relationship between the influence of tropical cyclones and the occurrence of haze-fog events. In this study, the statistical relationship between tropical cyclones in the Northwest Pacific and the haze-fog events in northern China during summers from 2001 to 2012 were analyzed. It was found that 30.5% of regional haze-fog events were related to tropical cyclones. The influence of tropical cyclones on haze-fog events was analyzed and compared based on classification of tropical cyclones by position and path. The results showed that tropical cyclones can form advantageous conditions for regional haze-fog events through dynamic and thermal processes, such as strengthening the downdraft, and increasing relative humidity and stability. The dynamic influence was dominant when the distance between a tropical cyclone and northern China was larger than the range of tropical cyclone airflow, and the contribution of thermal influence increased as the distance decreased. Furthermore, the surrounding circulations, such as the Northwest Pacific subtropical high and the westerly trough, also contributed to the regional haze-fog events. Their position, intensity and collocation with tropical cyclones could be the determining factors for haze-fog occurrence. This study illuminates the primary mechanisms of the combined effect of tropical cyclones and the surrounding circulations on regional air quality, which could improve forecasts of summer regional haze-fog events in northern China.


ADMITTANCE SELECTION FOR FORCE GUIDED ASSEMBLY WITH OPTIMAL MOTION Fernando Rodriguez Anton Marquette University, 2013 Current robots lack the precise relative positioning necessary to complete automatic assembly tasks. Several solutions have been proposed. Some approaches use complex vision and force sensing systems to generate corrective motion if misalignment is present in the assembly task. Other solutions rely on generating elastic behavior, known as compliance, between the end e ector and the held movable part. This compliant mechanism helps guide the movable part of the assembly into its proper position. The project focuses on designing a process by which passive compliant systems can achieve successful assembly for a range of misalignment and generate error-reducing motion that is considered of high quality. This is accomplished by using a velocity metric as the goal of a constrained optimization. The metric uses the average discrepancy of all the particle motion from an established "best motion". This motion minimizes the discrepancy in the velocity of all particles motion from their ideal motion towards their proper position. This procedure identi es the best worst case scenario for a representative set of con gurations. The results obtained for optimization over polygonal geometries of 3, 4, and 5 vertices, demonstrate the e ectiveness of the procedure in designing passive compliant behavior resulting in high quality error-reducing motion. Results also show that high quality motion is not only achieved for a set of nite con gurations but also for all intermediate ones.


In many multiagent scenarios, groups of participants (known as coalitions) may attempt to cooperate, seeking to increase the benefits realized by the members. Depending on the scenario, such cooperation may be benign, or may be unwelcome or even forbidden (often called collusion). Coalitions can present a problem for many multiagent systems, potentially undermining the intended operation of systems. In this paper, we present a technique for detecting the presence of coalitions (malicious or otherwise), and identifying their members. Our technique employs clustering in benefit space, a high-dimensional feature space reflecting the benefit flowing between agents, in order to identify groups of agents who are similar in terms of the agents they are favoring. A statistical approach is then used to characterize candidate clusters, identifying as coalitions those groups that favor their own members to a much greater degree than the general population. We believe that our approach is applicable to a wide range of domains. Here, we demonstrate its effectiveness within a simulated marketplace making use of a trust and reputation system to cope with dishonest sellers. Many trust and reputation proposals readily acknowledge their ineffectiveness in the face of collusion, providing one example of the importance of the problem. While certain aspects of coalitions have received significant attention (e.g., formation, stability, etc.), relatively little research has focused on the problem of coalition identification. We believe our research represents an important step towards addressing the challenges posed by coalitions.


Over the last century, psychoanalysis has transformed the ways in which we think about our relationships with others. Psychoanalytic concepts and methods, such as the unconscious and dream analysis, have greatly impacted on social, cultural and political theory. Reinterpreting the ways in which Geography has explored people's mental maps and their deepest feelings about places, The Body and the City outlines a new cartography of the subject.
The author maps key coordinates of meaning, identity and power across the sites of body and city. Exploring a wide range of critical thinking, particularly the work of Lefebvre, Freud and Lacan, he analyses the dialectic between the individual and the external world to present a pathbreaking psychoanalysis of space.


The globalization and liberalization of the world economic system have brought us to an era where global competition is highly intense. The introduction of new technology and systems has greatly afected the performance of organizations. Quality is widely recognized as one of the important disciplines and strategies for competitiveness. This study examines the relationship between quality management practices and the productivity in revenue and cost management in local authorities. Three hundred twenty managers from eighty organizations participated in this study. Disproportionate stratified random sampling was used as the sampling techniquefrom the population frame and the data were gathered through seIf-administered structured questionnaires. The results of the regression analysis showed that only two constructs among the seven quality management practices were found to be significantly related to productivity in revenue and cost management. The construct for employee focus has a positive*association with the productivity in revenue and cost management whereas process management has a signifcant inverse relationship with the productivity in revenueand cost management. Thus, local authorities need to address these two constructs in order to achieve a higher level of productivity in revenue and cost management


Technical education and vocational training programs in Nepalese society have been a aloud offbeat that is combating to slice through the prevalent socio-economic and contemporary social setup so that it could contribute at the very best. Despite more than a half a century's effort to establish it as a strong element that supports the country's economy and peoples' living standard, it has still been straining somewhere near the beginning point. This study investigates some impeding socio-cultural factors that fade the overall development of TEVT programs. The result should help the policy makers to be more assured about the major issues that hurdle the TEVT setup in Nepalese society. Analyzing several research works and national and international reports on concerned topics it is found that the TEVT values have not been placed as one of the top national priorities due to the existing social setup and people's perspective towards TEVT programs. Therefore the heterogeneous aspects are required to be synchronized even more tactically along with TEVT's integration in the labor market in order to choreograph, qualitatively improved TEVT programs so that TEVT could be significantly potential element among those on which the country's socio-economic development could depend on more reliably. Himalayan Journal of Sociology & Anthropology - Vol. VII (2016), page: 155-174


Lifting and modulus operations are the main operations on the RSA algorithm which require long computation time. Implementation of the operation of the lift and modulus on hardware devices requiring more resources than other arithmetic operations. Montgomery modular multiplication, the method which can be used to simplify the operation of lift and modulus, is implemented on FPGA, to speed up the computing process. The implementation results in this study, which is done using VHDL on the Xilinx Artix 7 series FPGA, were able to work at a maximum frequency of 133.76 MHz, requiring 17.66% LUT (11,195 of 63,400) and 7.14% of IOBs (15 of 210).


PURPOSE
Emerging evidence shows that interactive virtual environments (VEs) may be a promising tool for studying sensorimotor processes and for rehabilitation. However, the potential of VEs to recruit action observation-execution neural networks is largely unknown. For the first time, a functional MRI-compatible virtual reality system (VR) has been developed to provide a window into studying brain-behavior interactions. This system is capable of measuring the complex span of hand-finger movements and simultaneously streaming this kinematic data to control the motion of representations of human hands in virtual reality.

METHODS
In a blocked fMRI design, thirteen healthy subjects observed, with the intent to imitate (OTI), finger sequences performed by the virtual hand avatar seen in 1st person perspective and animated by pre-recorded kinematic data. Following this, subjects imitated the observed sequence while viewing the virtual hand avatar animated by their own movement in real-time. These blocks were interleaved with rest periods during which subjects viewed static virtual hand avatars and control trials in which the avatars were replaced with moving non-anthropomorphic objects.

RESULTS
We show three main findings. First, both observation with intent to imitate and imitation with real-time virtual avatar feedback, were associated with activation in a distributed frontoparietal network typically recruited for observation and execution of real-world actions. Second, we noted a time-variant increase in activation in the left insular cortex for observation with intent to imitate actions performed by the virtual avatar. Third, imitation with virtual avatar feedback (relative to the control condition) was associated with a localized recruitment of the angular gyrus, precuneus, and extrastriate body area, regions which are (along with insular cortex) associated with the sense of agency.

CONCLUSIONS
Our data suggest that the virtual hand avatars may have served as disembodied training tools in the observation condition and as embodied "extensions" of the subject's own body (pseudo-tools) in the imitation. These data advance our understanding of the brain-behavior interactions when performing actions in VE and have implications in the development of observation- and imitation-based VR rehabilitation paradigms.


Abstract This study explores the relationship between two health financing initiatives on women's progression through the maternal health continuum in Kenya: a subsidized reproductive health voucher programme (2006–16) and the introduction of free maternity services in all government facilities (2013). Using cross-sectional survey data, we ran three multivariable logistic regression models examining the effects of the voucher programme, free maternity policy, health insurance and other determinants on (1) early antenatal care (ANC) initiation (first visit within the first trimester of pregnancy), (2) receiving continuous care (1+ ANC, facility birth, 1+ post-natal care (PNC) check) and (3) completing the maternal health pathway as recommended (4+ ANC, facility birth, 1+ PNC, with first check occurring within 48 h of delivery). Full implementation of the voucher programme was positively associated with receiving continuous care among users of 1+ ANC [interaction term adjusted odds ratio (aOR): 1.33, P = 0.014]. Early ANC initiation (aOR: 1.32, P = 0.001) and use of private sector ANC (aOR: 1.93, P < 0.001) were also positively associated with use of continuous care among ANC users. Among continuous care users, early ANC was associated with increased odds of completing the maternal health pathway as recommended (aOR: 3.80, P < 0.001). Higher parity was negatively associated with all three outcomes, while having health insurance was positively associated with each outcome. The impact of other sociodemographic factors such as maternal age, education, wealth quintile, urban residence, and employment varied by outcome; however, the findings generally suggest that marginalized women faced greater barriers to early ANC initiation and continuity of care. Health financing and women's timing and source of ANC are strongly related to their subsequent progression through the maternal health pathway. To increase continuity of care and improve maternal health outcomes, policymakers must therefore focus on equitably reducing financial and other barriers to care seeking and improving quality of care throughout the continuum.


The biogeochemical cycling of silicon (Si) along the land‐to‐ocean continuum is studied by a variety of research fields and for a variety of scientific reasons. However, there is an increasing need to refine the methodology and the underlying assumptions used to determine biogenic silica (BSi) concentrations. Recent evidence suggests that contributions of nonbiogenic sources of Si dissolving during alkaline extractions, not corrected by standard silicate mineral dissolution correction protocols, can be substantial. The ratio between dissolved Si and aluminum (Al) monitored continuously during the alkaline extraction can be used to infer the origin of the Si fractions present. In this study, we applied both a continuous analysis method (0.5 M NaOH) and a traditional 0.1 M Na2CO3 extraction to a wide array of samples: (1) terrestrial vegetation, (2) soils from forest, cropland and pasture, (3) lake sediments, (4) suspended particulate matter and sediments from rivers, (5) sediments from estuaries and salt marshes and (6) ocean sediments. Our results indicate that the 0.1 M Na2CO3 extraction protocol can overestimate the BSi content, by simultaneously dissolving Si fractions of nonbiogenic origin that may represent up to 100% of the Si traditionally considered as biogenic, hampering interpretation especially in some deeper soil horizons, rivers and coastal oceanic sediments. Moreover, although the term amorphous Si was coined to reflect a growing awareness of nonbiogenic phases we show it is actually inappropriate in samples where silicate minerals may account for a large part of the extracted Si even after linear mineral correction.


Rainfall initiation is related to diurnal and semidiurnal radiation forcing (e.g. Wallace 1975, Carbone et al. 2002, Surcel et al. 2010). Much of the observed warm season rainfall results from a thermodynamic response to strong diurnal cycle of land surface temperature. Therefore, over some continental regions deep convection tends to peak around local afternoon and early evening hours. However, there is regional uniqueness in the precipitation pattern
that implies a connection between regional characteristics and the behaviour of the precipitation field (Wallace 1975, Carbone et al. 2002, Lee et al. 2007). Over western US the diurnal precipitation pattern becomes well organized with a late afternoon maximum along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains (Carbone et al. 2002, Ahijevych et al. 2004, among others). This mountain-initiated convection tends to propagate away, leading to the local evening maximum over the adjacent plains (Lee et al. 2007).
The daily occurrence of propagating systems has a high impact on the continental diurnal cycle of precipitation. Parker and Ahijevych (2007) found that approximately 90% of the episodes identified in the east-central US were due to propagating systems from the west. A consequence of these systems result on the transport of the diurnal cycle
from west to east (Surcel et al. 2010).
The objective of this work is to study the scale dependence of the diurnal cycle and the variability of the rainfall field with the location and time of the day, with special focus on the role of the different spatial scales in such variability.


The utilization of roadside-green-cuttings (grass) for anaerobic digestion increases provides an additional possible source of organic waste for use as a renewable energy source. Grass can be used as a substrate to increase biogas yield. Nevertheless, the anaerobic digestion of this kind of waste can be limited due to the fact that it could be contaminated with heavy metals, in particular from traffic emissions and industrial activity. For this reason the biogas production of grass from a busy road was assessed. Samples of roadside-grass were washed with an organosulphide, which is used for the removal of heavy metals from wastewater.
A comparison of the anaerobic digestion of washed and unwashed roadside grass was performed. Results showed that the anaerobic digestion of the unwashed grass was much more effective than the washed grass. A second experiment was carried out and co-fermentation of manure and farm-grass was prepared for anaerobic digestion. Lead was added in the concentrations 500, 1000 and 2000 mg Pb2+/kg. The results showed that the higher the lead concentration, the lower the inhibition of the biogas yield. The grass could be acting as phytoremediator for high lead concentrations. The grass could contain organic compounds, which can as-similate heavy metals.


W orld Environment Day 2005 might be just the moment to highlight some pristine location that showcases what we most value about our environment: clean air, pure water, uncluttered landscapes, and rich plant and animal life. But instead, the United Nations (UN) Environment Programme turns to a city, San Francisco, as the focus for its celebrations. The reason is simple: Cities are where people concentrate, and what we find there—business, universities, government, and media—shapes public perceptions and political agendas.

This June, mayors from around the world will gather in San Francisco to discuss "green cities" and what sustainability means in the urban environment. The topic is timely because we are witnessing a key moment in the history of our species. For the first time, more people are living in cities than outside them. Now and into the future, we will be Homo urbanus : the city dweller.

This transition is profound. For one thing, it seems likely to be irreversible, at least under any scenario we would care to witness. For another, it is a manifestation of a relentless trend. It has taken a few millennia for the number of people living in cities to reach 3 billion. It will take only about 50 years to double that number. According to UN projections, cities will absorb nearly all of the growth in the human population over the next three decades. At the beginning of the 20th century, the three most populous cities were London (6.5 million), New York (4.2 million), and Paris (3.3 million). By 2015, Tokyo, Mumbai, and Delhi will top the list with populations between 20 and 37 million residents. But it isn't only the megacities that fuel the growth in urban populations. The number of urban areas with over 1 million people is expected to grow by over 40% between 2000 and 2015. The vast majority of this growth will be in middle- and low-income countries.

![Figure][1]

CREDIT: © JOSEPH SOHM, VISIONS OF AMERICA/CORBIS

In some respects, cities are good for the environment. They concentrate half the world's population on about 2% of Earth's land surface, and they are undeniably centers of innovation and economic growth. However, they are also centers for the production of heat, waste, and pollution. The activities and demands of their residents can shape both nearby wilderness and globally distant sites, with better or worse environmental outcomes. If city mayors are to set out some steps on the path to sustainability, they will need to address these and many other interconnected issues as they seek to enhance the quality of life of urban residents, particularly the poor, in an environmentally sustainable fashion.

A further subtle but important consequence of increased urbanization is that most of the world's people will have much of their direct contact with nature in an urban rather than rural setting. We don't know what the long-term effect of this might be, but one likely outcome is increasing urban-versus-rural disagreement on priorities for the urban hinterland. For instance, what constitutes appropriate wildlife or habitat management? It seems very likely that our environmental ethic will gradually change.

Whatever the future of our environmental ethic, one thing is clear: What remains of habitats and biodiversity within the city is of disproportionate importance. And, perhaps surprisingly, these may also be of national or even global significance. Sao Paulo, Brazil, contains important fragments of the Atlantic Rain Forest embedded within its conurbation. Significant remnants of the unique Cape Floristic Province persist within and around Cape Town in South Africa. Even in London, there are still superb opportunities to connect with nature, from the restored wetlands of Barn Elms to the acid grasslands of Richmond Park.

If World Environment Day is anything, it is a day of reflection, and hopefully a day for commitment. Excellent partnerships for managing nature in the city are already under way, such as the Chicago Wilderness Consortium in the United States, which comprises 172 public and private organizations working together to protect, restore, and manage Chicago's natural resources. Such efforts need to be emulated. Extending them further will also require an integrated science of urbanization that is today woefully inadequate. We must move quickly. And we must remember that nature in the metropolis needs to be nurtured, not only for its value now, but even more for its importance in the future.

 [1]: pending:yes


The term "problem tree" refers to a conceptual model used as a diagnostic tool to analyse a sequence of events that leads to a problem (such as bush encroachment in rangelands). A problem tree is useful because the consequences of different interventions can be visualised and understood more easily in diagrammatic form, thereby guiding management decisions regarding the problem. A problem tree was constructed to show multiple causes of bush encroachment. It was generalised by considering many possible causes, and not only those applying to particular areas of encroachment or specific species of bush. If the problem tree is to be useful in decision-making, one needs to determine which of the multiple pathways are of greater significance in any particular situation. Management decisions are bound to be more effective in the long run if they address causes higher up in the tree and closer to the root causes, than the proximate causes or symptoms at the bottom of the tree.


In the 1774.2 macrophage cell line, microtubule disassembly by colchicine causes the polarization of membrane functions ane structure. Colchicine-treated cells develop a bulge or protuberance that is bordered by microvillous membrane. The protuberance is the site of concanavalin A cap formation. The fluid pinocytosis of horseradish peroxidase and of fluorescein- and rhodamine-conjugated high molecular- weight dextrans, the adsorptive pinocytosis of concanavalin A, and the concentration and phagocytosis at 37 degrees C of a range of phagocytic particles (IgG- and complement-opsonized erythrocytes, complement- opsonized zymosan, latex shpres, albumin-stabilized oil droplets) are all similarly restricted to the protuberance. A reduction in the rate of dextran pinocytosis, determined by fluorimetry, and reductions in phagocytic rates for oil emulsion and IgG-opsonized erythrocytes accompany the polarization of endocytic activity in colchicine-trated 1774.2 macrophages. Membrane receptors for phagocytic particles are not confined to the protuberance but rather may display their own unique topographical asymmetry. The inherent topography of receptors was inferred from particle distribution under conditions that limit particle-receptor redistribution (after labeling at 4 degrees C or a very brief incubation at 37 degrees C). Under these restrictive conditions, latex binding sites were detected over the whole membrane whereas receptors for IgG-opsonized erythrocytes, aggregated IgG, complement-opsonized erythrocytes, and complement-opsonized zymosan were excluded from the protuberance. Thus, functional (endocytosis) and structural (inherent receptor distribution) analyses of membrane topography define different patterns of asymmetry in protuberant cells. The asymmetry induced in 1774.2 macrophages by colchicine is highly analogous to the functional and structural polarity of epithelial cells. Exploration of this analogy may provide insight into the development of polarized epithelia and, more generally, into mechanisms by which specialized areas of membrane are established.


It has recently become dogma that reef systems arc a source of diversity to algal epiphyte communities in adjacent scagrass meadows. While this theory had not been tested, it was often cited as the reason for unexpected results in algal studies and marine pollution monitoring. This study examined whether reefs do in fact contribute to the diversity of seagrass epiphytes by testing the effect of distance from reef on seagrass epiphyte communities. The study was conducted in the vicinity of Carnac and Garden Islands and Parmelia Bank, off the coast of Fremantle, Western Australia. Three habitat types were selected as treatments, on reef (Om), seagrass meadow near reef (<20m from reef), and seagrass meadow distant from reef {>3000rn from reef), with the experiments replicated at four separate locations. The study consisted of two experimental components and descriptive sampling of epiphyte communities on natural seagrasses. Each component investigated a different stage in the recruitment process of epiphytes. Propagule availability was examined by collection and culture of propagulcs to determine their origin and whether reefs contributed algal propagules to seagrass meadows. Community structure was examined Uy studying the recruitment of epiphytes to artificial seagrass and by sampling communities on natural Posidonia simtosa, to investigate whether distance to reefs influences the post-recruitment processes which determine community composition. Artificial seagrass was used in addition to de!:>criptive sampling to remove the confounding effect of host variability. The results of this study showed that epiphyte assemblages in seagrasses adjacent to reefs were different to those different from reefs, and that reefs were a source of propagules to seagrass meadows. Propagule availability varied with distance to reef. Epiphyte communities growing on artificial seagrass and natural seagrass also-differed. The same trend was evident for propagule availbility, recruitment of epiphyk:3 to artificial seagrass and epiphytes on natural seagrass, where ordination patterns showed a significant separation of sites adjacent to reef from those distant to reef. The differences intensified post-recruitment, as shown by the tighter clustering patterns and increased spatial distance between habitats evident in ordinations. Biomass was significantly higher for sties adjacent to reef, which confinned earlier findings that proximity to reef is confounding monitoring programmes. These differences suggest different pre-recruitment and post-recruitment influences for epiphyte communities near reefs and distant from reefs. Reefs can reasonably be expected to produce changes in environmental factors such as water motion, grazing and nutrients, which affect epiphyte growth. Additionally, reefs provide a source of algal propagules to seagrass meadows which can affect community structure.


The size-dependent properties of ultra-small gold cluster ions ligated with phosphines are important to their scalable synthesis and potential applications in catalysis and energy production. However, the size distribution of clusters prepared in solution often makes it challenging to extract thermodynamic and kinetic parameters for species containing an exact number of gold atoms and phosphine ligands in a specific charge state. Here, we report for the first time the experimental determination of the stability toward fragmentation and ligand binding energies of mass-selected cationic gold clusters ligated with triphenylphosphine. Employing surface-induced dissociation Au7L62+, Au8L62+, Au8L72+ and Au9L72+ (L = triphenylphosphine) clusters are demonstrated to fragment through loss of a neutral ligand (AunLm2+ → AunL(m−1)2+ + L), asymmetric fission (AunLm2+ → Au(n−1)L(m−2)+ + AuL2+) and more symmetric fission (Au7L62+ → Au4L3+ + Au3L3+) involving charge separation of the gold core. It is shown that a cluster containing exactly eight gold atoms and six triphenylphosphine ligands, which is the predominant species formed during the early stages of reduction synthesis in solution, is exceptionally stable towards dissociation compared to the other clusters due in part to its large ligand binding energy.


In this manuscript, we construct a general family of optimal derivative free iterative methods by using rational interpolation. This family is further extended to a family of with-memory methods with increased order of convergence by employing two free parameters. At each iterative step, we use a suitable variation of the free parameters. These parameters are computed by using the information from current and previous iterations so that the convergence order of the existing family is increased from 2 to 2 + 2n−1 + 2n−2 without using any additional function evaluations. To check the performance of newly developed iterative schemes with and without memory, an extensive comparison with the existing withand without memory methods is done by taking some real world problems and standard nonlinear functions. Numerical experiments illustrate that the proposed family of methods with-memory retain better computational efficiency and fast convergence speed as compared to existing withand without memory methods. The performance of the methods is also analyzed visually by using complex plane. Numerical and dynamical comparisons confirm that the proposed families of with and without memory methods have better efficiency, convergence regions and speed in contrast with the existing methods of the same kind.


While snowmelt and rain-on-snow events have received considerable attention in rural watersheds they have been largely ignored in urban hydrology, despite the fact that they may result in severe flooding. The runoff responses of two subcatchments of a small drainage basin in Peterborough, Ontario were investigated for the spring snowmelts of 1984 and 1985. One of the catchments has undergone substantial suburbanization, while the other is largely in rural land use. Measurements in each catchment included snowpack water-equivalent depths, snowmelt and precipitation, fluxes of net radiation over snowpacks, infiltration capacities of pervious surface types, and streamflow. Suburban development appears to have produced substantial increases in spring quickflow yields from the entire basin. A comparison of the responses of the two subcatchments reveals that the suburban catchment reacts more rapidly to snowmelt and rain-on-snow inputs and generates larger initial quickflow response ratios than the rural basin as a result of the microclimatic, pedologic and hydraulic characteristics of built-up areas. However, the dynamic behaviour of the runoff contributing area of the rural catchment results in a marked increase in its quickflow yield as melt progresses. The results suggest that the distinct nature of the processes of snow accumulation, melt and runoff generation in built-up areas should be considered when modelling suburban snowmelt runoff.


This paper presents the results of analyses of demersal fish assemblages in various fishing grounds in the Philippines. Data from exploratory trawl surveys conducted in 1947 - 49 show that the 24 fishing grounds covered by the survey can be arranged along a gradient of substrate type (i.e. relative coral cover and sediment characteristics). These may be used to determine the species commonly caught in these grounds. A trend of increasing catch rates with decreasing water depth and increasing proportion of mud in the substrate was noted. Data from more recent systematic surveys in Samar Sea (1979 - 80), San Pedro Bay (1994 - 95) and Manila Bay (1992 - 93) were analyzed to examine spatio-temporal patterns in fish assemblages. In all 3 areas, the fish community was characterized by a large number of ubiquitous species, with Leiognathids comprising at least 28% of the total catch. In terms of habitat relations, depth was the primary factor in Samar Sea and San Pedro Bay, where transitions in fish assemblage composition were recognizable at certain depth ranges. In Manila Bay, however, species composition appears to be more related to location (inner versus outer portions of the bay). Analysis of data from five locations (Manila Bay, Tayabas Bay, Sorsogon Bay, Samar Sea and San Pedro Bay) extending from the western to the eastern portions of the country showed similar seasonality, with fish assemblage composition varying slightly during the monsoon season.